The New Deal era brought considerable support for placing more decision-making power in the hands of university professors and other specialists, and even some well-credentialed journalists. During the Second World War and the Cold War, the idea of relying more on scientists, engineers, and other intellectuals in matters of public policy gained strength.10 The sociologist C. Wright Mills advocated the creation of a ruling cognitive elite, asking, “Who else but intellectuals are capable of discerning the role in history of explicit history-making decisions?”11
As economic competition from Germany, Japan, and other countries grew in the 1970s, some American policy intellectuals argued for establishing a powerful cadre of planners to bring rational order to the “untidy competitive marketplace,” which they saw as weakening the American economy.12 Today, people such as the journalist Thomas Friedman and the former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag have called for granting more power to credentialed “experts” in Washington, Brussels, or Geneva, in the belief that our societal problems are too complex for elected representatives to address.13
Today’s “Knowledge Class”
Half a century ago, Daniel Bell recognized an emerging “knowledge class,” composed of people whose status rested on educational attainment and access to knowledge in a postindustrial society.14 Theoretically it represented a meritocracy, but this class has become mostly hereditary, as well-educated people, particularly from elite colleges, marry each other and aim to perpetuate their status. Between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 percent to 48 percent.15 As Bell observed, parents of high status in a meritocracy will use their advantages to improve their children’s prospects, and in this way, “after one generation a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.”16
Michael Lind uses “professional and graduate degrees” as a way of measuring what he calls the “managerial overclass,” which includes “private and public bureaucrats who run large national and global corporations” as well as directors of nonprofits and university professors. He estimates the “overclass” to be some 15 percent of the American population.17 Charles Murray defines a “new upper class” more narrowly, as the most successful 5 percent in managerial positions, the professions, and the media, and he estimates it at roughly 2.4 million people out of a country of over 320 million.18 (By comparison, the First Estate in France was around 1 percent of the population on the eve of the revolution.)19 In France today, Christophe Guilluy identifies a “privileged stratum” of people who gain from globalization, or at least are not harmed by it, and who operate from an assumption of “moral superiority” that justifies their privilege.20
What I designate as the clerisy is a group far larger and broader than the oligarchy. It spans a growing section of the workforce that is mostly employed outside of material production—as teachers, consultants, lawyers, government workers, and medical providers.21 These professions are largely insulated from the risks of the marketplace. They also make up an increasing proportion of the workforce in the high-income countries: many of the fastest-growing occupations since 2010 have been in the arts, personal care, and health care, usually tied to nonprofits or the state. Meanwhile, those in private-sector middle-class jobs—small-business owners, workers in basic industries and construction—have seen their share of the job market shrink.22
The picture is similar in Europe. In France, well over a million lower-skilled industry jobs have disappeared in the past quarter century, while the numbers of technical jobs have increased markedly in both the public and private realms.23 Those who work for state industries, universities, and other clerisy-oriented sectors enjoy far better benefits, notably pensions, than those working in the purely private sector.24
Many of the people in these growing sectors are well positioned to exert a disproportionate influence on public attitudes, and on policy as well—that is, to act as cultural “legitimizers.”
“Engineers of the Soul”
The clerical estate in the Middle Ages could mold cultural attitudes through its power over education and the written word. In modern times, this role is often played by what Stalin famously recognized as “engineers of the soul”—journalists, novelists, filmmakers, actors, and artists.25
Writers and other creative people are often portrayed as being resistant to authority and tolerant of differing viewpoints, but history often reveals them to be no more willing to oppose orthodoxy than anyone else. Many of Russia’s most brilliant minds endorsed or assisted the Bolshevik efforts to remake the culture, and were often rewarded with comfortable lives while the masses struggled to survive. The new ruling elites helped themselves to the property and possessions of the old aristocracy.26
In Germany, right-wing intellectuals such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmidt, and Edgar Jung helped plow the ideological field ahead of the Nazis.27 Many prominent creative people welcomed the Führer as a fellow artist—albeit one who had failed miserably as such in Vienna—and avidly assisted Hitler’s efforts to “cleanse” German culture of foreign contamination. In the first months of the regime, “testimonials of loyalty rained down upon it unrequested,” writes the historian Frederic Spotts. Some of those testimonials were self-serving, he suggests, since Nazi policies were hostile to leftist intellectuals and artists, as well as gays and Jews.28
Whether on the left or the right, totalitarianism “represents the twentieth-century version of traditional religiosity with its own dogmas, priesthood and inquisitions,” notes the historian Klaus Fischer.29 The priests of totalitarianism have often been academics or artists or intellectuals—representatives of a modern clerisy.
Toward a New Orthodoxy
In the decades following the Second World War, a healthy debate about culture and society took place in the United States—albeit within limits—between conservatives and liberals, and even Marxists. In contrast to the brazen propaganda of the Soviet and Fascist regimes, the U.S. news media embraced an ideal, though not always followed in practice, of impartiality and respect for the validity of numerous viewpoints.
Today the news media are increasingly inclined to promote a single orthodoxy.30 One reason for this is a change in the composition of the journalistic profession: working-class reporters, many with ties to local communities, have been replaced by a more cosmopolitan breed with college degrees, typically in journalism. These reporters tilt overwhelmingly to the progressive side of politics; by 2018, barely 7 percent of U.S. reporters identified as Republicans, and some 97 percent of all political donations from journalists went to Democrats.31 Similar patterns are found in other Western countries too. In France, as two-thirds of journalists favor the socialist left, and sometimes spend considerable effort in apologizing for anything that might offend certain designated victim groups.32 The political tilt in journalism has been intensified by a geographical concentration of media in fewer centers—especially in London, New York, and San Francisco.33
At the same time, as a 2019 Rand report shows, journalism is steadily moving away from a fact-based model to one dominated by opinion. Usually it is left-leaning opinion that dominates, but a shift toward opinion also appears in the residual media institutions on the right. The Rand study suggests that the result for society is “truth decay.”34
Entertainment media are also turning into bastions of left-wing orthodoxy. Once divided between conservatives and liberals, Hollywood now tilts heavily to the left, as do its imitators elsewhere. Jonathan Chait, a liberal columnist, reviewed the offerings of major studios and networks, and found “a pervasive, if not total, liberalism.”35 This tilt reflects the political views of the executives: over 99 percent of all political donations by major entertainment executives in 2018 went to Democrats.36
There is a conservative branch of the “clerisy” today: some journalists and academics and residents of think