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.