The Two Middle Classes

Of course the motivation for your comment is easy to deduce. It's okay, WalterBright gets downvoted sometimes too.

I assume I am being downvoted because I didn't read far enough to hear the author pivot into a tangent about green energy (which was apparently wrong, and which seems to be everyone else's focus). While Quillette's mission to highlight well-formed ideas that are unpopular may seem admirable, it cannot escape the fact that most people simply don't like to make public statements — which means that people who want to talk for the wrong reason are over-represented, no matter your ideology.

I just had a serious case of "read this one before" syndrome and I think both of those links are enlightening (and less distracted).

It’s interesting the way you equate fossil fuels with scarcity and renewable energy with abundance, when renewables are still a tiny minority of the world energy supply. In reality, it’s fossil fuels that allow for energy abundance, while the movement to transition to renewables is accompanied by energy austerity: less driving, less air travel, less meat consumption.

I was expecting a piece covering the growing gap between the traditional middle class, which seems to be falling, and the upper-middle class, which seems to be doing better in recent decades.

Instead, what we have is a attempt to separate out the middle class into left and right sections. I don't really see it.

> No president has ever incurred the wrath of the clerisy—the media, the entertainment industry, academia—more than Donald Trump. But Trump retains record support among the small business people on Main Street, particularly in the manufacturing and energy-dependent parts of the country.

Perhaps the author has failed to see the split between "mainstream" media and right-wing media over the last decade, and the massive reach the right-wing media has these days - with the largest cable news shows, the largest radio news/commentary shows, and frequently the most interactions on social media. One could reasonably conclude there is a "right" clerisy, with academia replaced by think-tanks, that is very competitive with the "left" version he defines, though this might cause problems with his entire premise.

> The climatistas’ appeal is not likely to improve as they increasingly advocate the elimination of ownership of single-family houses...

Ah yes, the proposals of a single random professor does seem like a good representation of a "climate-friendly density regime".

There's other issues to pick at with this piece ("ultra-green policies", climate policy supported by oligarchs, etc.), but I think it's better to point to someone who covers the same issues to some degree in more convincing manner.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Stoller takes a look at the current state of the economy through the lens of monopoly and big business, and I find his analysis to match the world I see with much greater accuracy. Kotkin mentions a lot of the issues in his section on "the embattled yeomanry", but fails to consider causes that lead to this. He'll talk about concentration of wealth, but fails to conclude any negative effects it might have. And it's truly curious how he moves from increasing corporate concentration in one paragraph to fighting against climate policy in the next.

I just turned on the television for the first time in years. There was an ad from an oil company talking about climate change as if it’s a given, and how they’re taking measures to stop it.

Is the ad superficial, meaningless bullshit? Of course.

But the presence of hypocritical financial interests is irrelevant. Or rather, it supports the thesis that the clerisy are interested in power rather than actual morality.

Regarding the poor academics, the conflict between members of the middle class is the point of the article.

Tenured professors v. adjuncts might be the best possible example of the authors point.

> First, I do think it's ridiculous that he takes it as a given that Oligarchs favour climate policy. Yes, I can see how someone can point to Musk and .... I dunno Al Gore? and try to make the point, but for every Musk-a-like, there are many dozens of rich people very deeply vested in the fossil industry. I don't think any serious survey of the financial interests of the global superrich will support this view.

Name some names