Alternative prediction: the basis for new Aristocratic morality will come directly from socialism and communism via either Wokeness (Marxist in origin) or shit like Zizek and the Dirtbag Left (Marxism as neo-fascism). Take the populist desire to speak for the people and use institutional privilege to shut up everyone but your yes-men, like how Republicans increasingly rely on voter suppression.
A clerisy (incl. a bureaucratic technocracy, think of the midcentury US order, the USSR, the Third or Second Reichs) could swing the first one, and you can see something like that forming, but it doesn’t have any resource base it can extract from without the aid of other factions it would make enemies with this way, and it might be strong enough to administer but not to strip for parts. And if they attempt to ally with the lower orders to this end, off of memories of the 20th century where administrative classes had more of an advantage, they’ll get eaten alive before they manage to swallow anything else.
Zizek and the Dirtbag Left\u2026 I mean yes, a red-brown Back to the 90s is the other possibility for how the administrative middle classes go, ha ha dirtbag is the new PMC, but both of these possibilities are for the layer under the aristocrats or bourgeois (midcentury America was bourgeois/clerisy, “creative class” America was bourgeois/dirtbag, the Second Reich was clerisy with bourgeois displacing aristocratic, the Third Reich was clerisy with aristo displacing bourgeois, and I’m not really sure what aristo/dirtbag would be, Renaissance Italy?)
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