Joel Kotkin and the Embattled Middle Class

In a recent issue of First Things, Naomi Schaefer Riley reviewed Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict:

Ever since the 2000 election, we have talked about an America divided between red and blue. But in his new book, Joel Kotkin argues that we are experiencing more than a geographical divide. For the first time since its founding, he suggests, America is experiencing a potentially devastating class conflict—the kind of division between the elites and the rest of America that could all but break the country’s middle-class backbone.

It is striking that Kotkin, a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial pages, is making this claim. For years, the left has argued that class warfare is a fact of life in America, even encouraging class resentment to achieve its political aims.

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Joel Kotkin on New York’s Declining Middle Class

In today’s New York Daily News, Joel Kotkin writes about the death of New York’s middle class. Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict, recently published by Telos Press, is available for purchase in hardcover format in our online store, as well as in ebook format at Amazon.com (Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (Nook).

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Now Available: Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict

Telos Press Publishing is delighted to announce that Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict is now available. Purchase your copy today in our online store.

In ways not seen since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, America is becoming a nation of increasingly sharply divided classes. Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict breaks down these new divisions for the first time, focusing on the ascendency of two classes: the tech Oligarchy, based in Silicon Valley; and the Clerisy, which includes much of the nation’s policy, media, and academic elites.

The New Class Conflict is written largely from the point of view of those who are, to date, the losers in this class conflict: the middle class. This group, which Kotkin calls the Yeomanry, has been the traditional bulwark of American society, politics, and economy. Yet under pressure from the ascendant Oligarchs and ever more powerful Clerisy, their prospects have diminished the American dream of class mobility that has animated its history and sustained its global appeal.

This book is both a call to arms and a unique piece of analysis about the possible evolution of our society into an increasingly quasi-feudal order. Looking beyond the conventional views of both left and right, conservative and liberal, Kotkin provides a tough but evenhanded analysis of our evolving class system, and suggests some approaches that might restore the middle class to its proper role as the dominant group in the American future.

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Joel Kotkin on America’s Disappearing Middle Class

The Daily Beast has posted an excerpt from Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict, forthcoming from Telos Press. Read the full excerpt here and pre-order your copy of The New Class Conflict in our online store.

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Now Available for Pre-Order: Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict

Telos Press Publishing is happy to announce that Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict is now available for pre-order. The book will be released on September 1, 2014.Pre-order your copy here, and we will ship it as soon as it becomes available.

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