On Wednesday, November 17th, Discourse in Democracy and the Department of Political Science hosted Dr. Michael Lind for a lecture on “America’s New Class War.” Dr. Lind is a professor of practice at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and has authored many books including The Next American Nation (Free Press,1995), The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (Harper Collins, 2012). His lecture drew on his most recent book The New Class War: Saving Democracy From The Managerial Elite (Random House, 2020). Over 150 students and faculty attended the talk.
In his lecture, Dr. Lind contended that the modern left’s orientation of politics around issues of gender and race fails to account for the rise of a national neoliberal managerial class which cuts across racial boundaries. He used demographic data to show that college education is a better predictor of class privilege than race while acknowledging racial boundaries to educational access. The dominance of this new class, he argued, threatens to effectively exclude the bulk of Americans from effective influence on the political process and to threaten democracy. Topics he touched on in the course of his lecture included the decline of both the middle and working classes and the decay of political parties, unions, and religious institutions. Dr. Lind characterized the rise of Donald Trump as a function of rebellion of the American working class against the American managerial elite, and gave prescriptions for forming a new base of working-class power in America. Attendees praised Lind’s “historical knowledge,” “insight,” and “engaging lecture style.”
