In every college town, there is this odd split. This goes back probably centuries.
There are academics, who can come from anywhere. Without a personal history in the town, they do not use the local accent, whatever it is. As a class, they imagine themselves to know more than anyone else. That also means that they think they should be in charge of whatever sector over which they consider themselves academic masters.
This could apply to anything: politics, economics, medicine, architecture, agriculture, literature, and even medical sciences and biology. They have the credentials, the knowledge, and the constant social and professional reinforcement of the perception of their mastery over all. They aren’t paid as much as the merchants and gownies resent that. But at least they have their intellectual pretensions as currency.
The townies don’t buy a word of it. These people are mostly native of the community. They have done hands-on work in everything in the locality. This could be in building, development, small business, gardening, landscaping, retail, or whatever. Their knowledge base is experience and evidence with skin in the game.
They tend to look at the academic class as a group of poseurs, mostly harmless but rather silly overall. They rarely socialize together at all. They certainly don’t understand each other. They are polite enough at the grocery store and so on but there is a deep divide there.
By the way, none of this applies to sports, which is the one sector that heals the divide. On the other hand, academics despise the sports departments except for the revenue it generates.
One way to look at the history of government in the United States and Europe is as a struggle between the townies and gownies for control of the commanding heights of society.
Old-world governments were populated by the aristocracy, which has its roots in commercial life. They are townies who made good. They are the land-owning class with a deep familial memory of all that entails: the struggle, the techniques, the markets, the balance sheets, the familial lineage including training of children, and so on.
The clerics, too, played a role here, as a check against the excesses of the nobility and also as a means of blessing their work was consistent with God’s will.
The history of the last 400 years has been about the gradual incursion of the unrooted academic class into the affairs of government. This is why so many people think Nicolo Machiavelli is such an important figure. He was a pure intellectual, neither merchant nor cleric, who provided golden advice to the prince. Be ruthless. Slaughter your enemies. Keep the people happy. This is the path to secure reign.
In the American case, this took far longer. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the merchant class still largely ruled. This traces to the Founding period in which the architects of the main documents were mostly from the landed aristocracy, as with Thomas Jefferson, or, in the case of Alexander Hamilton, the banking business.
The decisive point in which this began to shift was in the Progressive Era with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, a consummate academic who believed strongly in government power, centralization, and rule by trained experts. Freedom, as traditionally understood, was just not part of his thinking.
Over the last century, the rule by experts has only intensified. Today, the path to power flows through the Ivy League and rampant credentialism. Barack Obama was the paradigmatic case: erudite, credentialed, all the right friends in high academic places, full of abstract ideas of how experts always know more than the people. The merchants, in his view, live as parasites on the glorious world created by the intellectuals.
With Obama’s presidency, the gownies finally triumphed. No more rabble-rousers like Nixon or actors like Reagan or bumpkins like Clinton. We would now experience perpetual reign by the learned muckety-mucks who would forever busy themselves with models, plans, designs, implementations, and impositions. This is why this crowd utterly loathes Donald Trump: he seems to represent a backwards step.
Let’s step back a bit in time. What about the New Deal? Let’s examine this with reference to a fascinating movie that came out in 1938, mid way in the second term of FDR. It is “Holiday” with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Don’t rush out to see it. It is mostly boring and preposterous on many levels. Underneath it, however, is an amazing revealing thematic.
It begins with a man and woman who meet, and she gives him her address in New York City. He shows up and the place is a marble palace with servants and footmen and the works, with everyone wearing white ties. As a normal person, he is taken aback but also doesn’t take the attempted class intimidation seriously.
The father of the house is a New-Deal caricature of a stock-market and banking mogul. He buys and sells (with inside information) and keeps adding to his fortune. He wants his children to marry into the same business so naturally his future son-in-law would follow him into the banking/stock business and amass vast wealth.
The suitor reveals that he doesn’t want this. He just wants to make enough to live on and otherwise be creative, travel, discover the world, and discover himself. Both the father and the bride-to-be are appalled at his attitude.
The guy ends up choosing his dream over the money. The plot twist is that he gets together with the disgruntled sister, who had previously decorated one room in the vast mansion to look like a 1938 middle class living room. Viewers are encouraged to believe that this is the path to true happiness, not fussy elite stuff with butlers and white ties but puffy sofas, musical instruments, and relaxing fun.
There is a slight moment here that reveals the whole scheme of the plot. The man and would-be suitor explains his personal history. He is from Baltimore and had to struggle financially. He did dozens of odd jobs and learned many different trades. In quick passing, he mentions that he worked his way through Harvard at a time when this was possible.
Catch that? He is a gownie, a person educated in the Ivy league. What is his nature? He dreams. He discovers. He is humane. He doesn’t care about money. He is interested in truth and decency. He rejects the cold, cruel world of commerce and stock jobbing for high ideals.
There we go: the ethos of the New Deal in a nutshell right there! FDR said he was facing down the old denizens of finance and corporate corruption and putting in their place smart people, the best and brightest, who would guide us out of the money-grubbing world of the past into a brilliant future guided by those with serious academic training.
Of course the whole bit is nothing but propaganda. New Deal bureaucrats worked very closely with the largest among big business. The idea that the New Deal was overthrowing the money power was never true. But that was the language and rhetoric in any case. This whole movie was nothing but a manipulative fable to make the public believe it.
Where are we today with the gownie and townie split? In the last 20 years, we’ve seen the gownies massively invade the commercial sector at the highest levels. That’s how we got HR, DEI, ESG, and a dramatic political turn of the largest businesses fully supportive of the Democrats, plus top-down government planning, while turning their backs on small businesses, workers, small investors, and the middle class.
The new class of business managers then invaded government to the point that they fully control it now through pharma, tech, agriculture, banking, and pretty much everything else. The worst of the gownies became the worst of the townies and their town is Washington, D.C.
Incredibly, much of the current despotism is funded by private enterprise fortunes, which mutated into foundations, which are in turn backing globalist institutions of oppression. The source is shocking: the merchant craft that once liberated humanity from feudal tyranny became the handmaiden of 21st-century totalitarianism.
This is a new situation, seemingly unparalleled in history but actually functioning like a high-tech version of feudalism. This is why the paradigm of class war defines our times. A tiny number of people are aspiring to rule everyone else, not only in the United States and Europe but all over the world.
