Redan 1994 kom det ut en bok av Christopher Lasch som i hög grad behandlade orsakerna till den samhällsutveckling med en vänsterliberal samhällselit och en arbetarklass som sedan har i växande grad anpassat sig till deras olika intressen.
Citat:
The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy
In his last months, he worked closely with his daughter Elisabeth to complete The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy, published in 1994, in which he "excoriated the new meritocratic class, a group that had achieved success through the upward-mobility of education and career and that increasingly came to be defined by rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, a thin sense of obligation, and diminishing reservoirs of patriotism," and "argued that this new class 'retained many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues', lacking the sense of 'reciprocal obligation' that had been a feature of the old order."[33]
Christopher Lasch analyzes[34] the widening gap between the top and bottom of the social composition in the United States. For him, our epoch is determined by a social phenomenon: the revolt of the elites, in reference to The Revolt of the Masses (1929) of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. According to Lasch, the new elites, i.e. those who are in the top 20 percent in terms of income, through globalization which allows total mobility of capital, no longer live in the same world as their fellow-citizens. In this, they oppose the old bourgeoisie of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was constrained by its spatial stability to a minimum of rooting and civic obligations.
Globalization, according to the historian, has turned elites into tourists in their own countries. The de-nationalization of society tends to produce a class who see themselves as "world citizens, but without accepting… any of the obligations that citizenship in a polity normally implies". Their ties to an international culture of work, leisure, information – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of national decline. Instead of financing public services and the public treasury, new elites are investing their money in improving their voluntary ghettos: private schools in their residential neighborhoods, private police, garbage collection systems. They have "withdrawn from common life".
Composed of those who control the international flows of capital and information, who preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher education, they manage the instruments of cultural production and thus fix the terms of public debate. So, the political debate is limited mainly to the dominant classes and political ideologies lose all contact with the concerns of the ordinary citizen. The result of this is that no one has a likely solution to these problems and that there are furious ideological battles on related issues. However, they remain protected from the problems affecting the working classes: the decline of industrial activity, the resulting loss of employment, the decline of the middle class, increasing the number of the poor, the rising crime rate, growing drug trafficking, the urban crisis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lasch
Intressant nog var Lasch själv nymarxist, om en allt mer konservativ sådan.
Men jag tycker det går att redan finna intressanta tankar kring inte bara förutsägelsen om en allt mer verklighetsfrämmande ekonomisk, kulturell och politisk elit i städerna (som idag ju i hög grad är vänster och/eller liberal), utan även förutsägelsen om en växande konflikt mellan denna stadskultur och en allt mer politiskt svag landsbyggd i Oswald Spenglers
Västerlandets undergång (1918 och 1922). I hans beskrivning av stadskulturen i civilisationers slutskeden ekar i hög grad Laschs beskrivning av den (amerikanska) liberala och globalistiska samhällseliten.
