In the early 2010s, there was a lot of pushback from up-and-coming left media figures like Owen Jones and Laurie Penny to criticisms of their PMC and educational backgrounds.

"So what if we went to Oxford, or if our parents were solicitors?", the line of defence went. "Our hearts are in the right place. We fight for the many, not the few."
Ten years on, seeing where PMC domination of the left has taken the movement, we can revisit those criticisms and see the importance of the original pushback.
What a PMC parental background and a prep-school and Oxbridge education tend to provide their beneficiaries with is a high degree of entitlement, verbal polish and presentation, and an often unshakeable personal confidence.
Combined with the utopian and improvement- and uplift-focused aspects of left thought, this prior socialisation tends to produce a highly authoritarian form of left-managerialism, one in which the PMC left appoint themselves both moral spokespeople and moral technicians.
It's not so much that these left representatives are "out of touch with the working class" (though they certainly are), it's that they are "in touch" with others of their class, producing an intense degree of PMC class solidarity within the erstwhile left.
Ideas spread easily from Stanford and Harvard to Oxford, Cambridge and Copenhagen because members of the international PMC are primed to pick them up and assimilate them, regardless of nationality. https://t.co/iTJapCPTAZ
Graduates of the same universities, in managerial positions in the educational and GLAM sectors, assume the same ideological positions and impose uniform blanket policies as though all acting in unison.
PMC socialisation in elite schools and universities expresses itself in other ways as well. Social media mobbing and ostracism among the LARPing left reflect the networking and social skills learned in elite school and university common rooms.
The aim of the PMC left isn't the creation of a broad and successful political movement. Instead, it is to imbue the PMC with a new sense of moral authority (and moral mission) and to create career opportunities for highly educated moral technicians in institutions.

More from Education

It appears to be a combination of some of these factors, along with others not mentioned here. Ibn Khaldun’s analysis appears to be a good foundation to go off. [Thread]


Ibn Khaldun makes an important distinction between what he calls العُمران الحضري and العمران البدوي, which, for convenience’s sake, I’ll translate as urban civilisation and rural/Bedouin lifestyle.

He notes that the rural world is largely nomadic, and, as such, Bedouins build character traits that assist the survivalist lifestyle — e.g. the fact that they have to kill snakes that might pop up at any time during their travels helps them build courage and bravery.

The lack of stability and a proper settlement means they don’t really have the luxury of sitting down to let their minds wonder around. They thus build a preservation mindset, which manifests itself through emphasis on memorisation and transmission.

Inhabitants of urban world, on the other hand, are largely settled and established. This means they face less attacks from snakes, lions or danger of human attack from other tribes. Thus, they don’t build the courage and bravery of the Bedouins.

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