Thread by @Arcturus5324

The invaluable @Eugyppius1 has a Substack piece titled "Trump and the Dictatorship of the Upper Middle-Class Urbanites." It's a must-read piece wherein he analyzes socioeconomic group dynamics and creates what I think is a brilliant framework for understanding. (1/15(?))

The piece is paywalled, but with his permission, I am going to feature it as a series of images. My images are taken from my Yahoo email with its dark background and white text.

First, the link:

(2/15)eugyppius.com/p/trump-and-th…

It begins with a series of 6 stories in which key nodes of Regime Media incant with varying degrees of hysteria the charge that Donald Trump is an authoritarian / fascist threat to Our Democracy. Each article involves, as noted “concrete accusations of authoritarianism." (3/15)

He then asks the question:

Who, specifically, does an American president have to fire, defy, offend or intimidate to qualify as an evil antidemocratic authoritarian and possibly fascist politician?

(4/15)

For Eugyppius, The answer to the question of “what is a threat to Our Democracy” is ANY action against its Sacred Cows. This involves pursuit of “bureaucrats, federal workers, scientists, lawyers, judges, journalists, CEOs, academics and leading politicians.”

(5/15)

This group forms what he calls the Upper Middle-Class Urbanites (UMCUs). These are the educated professionals comprising about 10% of the population but who have a massively outsized prominence owing to the peculiarities of Western democratic / technocratic institutions.

(6/15)

There remainder of this thread contains additional image files of the text of his Substack piece.

First, how to define UMCUs …Note the importance of their salaried jobs. They aren't entrepreneurs, self-made men, superrich/trust fund babies, etc., but very credentialed.

(7/15)

What UMCUs own their prominence to in the fragmented power regime that characterizes liberal democracies…and why, inevitably and invariably, UMCUs get the various bureaucratic, political, and state-adjacent systems (including media) all pulling their way.

(8/15)

UMCUs end up defining their political preferences with democracy itself. And “breaking their power in any significant way would require doing things that would strike many as undemocratic.” This includes reining in an activist liberal judiciary and an unaccountable media.

(9/15)

I love this: "In the absence of such brutal countermeasures, the state remains enslaved to every last casual preference, intellectual whim, moral fixation and cultural obsession of the UMCUs.” This includes "abstract things like atmospheric gases and droughts in Africa."

(10/15)

Why UMCUs appear to be so “unreflective” and even, yes, naïve to outsiders: “They don’t really have a Marxist-style class consciousness, but rather an unthinking universalism and a total lack of awareness about their peculiar situation and perspective.”

(11/15)

Excerpt: "As sheltered, salaried professionals, the UMCUs have little knowledge of the pragmatic and technical underpinnings of their lifestyle, and while they are not strictly speaking wealthy, they have enough money to be well insulated against sudden economic shocks."

(12/15)

Owing to their relatively small numbers, UMCUs must make alliances among the underclasses—in whose interests they claim to be acting against middle / working class populists. This explains their common cause with the dregs of society and fixation on welfare for them.

(13/15)

The greatest threat to UMCUs is when their “coalition of the fringes” fails to counterbalance the “swelling ranks of a discontented and politically excluded populist middle.” Otherwise, there are no institutional constraints on the UMCUs (recall Covid lockdowns).

(14/15)

Different Western countries have different levels of UMCU threat. For now, the U.S., unlike, say Germany, “if only by virtue of its sheer size and internal cultural heterogeneity – has a much milder case of this particular tyranny" and enabled a second Trump presidency. (15/15)