[donna]

National Review
November 6th, 2000
John Derbyshire

Head of the New Class

. . . the New Class—the intellectualized, tertiary-educated, meritocratic elites of the law, academia, the media, the great foundations and government bureaucracies.

The term “new class” was first used in this precise context by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1972, and got capital letters from Michael Novak later that same year. Some key essays on the phenomenon were gathered together in a 1979 book, The New Class? edited by the historian B. Bruce-Briggs. Anyone who seeks clarification of who the New Class are and where they come from could not do better than to track down a copy of that book (now, alas, long out of print).

The New Class has been engaged in its “long march through the institutions” for thirty years . . .

http://olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Commentary/NewClass.htm

[Sherman Logan]

Thanks so much for posting the link.

Despite being written over 8 years ago, there is no better description of the Obama campaign or of the elite reaction to Sarah Palin.

[Seven plus One]

Great article at the link.

The New Class has deep differences of opinion with the common people and therefore cannot get elected without a certain amount of deceit. The American public is, for example, religious; the New Class is atheist. (As Peter Berger expressed it very elegantly: the people of the U.S.A. are as religious as those of India, but they are ruled over by an elite as irreligious as Swedes.) Thus New Class candidates for power must make a show of piety. At critical points in his various personal dramas, President Clinton has taken care to be seen coming out of church clutching a bible.

Huntington describes the pickle we're in. Derbyshire helps to point out why.

[Jim Noble]

The term “new class” was first used in this precise context by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1972

I beg to differ.

The term was coined by Milovan Điljas, writing about the power structure in communist bloc states in his work "The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System" in 1957, although the concept was described earlier by George Orwell in 1984 explicitly, and in Animal Farm ironically (all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others). Moynihan borrowed the idea and extended its application to the Federal government, but it was not original with him.