In the post-World War II era, an invigorated form of democratic capitalism, promoting the bourgeois virtues of self-development, discipline, hard-work, loyalty, family, and community, gave millions of Americans the opportunity to enter the ranks of the middle class.
But that way of life is rapidly declining thanks to the growing power of wealthy tech oligarchs and their intellectual sycophants who are contemptuous of middle-class values and reject the fundamental democratic premise that people may be relied on to govern themselves.
This frightening development is the subject of a new book by one of the nation’s leading social scientists, Joel Kotkin, Executive Director of the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute and Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California.
In "The Coming of Neo-Feudalism – A Warning to the Global Middle Class," Kotkin contends a new aristocracy, led by technology oligarchs, is dominating America’s political landscape and imposing a new form of feudalism that favors inheritors and is turning working-class folks into mere vassals.
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