If you see someone glued to the Slack app on their phone, or lugging around a MacBook at a coffee shop, please salute them. They aren’t just doing their email jobs — they’re troops in the Great Class War of 2025.
I’m referring to the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe campaign against the hard-to-define strata of college-educated Americans who perform “knowledge work”. They are often dubbed the professional managerial class, or PMC for short. This month, scribes at The Atlantic and New York published essays lamenting the Trumpian war on the professionals. PMCs are “being targeted for political, cultural, and perhaps economic extinction” by the White House, wrote Ed Kilgore. He’s got a point. Now that we’re entering the fourth month of Trump II, it’s clear that when the President repeatedly uttered, “I am your retribution” with comic-book-villain bravado on the campaign trail, he wasn’t bluffing.
Trump has mounted a multi-pronged assault on the PMC by eagerly siccing a rabid Department of Government Efficiency on vast swathes of the civil service, the scientific establishment, non-Trump media, the university system, and NGOs, while wielding executive orders like Thor’s hammer to smite these workers and their institutions.
The story that liberal commentators tell is that the New Right hates the PMC due to their disloyalty or perceived treachery, or bloodthirsty hatred of the cognitive elite. They just hate the pencil-pushers who won the meritocracy game after American de-industrialisation. Now the jocks have returned to power to stuff the nerds back in their lockers. But while this “they hate us because they ain’t us” analysis has a kernel of truth, it doesn’t tell the whole story, and I can’t help but think about how the Democratic elite were warned for years — decades even — that the establishment was rotting from the inside and was vulnerable to a sacking.
Ironically, critiquing the PMC was once the province of the Left. The conservatives say they hate globalists now, but in the second half of the 20th century, Reagan Republicans openly embraced neoliberalism and a strategy of globalisation, free trade, and deindustrialisation. The fortunes of blue-collar workers declined as those of the professionals climbed.
“Ironically, critiquing the PMC was once the province of the Left.”
As far back as the early Forties, Trotskyite philosopher John Burnham identified the power of the PMC and predicted that the capitalist class would lose to them in what he called “the managerial revolution”. More than three decades later, in the late Seventies, the socialist intellectuals Barbara and John Ehrenreich first coined a more specific term for these ruling class managers: the “professional managerial class”. It originally described “salaried mental workers” — doctors, lawyers, academics, social workers, PR consultants, nonprofit administrators, and corporate middle managers — the knowledge workers and culture shapers who managed people, systems, and information and socially reproduced capitalism, even if they didn’t quite own it.
Admittedly, PMC is a clumsy moniker, but it’s better than “white collar” so as not to confuse professors and DEI executives with, say, nuclear technicians, radiation therapists, or civil engineers. (I also appreciate the term MANGOs, as in Media, Academia, and Non-Governmental Organisations, coined by writer Alex Hochuli). This third class, as the Ehrenreichs noted, caught between capital and labour, often expressed solidarity with the working class in theory, while undermining it in practice by opposing unions and imposing neoliberal reforms in health and education.
Social critic Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995, argued that the PMC worshipped credentials and proceduralism, and like all priesthoods, believed itself immune from corruption by virtue of its own enlightenment. Ultimately, he said, they were responsible for dismantling the old society and civic life while preaching inclusion from behind the safe havens of tony suburbs and tenure-track appointments (or, we might add in our time, password-protected Zoom calls).
Their power only grew over the last three decades, as the Democratic Party evolved from the party of farmers and workers to the Party of the PMC. Its financial and philosophical bedrock became Hollywood, the tenured thinkers of academia, the mainstream media, and the itinerant members of what Richard Florida once breathlessly called the “creative class” (Silicon Valley used to be on this list but has been partially won over by MAGA).
In his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty explicitly predicted that working-class Americans would rebel against this arrangement. They’d eventually realise their government, including both parties, had abandoned them by allowing wages to fall and jobs to vanish without a fight. They would see that timid PMCs weren’t about to sacrifice their own comfort to help anyone else. When that moment came, Rorty warned, something would snap, and disillusioned voters from outside the suburbs would rally behind a strongman who promised revenge on the elites. Decades later, Rorty’s grim prophecy found its avatar in Donald Trump.
That didn’t prompt the Democrats to change their tune and return to working-class politics. They went harder for the PMC. For a decade, starting roughly in Barack Obama’s second term, identity-politics-obsessed liberals led a top-down shift in culture that ranged from the stifling of speech (cancelling comedians, the overreach of #MeToo) to the forced symbolic diversity of entertainment, plus the pressure to put pronouns in email signatures. What we now call “woke”, a soft totalitarian ideology of cosmopolitanism and the elevation of identity over class, was prophesied about by Lasch. He described how the liberal elite were waging class war on the working class by creating “parallel or alternative institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all”.
The PMC label returned with a vengeance during this period of parallel institution-building, this time as a half-ironic slur from the old class-based Left critiquing the Democrats’ version of neoliberalism. Wokeness was anathema to many of the classic Marxists, like Adolph Reed, but when they pushed back against woke, they were lambasted by the PMC-heavy millennial Left. In 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Afro-socialists and Socialists of Colour Caucus called Reed “reactionary, class reductionist, and, at best, tone deaf”. Likewise, UnHerd contributor Catherine Liu’s 2021 polemic, Virtue Hoarders, whose subtitle was The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, was pilloried or ignored.
The MAGA Right meanwhile, homed in on the crises generated by free-for-all of globalised free markets. It was just then, at the dawn of the MAGA era, that the PMC’s power in the Democratic Party solidified and the atomised working class began voting for Trump. This political realignment meant that when Left-wing essayist Amber A’Lee Frost wrote that the PMC “can — and should — be brought to commit to its own abolition”, it wasn’t in the pages of a Left-wing publication, but the vaguely New Right intellectual journal American Affairs.
The problem is that while the New Right has adopted and tweaked the Left-wing critique of the PMC, its support for the working class has been largely rhetorical. Taken together, Trump II’s domestic policies surely represent a class war of sorts, but not one you’d easily recognise in a textbook. This fight isn’t the proletariat pitted against the capitalists or vice versa. Instead, Trump versus PMC is an asymmetrical clash involving a billionaire president and conservative PMCs and techno-capital attempting to excommunicate a subset of the liberal bourgeoisie, all in the name of the “War on Woke”. It’s less Marx and more like a mirror world version of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, with the purge of Left-leaning meritocrats. The philosophy is A Great Leap Back — to restore nationalism and capitalism as the nation’s civic religion.
As for the working class? They’re just collateral damage in this intra-elite class war.
