How the Democrats became the party of the Professional Managerial Class

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By now, you’ve all already heard the news: After coming in hot with Brat memes and aligning itself with Wall Street and Liz Cheney, the Kamala Harris campaign suffered a historic and existentially unsettling defeat—delivering America straight into the hands of what the Democrats warned us was the worst outcome possible, which was another four years of Donald Trump. Here to help us make sense of it in terms of longer-tail shifts in American class dynamics and political consciousness is Catherine Liu, professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine and author of the book Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against The Professional Managerial Class.

The book’s polemic against an elite class of contemporary knowledge workers— think: the corporate managers, cable news pundits, political consultants, credentialed experts, and arts and entertainment power players who are obsessed with signaling their own virtue, even as their work functions to shore up an unequal status quo — goes a long way to explaining how America became so culturally divided.

And we also think it’s a useful tool for understanding how the election played out — from the Democrats’ failure to meaningfully engage with bread-and-butter issues and Gaza, to the party’s decision to shift right instead of listening to its own base, to its tone-deaf insistence on joy in the face of widespread economic insecurity and despair. (We should note that we, too, are members of the professional managerial class, as are many of our listeners, which is part of why we feel that talking about this stuff is so important). 

Catherine joins us to discuss how the PMC became so deeply alienated from the working class, the differences between Trump’s brand of right-wing populism and actual economic populism, and where the Democrats, and the Left, go from here. Plus, we touch on what cultural opposition looks like in a world where the Left has so clearly lost the meme war. (Sorry, Charli.)

Catherine Liu. Photo courtesy of Catherine Liu.

Follow Catherine on Substack and X.

Read Virtue Hoarders via University of Minnesota Press.

Read Catherine’s article, “Postmodern Liberalism and the Democratic Party”