The political life is sometimes implicitly thought of the same way. It’s easy to imagine that the challenge of politics is limited to questions about just where things will end up if we apply our enormous, and enormously reliable, tools in various ways. Take a recent tweet by Keith Olbermann, in which the former MSNBC star raged: “You know what would’ve stopped Trump’s blackmailing of these universities? What could STILL stop it? If [the University of Pennsylvania] retracted his degree. If Penn merely announced it was being ‘reviewed’ because of problems in the admissions office.”

The notion is remarkable both for the sentiment and for the choice of weapon.

A place like Penn plays a double role in the pool game of liberal politics. First, the duly credentialed experts at such an institution are the ones who can do the billiard math. They can tell you authoritatively what is going on around you: why Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, how one of your thoughts or actions constitutes a microaggression or an implicit bias, that you must wear a mask outdoors to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and so on.

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Second, the expertise of academics at Penn and similar institutions is itself one of the main tools of American progressives. Trump can be attacked because the experts gave him a low score on the democracy index. You can win an argument because you have experts to cite, and your opponent doesn’t.

At the heart of this role is the credential, which makes an expert somehow official. Of course, a credential is precisely what Olbermann suggested Penn should retract. The idea that some people and institutions have this quality of being official and others don’t is surely part of selective liberal meltdowns about fake news, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and conservative skepticism about the academy. The sensible and admirable concern that falsehoods and bullshit are easily spread is often unwieldy, since it gets us quickly into very difficult questions about how to figure out what’s true and what’s false, and how to convince others once we’ve convinced ourselves. These dangerous waters are canalized into the worry that official sources are being drowned out by unofficial ones.

What went wrong with our experts and our official stories? There’s no master answer, but various sorts of errors were made, I think, over and over again. One characteristic mistake is confusing the political and non-political realms. For instance, in applying for grants, academic scientists and mathematicians for years have been asked to frame the benefits of those grants in terms of political goals like diversity, equity, and inclusion, even if the topic of the research was something non-political like theoretical physics. On the other hand, clearly political projects like the 2020 protests over the death of George Floyd might be recommended under the supposedly non-political banner of public-health expertise.

Another characteristic mistake is confusing the entry requirements for expertise with the outcome of expert inquiry. Someone with a credential in the study of, say, race or gender might rest on their authority to give some pronouncement about race- or gender-based oppression. But anyone who would contradict that pronouncement would have been weeded out of race and gender studies long ago. So the credential doesn’t give the pronouncement any extra weight; to a sensible observer, it should already be factored in. Noam Chomsky famously asserted that American foreign policy was controlled by a “secular priesthood” which required certain views at the outset.

The patina of expertise can be produced in much sillier ways. Soon after Trump was elected in 2016, a “Media Bias Chart” started circulating. On this graph’s left was an arrow indicating reliability pointing upward, in some versions toward “Original Fact Reporting” and in others toward “Fact-Reporting Sources,” and on its bottom axis were the words “Liberal” or “Left” on the left and “Conservative” or “Right” on the right. The chart looked a bit like a bell curve, so that the most centrist sources (apparently Reuters, The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBC, and so on) were also among the most reliable, and the most Left-wing (apparently Mother Jones, New Republic, “Occupy Democrats,” and so on) and Right-wing (apparently Fox News, The Daily Wire, Breitbart, and so on) sources were among the least reliable.

This chart is now in its 13th version, but even in its nascent form, it was virally popular. But very few concrete metrics went into the determinations made for the chart; even now, nearly a decade later, its methodology mostly involves splitting the task of rating individual articles between a few people of different political persuasions. It was the fact that the chart looked like the sort of thing that features hard data, rather than the presence of any actual hard data, that gave it persuasive power. It looked, in a word, official.

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In a polity of critical thinkers, things ought to first be official because we trust them, and only later, derivatively and provisionally, should it be that we trust things because they seem official. Official stories have faced myriad challenges recently, from the replication crisis in social science (which I wrote about for UnHerd five years ago) to journalists’ abandonment of objectivity to government malpractice of all sorts. At heart, an expert must be someone with extraordinary knowledge or extraordinary skills, but our respect for excellence has dwindled, as has our ability to recognize it.

Early on in The Godfather, a great film about the realities of pursuing political power, the drug dealer Virgil Sollozzo tells Don Corleone that he needs “all of those politicians that you carry around in your pocket,” to which Corleone responds — after some time — that his “friends in politics . . . wouldn’t be so friendly if they knew [his] business was drugs.” Just as friends can stop being friends, and no longer serve our political goals, so can experts stop being experts, officials lose the imprimatur of their offices, and credentials cease to mean anything at all, if they don’t act with prudence and in the way that their role requires.

There is a kind of uncertainty principle in politics, that the tools we use to accomplish our goals change in our very hands as we make our attempts. Liberals like Olbermann should step back and think about just what is left in their arsenals before lining up their pool shots.

I’m referring to the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe campaign against the hard-to-define strata of college-educated Americans who perform “knowledge work”. They are often dubbed the professional managerial class, or PMC for short. This month, scribes at The Atlantic and New York published essays lamenting the Trumpian war on the professionals. PMCs are “being targeted for political, cultural, and perhaps economic extinction” by the White House, wrote Ed Kilgore. He’s got a point. Now that we’re entering the fourth month of Trump II, it’s clear that when the President repeatedly uttered, “I am your retribution” with comic-book-villain bravado on the campaign trail, he wasn’t bluffing.

Trump has mounted a multi-pronged assault on the PMC by eagerly siccing a rabid Department of Government Efficiency on vast swathes of the civil service, the scientific establishment, non-Trump media, the university system, and NGOs, while wielding executive orders like Thor’s hammer to smite these workers and their institutions.

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The story that liberal commentators tell is that the New Right hates the PMC due to their disloyalty or perceived treachery, or bloodthirsty hatred of the cognitive elite. They just hate the pencil-pushers who won the meritocracy game after American deindustrialization. Now the jocks have returned to power to stuff the nerds back in their lockers. But while this “they hate us because they ain’t us” analysis has a kernel of truth, it doesn’t tell the whole story, and I can’t help but think about how the Democratic elite were warned for years — decades even — that the establishment was rotting from the inside and was vulnerable to a sacking.

Ironically, critiquing the PMC was once the province of the Left. The conservatives say they hate globalists now, but in the second half of the 20th century, Reagan Republicans openly embraced neoliberalism and a strategy of globalization, free trade, and deindustrialization. The fortunes of blue-collar workers declined as those of the professionals climbed.

As far back as the early Forties, Trotskyite philosopher John Burnham identified the power of the PMC and predicted that the capitalist class would lose to them in what he called “the managerial revolution”. More than three decades later, in the late Seventies, the socialist intellectuals Barbara and John Ehrenreich first coined a more specific term for these ruling class managers: the “professional managerial class”. It originally described “salaried mental workers” — doctors, lawyers, academics, social workers, PR consultants, nonprofit administrators, and corporate middle managers — the knowledge workers and culture shapers who managed people, systems, and information and socially reproduced capitalism, even if they didn’t quite own it.

Admittedly, PMC is a clumsy moniker, but it’s better than “white collar” so as not to confuse professors and DEI executives with, say, nuclear technicians, radiation therapists, or civil engineers. (I also appreciate the term MANGOs, as in Media, Academia, and Non-Governmental Organizations, coined by writer Alex Hochuli). This third class, as the Ehrenreichs noted, caught between capital and labor, often expressed solidarity with the working class in theory, while undermining it in practice by opposing unions and imposing neoliberal reforms in health and education.

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Social critic Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995, argued that the PMC worshipped credentials and proceduralism, and like all priesthoods, believed itself immune from corruption by virtue of its own enlightenment. Ultimately, he said, they were responsible for dismantling the old society and civic life while preaching inclusion from behind the safe havens of tony suburbs and tenure-track appointments (or, we might add in our time, password-protected Zoom calls).

Their power only grew over the last three decades, as the Democratic Party evolved from the party of farmers and workers to the Party of the PMC. Its financial and philosophical bedrock became Hollywood, the tenured thinkers of academia, the mainstream media, and the itinerant members of what Richard Florida once breathlessly called the “creative class” (Silicon Valley used to be on this list but has been partially won over by MAGA).

In his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty explicitly predicted that working-class Americans would rebel against this arrangement. They’d eventually realize their government, including both parties, had abandoned them by allowing wages to fall and jobs to vanish without a fight. They would see that timid PMCs weren’t about to sacrifice their own comfort to help anyone else. When that moment came, Rorty warned, something would snap, and disillusioned voters from outside the suburbs would rally behind a strongman who promised revenge on the elites. Decades later, Rorty’s grim prophecy found its avatar in Donald Trump.

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That didn’t prompt the Democrats to change their tune and return to working-class politics. They went harder for the PMC. For a decade, starting roughly in Barack Obama’s second term, identity-politics-obsessed liberals led a top-down shift in culture that ranged from the stifling of speech (cancelling comedians, the overreach of #MeToo) to the forced symbolic diversity of entertainment, plus the pressure to put pronouns in email signatures. What we now call “woke”, a soft totalitarian ideology of cosmopolitanism and the elevation of identity over class, was prophesied about by Lasch. He described how the liberal elite were waging class war on the working class by creating “parallel or alternative institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all”.

The PMC label returned with a vengeance during this period of parallel institution-building, this time as a half-ironic slur from the old class-based Left critiquing the Democrats’ version of neoliberalism. Wokeness was anathema to many of the classic Marxists, like Adolph Reed, but when they pushed back against woke, they were lambasted by the PMC-heavy millennial Left. In 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Afro-socialists and Socialists of Color Caucus called Reed “reactionary, class reductionist, and, at best, tone deaf”. Likewise, UnHerd contributor Catherine Liu’s 2021 polemic, Virtue Hoarders, whose subtitle was The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, was pilloried or ignored.

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The MAGA Right meanwhile, homed in on the crises generated by free-for-all of globalized free markets. It was just then, at the dawn of the MAGA era, that the PMC’s power in the Democratic Party solidified and the atomized working class began voting for Trump. This political realignment meant that when Left-wing essayist Amber A’Lee Frost wrote that the PMC “can — and should — be brought to commit to its own abolition”, it wasn’t in the pages of a Left-wing publication, but the vaguely New Right intellectual journal American Affairs.

The problem is that while the New Right has adopted and tweaked the Left-wing critique of the PMC, its support for the working class has been largely rhetorical. Taken together, Trump II’s domestic policies surely represent a class war of sorts, but not one you’d easily recognize in a textbook. This fight isn’t the proletariat pitted against the capitalists or vice versa. Instead, Trump versus PMC is an asymmetrical clash involving a billionaire president and conservative PMCs and techno-capital attempting to excommunicate a subset of the liberal bourgeoisie, all in the name of the “War on Woke”. It’s less Marx and more like a mirror world version of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, with the purge of Left-leaning meritocrats. The philosophy is A Great Leap Back — to restore nationalism and capitalism as the nation’s civic religion.

As for the working class? They’re just collateral damage in this intra-elite class war.