The United States, like the developed world more generally, is going through its greatest economic transformation since the early 20th century. A hundred years ago, giant corporations in the oil, steel, rail transport, and meat-packing industries reshaped the American political and social landscape. Now our way of life is being dramatically altered once again by the digital revolution.

Two distinguished public intellectuals, Michael Lind of the University of Texas at Austin and Joel Kotkin of Chapman University in California, have taken the lead in trying to make sense of the new digital economy. Lind’s The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite and Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class deserve to be read together. Though they approach their subject from slightly different perspectives, both authors meld history, sociology, and geopolitics with on-the-spot journalism and energetic prose to demonstrate that our society is becoming highly stratified. Their arguments will likely remain resonant throughout the 2020s and afterward.

Lind, inspired by Teddy Roosevelt, has repeatedly argued for a Hamiltonian economic philosophy involving strong, centralized government action. In 2012, when his book Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States was released, he laid out the case in a Salon article for what is sometimes described as an “industrial policy”:

The most innovative entrepreneur in the 20th century was the U.S. government. The federal government invented or developed nuclear energy, computers, the Internet, and the jet engine. And it built the interstate highway system and completed the national electric grid, creating a continental market based on the technologies of the second industrial revolution.

In The New Class War, Lind doesn’t so much argue for a nationalist economic policy as express his fears that an emerging overclass, much of it based in Silicon Valley, will crush democracy under the weight of its oligarchical power.

* * *

Lind’s core insight is that corporate globalists have indulged in a ruthless form of arbitrage—the practice of purchasing things in one market and selling them in another where they are worth more—to shrink wages and circumvent regulations. The development of the internet allowed companies to gain short-term profit by shifting production from high-wage advanced economies, like California, to places where wages are meagre and regulations scant, like China. Lind explains that “arbitrage enriches industrializing poor countries, impoverishes the semi-affluent majority in rich countries, and greatly adds to the incomes of the top 1 percent on both sides who are managing the arbitrage.”

Advanced computer technology made such practices more feasible than ever before. As Christopher Caldwell observed in the Claremont Review of Books (“Sending Jobs Overseas,” Spring 2017),

around 1990, the cost of sharing information at a distance fell dramatically…. [C]omputers were the key. Once a complex manufacturing process could be supervised from afar, it could be broken up into the simplest constituent tasks, and those could be done almost anywhere. Why not do them in those economies that paid workers a pittance?

The upshot of these developments was that far-flung “global supply chains,” initially hailed as little short of miraculous, replaced factory towns.

But life in those factory towns was more than workplace drudgery. It was enriched and enlivened by fraternal and sororal organizations dedicated to local improvements. Industrial communities also brought about a now-defunct Democratic Party counterbalance to the power of big business. On a national level, the Democrats of the postwar years saw to it that working-class issues were given a voice and a place at the bargaining table. Lind argues that globalization left blue-collar workers essentially powerless to resist as a wealthy minority robbed them of their livelihoods.

* * *

Kotkin expresses similar concerns about oligarchy, but he offers a more sweeping historical narrative. He notes two interrelated developments in California which are strikingly reminiscent of the medieval period: the economy has become increasingly “feudal,” and a new “clerisy” or “secular clergy” has assumed cultural authority in the name of trendy social justice causes. California’s clerisy has magnified public fear about climate change into a postmodern cult of hysteria—a cult which has been used to justify the export of the state’s industries to China. Apple, for instance, claimed that by sending manufacturing jobs to Asia it was blessing California with reduced carbon emissions.

Feudal society was traditionally divided between the nobility, or first estate, the clergy of the literate second estate, and the serfs of the third estate who did all the agricultural work. Kotkin sees a new set of estates in California: the tech and financial oligarchs of the new first estate, the clerisy of the new second estate, and the skilled workers and small businessmen of what Kotkin calls the “yeomanry,” and below them the temporary workers of the “precariat.”

* * *

For a time, it was assumed by globalists that Californians would retain the high-end design jobs while the Chinese did the grunt work. In reality, only a tiny minority of well-heeled elites have benefitted from the new arrangement. “The tech giants,” notes Kotkin, “have…generated huge individual fortunes: eight of the twenty richest people on the planet acquired their wealth in the tech industry. Nine of the thirteen richest people under age 40 are in the tech industry, and all live in California.” A new kind of feudalism has emerged: “In the Middle Ages,” Kotkin argues, “the power of the nobility rested on the control of land and the right to bear arms; the power of today’s ascendant tech aristocracy comes largely from exploiting ‘natural monopolies’ in web-based business.”

The clerisy hailed China’s newfound middle class. But they had almost nothing to say about the tens of millions of migrant Chinese workers who earned little and received almost nothing in the way of social protections. “China’s migrant workers today,” writes Kotkin, “are part of a broader global trend of weakening prospects for the working class: diminishing opportunities and declining incomes.” The poverty of rural China is what drives migration to the cities. “Around the world, rural areas are typically poorer than cities, but the disparities are usually not so stark as in China. Rural households in America are 4 percent poorer on average than urban households; the difference in China is 63 percent.”

California’s overclass, in thrall to globalism, calls for open borders and denser cities. But those cities are increasingly inhabited by “gig workers,” people working part-time in conditional work. Many of them are illegal immigrants, half of whom struggle to stay out of poverty. Gig workers, who make up Kotkin’s precariat—a term that highlights their jobs’ lack of predictability or security—live in well-to-do coastal California but must fight off homelessness. Many reside in trailer parks or along the Pacific Coast Highway. In the industrialized world more generally, part-time, conditional work has grown at triple the pace of full-time employment. For many, this instability is exacerbated by the ongoing erosion of traditional family systems. “What is emerging,” Kotkin concludes, “is a post-familial society, in which marriage and family no longer play a central role. In the United States, the rate of single parenthood has grown from 10 percent in 1960 to over 40 percent today.”

* * *

Neither Kotkin nor Lind handles President Trump very well. Lind gets it partly right when he asserts that the supposed “populism” of Trump’s supporters is really a “defensive reaction” against an excessively cosmopolitan ruling class. What unites Trump supporters is a desire to reassert the importance and integrity of American citizenship. But they also share a burning hostility toward political correctness. Kotkin, who’s rubbed the wrong way by Trump’s bumptious personality, fails to grasp that Trump is one-of-a-kind. He’s a unique melding of pro-corporation enthusiasm with anti-politico suspicion. A more conventional character would have crumbled under the relentless assault from the clerisy and their journalistic and academic spear carriers.

That being said, both Kotkin and Lind have seen their major claims proven true by recent events: the troubling trends they anticipated have been accelerated by the Wuhan virus. Lind, writing in Tablet, notes that the influential Chinese consulting company McKinsey encouraged U.S. companies to cut wage costs by offshoring essential medical production from the U.S. to China. He sees the dissolution of American industries and families as “backed chiefly by the U.S. business sector and the college-credentialed, professional-class consultants, think tank experts, academics, and activists whom business elites have bankrolled.”

Meanwhile, writing in the American Mind, Kotkin suggests that the pandemic is being used as “a test run for the true green agenda of less material progress and, ultimately, ‘de-growth.’” The parallels with the Middle Ages are profound. “History,” writes Kotkin, “does not always move forward.” As the collapse of Rome and the rise of feudalism demonstrated, sometimes regress is perfectly possible—or even likely. In an article written with Marshall Toplansky and published on Quillette, Kotkin adds that the pandemic “has hit core cities with particular force. The New York region alone accounts for more than 40 percent of all US fatalities.” And the novel coronavirus “has proven an utter disaster for much of the Third Estate”—i.e., for the middle class, some of whose businesses may remain under lockdown for months.

The explanatory power of Kotkin’s and Lind’s arguments will not be limited to the Chinese pandemic. These two books will be read and reread in the coming decades. They present an ongoing challenge to the once-conventional wisdom about the virtues of globalization.