The New Class, after all, lacks a popular base as well as money of its own, and just as it relies on Wall Street to underwrite its power, it depends on its competing brands of identity politics to co-opt popular support. For the center-left establishment, minority voters supply the electoral muscle. Religion and the culture war have served the same purpose for the establishment’s center-right faction. Trump showed that at least one of these sides could be beaten on its own turf—and it seems conceivable that if Bernie Sanders had been black, he might have similarly beaten Clinton, without having to make concessions to New Class tastes.
The New Class establishment of both parties may be seriously misjudging what is happening here. Far from being the last gasp of the demographically doomed—old, racially isolated white people, as Gallup’s analysis says—Trump’s insurgency may be the prototype of an aggressive new politics, of either left or right, that could restore the managerial elite to power.
McCarthy has struck me as a peculiarly compromised figure who is yet somewhat gamely struggling to discover a political rationale not entirely inconsistent with his, as they say, political priors. As I’ve argued elsewhere, AmConMag was “alt-right” or part of it in the fuller sense of the term before “alt-right” was “alt-right,” and was instead simply a term for whatever wasn’t left, wasn’t obviously insane, and wasn’t comfortable inside the reigning Republican coalition: alternative right.
As for this latest effort, I agree that McCarthy’s attempt to impose a non-Marxian class conflict framework on the Trump phenomenon is perhaps less persuasive than it is interesting. After considerable brush-clearing, the connections between a type of libertarianism and a type of ethno-politics – reversion to the tribes and to regimes of the Masters and Slaves necessitated by rejection of the Universal Homogeneous State – might be re-examined. Instead, we have political campaigns in which the matter has to thrashed out via schoolyard taunts and the clash of voting blocs.
Though I thought the McCarthy piece was interesting–and some of the responses to the piece from the commenters down below also interesting–I came away with the distinct impression that McCarthy’s purpose in writing it was to recast the Trump phenomenon and all it signifies and portends away from its rather obvious racial implications and substitute instead an interpretation rooted in a (to my mind, controversial) understanding of contemporary class dynamics (“managerial elite” vs. “new class”) all to the end of allowing Mr. McCarthy to salve his paleocuckservative conscience as he proceeds to vote Trump. “No racial interests here, just class interests.”