The most fundamental divide in politics. By Richard Miniter.

Well, I’m going to sound a little bit like a Marxist here because only Marxists talk about class theory in an intelligent way. But the devil can sometimes tell the truth, right?

There are two classes that are dividing our society. … One is the unaccountable class. And these are people whose pay is not tied to results. It doesn’t affect them if the economy grows at 1% or 3%. No change in the real world affects them in a professional way.

Then there’s the accountable class, and these are people who live on results. If you fail to save too many patients as an emergency room surgeon, you’re shown the door. If you are a shoe salesman and you don’t sell any shoes, there’s the door, right? If you don’t turn up for work, uh, laying bricks, there’s the door. …

At every strata of our society, at every income level, at every education level, there are accountable and unaccountable people. But that’s the real divide, right? Jeff Bezos is a very wealthy man, but he’s highly accountable to shareholders. … It’s easier to show in a working class environment because it’s very clear if you don’t turn up for work, they just don’t pay you, right? People who will be punished by the market if they drift from the truth or drift from reality, and don’t provide value for other people. …

It affects everything about how you see the world:

Capitalism is essentially solving other people’s problems in exchange for money.. … If you’re out there curing the sick, or educating the young, or you’re winning a gold medal in the Olympics, or you’re writing software code, whatever you’re doing — if you’re paid by the performance of that, you’re on some deep level accountable.

And it changes who you are as a person and it changes what you do as a person. And from a political cultural sense, it changes how you think about the world. Your idea of justice, your idea of freedom, your idea of right and wrong.

The unaccountable class has conquered society since the 1930s, and it lives on the left:

But then there’s this large unaccountable class and these are people who live in a insulated, almost isolated world. These are people who might be in the bowels of bureaucracy of some big company. They might be trade union leaders who haven’t faced a competitive election in decades. And of course this is the tenured professors, the civil servants.

It doesn’t matter how quickly they move, whether they do anything at all. They get paid for showing up. …

During the run-up to the Iraq war, when I was talking to a lot to then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s staff, the generals were opposed to the Iraq war and I talked to them one-on-one. I asked why — I mean this must be your chance to show what you can really do. They … made a careerist argument. They said, listen Richard the problem with going to war as a general is that some people who have certain tactics, certain strategies, certain methods, are proven right and other people … are proven wrong. It’s bad for their careers, safer not to go to war at all, and then no one really knows who’s right and who’s wrong and we can just coast to retirement. …

Everything that you and the people who watch you don’t like about the world can be traced one way or another to the guiding hand of the unaccountable class. …

The fundamental political choice:

I wish it could say it’s, you know, individual versus the collective, or freedom versus slavery ,or one of those things you learn in philosophy class, but it’s not that. It’s fundamentally do you change yourself or do you change the world? Do you say I’m unhappy and therefore I need to change, I need to adapt to the reality beyond me. Or — I’m perfect, I need the world to change and accept me. …

The the body positivity is a classic case of this. The world needs to change what it finds attractive rather than you need to change.

So the political implications and the cultural implications for this are quite large because the people who think that they don’t need to change and they want the world to change to make them feel better about themselves. These people overwhelmingly gravitate toward the unaccountable class because they do not want to be shaped right by the outside world.