Joel Kotkin - The New Class Conflict

From roughly 1916 to 1932 the journalist-intellectual H. L. Mencken set the tone for much of American reporting by way of his thumb-sucking pieces on the American scene, collected in six volumes of his Prejudices . Most of the pieces were written from Menckens hometown of Baltimore, and on the unusual occasion when he traveled to observe the scene, as in his coverage of the famous Scopes trial, what he wrote was more a reflection of his prejudices than the events observed. Joel Kotkin is the anti-Mencken; for the past quarter century his richly grounded writings have been essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of American society and politics. Kotkin has toured the globe, and, more importantly for this volume, he has traveled across America to report on developments overlooked or more often misunderstood by the press. But where Mencken overwrote so that his prose often became the story, Kotkin writes in a fluid, transparent style in which the scene he is describing comes to life o n the page unobscured by rhetorical pyrotechni cs.

Time and again, Kotkin, informed not only by on-the-ground observation but also by a firm grounding in the nations demographic changes, has challenged conventional accounts of American society. For example while a flood of articles from the New York Times and major magazines such as the Atlantic , the New Republic , and Harpers evoked the supposed decline of suburbia and the repopulation of Americas downtowns over the past two decades, Kotkin has deflated these self-serving pretensions. The numbers he has patiently explained, time and again, do not demonstrate such a transformation. The stories being written reflect, he shows, the lifestyles and sense of self-importance of the people writing such articles and the interests of their friends and allies in hip architectural claques. A former New Yorker who has lived in Los Angeles for the past forty years, he has described both the citys ascent in the 1980s and 1990s and its decline over the past twenty years. His personal attachments to his adopted home notwithstanding, the evidence and not emotion has imposed itself on the argument.

In The New Class Conflict Kotkin picks up on a variety of themes he was the first to explore, from the hyping of the so-called creative class, to the oligarchy that tarnishes the shine of Silicon Valley, to the growth of gentry liberalism, which he then weaves together to make it clear that our contemporary political compass is broken. The standard assumptions that fill our quality dailies and their aural offshoots are guided by presuppositions about what constitutes left and right that have been eclipsed by the changes of the past quarter century. To be guided by their compass is to wander aimlessly in a welter of rhetorical posturing in which billionaires who have made their fortunes in coal become the leaders of the left-wing campaign against the Keystone pipeline.

Kotkin guides the attentive reader down the byways of an unprecedented political structure in which the competing elites of the Obama era have attached themselves to dramatically different segments of society. In the new compass the true north of powerful elites points to both a new ruling class defined by the production of abstractions, digital and financial, and another rooted in the manufacture and manipulation of material objects. Similarly, when the arrow points east or west toward the middle class, it designates two dramatically different populations: one rooted in the public, the other in the private sector.

As the country shambles into the post-Obama era, Kotkins writing serves as an essential guide to a new political landscape, one that no longer makes sense in conventional terms.

Fred Siegel

Scholar in Residence

Saint Francis College

Brooklyn, New York