TODAY'S CLASS STRUCTURE: CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

What is The Blue Oligarchy?

Tech and media executives, university presidents, foundation heads, banking CEOs, highly successful doctors, and lawyers. The blue oligarchy leads the key Information Age institutions, and its members live in the biggest cities.

Corporate executives or entrepreneurs, but many are top-tier doctors, lawyers, & other professionals who aspire to low taxes & other libertarian ideals.

Most rich places are —— but a lot of the richest people are ——

blue, red

Blue Oligarchy: Big tech execs are in favor of —- taxes, redistributive welfare policies, universal health care, green environmental programs

higher

Blue Oligarchy: What do they oppose?

Anything that would make their perch less secure: unionization, government regulation that might affect their own business, antitrust policies

Members of the blue oligarchy sit atop systems that produce —— and their actions suggest a commitment to ——- them

inequality, sustaining

What is the creative class? (Blue)

The creative class, a broader leadership class of tenured faculty, influencers, urban/suburban lawyers, and corporate managers. Mimic the blue oligarchs above them.

What are Gentrifiers? (Blue)

Children of the educated elite, many of whom live in the newly gentrifying areas of urban America. More diverse than the elites of earlier generations, they work in the lower rungs of media, education, technology, and the nonprofit sector.

What is the Caring Class (Blue)?

• The largest in America, but sits quite low from the other three (Blue Oligarchs>caring class>gentrifiers)

• Low-paid members of the service sector: servers, hotel employees

What is the GOP Gentry? (Red)

• Property-owning families

• not from salary, but from ownership of assets (ranches, future companies)

• Generational wealth, leadership class

Proletarian Aristocracy (Red)

• Trump regatta: contractors, plumbers, electricians, middle managers, and small business owners

• People in this class have succeeded in America, but not by meritocracy

Complex Cultural Capital

• Both of the Red classes (Proletarian and GOP) embrace the class markers of the sociologically low: pickup trucks, g*ns, Christian Nationalism

• Both dislike sending their kids to schools that disdain their values, but know that they are going to have to adopt creative class values to be accepted in the new elite

Rural Working Class

• construction, transportation, repetitive jobs

• loyalty to their small town

• value interdependence and are less individualistic

Class Conflict: Bobos have abundant cultural, political and economic power, but scant —- ——

cultural power

The young, educated elites have tons of —— power and growing —— power, but still not much —— power

cultural, political, economic

Which two classes are the unheard and unseen

Rural working class (red) caring class (Blue)

Among the Creative class there is an ingenious code of ——

“Openness”

Creative Class on “Openness”

• open floor plans, casual dress

The Creative Class seems to be Egalitarian, but only the most culturally —— person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are —— and ——

privileged, mysterious, hidden

What is Ease?

Ease is the knowledge of how to act in open environments where the rules are hidden.

• one knows how to structure relationships w/ teachers and other professional superiors

• Hyper-social awareness