The "class of public intellectuals" that Quillete likens to the Second Estate largely parallels the formation of the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union: http://e

The "class of public intellectuals" that Quillete likens to the Second Estate largely parallels the formation of the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura A more cynical, but illuminating, depiction of the way this class came to be recognized and criticized was given in an old New Yorker article about why Americans don't like Hillary Clinton -- from 1996: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/02/26/hating-hillary https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/02/26/hating-hillary >In the sixties and seventies, neoconservatives liked to talk about the ascent of “the New Class,” consisting of highly educated professionals who were, in Norman Podhoretz’s words, “making a serious bid to dislodge and replace the business and commercial class which had on the whole dominated the country for nearly a century.” Podhoretz ascribes to Irving Kristol (father of William) the insight that the New Class “represented itself as concerned only with the general good, the good of others (especially the poor and the blacks), but what it really wanted was to aggrandize its own power.” As the only First Lady thus far to have come from its ranks, Hillary Clinton has suffered the fluctuating fortunes of the New Class itself. Among her peers, you’ll hear, variously expressed, a very basic sentiment: finally, a First Lady who’s one of us. “It was just as if we’d known each other all our lives,” says Carly Simon, who has spent time at Martha’s Vineyard with the First Lady; when Hillary admired a naïve Haitian painting in Simon’s house, Simon made a present of it. “It was an easy, Ivy League kind of camaraderie. Like, ‘You went to Wellesley? Oh, I went to Sarah Lawrence.’ And, ‘Oh, you like that kind of art? I like that kind of art.’ ” But if you do not feel part of that “us”—if, indeed, the very idea of Haitian folk art on the Vineyard makes you shift uneasily—you may feel the tug of an answering sentiment: that this First Lady is one of them. Both this Quillette piece and the New Yorker article are presaged and, in my opinion, upstaged by Hayek's 1960 diatribe "The Intellectuals and Socialism": https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Intellectuals%20and%20Socialism_4.pdf https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Intellectuals%20and%20S... Hayek's piece seems to me to be the founding treatise of modern libertarianism, with regard to the parts that are valuable at least. The central hypocrisy of modern liberalism is the way in which it serves the selfish interests of its most powerful proponents -- the managerial state -- while supposing to be egalitarian. Unfortunately, Hayek himself simply became increasingly cynical and decreasingly coherent towards the end of his life, after publishing his most famous works from a more moderate perspective, so we didn't get to hear a conclusion to this train of thought. It's not obvious how to overcome this limitation; all ideologies need a base of support, and people on average tend to be selfish enough that we notice it. Andrew Yang's proposal to give citizens money earmarked for political donations ("Democracy Dollars") seems, to me, the most practical step currently available towards making politics more participatory and less hierarchical: it can foster the growth of competition among political campaigns for ordinary people's support with floating prices, reminiscent of a system we usually think of as reliable. Innovation in politics is already happening (c.f. Cambridge Analytica) and the IP is being monetized, but only a few people are currently allowed to play.