"Blue" Inequality

Intramural Fight Amongst Factions on the Left

Here is an interesting take on the OWS protestors--which are rapidly becoming a noisome stench in the nostrils of the Democratic and progressive elites in the United States.

It is more complex because — as noted by Kenneth Anderson, David Brooks and Walter Russell Mead among others — the Occupy protests are primarily an intramural fight among the factions of the Left.  As Brooks would have it, this is a fight about Blue Inequality, not Red Inequality.  But these analyses  — perhaps because they are primarily intellectual pursuits — tend to gloss over the more simple aspect.  The Occupy protests are about jobs.  The Occupiers are unemployed and they tend to have a certain class of college degree and cannot find a certain class of job.  Anderson strikes close to the heart of the problem with Blue Inequality:

The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been.  It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction.  The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem — they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state.  Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage.

The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide.   But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.

The upper tier is still doing pretty well.  But the lower tier of the New Class — the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies — with or without the benefit of law school — has broken down.  The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up.  The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS.

The part Anderson likely gets wrong is the part about “everyone” knowing the model no longer works.  As Mead wrote pre-OWS, the Blue Model was very much about selling people security within that model.  And while it’s true that model has been crumbling for some time, the establishment was still selling gullible youngsters on the dream of permanent jobs, however much Matt Welch might be correct in calling them on it (the dysfunction of higher education fuels this phenomenon).

The "virtuecrats" mostly service and manage the client-consumers of the welfare state.  Well put.  And now the elites amongst the Left realise the money has run out.  The result: the blue-collar-classes--all educated with college degrees, all aspiring to make a difference in the social-welfare society--are being left out in the cold.  That is why they are protesting.