Professor Bites the PMC

 “Virtue Hoarders – the Case Against the Professional-Managerial Class,” by Catherine Liu, 2021

This is a book that could have used more economics and more humorous insults.  Liu is mad at the class she is a part of (she’s a professor of course) while being a member of the DSA – Democratic Socialists of America – and dwells mostly on the cultural world of the “PMC” - professional managerial class.  The title is a riff off of virtue signaling – you know, those people in some neighborhoods who love everyone and have a sign in their yard or store to prove it.

Liu covers the obsessive parenting of upscale liberals; meritocratic and privatizing ‘education reform’ as practiced by Clinton, Bush and Obama; the PMC's ostensible ‘professionalism’ - even their sexual attitudes.  Not a word about their incomes, wealth, neighborhoods, national or ethnic identity or networks.  The PMC is made up of professionals – doctors, dentists, professors, journalists, corporate managers, engineers, lawyers, architects, scientists, etc.  Not every layer of this strata however is wealthy - some are proletarianized. Then there are those who imagine they are part of the PMC, like people with MA’s who never quite made it. You know, those people who think everyone who disagrees with them is ‘stupid.’

But Liu is wrong that they are a ‘class’ – they are a part of a strata close to the petit-bourgeoisie, or the upper middle-class in U.S. terms, but with links below.  The petit-bourgeois class is business people – owners, farmers, ranchers, landlords, real estate contractors, ‘entrepreneurs,’ independent contractors, etc. Both fractions of this strata or class usually ally with a different capitalist party – either the Democrats for the PMC or the Republicans for the business types.

Which is the rub for Liu, as the PMC - part of the 9.9%-20% - of millionaires, sub-millionaires and the comfortable - are the key group blocking DSA’s work within the Democrats and DSA’s support for Bernie Sanders.  She rarely mentions the PMC’s big daddy – the top sector of capitalists who run the Democrats, many from the FIRE, Hollywood or FAANG tech sectors.  The PMC forms the hard voting base for the centrist/corporate wing of the Democrats who dominate the organization - the Clintons, Obamas, Pelosis, Schumers, Schiffs, etc. Hence the rage.  Oh, the rage!

I certainly sympathize with a professor surrounded by timid but monied academics, incompetent deans and provosts and a corporatized Board of Regents, in departments full of personal in-fighting and politics. But you chose to work with these people!  Was it the money?

Liu mostly follows fellow DSA’er Barbara Ehrenreich’s original analysis of this strata of the middle-class, who claimed it all started with the hippies!  (A tired conservative trope, that… where soc-dems and reactionaries meet evidently.) She looks at Alan Sokal’s pranking of Social Text’s ideological crap-fest of post-modernism, which she calls post-structuralism.  She has a section on the hallowed role of To Kill a Mockingbird and Atticus Finch in the PMC’s cultural views, in spite of the honest correction offered by Harper Lee in Go Set a Watchman.  (Hint:  Finch was an educated bigot.)  She analyzes the PMC’s adoration of Obama as the shining example of American meritocracy, even while he sank millions of black homeowners into the mud.  She praises the concept of the ‘good enough mother’ who needs help from the whole community, not a battalion of prosperous ‘tiger moms.’ There is even a bright analysis of the love of 'detective' films, which are a predictable simulacrum of real mysteries.  Worst is a weird, narrow section on how the women’s movement of the 1970s was just for PMC women, and how sexual violence on campuses is over-drawn, based on the moralistic outrage of the PMC.  All covered with a hatred of the generation of revolutionary 1968 – which was light-years ahead of Liu or the PMC.  

Liu never mentions the support the 'other' wing of the petit-bourgeoisie in the Republican party gives to capital - small businessmen  - to the point of them calling the Democrats 'Communists' AND 'fascists' at the same time.  Liu ends with a screed against snobbish PMC neo-liberalism, whose well-modulated superiority she despises.  She writes:  “In calling out capitalism as the enemy of the people, we must also name our enemy’s most assiduous courtier and sycophant:  the professional managerial class.” 

P.S. - David Brooks brought up a similar idea in 2000 of the 'Bobos' - Bohemians who were also yuppies.  Relying heavily on Republican cultural tropes, he ignored the fact that the basis of this group was economic, not their attitude towards gay marriage or abortion.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive using these search terms:  “Fashionable Nonsense” (Sokol / Bricmont); “Got Set a Watchman” (Harper Lee); “Monroeville, Alabama,” “The Sinking Middle-Class,” “Class Lives,” “The Melancholia of the Working Class,” “Rich People Things,” “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “Toward Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism” (Reed); “Really?  Rape?  Still?” “Missoula,” “What is Behind Rape, Assault, and Harassment,” “Chavs – the Demonization of the Working Class,” “Death of the Liberal Class”(Hedges); “Listen, Liberal” (Frank). 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Kultur Kommissar

October 19, 2021