Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich

Author:Barbara Ehrenreich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

This was of course the group in which Kristol, the sometime professor, editor, and by now neoconservative commentator, could himself claim to be a member in good standing. But he did not introduce it to the readership of the Journal in order to establish his own credentials. He introduced—or more accurately, exposed—it in order to warn them. In Kristol’s description, the New Class had a political agenda that included the destruction of the capitalist system. In fact, Kristol believed that the power of the New Class had already nearly surpassed that of the corporate elite. “In any naked contest with the ‘new class,’” Kristol warned his business readers in a later column, “business is a certain loser.”

In the national media, the discovery of the New Class never went beyond Kristol’s attacks in the Journal. There was, of course, no fanfare on a par with the earlier discoveries of the poor and the working class, no cover stories or television specials featuring professors, lawyers, journalists, and the like as the latest group of “neglected” and “forgotten” Americans. But even as something far smaller than a discovery and more like a rumor circulating among an exclusive readership, the idea of the New Class was to have a commanding impact. In the late seventies the idea took hold as the defining wisdom of neoconservatism—the sine qua non of any sophisticated attack on liberalism or the left. Every liberal goal could now be discredited as a cover-up for New Class ambitions; every supposedly generous impulse could be exposed as a self-serving stratagem. Above all, any effort on behalf of the poor could now be understood as a scheme to fatten the public sector and expand the career opportunities of New Class operatives. As Podhoretz concluded, the New Class “represented itself as concerned only with…the good of others (especially the poor and the blacks), but what it really wanted was to aggrandize its own power.”

Denouncing the New Class became an almost obligatory rite of passage for men (and occasionally women) moving rapidly from left to right, as if it were the seventies equivalent of the Communist Party—something that intellectuals had to repudiate in order to establish themselves as trustworthy citizens. Indeed, neoconservatives often used the term New Class as a substitute for liberals or the left, suggesting that it was not a class at all but a political party, which everyone was free to join or leave at will. And, like Communist Party defectors in earlier decades, the neoconservatives cherished the conceit that they were the embattled rebels, bravely striking out against a powerful establishment. If the characteristic delusion of the American left is that it has the mass support of “the people,” the parallel delusion of the right is that it is a lonely band of risk-takers, willing to stand up for capitalism when the capitalists themselves are too weak or befuddled to fight back.

But why call the ideological enemy a class, when it was actually a very different kind of group, defined more

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