Reading David Brooks’ “A Moderate Manifesto”, I remembered another manifesto he wrote a few years ago, “Karl’s New Manifesto”, wherein he imagines being visited by the spirit of Karl Marx. He wrote:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.
The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system. The median family income of a Harvard student is $150,000. According to the Educational Testing Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a small, co-optable portion of them can get in.
The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy – seizing for itself most of the income gains of the past decades – and then ruthlessly exploits its position to ensure the continued dominance of its class.
Yesterday, he wrote:
The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide. The president issued a read-my-lips pledge that no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people. All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.
[….]But beyond that, moderates will have to sketch out an alternative vision. This is a vision of a nation in which we’re all in it together — in which burdens are shared broadly, rather than simply inflicted upon a small minority….Moderates are going to have to try to tamp down the polarizing warfare that is sure to flow from Obama’s über-partisan budget.
I’m sure Brooks would say he didn’t really believe the first manifesto, that it was his alterego David Marx or Slim Brooksie or David Fierce or whatever.
But isn’t it a bit strange to write one column that ends “Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win!” and another that suggests that it’s important to make the working class sacrifice even more than they already are in the name of “Hamiltonian moderation”?