The oligarchs are assisted in their control by what Kotkin calls the “clerisy” class — an amalgam of academics, media and government employees who play the role that medieval clergy once played in legitimizing the powerful...

Because it doesn’t have to work in competitive industries, the clerisy favors regulations, land-use rules and environmental restrictions that make things worse for businesses — especially the small “yeoman” businesses that traditionally sustained much of the middle class...

But the lower classes, sustained by government handouts and by rhetoric from the clerisy, provide enough votes to keep the machine running, at least for a while.

How can you miss it, Bowz? This is the whole right-wing mythology summarized right there for you--all the old cliches, all the right memes. It's all there, "academic parasites, media drones, and government bureaucrats"; "who don't have to work in competitive industries" crushing the "small yeoman businesses" with endless "land-use rules and environmental regulations".

The role of outsourcing, relocation, lobbying, crony capitalism, Walmarting and big franchises putting the mom-and-pops out of business, overseas inversion, and all the other tricks big business uses to avoid paying decent salaries and fair taxes, are conveniently ignored, and the blame is dumped on those "media and academic elites". Yeah, Kollege perfessers, Hollywood pansies and pinko journalists. Round up the usual suspects.

And of course, lurking in the background, "the lower classes sustained by government handouts". We all know who they are, right? Welfare queens and Mexican illegals.

This is classic Joe Goebbels agitprop. You create an enemy, a scapegoat, that the current malaise can be dumped on, to distract the man who feels his entire old world slipping away from him. It is not world economic conditions, the forces of history, and certainly not the plutocrats and oligarchs who really run his society that (if they have not deliberately crafted this crisis) are doing everything they can to position themselves to profit from it--at everyone elses expense.

I'm surprised they were able to restrain themselves from just invoking the "Bolshevik Jewish Bankers Conspiracy who have stabbed us in the back".

That's what they did the last time.