by Joel Kotkin 05/26/2020
The COVID-19 pandemis is accelareating the shift already underway towards a neo-feudal society. With the middle-class largely shut down and, in the best.case scenario, in for a long and painful recovery, the population that is barely hanging on is expanding rapidly in America and around the world. In the U.S. alone, the ranks of the poor are projected to increase by as much as 50 percent, to levels not seen in at least a half century.
Neo-feudalism is reprinsing the kind of society that existed in Medieval times, characterized by declining social mobility and greater concentrations of power. In the neo-Feudal world, as in the original, the middle class loses its primacy, as small businesses fail and even affluent families face the prospect of joining the rank of ever expanding class of property-less serf.
Yet not all will be losers- the tech oligarchs, whose net worths have surged during the pandemic, are nowpoistioned to pick up the pieces of a devastated analog economy. But the class tahat may benefit most may be the Clerisy, encompassing porfessions such as teachers, cosultants, lawyers, top level government officials and medical specialist. Their share of the market has grown while those of the traditional middle class-samll business owners, workers in basic industries and construction-have shrunk.
Many in the Clerisy has barelu been discomfited by pandemic as they continue to have checks deposited while working largely from home. Some members of the “expert” class-medical professionals is while coats, empowered bureucrats and the media that interprets their porgnostications-have emerged as the privileged stratum”, in the words of the French leftist Christophe Guilluy, operating from an assumption of “moral superiority” that justifies their right t instruct others.
Just as the tech oligarch, having conquered and consolidated the digital economy, have assumed the predominant role of the old feudal aristrocracy, the Clerisy repises the role once played by the Catholic clery. S muel Coleridge coined the term in the 1830s to define a class of people whse job it was to instruct and direct the masses, as traditional cleric were joined by university professors, scientist, public intellectuals and foundation heads.
Like the elites of Medieval times, today’s cleisy has become increasingly hereditary in part due to the phenomena of well-educated people marrying each other; between 1960 and 2005 the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25% to 48%. “After one generation,” Daniel Bell noted in 1972, a “a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.”
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