Thank you for your considered response. I have expanded the original piece to provide further clarification of what I was (and was not) arguing.
I am aware of the professional-managerial class literature, but think it misses much of the point. Much of this stuff comes out of the universities, and academics are not managerial. Moreover, the key leverage is not managerial. The human-and-cultural-capital class is performing equivalent roles to that which priesthoods, clergies, etc performed in past ages as it is the secular equivalent.
(1) These concerns I have dealt in the aforementioned expansion of the piece.
(2) The anthropological literature is very clear that status is more universal human concern than wealth. Speaking as a medievalist, the knightly class would fight viciously (indeed, to the death) over power and economic interest, but combine on matters of status. Contemporary political science also suggests strongly that status concerns are a more reliable political motivator than economic interest, which is often (in policy terms) hard to calculate anyway.
Seeing oneself as a moral elite and being actual elite are not the same thing. I am not analysing the 1% here. Besides, much of the stigmatising behaviour is coming from lower layer (and a younger generation). Social dominance strategies can be aspirational.
I am also not dealing with wider media dynamics. Though it was precisely the beginnings of mainstream media coalescing around a relatively narrow range of views that generated the conservative insurgency in the first place.
Megyn Kelly has made some pertinent observations about the very different ambiance of NBC—staffed by Ivy Leaguers—and Fox News—staffed by more middle class folks (a relative, not an absolute, judgement).
(3) Hate Crime hoaxes may not work to generate national celebrity, but they work just fine to generate moral prestige and mutual reinforcement within local social networks. The book includes 409 hoax cases that generated publicity, where about 700 hat crime cases a year are reported in the media.
Thinking about these issues like a policy wonk is entirely the wrong approach. Almost none of the mimetic moralising is focused on what works, but on moral display, which may have various policy positions attached to it, but as moral plumage not as central moral concern.
The 1619 project is explicitly about creating a new moral narrative about the US making racial oppression and racism the core story. That is clearly about separating people from any past they can feel pride or positively anchored in.
Responding to my point about Trump voters and Brexit voters being treated as MORALLY delnquent by raising economic matters is at best irrelevant and at worst point-avoiding “what-about-ism”.
The term ‘cancel culture” is a good marker. Those who sneer at, or dismiss, the term and its use are essentially saying “of course, we the righteous, the morally meritorous, have the right to police legitimacy and to destroy people’s lives, businesses, reputations and careers if we determine they have offended our (ever expanding) linguistic and attitudinal taboos“. The climate of fear spreading through organisations and institutions is obvious to anyone who is not invested in the crusade to root out every last bit of disagreement with the anti-racism agenda. That there are areas of society resistant to the trend does not mean it is not serious and spreading.
It is essentialy totalitarian. Not in the sense of secret police and gulags but in the sense of demanding EVERY aspect of life be politicised, that no one be permitted areas of private opinion. That SF, comic and other franchises have been turned into cultural battle spaces, that highly ideological “diversity” training is being pushed into an ever-expanding number of workplaces are major signs of this pervasive politicisation. But it also precisely what one would expect in modern secular societies of a human-and-cultural-capital class seeking to police legitimacy as a social dominance strategy. It strips people of the standing of citizens, entitled to their views, and turns them into subjects of potentially-career destroying judgement by those passing themselves off as their moral betters. A process, quite literally, of subjugation.
