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# The Convergence

Something has happened in American political thought that the conventional ideological maps cannot register. A democratic socialist mayor, a budget director firing federal employees, a Silicon Valley CEO writing manifestos about hard power, a neoreactionary blogger advising the vice president, and an obscure left polemicist named Catherine Liu all converge on the same diagnostic claim: the credentialed administrative class has become parasitic on the functions it claims to perform. They disagree on what replaces it. They agree on what to remove.

This is the most important fact about American politics in the present, and the political class — the press, the consultants, the donor networks, the ambient liberal commentariat — keeps misnarrating it as polarization. It is not polarization. It is the opposite. A diagnostic consensus has formed across factions that until recently could not have shared a room.

## Five vocabularies, one target

Liu calls the target the PMC, the professional managerial class. She means the lawyers, consultants, HR officers, foundation officers, DEI administrators, public-health officials, journalists, academic mid-managers, and progressive nonprofit functionaries who staff what used to be called the helping professions and are now better described as the supervising professions. Her claim is that this stratum performs symbolic work that produces no goods, that consumes resources extracted from the people it claims to help, and that has organized American liberalism around its own social reproduction rather than around the working class it once represented. Her program is robust public provision: pay the benefit, strip the intermediary.

Trump’s idiom is the deep state, the experts, the swamp, the regime. The populist right refined the diagnosis for fifteen years before Trump arrived to operationalize it. His instinctive contribution was to recognize that the credentialed class operates the legitimacy machinery of the existing order — its courts, its prosecutors, its newspapers, its universities, its agencies — and that delegitimating the machinery delegitimates the order. His program is destruction: drain the swamp, defund the agencies, fire the bureaucrats, replace them with our people. He has no theory of what replaces the state capacity he is dismantling. He does not need one to be correct about the diagnosis.

Friedman, dead now twenty years, called it the bureaucracy. His diagnostic claim was identical to Liu’s in form and opposite in implication: the case worker, the social worker, the HUD administrator, the Section 8 functionary — the entire apparatus of mediated provision — was wasteful, demeaning, and self-perpetuating. His program was the negative income tax, the school voucher, the cash transfer: write the check, eliminate the intermediary. He thought the bureaucracy was inefficient. Liu thinks the bureaucracy is paid to be inefficient — its waste is its employment program. They share the target. They differ on whether the target’s parasitism is a bug or a feature.

Yarvin calls it the Cathedral. His name for the credentialed stratum identifies its theological character: a decentralized magisterium of universities, foundations, prestige media, and federal agencies that align without coordination because they share a formation. His program is the most radical and the most honest about its radicalism: dissolve the Cathedral entirely, install a CEO-monarch, run the country as a corporation. The civil service is fired. The constitutional order is suspended in favor of executive command. Yarvin has been clear for two decades that he is not interested in democratic reform. He thinks democracy produces the Cathedral and the Cathedral produces civilizational decline. The vice president has quoted his prescriptions almost verbatim.

Karp, in the Palantir manifesto, calls it nothing in particular but indicts the same target from a third angle: the public servant, the foundation officer, the credentialed nonprofit functionary, the soft-power apparatus that confuses moral pronouncement with strategic capacity. His diagnostic claim is that the credentialed liberal class has gutted the West’s ability to generate hard power, build durable goods, and defend itself. His program is republican-corporatist mobilization on the WWII model: technological nationalism, universal service, restored manufacturing, executive-branch capacity rebuilt around mission rather than process.

Vance, when he is being honest, says fire every mid-level bureaucrat and replace them with our people. He took the formulation directly from Yarvin. The post-liberal right around him — Deneen, Vermeule, Hazony, the *Compact* milieu — wants the administrative state captured rather than dismantled, its capacity preserved and redirected. The Catholic integralist version of the same diagnosis: the credentialed class is the priesthood of a false religion, and the state’s coercive instruments should be wrested from them and put to better use.

Sanders and Mamdani, in a more electorally palatable register, are saying the same thing as Liu. The donor class, the consultant class, the corporate Democratic establishment — these are the layers that have hollowed the party of its working-class loyalty and replaced it with credentialed advocacy. Their program is the most coherent of the populist left’s: tax the rich, build the housing, run the buses, deliver the goods. The intermediary is the corporate Democrat who would rather lose an election with a moderate than win one with a populist.

Five vocabularies. One target. Programs that agree on confiscation of the function and diverge on what to do with it after.

## How the consensus formed

The structural reason this convergence emerged simultaneously is that the credentialed stratum overreached, in a specific and verifiable way, between roughly 2015 and 2022. Public health during COVID. Universities during the protest cycles. The DEI bureaucracy in corporations. The press during 2016 through 2020. The federal agencies in their posture toward the Trump administration. The foundations and the nonprofits in their capture by what Liu calls the symbolic class. In each case the credentialed stratum claimed expertise it did not have, exercised authority that exceeded its mandate, and produced outcomes that visibly harmed the populations it claimed to serve. The legitimacy of the entire arrangement, which had been declining gradually since the late twentieth century, collapsed in a window of about seven years.

The collapse was perceptible across factions because the harm was perceptible across factions. The right saw the credentialed class persecuting its political project. The left saw the credentialed class abandoning the working class for symbolic recognition battles. The libertarian saw the credentialed class confirming every prediction Friedman had made about bureaucratic capture. The Silicon Valley founder saw the credentialed class strangling the technical capacity the country would need to survive the next century. The populist mayor saw the credentialed class managing decline in cities that used to build subways in three years and now cannot replace a bus shelter in five.

The diagnostic consensus is therefore not coincidental. It is the rational response of every faction outside the credentialed stratum itself to the stratum’s recent performance.

## Where the convergence ends

The programs are incompatible, and their incompatibility is structural rather than rhetorical. Liu wants the state to deliver goods directly to citizens. Yarvin wants the state to be a corporation owned by a CEO. Friedman wanted the state to write checks and disappear. Karp wants the state to mobilize for hard-power competition. Trump wants the state to be loyal to him. Vance wants the state captured for post-liberal ends. Mamdani wants the state run by socialists for the working class.

These cannot coexist. One of them, or some synthesis not yet articulated, will fill the space the credentialed stratum vacates.

## The asymmetries

The asymmetries between factions matter more than their shared diagnosis, because they determine which program wins.

The right has builders with money. Thiel funded Yarvin for fifteen years before the project became operational. He funded Vance into the Senate and the vice presidency. He funded Palantir before there was a market. The Mercers funded Bannon and Breitbart for a decade. The Kochs built a parallel academic and policy infrastructure over thirty years. The right-wing donor class understood that you build the institutions first and capture the party with them. It was patient. It was ideological. It wrote checks for projects that would not pay off for two decades.

The left has a diagnostic class without builders. The liberal donor class — Soros, Pritzker, Hoffman, Bloomberg, Steyer — funds the existing PMC apparatus and treats elections as the primary intervention. It cannot fund the populist-left program because that program is a program against the donor class itself. Soros can fund criminal-justice reform because criminal-justice reform does not constrain Soros. He cannot fund a serious working-class economic program because that program would constrain him. The same is true of every major liberal donor. The structural result is that the populist left enters every fight underfunded, against opponents with twenty-year time horizons and aligned class interests.

The intellectuals follow the money. The right has produced, in the last decade, a serious intellectual ecosystem — *American Affairs*, *Compact*, the post-liberal academic apparatus, the Claremont network, the Hazony-Deneen-Vermeule axis, the techno-nationalist current Karp now leads. It is incoherent across its factions, but it exists, and it is funded for the long term. The left has Liu and Reed and Frank and a handful of others, mostly unfunded, mostly in journals nobody reads, mostly shouted down within their own coalition. Mamdani is being asked to substitute for institutions that do not yet exist.

This asymmetry is the most important political fact of the moment after the diagnostic consensus itself. The diagnosis is shared. The capacity to act on it is not. The factions with builders will determine what replaces the credentialed stratum, and the factions without builders will spend the next decade losing arguments about a diagnosis they got right first.

## The failure modes

If the Yarvinite faction wins the right’s internal contest against Karp’s republican faction — and it has the funding, the patience, and the ideological clarity to win — what replaces the PMC is not a restored republic but a network of private fiefs performing public functions on terms the public cannot constrain. Palantir already does intelligence the IC used to do. SpaceX does what NASA used to do. Anduril builds autonomous weapons the procurement system cannot meaningfully oversee. Starlink controls battlefield communications based on a single individual’s discretion. The structural privatization of state capability is feudal in the technical sense — personal loyalty replacing institutional accountability, hereditary concentration of capital, geographic enclaves with their own rules — regardless of how the participants describe themselves. Karp’s manifesto is the most articulate intra-right rebuttal currently in print. Whether his faction or Yarvin’s wins is genuinely undetermined.

If the populist left fails to build institutions before Mamdani’s mayoralty produces the visible failures it almost certainly will produce — pension obligations the coalition cannot reform, Albany blocking the tax program, donor-class sabotage, fiscal pressure compounding into bond-rating problems — then the establishment metabolizes the failure as proof that the program does not work, and the donor-aligned restoration wins 2028. The populist left loses a generation of momentum. The diagnostic consensus survives but the political opportunity passes.

If kleptocracy calcifies into structural state capture, if Vought’s impoundment doctrine becomes precedent, if Schedule F becomes permanent, if the courts capitulate to executive power that exceeds constitutional bounds, then the question of which faction’s program replaces the PMC becomes secondary to the question of whether democratic contest survives at all. The Yarvinite project does not require Yarvinite intent to succeed. It only requires the infrastructure to outlast the administration that built it.

If the populist left and the populist right cannot find tactical alliance on the small set of issues where they actually agree — antitrust, financial regulation, industrial policy, foreign policy restraint, the dismantlement of monopoly — then the credentialed stratum survives by playing the populist factions against each other indefinitely. This is the most boring failure mode and probably the most likely one. The right’s worst factions and the left’s worst factions are vested in preventing exactly the alliance that would actually move the country.

## The deeper void

There is a failure mode none of the factions address. Even if the political project succeeds — even if the right delivers republican-corporatist renewal and the left builds working-class institutional power and the worst feudal and kleptocratic outcomes are avoided — none of it produces meaning. The credentialed stratum’s deeper crime was not its inefficiency. It was its replacement of formation with management. Schools that teach children procedure instead of inheritance. Churches that became therapy. Neighborhoods that became markets. Families that became contracts. The PMC managed the dismantling of the institutions through which human beings are formed, and what is left, even after the PMC is removed, is the void it managed.

Politics can clear the ground. It cannot supply what was cleared. The brightest plausible scenario is that the contest now opening produces enough political renewal to restore the conditions under which the slower work of formation can begin again. Schools that form rather than process. Churches that disciple rather than therapize. Neighborhoods of obligation. Families of inheritance. None of this is on the ballot. None of this can be delivered by any of the factions currently competing. But none of it can begin until the credentialed stratum’s claim to manage these domains is broken.

The diagnostic consensus has done that work. The credentialed stratum’s legitimacy is gone and will not return. What replaces it is now genuinely contested for the first time in fifty years.

The contest is real. The outcome is open. The corridor is narrow.

This is more than was true five years ago. Most of human history has run on worse odds.

Current

# The Counterfeit

Credential is capital.

This is the move the American left cannot make and the American right cannot stop making. Once it is made, the political landscape rearranges. Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani exit the working-class coalition they claim to lead and rejoin the class they actually belong to. Their politics becomes legible. Liu’s polemic becomes intelligible. The convergence essay I wrote was wrong, and wrong in a specific way that protects exactly the figures it should have indicted.

## The thesis

In an economy where the means of production have been replaced by the means of credentialing, the dominant form of capital is no longer industrial. It is positional. The university admission, the professional license, the editorial board seat, the foundation officership, the nonprofit directorship, the academic appointment, the policy fellowship — these are not jobs. They are stakes in a system of social reproduction that gates access to income, status, marriage markets, and political voice. To possess credential is to possess capital. To control credential is to control the gate. The class that controls the gate is a capitalist class.

This is not metaphor. The credentialed stratum reproduces itself through marriage, through inheritance of the cognitive and dispositional traits that produce credential, through the geographic concentration of high-credential institutions, and through the political capture of the apparatus that issues credential. It accumulates. It compounds. It transmits to children. It defends its prerogatives through state action, just as the industrial bourgeoisie did, but the prerogatives now defended are licensure, accreditation, peer review, and the administrative gate. The PMC is not a class of managers serving capital. It is a class whose form of capital is credential, and whose political project is the protection and expansion of credential’s authority over economic and social life.

This is what Liu names. Her polemic is not against billionaires. It is against the PMC. She is the most consistent left voice on this point, and she pays for it by being shouted down within her own coalition.

## The figures

Mamdani is the son of a Columbia University professor and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. Bronx Science. Bowdoin. He is, in the most literal sense, an heir of credential. His coalition — DSA — is the most credential-heavy political organization in American life, with a membership composed disproportionately of graduate students, nonprofit workers, adjunct professors, and credentialed urban professionals. The “working class” he invokes does not staff his transition team, fund his campaigns, write his policy papers, or attend his rallies in proportional numbers. His coalition is the PMC. His rhetoric is class. His structure is credential.

Ocasio-Cortez is the cleaner case. Boston University. Brown University internships. Educational Justice Coalition. She is a credentialed political professional who briefly worked as a bartender, and the bartender period has been load-bearing for her entire political identity. Her actual class location, before and after Congress, is PMC. Her staff is PMC. Her donor base is PMC. Her political vehicle is the Justice Democrats, a PMC organization. Her program has drifted, over six years in office, away from the direct-provision politics of the early Sanders era and toward the symbolic-recognition politics that Liu specifically indicts. Climate justice. Reproductive justice. Trans rights. Each of these is a real issue. None of them is a class issue, and the systematic substitution of these issues for class issues is the PMC’s signature political move.

Sanders is the hardest case and the most important one, because his program is the most direct-provision-coded of the three. Medicare for All. Free public college. The $15 minimum wage. These are New Deal policies, structurally similar to Social Security in form: pay the benefit, eliminate the intermediary. If any major American politician has held the line against the symbolic substitution Liu describes, it is Sanders.

But the program is not the politics, and the politics is the politics of the coalition. Sanders’ coalition is the PMC. His organizational infrastructure — Our Revolution, the Sanders Institute, the network of consultants and operatives that runs his operation — is PMC. The activists who knock his doors are PMC. The journalists who frame him sympathetically are PMC. The young volunteers who built his two presidential campaigns came overwhelmingly from elite universities. His one durable institutional achievement, the Squad, is a PMC vehicle. The class he claims to represent does not turn out for him in the numbers his rhetoric implies. The Black working class did not vote for him. The Hispanic working class did not vote for him in the proportions a class-first politics would require. The white working class, after voting for him in 2016 against Clinton, drifted to Trump in 2020 and stayed there.

This is the deepest version of Liu’s indictment. Even when the program is right, the coalition that delivers it is wrong, and the wrong coalition delivers a wrong politics in the long run. Sanders has spent forty years trying to build a working-class movement, and the movement he has actually built is a PMC movement that uses working-class rhetoric. The failure is not personal. It is structural. There is no available institutional vehicle for working-class politics in contemporary America that does not run through PMC infrastructure, and running politics through PMC infrastructure produces PMC politics regardless of the candidate’s intentions.

## The expansion

The substantive program of the populist left, where it diverges from Sanders toward AOC and Mamdani, is the expansion of PMC employment under the cover of working-class advocacy.

Universal pre-K is a credentialing project. It places several hundred thousand new workers in a credentialed sector, regulated by credentialed administrators, accredited by credentialed bodies, with curricula written by credentialed experts. The children’s class outcomes are dubious; the labor-market outcomes for the credentialed stratum are direct.

Universal child care, similarly, places a new layer of credentialed labor between parents and children. The political appeal is to working-class parents who need affordable care. The structural effect is to absorb private familial labor into the credentialed economy, where it can be regulated, standardized, and supervised.

The Department of Community Safety in Mamdani’s program transfers responsibility for mental-health crises and community policing from line officers to credentialed social workers, mental-health professionals, and community engagement coordinators. The political appeal is to working-class neighborhoods harmed by aggressive policing. The structural effect is to expand the credentialed workforce into a domain previously held by a different, less credentialed labor force.

Social housing requires a new administrative apparatus. City-owned grocery stores require managers, procurement officers, equity consultants, and a compliance regime. Public option insurance requires a credentialed bureaucracy. Each program addresses a real working-class need. Each program addresses it by expanding the credentialed stratum’s employment base. The working class is the beneficiary of the program in the rhetoric, and the constituency for credentialed service provision in the structure.

This is the form Liu identifies. Provision flows from the credentialed administrator to the working-class recipient, with the administrator extracting status, employment, salary, and political loyalty in the process. The administrator is the citizen. The working-class recipient is the case. The relationship is not solidarity. It is supervision.

## The donor class fight

The fight between the populist left and the corporate Democratic establishment is a fight inside the PMC for control of the redistributive apparatus. It is not a class fight. Both sides of it are credentialed. Both sides of it propose programs that flow through credentialed administration. Both sides of it draw their staff, their volunteers, their journalists, and their donor networks from the same credentialed stratum.

The donor class is not the PMC. The donor class is the rentier capital that funds the PMC’s symbolic and administrative work in exchange for the PMC’s electoral labor and ideological cover. Soros funds Open Society. Pritzker funds Democratic operations. Hoffman funds resistance infrastructure. The PMC delivers votes, policy, and legitimacy. The donor class delivers funding. The arrangement is symbiotic, not antagonistic.

When Mamdani attacks “the billionaire class,” he is attacking the donor wing of the arrangement while preserving the PMC wing — his own wing. The billionaire is the visible target. The credentialed administrator is the invisible beneficiary. Tax the billionaire and the revenue funds the administrator’s salary, the program the administrator runs, the building the administrator works in, the school the administrator’s children attend. The administrator does not lose in the populist-left victory. The administrator is the populist-left victory.

This is why the populist left can never deliver what Liu’s diagnosis requires. The diagnosis requires the dismantlement of the credentialed administrator’s authority over working-class life. The populist-left program *expands* the credentialed administrator’s authority while shifting its funding source from billionaires to taxes on billionaires. The supervisor remains. Only the supervisor’s payer changes.

## The actual anti-PMC factions

Trump and Vought attack the PMC directly. Federal workforce cuts, agency dismantlement, executive defunding of credentialed institutions. The substantive intent is destruction. The PMC is the target.

Yarvin attacks the PMC most theoretically. His Cathedral concept is the cleanest articulation of credential-as-capital in contemporary thought, and his program — replacement of the entire credentialed administrative state with corporate-monarchical authority — is consistent with the diagnosis.

Friedman attacked the PMC through the negative income tax and the school voucher. His program eliminated the case worker by paying the citizen directly. The bipartisan PMC consensus has resisted his program for sixty years, because his program is the only redistributive structure that does not require credentialed administration to operate, and therefore does not generate PMC employment.

Karp attacks a slice of the PMC: the soft-power apparatus, the foundation officers, the credentialed pacifist class. He preserves the technical PMC, which is his class. The Palantir manifesto is a class war within the credentialed stratum, not against it.

Liu attacks the PMC most clearly from the left and pays for it by being unfunded, unorganized, and shouted down. Reed, Frank, Michaels, the *Catalyst* circle — all in her position. The class-first left has the diagnosis. It has no political vehicle. The vehicles available to it are PMC vehicles, which produce PMC politics, which the class-first analysis indicts.

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani are not in the convergence. They are the thing the convergence is against. They are the most rhetorically sophisticated wing of the PMC, the wing that has learned to speak the language of class while protecting the structure of credential. The donor class is their visible enemy. The credentialed stratum is their actual base. The working class is their stage prop.

## What the working class actually has

The working class, properly named — the people without college degrees, without credential, without positional capital, who work in the productive economy and are governed by the symbolic one — has no major political vehicle. Trump speaks to them and uses them. He does not give them institutional power. The Republican Party remains owned by donors whose interests are not theirs. The populist left speaks at them and provides for them through credentialed administration. Liu names their situation but cannot organize. The labor movement is a shell of what it was. The Catholic working-class infrastructure that once produced political voice has been dismantled. The Black working-class church remains but its political integration runs through PMC channels. The Hispanic working class is a battleground for the two parties’ marketing operations, not a political subject in its own right.

The working class is the demographic majority of the country and has no representation in the political contest currently underway. The fight is between two PMC factions and a donor class. The right’s PMC faction (technical, engineering, security) wants to mobilize the state for hard power. The left’s PMC faction (administrative, symbolic, therapeutic) wants to expand the state’s redistributive and regulatory apparatus. The donor class wants to be left alone or to capture state power for its own ends. None of these factions has a working-class program in any structural sense. All of them deploy working-class rhetoric.

This is the situation Liu’s polemic actually describes, and it is much darker than the convergence reading I gave first.

## The formation point

The credentialed stratum’s deepest harm is not its inefficiency or its self-dealing or even its substitution of supervision for solidarity. It is the displacement of formation by credential. The institutions that used to form working-class people — parishes, unions, neighborhood schools, ethnic associations, fraternal orders, family economies — have been dismantled or absorbed by the credentialed apparatus. What used to be inheritance is now training. What used to be membership is now certification. What used to be authority is now license.

The populist-left program does not address this. Mamdani’s program assumes that the credentialed stratum can deliver to the working class what the working class lost when the formation institutions were destroyed. It cannot. The credentialed stratum is the agent of the destruction. Adding more of the credentialed stratum, paid better and aimed at working-class welfare, does not restore what was destroyed. It deepens the dependency.

The right’s anti-PMC factions are not solving this either. Yarvin’s program produces a feudal arrangement in which the working class trades supervision by credentialed administrators for supervision by corporate monarchs. Trump’s destruction produces a vacuum that the donor class fills with its own preferred form of administration. Karp’s republican mobilization restores hard-power capacity without addressing the formation void.

The honest position is that no faction in contemporary American politics has a program for restoring working-class formation, because the institutions through which working-class formation occurred were destroyed by processes that all current factions accept as given. The populist left expands the destroyer. The populist right destroys the destroyer without rebuilding what the destroyer destroyed. The donor class profits from the wreckage. Liu names the situation. Nobody is in a position to act on her naming.

## Close

The convergence essay was wrong because it counted Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani as anti-PMC voices on the strength of their rhetoric. The corrected reading is that they are PMC voices using anti-billionaire rhetoric to expand PMC power.

Liu’s polemic indicts them. They invoke her diagnosis to attack their donor-class enemies and obscure the part of her diagnosis that names them. The class-first left has no political home. The working class has no political vehicle. The fight underway is between PMC factions and donor factions, all of them speaking a language they did not write, all of them using the working class as the stage prop on which their internal class war is performed.

This is what convergence actually looks like in late credential capitalism. Not five vocabularies attacking one target. Two PMC factions and a donor class fighting over the spoils of a working-class collapse none of them caused, all of them benefit from, and none of them will repair.

The corridor I named at the end of the convergence essay is narrower than I drew it. The bright case requires that the working class somehow generate, ex nihilo, a political vehicle that the existing institutional landscape provides no path to producing. The factions currently competing all gain from its continued absence. The diagnostic class names the absence and cannot fill it. The donor class funds the obscuration of the absence. The credentialed stratum on left and right performs the absence as politics.

This is more honest than the first version and considerably less hopeful. Most of human history has run on worse than this too. But the worse is what is actually here.