The value that America has always placed on industry and social mobility has been replaced by a belief in immutable characteristics like race and the use of science, to justify a calcified class hierarchy that keeps some at the bottom and some at the top. And rather than replacing the missing steps on the staircase of social mobility, the tech oligarchy and its poets laureate, the liberal media, push for higher taxes and redistribution, a model Kotkin calls “oligarchical socialism.”12 In this elite fantasy, the working class would not be a self-sufficient countervailing power to the elites as
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