In 2017, I sent the following book proposal to Sarah Mesle, who was editing a new non-fiction series for NYU Press. She never got back to me. I was already a tenured professor, but her silence made me abandon the project for two years. Only after a group of people, including Amber A’Lee Frost, asked me to expand upon the topic did I return to the project that eventually became Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. Virtue Hoarders can be bought here. It has sold over 17,000 copies and has been translated into many languages. As writers, we need encouragement. We need readers.
To encourage those who should have readers, the Palm Springs School for Social Research has established the Emerging Writers Fund, a fellowship with a modest financial award that provides mentoring and editorial guidance from the CLiuAnon and PSSSR staff. Aimee Walleston, Tara Heffernan and I will work with emerging writers whose voices are not amplified or even “centered” by the present gatekeepers. We don’t think we can as yet change the financial and political structures of academic and mainstream publishing, but we can reach writers who are doing the work of recording and analyzing the political, cultural and economic turmoil of our times. This is one of the most important tasks of building a real institution for critical theory. We are taking applications until August 20.
Please consider applying to the program. I will be hosting an AMA on July 26th at 9am PDT. We need new voices, we need good writers. We need more good writing in the world. Thanks for reading!
As the first and perhaps last member of my family to earn a Ph.D., I cannot tell the story of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) and its war against the working classes without revealing something of my own class background. Both my grandmothers were functionally illiterate; my paternal grandfather was a peasant farmer and my maternal grandfather was a former soldier and security guard. My mother never finished high school. My father went to a mediocre college in Taiwan and, after immigrating to the United States in the mid-1960s and working in restaurants, passed a translation exam to become a translator at the United Nations. His job conferred upon my family a middle class existence. While his place in the white collar workforce was guaranteed and our economic situation dramatically improved, my family did not miraculously exit its lumpen immigrant existence.
My public school teachers in Westchester County were the first adult Americans with whom I had sustained contact. For the most part they were thoughtful people of integrity and intelligence, and their presence in my life made me believe that education made people more empathetic, honest and reasonable. In contrast, my own comparatively under-educated family was haunted by a history of violence, anxiety and fear.
In 1968, I started kindergarten in Queens, New York and I didn’t speak a word of English. By the time I graduated from High School in Westchester, I was deeply influenced by the progressivism of my liberal teachers—they shaped the way I thought about knowledge and education as critical to both self-improvement and participation in a democracy. Although I internalized the idea that white collar professionals were better than ordinary people, as a family, we resented and feared lawyers, doctors and professors. It was in college that I fully embraced the mid-century liberal ideas that racial prejudice, sexism, sexual predation, vanity, physical violence and raw abuse of power could be cured by education, especially in the Humanities.
As a child, I learned from mainstream liberal media—from Time magazine to Sesame Street—that reading books made you a better person. I was, in short, a great meritocratic recruit to the PMC: my loyalty to the myth of meritocracy extended itself to the undertaking of a long and penurious period of apprenticeship known as graduate school. Most pragmatically oriented children of immigrants were focused on business pursuits. I wanted to answer a higher calling, and yet I had no cultural or psychological confidence to set off on my own as a “writer”—a career that I felt naturally excluded people like me. I needed the job security and the external approbation of the ‘credential.’
By the time I entered graduate school, Ronald Reagan was President of the United States and a full-blown Restoration of ruling class values was under way. The Reagan Restoration was made possible by the popular perception that the New Left, and the counterculture in which they were nurtured, had gone too far. American traditions and strength needed to be restored. Dreams of working class solidarity faded as Leftists embraced first countercultural, and finally entrepreneurial, ways of being in the face of working class defection from the Democratic Party. The differences between working class rage and white collar discontent became starker and starker as the 1970s wore on.
The American white collar liberal class thinks of itself as essentially nonviolent: the wars it wages are just and the violence it uses is absolutely necessary. It wants to believe that “Others” are violent and impulsive: its narcissism precludes it from confronting the fact that it has waged a class war against the working classes, despite all the studies and numbers that show that inequality and economic polarization have accelerated by every study and every measure over the past four decades.