Culture: May 2020 Archives

The Pandemic Road to Serfdom - The American Mind

Joel Kotkin's description of "the clerisy" sounds a lot like my "yacht guests": "Today's other ascendant class is what I call the clerisy, who today fulfill the role played by the clergy in the Middle Ages. Known as the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the clerisy today is largely secular but consists of the key influencers in the media, academia, the upper bureaucracy and the ever-expanding 'non-profit' sector. This new middle class enjoys something of a symbiosis with the oligarchic elites who mainly finance non-governmental organizations and the universities, and tends to a share a similarly progressive world view."