lawyers, government workers, and medical providers.21 These professions are largely insulated from the risks of the marketplace. They also make up an increasing proportion of the workforce in the high-income countries: many of the fastest-growing occupations since 2010 have been in the arts, personal care, and health care, usually tied to nonprofits or the state. Meanwhile, those in private-sector middle-class jobs—small-business owners, workers in basic industries and construction—have seen their share of the job market shrink.22
The picture is similar in Europe. In France, well over a million lower-skilled industry jobs have disappeared in the past quarter century, while the numbers of technical jobs have increased markedly in both the public and private realms.23 Those who work for state industries, universities, and other clerisy-oriented sectors enjoy far better benefits, notably pensions, than those working in the purely private sector.24
Many of the people in these growing sectors are well positioned to exert a disproportionate influence on public attitudes, and on policy as well—that is, to act as cultural “legitimizers.”
“Engineers of the Soul”
The clerical estate in the Middle Ages could mold cultural attitudes through its power over education and the written word. In modern times, this role is often played by what Stalin famously recognized as “engineers of the soul”—journalists, novelists, filmmakers, actors, and artists.25
Writers and other creative people are often portrayed as being resistant to authority and tolerant of differing viewpoints, but history often reveals them to be no more willing to oppose orthodoxy than anyone else. Many of Russia’s most brilliant minds endorsed or assisted the Bolshevik efforts to remake the culture, and were often rewarded with comfortable lives while the masses struggled to survive. The new ruling elites helped themselves to the property and possessions of the old aristocracy.26
In Germany, right-wing intellectuals such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmidt, and Edgar Jung helped plow the ideological field ahead of the Nazis.27 Many prominent creative people welcomed the Führer as a fellow artist—albeit one who had failed miserably as such in Vienna—and avidly assisted Hitler’s efforts to “cleanse” German culture of foreign contamination. In the first months of the regime, “testimonials of loyalty rained down upon it unrequested,” writes the historian Frederic Spotts. Some of those testimonials were self-serving, he suggests, since Nazi policies were hostile to leftist intellectuals and artists, as well as gays and Jews.28
Whether on the left or the right, totalitarianism “represents the twentieth-century version of traditional religiosity with its own dogmas, priesthood and inquisitions,” notes the historian Klaus Fischer.29 The priests of totalitarianism have often been academics or artists or intellectuals—representatives of a modern clerisy.
Toward a New Orthodoxy
In the decades following the Second World War, a healthy debate about culture and society took place in the United States—albeit within limits—between conservatives and liberals, and even Marxists. In contrast to the brazen propaganda of the Soviet and Fascist regimes, the U.S. news media embraced an ideal, though not always followed in practice, of impartiality and respect for the validity of numerous viewpoints.
Today the news media are increasingly inclined to promote a single orthodoxy.30 One reason for this is a change in the composition of the journalistic profession: working-class reporters, many with ties to local communities, have been replaced by a more cosmopolitan breed with college degrees, typically in journalism. These reporters tilt overwhelmingly to the progressive side of politics; by 2018, barely 7 percent of U.S. reporters identified as Republicans, and some 97 percent of all political donations from journalists went to Democrats.31 Similar patterns are found in other Western countries too. In France, as two-thirds of journalists favor the socialist left, and sometimes spend considerable effort in apologizing for anything that might offend certain designated victim groups.32 The political tilt in journalism has been intensified by a geographical concentration of media in fewer centers—especially in London, New York, and San Francisco.33
At the same time, as a 2019 Rand report shows, journalism is steadily moving away from a fact-based model to one dominated by opinion. Usually it is left-leaning opinion that dominates, but a shift toward opinion also appears in the residual media institutions on the right. The Rand study suggests that the result for society is “truth decay.”34
Entertainment media are also turning into bastions of left-wing orthodoxy. Once divided between conservatives and liberals, Hollywood now tilts heavily to the left, as do its imitators elsewhere. Jonathan Chait, a liberal columnist, reviewed the offerings of major studios and networks, and found “a pervasive, if not total, liberalism.”35 This tilt reflects the political views of the executives: over 99 percent of all political donations by major entertainment executives in 2018 went to Democrats.36
There is a conservative branch of the “clerisy” today: some journalists and academics and residents of think tanks. But they have little influence in the dominant mainstream media, the universities, or the wider culture. The real cultural power and influence are in what Thomas Piketty calls the “Brahmin left” rather than the “Merchant right.”37
The modern clerisy tend to believe themselves more enlightened than the average person—on attitudes about the family, for example—and seek to impose their own standards through the media, the education system, and various arenas of cultural production. Their judgments about such issues as race relations and “white privilege” can be even more unforgiving than traditional religious teaching on homosexuality, divorce, or birth control. People who venture outside the “correct” worldview may be made to feel they have committed a kind of “original sin,” for which they can ask forgiveness but will nevertheless remain excommunicated.38
Technocratic Authoritarianism
Those who harbor a sense of natural superiority tend to support strong governmental action in line with their personal values and an overconidence in their own competence, according to research by Slavisa Tasic of the University of Kiev on decision making in government.39 But the history of unaccountable rule by “experts,” or those claiming intellectual superiority, is less than encouraging for liberal democracy.
Mussolini’s Fascist ideology is now viewed as reactionary and clownish, but it highlighted the idea of a society governed with scientific principles by a cognitively superior ruling class.40 Soviet Communism, the sworn enemy of Fascism, followed a similar technocratic course. In the late 1890s, Engels saw technology as the key to achieving the productivity gains that could transform societies without the need for capitalism.41 Marx believed utterly in the crucial role of technocratic administrators and scientists in society. He even offered to dedicate Das Kapital to Charles Darwin.42 Marx’s first successful acolytes, the Bolsheviks, believed that a small, ideologically motivated elite could turn a backward Russia into the most advanced and progressive regime on earth. The Bolsheviks would replace the old aristocracy with their own ideological elite, whom they believed could orchestrate a more egalitarian society. “If 10,000 nobles could rule the whole of Russia,” Lenin asked. “why not us?”43
At the time of the USSR’s collapse, the nomenklatura constituted a true elite of 750,000 people. They and their families were a mere 1.5 percent of the population, not far different from the nobility’s percentage in fourteenth-century France.44 While Stalin had hoped they would come from a “special mold,” they showed themselves to be “ordinary mortals as fallible as other men.” After the fall of the Soviet regime, some members of the nomenklatura used their influence to
