The Cold War has been followed by the class war.

Europe and North America are living through the greatest revolutionary wave since the 1960s — or perhaps the 1930s.

Brexit (June 2016). Trump (November 2016). Italy’s League–Five Star coalition (2018). Germany’s Social Democrats implode; populists enter parliaments in Sweden, Germany and Spain. Macron was hailed as proof the populist “dominos” wouldn’t fall — until the yellow-vest protests erupted in November 2018. Except in France, Lind notes, the revolution has stayed nonviolent.

War forced Western elites to share power.

The first class war — industrial workers against bourgeois capitalists — began with industrialization. Reforms stayed partial until total war made class peace a necessity. After WWII, in the America of Truman and Eisenhower, Adenauer’s Germany and Churchill’s Britain, working-class brokers bargained with elites on every front. The result: mass prosperity and lower inequality.

The populists will almost certainly lose.

Lind’s reasoning: populist voters are only one constituency in fragmented systems. Their leaders tend to be charlatans, often corrupt, many racist or ethnocentric — though he thinks the Mussolini and Hitler comparisons exaggerate. Entrenched elites hold near-monopolies of expertise, wealth and culture. They can repress dissent (restricting political activity and media) or co-opt it with minor concessions. Neither ends the war.

Populism is the symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure.

Redistribution and symbolic respect won’t end the new class war, Lind argues, unless the overclass shares genuine power. Lasting class peace means uniting native and immigrant workers and restoring real decision-making power to the non-college majority in all three realms.

Every mainstream ideology pretends class has disappeared.

Lind’s survey: neoliberals see a meritocracy, so they explain populism as bigotry, a 1930s-style fascist revival, or Putin’s meddling. Mainstream conservatives see the elite as an ever-changing mix of talented individuals and blame a progressive “new class” of intellectuals. Marxism takes class seriously, but he calls its providential theory of history “absurd.” Meanwhile, left vs. right has given way to insiders vs. outsiders.

A managerial class has replaced the old bourgeoisie.

Lind’s lens is James BurnhamEx-Trotskyist turned conservative; author of The Managerial Revolution (1941).’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) — building on Berle & MeansAdolf Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932): ownership separated from control. — plus J. K. GalbraithLiberal economist; The New Industrial State (1967).’s “technostructure” (1967). Managers who control production displace those who own it. Ownership survives in name only: fleeting shares held through funds; homes and cars effectively rented via loans. OrwellGeorge Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” (1946). summarized Burnham’s predicted rival “super-states”; Lind sees them in NATO/NAFTA, the EU, Russia’s EAEU and China’s sphere.

Not VeblenThorstein Veblen, economist who hoped for rule by engineers.’s “soviet of technicians” — the key managers are bureaucrats running corporations, agencies and nonprofits, circulating among all three.

Degrees are the new titles of nobility — diplomas the new coats of arms.

Lind’s numbers: in both Europe and the US, about three in ten citizens hold college degrees — and that third supplies almost all government, business, media and nonprofit staff. The true overclass, with graduate or professional degrees, is no more than 10–15% of the population — far larger than “the 1%.” In the US it owns roughly half the wealth.

The tickets out of poverty are mostly handed out at birth.

Roughly half of a father’s earnings advantage passes to his sons. At current rates it takes about six generations for family advantage to fade in the US and UK, about three in Canada, Norway, Finland and Denmark (Julia IsaacsEconomist at the Brookings Institution; studies intergenerational mobility., Brookings). Norman-surname families have sat atop English society for 27 generations since 1066 (Clark & CumminsGregory Clark and Neil Cummins, economic historians who trace status through surnames.). Rich US students with low math scores are likelier to finish college than poor students with high scores.

The new class war is not a global class war.

Western elites pose as “citizens of the world,” Lind writes, but most are rooted at home. The top ten multinationals by foreign assets (2016) are all headquartered in the US, UK, Japan or Western Europe. Foreign-born CEOs ran just 14.6% of the Fortune 500 (2015). S&P 500 firms earned 37% of revenue abroad (2014), yet only 7.2% of directors were foreign nationals. These are parallel national class wars, happening at once.

The vote now splits by diploma.

In 2016, among US counties of 50,000+, Clinton won 48 of the 50 most-educated and her support “collapsed” (Nate SilverPollster and election analyst.) in the 50 least-educated. In the Brexit vote, low educational qualifications predicted Leave more strongly than race or ethnicity. Because diplomas track birth, Lind reads this as conflict between largely hereditary classes — not knowledge versus ignorance.

A united working class would win every election. It isn’t united.

Working classes have always been split — by religion, region, race, ethnicity, ideology — to the benefit of outnumbered elites. Today’s key cleavage, for Lind: old-stock natives vs. recent immigrants, competing for jobs, public services and status. BonacichEdna Bonacich, sociologist; proposed split labor market theory in 1972.’s split labor market theory explains it: employers prefer the cheaper group; higher-paid workers respond by excluding rivals or leveling wages. Lind’s point: economic rivalry runs deeper than prejudice.

Historian Gavin WrightEconomic historian of the American South.: ending the segregated South’s split labor market helped spread prosperity.

The only winners are the overclass.

Politics, in Lind’s picture, is a struggle with three sides: the overclass; immigrants and rising minorities; and a native working class that feels threatened “from below as well as from above.” Lind admits the picture is simplified — the overclass includes schoolteachers as well as corporate lawyers; the working class, prosperous contractors as well as janitors.

All politics is local — so class conflict shows up on the map.

“All politics is local,” as the old American saying has it. Because modern Western democracies divide their territory into federal subunits and voting districts, Lind argues, class conflict is manifested as geographic differences in partisanship and worldview.