… Class warfare between workers and elites explains Trump-era conflicts.
The postwar era saw the creation of international institutions ranging from NATO to the United Nations to the World Bank, along with a proliferation of think tanks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to accompany them. It saw the vast expansion of higher education in the United States, and the transformation of academic degrees into something close to must-haves for the upper-middle class. It saw a great expansion of power on the part of media organizations, and on the part of government bureaucrats and lobbyists, both of whose numbers increased enormously.
The post-1960 era saw well-paid, reasonably secure jobs in manufacturing go away, some as the factories left the country, some as the wages were set by the availability of undocumented labor. Those behind the decisions that led to those trends one could call elites, but not I think in Reynolds's sense.
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