This is a well written essay, however its reference to America's past is in deep historical error. It refers to a “the Eastern Establishment” plus a handful of inventors and system-builders as if they were in control, or even dominant within, the USA's System between 1870 and 1930, when the basic architecture of the USA's Old Republic made that simply structurally impossible. In those decades you still have fiercely autonomous state and local governments, wildly different corporate and railroad codes, competing reserve-city banking pyramids, and mass-member party machines that run cities and states as their own civic-industrial projects. Capital markets are fragmented by design; New York is a central reserve node, but it is hemmed in by the Independent Treasury, unit-banking rules, blue-sky laws, state-level public utility commissions, municipal ownership of key infrastructure, and a constant drumbeat of agrarian, labor, and Midwestern insurgencies. If a single “techno-nationalist” stratum truly governed America, you would not see the constant rate wars, anti-trust prosecutions at state and even local levels, insurgent third parties, related regional banking events, state-driven experiments in regulation, etc., etc. that characterize this period; you would see something closer to a unified developmental state. You don’t because the system is built to keep any one financial-industrial cluster from fixing permanent roles for the rest of the continent.
What did exist was a somewhat powerful aspirant elite centered in Northeastern finance, law, and big industry, retrospectively labeled the Eastern Establishment. They did built a lot of corporate and financial plumbing, but they built it inside a pre-existing Jacksonian federal architecture that diffused power outward and downward, and they were constantly forced to bargain with state legislatures, local bond markets, party organizations, and hostile blocs in Congress; at their strongest points they were coordinators but not vertical coordinators but rather horizontal coordinators (which is still quite influential in the moment it occurs) but those moments were limited. The very story the essay is telling, contained repeated battles over tariffs, money, railroads, utilities, and later the Fed and New Deal, only makes sense if no coherent techno-nationalist governing class ever fully captured the system. Calling 1870–1930 “rule by a techno-nationalist elite” projects a later, post-WW2 transformation decades resulting technocratic managerial order backwards onto a polity that still ran as a lower case "d" democracy
I am very sympathetic to this critique and think there is not so much distance between what you believe and what I do.
I call them a governing class, not a ruling class, for a reason. The proto-Eastern Establishment was a strong voice--perhaps the strongest--in the dominant electoral coalition. This coalition also included, at a minimum, a huge midwest contingent anchored on Union army veterans and the general prosperous farmers and petty business men of the northeast. This coalition was not always victorious in federal contests and the eastern establishment was not always victorious in inttra-Republican disputes, but the Republican coalition was more often victorious and the Eastern Establishment was more often able to convince its coalition to on the questions that mattered most to it. I do not claim the "system" was ever "captured" by the eastern establishment--for the majority of this era they could not keep control over their most important city!
But.... the agrarian revolts failed. The party systems were forcefully nationalized and had lost their Jacksonian character by Mark Hanna's time (and partially due to his efforts--see Daniel Klinghard, The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), for more on this--you are clearly one of the few people who will understand and find interesting Klinghard's little known book).. The state legislatures that tried to put up meaningful resistance to industrial integration were shut down by the courts (or less commonly, by industrial interests willing to buy the right votes). Regional railroads lost place to national lines. American business was thoroughly "Morganized." Tariffs were never brought down to Jacksonian levels. The gold standard held. Labor movements were put down (right up until Gompers learned how to cooperate with this elite group). If you look at the federal judiciary, executive cabinet, and senate leadership in 1902 you see that the majority of those in leadership positions come from the social strata and even specific industries described. The only real place the establishment's federal policy preferences were completely upended was the failure of reconstruction, and that occurred partially because the "liberal Republican" faction split. (Depending on how you look at it the same thing is true of the progressive movement, where the split was larger).
America was a democracy, but it was a democracy in which a fairly small and culturally distinct group of men and women had a immensely disproportionate impact on national affairs. This group of men industrialized America and ended the old Jacksonian republic (which assumed a yeoman population employed by no men but themselves). They also had the deciding vote in almost every political issue to rise to the federal level--and plenty at the state levels as well. They weren't dictators and they weren't a legally privileged aristocracy of the European sort--but their position was elect, and their influence on American culture, industry, and government can be fairly called "dominant."
One last thing I think I will add to that: the eastern establishment's power was partially dependent on its wealth and legal ingenuity. But a great deal of it was based on their ability to convince the majority of Americans that they could and should be trusted with wealth and power. Not all Americans so trusted, but a slight majority clearly did. This was partially because they generally had a very good track record of governing well. This was partially because they convinced the rest of the country that the things they wanted were good for America writ large. And it was partially because they were skilled at old-fashioned political log-rolling and other party tricks of the era. This is actually one of the lessons I want the Silicon Valley folks to learn from this experience--the old establishment governed <i>by and through</i> democracy, not in opposition to it.
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply! I appreciate the distinction you make between "governing" and "ruling", and we may actually be closer in position than it seemed at first, but when you look at the actual landscape of authorities and in-general decision making across and within the major spheres, I think you may still be overestimating it. I say this because I think you may be inferring “system dominance” from a set of federal outcomes, and that’s where our a perspective give an inaccurate view.
Where I think an analytical error occurs is that you are, unintentionally, inferring system dominance from a set of federal level outcomes. That inference is what becomes a misinterpretation when done with the Old Republic. Even if Klinghard is right about partial party nationalization in the 1880 - 1896 period, and I agree that there were real changes in national coordination, that is not the same thing as the emergence of a post WW2 style national governing apparatus. The United States of this era still operated with deliberately fragmented capital markets, unit banking and competing reserve-city hierarchies, highly variable state corporate and railroad law, municipal bond-finance autonomy, state public utility commissions, municipal ownership fights, and congressional bloc and committee power that routinely overrode presidents and “establishments”, in the later phase this includes Taft and FDR, sometimes simultaneously, in ways a genuinely centralized order simply could not tolerate or survive.
So sure, depending on how narrowly one defines the term, I can accept “governing class” to mean an a group with outsized agenda setting influence on the subset of questions that actually rose to Washington. But “dominant” in the stronger, system-wide sense does not follow from that. Most governing capacity, and most economic, scientific, fiscal, and cultural decision-making, continued to live below the federal and national-private-sector levels. The constant rate wars, state antitrust and regulatory experimentation, insurgent factions inside and outside the major parties, and recurrent bargaining crises are not small noise; they are symptoms of constraint. They are evidence that capture was only ever partial, contested, and repeatedly reversible. This brings me back to my horizontal vs vertical framing, what you are describing is an influential horizontal coordination inside a still-Jacksonian federated architecture, not vertical near-command over a unified developmental state.
RE the Federal judiciary was stationed by the people you referred to when referencing it. In practice, state judiciaries, state legislatures, municipal courts, and state administrative bodies were far more consequential to everyday economic, scientific, and social governance than the federal bench. Corporate law, banking law, railroad regulation, labor rules, utilities, land use, and most contract enforcement lived overwhelmingly at the state and local level. A federal judiciary staffed by elite lawyers does not imply system command when the bulk of legal authority and enforcement remained fragmented across dozens of semi-sovereign jurisdictions with wildly different rules and political coalitions.
On Reconstruction, it’s also far from clear that its “failure” represents a clean defeat of Northeastern establishment preferences. If one looks at the economic and institutional outcomes rather than the moral rhetoric, Reconstruction produced a South that was capital-poor, credit-constrained, politically fragmented, and structurally subordinate in national markets, well, that's the kind of regional configuration that advantaged Northern finance and industry. So that may actually be there biggest victory, I don't know enough to state that, though.
And since you referenced the “Progressive movement” , it should be briefly mentioned as well, I think the idea of a coherent “Progressive movement” operating as a national force is something we have been deeply misinformed about. What we call Progressivism was not a centralized project, but a loose aggregation of state and local level actions, driven by very different autonomous coalitions, using the older lower-case “d” democratic governance structures
I also want to push back directly on the framing that “this group of men industrialized America and ended the old Jacksonian republic (which assumed a yeoman population employed by no men but themselves).” The Jacksonians were never a unitary bloc with a single sociological assumption about universal self employment; they were a coalition of coalitions urban workers, farmers, mechanics, merchants, scientists, artists, professionals, and wide and diversified assortment of local actors that engaged in conscious system-building. Their project was not anti-industry, quiet the opposite as they full throttle led us into modernity (it was the Democrats that moved priority from canals to railroads, several other examples like that, they were they big industrializers, not the Whigs), nor was it premised on freezing a yeoman something or other. It was lower case "d" democracy and about things such preventing any one financial-industrial cluster from fixing permanent roles for the rest of the continent.
Likewise, the people you describe as “dominant” did not industrialize America, they coordinated across a vast number of already-emergent localities, firms, banks, laboratories, and civic institutions that had grown out of a decentralized political economy designed with intentional economic, scientific, and institutional redundancy. That redundancy was not an early-19th-century relic that vanished by 1900; it was still very much present well into the 1930s, often to the frustration of the groups you describe as dominant. The fact that these elites were repeatedly forced to bargain with state legislatures, municipal finance systems, party organizations, hostile blocs in Congress, and regionally autonomous production and research ecosystems is itself strong evidence that the system had not yet crossed the threshold into true centralization
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply! I appreciate the distinction you make between "governing" and "ruling", and we may actually be closer in position than it seemed at first, but when you look at the actual landscape of authorities and in-general decision making across and within the major spheres, I think you may still be overestimating it. I say this because I think you may be inferring “system dominance” from a set of federal outcomes, and that’s where our a perspective give an inaccurate view.
Where I think an analytical error occurs is that you are, unintentionally, inferring system dominance from a set of federal level outcomes. That inference is what becomes a misinterpretation when done with the Old Republic. Even if Klinghard is right about partial party nationalization in the 1880 - 1896 period, and I agree that there were real changes in national coordination, that is not the same thing as the emergence of a post WW2 style national governing apparatus. The United States of this era still operated with deliberately fragmented capital markets, unit banking and competing reserve-city hierarchies, highly variable state corporate and railroad law, municipal bond-finance autonomy, state public utility commissions, municipal ownership fights, and congressional bloc and committee power that routinely overrode presidents and “establishments”, in the later phase this includes Taft and FDR, sometimes simultaneously, in ways a genuinely centralized order simply could not tolerate or survive.
So sure, depending on how narrowly one defines the term, I can accept “governing class” to mean an a group with outsized agenda setting influence on the subset of questions that actually rose to Washington. But “dominant” in the stronger, system-wide sense does not follow from that. Most governing capacity, and most economic, scientific, fiscal, and cultural decision-making, continued to live below the federal and national-private-sector levels. The constant rate wars, state antitrust and regulatory experimentation, insurgent factions inside and outside the major parties, and recurrent bargaining crises are not small noise; they are symptoms of constraint. They are evidence that capture was only ever partial, contested, and repeatedly reversible. This brings me back to my horizontal vs vertical framing, what you are describing is an influential horizontal coordination inside a still-Jacksonian federated architecture, not vertical near-command over a unified developmental state.
RE the Federal judiciary was stationed by the people you referred to when referencing it. In practice, state judiciaries, state legislatures, municipal courts, and state administrative bodies were far more consequential to everyday economic, scientific, and social governance than the federal bench. Corporate law, banking law, railroad regulation, labor rules, utilities, land use, and most contract enforcement lived overwhelmingly at the state and local level. A federal judiciary staffed by elite lawyers does not imply system command when the bulk of legal authority and enforcement remained fragmented across dozens of semi-sovereign jurisdictions with wildly different rules and political coalitions.
On Reconstruction, it’s also far from clear that its “failure” represents a clean defeat of Northeastern establishment preferences. If one looks at the economic and institutional outcomes rather than the moral rhetoric, Reconstruction produced a South that was capital-poor, credit-constrained, politically fragmented, and structurally subordinate in national markets, well, that's the kind of regional configuration that advantaged Northern finance and industry. So that may actually be there biggest victory, I don't know enough to state that, though.
And since you referenced the “Progressive movement” , it should be briefly mentioned as well, I think the idea of a coherent “Progressive movement” operating as a national force is something we have been deeply misinformed about. What we call Progressivism was not a centralized project, but a loose aggregation of state and local level actions, driven by very different autonomous coalitions, using the older lower-case “d” democratic governance structures
I also want to push back directly on the framing that “this group of men industrialized America and ended the old Jacksonian republic (which assumed a yeoman population employed by no men but themselves).” The Jacksonians were never a unitary bloc with a single sociological assumption about universal self employment; they were a coalition of coalitions urban workers, farmers, mechanics, merchants, scientists, artists, professionals, and wide and diversified assortment of local actors that engaged in conscious system-building. Their project was not anti-industry, quiet the opposite as they full throttle led us into modernity (it was the Democrats that moved priority from canals to railroads, several other examples like that, they were they big industrializers, not the Whigs), nor was it premised on freezing a yeoman something or other. It was lower case "d" democracy and about things such preventing any one financial-industrial cluster from fixing permanent roles for the rest of the continent.
Likewise, the people you describe as “dominant” did not industrialize America, they coordinated across a vast number of already-emergent localities, firms, banks, laboratories, and civic institutions that had grown out of a decentralized political economy designed with intentional economic, scientific, and institutional redundancy. That redundancy was not an early-19th-century relic that vanished by 1900; it was still very much present well into the 1930s, often to the frustration of the groups you describe as dominant. The fact that these elites were repeatedly forced to bargain with state legislatures, municipal finance systems, party organizations, hostile blocs in Congress, and regionally autonomous production and research ecosystems is itself strong evidence that the system had not yet crossed the threshold into true centralization
Thank you for this post. Arnold Kling sent me the link because he knew I would appreciate it. I read the book so we could discuss it on his podcast (here's the link for the curious: https://youtu.be/sc2lR_iFp5g?si=lKhK2QjEdA20aKWQ).
This book is a fraud. It is absolute junk. It is the sort of "book" you get from rich, powerful people surrounded by yes-men. It is an insult to the intelligence of its readers, although a disturbing number of them don't realize it. It is an insult to the intelligence of its authors, although at least one of them doesn't realize it. I am angry that I wasted time reading it. I am more angry that it has blurbs from people who should know better. I am angry that it exists.
Another central factor in the success of the Eastern Establishment as a techno-industrial elite was the set of foundational inventions they refined, scaled, and commercialized: a set of inventions unlike any before or since in their transformative potential, many made by American inventors but many more by Europeans. Vaclav Smil's _Creating the Twentieth Century_ is great on this. Maybe the most cutting critique of the Silicon Valley elite is that they imagine themselves the heirs of Bell, Edison, Siemens, Marconi, the Wrights etc, but in fact aren't remotely close to the achievements of those titans.
Not trying to knock the essay, I think its good, however its implied descriptions of the scope of the power and influence of “the Eastern Establishment” is deeply in error. It refers to a “the Eastern Establishment” plus a handful of inventors and system-builders as if they were in control, or even dominant within, the USA's System between 1870 and 1930, when the basic architecture of the USA's Old Republic made that simply structurally impossible. In those decades you still have fiercely autonomous state and local governments, wildly different corporate and railroad codes, competing reserve-city banking pyramids, and mass-member party machines that run cities and states as their own civic-industrial projects. Capital markets are fragmented by design; New York is a central reserve node, but it is hemmed in by the Independent Treasury, unit-banking rules, blue-sky laws, state-level public utility commissions, municipal ownership of key infrastructure, and a constant drumbeat of agrarian, labor, and Midwestern insurgencies. If a single “techno-nationalist” stratum truly governed America, you would not see the constant rate wars, anti-trust prosecutions at state and even local levels, insurgent third parties, related regional banking events, state-driven experiments in regulation, etc., etc. that characterize this period; you would see something closer to a unified developmental state. You don’t because the system is built to keep any one financial-industrial cluster from fixing permanent roles for the rest of the continent.
What did exist was a somewhat powerful aspirant elite centered in Northeastern finance, law, and big industry, retrospectively labeled the Eastern Establishment. They did built a lot of corporate and financial plumbing, but they built it inside a pre-existing Jacksonian federal architecture that diffused power outward and downward, and they were constantly forced to bargain with state legislatures, local bond markets, party organizations, and hostile blocs in Congress; at their strongest points they were coordinators but not vertical coordinators but rather horizontal coordinators (which is still quite influential in the moment it occurs) but those moments were limited. The very story the essay is telling, contained repeated battles over tariffs, money, railroads, utilities, and later the Fed and New Deal, only makes sense if no coherent techno-nationalist governing class ever fully captured the system. Calling 1870–1930 “rule by a techno-nationalist elite” projects a later, post-WW2 transformation decades resulting technocratic managerial order backwards onto a polity that still ran as a lower case "d" democracy
> Maybe the most cutting critique of the Silicon Valley elite is that they imagine themselves the heirs of Bell, Edison, Siemens, Marconi, the Wrights etc, but in fact aren't remotely close to the achievements of those titans.
Great review! Also read your American Affairs piece and learned a lot.
What values and overarching vision do you think could animate and bind a new technological elite in the US?
It would certainly need to be welcoming to high-skill immigrants joining its ranks.
I think that means vision or goal-wise to once again make the US the destination for the world’s best talent and dreamers.
It would also mean greatly strengthening at all levels the bar for achievement in education so that people would want to study and do research here and would want their children educated here.
As you point out though, the previous elite greatly expanded the number of schools or drastically transformed extant ones.
But that’s perhaps too concrete. I think the vision, which is considered laughably naive at the moment is some earnest optimism that life can rapidly get better for all Americans.
I feel like Elon had this mantle for a while and then lost it. To me, he first reversed my fatalism that America couldn’t do big new things, particularly with SpaceX. But the quality of his discourse and his self-conduct have rapidly degraded and his embrace of a particular party I think has permanently alienated him from being some new kind of statesman.
My apologies for such a late reply, but I've been thinking about the question you raised, and that came to my mind as well: "What values and overarching vision do you think could animate and bind a new technological elite in the US?" My tentative answer to this and related questions can be found at https://frankhecker.com/2026/01/03/recreating-a-techno-nationalist-elite/
To respond to some of your points: immigration, and America as the desired destination for the world's best and brightest, yes, definitely. I wrote a couple of other posts specifically on this topic, which I link to from the above post. Strengthening education, especially for the talented, yes. I name-check Alpha School and its spin-offs and imitators as a potential 21st century rival system to the private schools that Tanner Greer mentions.
Also, I name-check Elon Musk briefly in the course of discussing how a new techno-nationalist political coalition might be formed. Suffice it to say that I think his particular approach is not going to work.
How are we different from China might help frame it?
Perhaps we tolerate more individuality, more variance, more fun.
I think while China conceives of itself as righting historical wrongs and ascending to its rightful place, America is adrift, timid, and more scared of decline than believing in its ability to rise to the challenge of producing broad-based growth and once again leading the world order.
Having grown up in California, I think I may have a biased take on general American sentiment, but do have a better feel for what might inspire the Californian tech elite and broader coalition.
I think maybe something like what Casey Handmer argues for might be what this looks like.
Aggressively optimistic about the bounties technology can give us. Pro-natal, pro-human development, pro-YIMBY, pro-speed, pro-environmental intervention, anti-bureaucracy.
He’s also lived a kaleidoscopic life, hitchhiking around central Asia, playing the organ, getting a physics PhD from Caltech.
Ah, Casey is also very pro “immortality” which Elon has never embraced, but is distinctly transhuman and I think something a lot of the tech elite privately support, but is regarded with revulsion by the general populace.
And then there’s the whole space thing, which I think will also be part of the vision, particularly as a race with China. Who will get to shape the image of the society that settles the solar system?
This may sound exceedingly naïve, but I think Substack may be better at eliciting these discussions and forming the initial seeds of community that could shape a new elite coalition than Twitter. I think pre-2021 Twitter had similar energy with calm little spaces for people to virtually gather and discuss together.
Now it’s a din of aggressive marketing of ideas. I think many of my favorite people (Tanner included) have shifted over here. I think the center of gravity of where the interesting, generative conversations are has already shifted. Substack certainly has better, calmer vibes.
I read through this as well as the full piece at American Affairs. Very interesting!
One question I have, which is admittedly outside the scope of your piece but seems very important to understanding the conditions under which a durable class of elites will form, is about why an elite didn't form after World War II. If anything, World War II and the twenty or so years that make up its immediate aftermath seem to mark the end of Eastern Establishment (Goldwater's nomination over Nelson Rockefeller is the point at which people typically seem to bring down the curtains on the Eastern Establishment, which is different from your date of 1930). Is the difference that America's fate as a nation did not hang in the balance during this war in the same way as it did during the Civil War? On the other hand, one might have thought that the massive industrial-political machine that formed during the 1930s and that then fought WWII to a victory would create both the a political coalition a shared set of material interests, and the conviction that formed during and after WWII that America was fighting for a particular set of ideas would create the basis for an elite ethos or culture. The combination of these three factors are what you identify in your piece as the essential ingredients for the formation of an elite. So what's different about WWII? Why, instead of 70 years of stable rule by a relatively stable elite class, did we get the antinomian upheavals of the 1960s and then the formation of the non-nationalistic Silicon Valley software elites starting in the 1980s?
We did get an elite class in a way, but it was a more fractured and less culturally cohesive one. More national and meritocratic, less of a distinct “class” however.
The core problem is the failure of Silicon Valley to engage seriously with the discipline of economics: how can you use technology to create functioning markets? Because when those are the sorts of questions you're asking, you naturally engage with the law in its moral (rather than procedural) aspects - and therefore with the nation. AI has always been about a machine god to replace voluntary exchange. Blockchain was about markets, but pointedly about dysfunctional ones, circumventing legal control. This seems implicit in the footnote about deritivatives, but it's worth spelling out.
if a "vibe" comment may be allowed, Karp "gives" "male loneliness epidemic:" a person desperate for emotional connection but unable to summon enough genuine self-expression, vulnerability, and fellow-feeling to initiate actual relationships with other people.
Great post. I couldn’t agree more with the substance. The book is shallow, incoherent and badly written. For a guy praised for his intellect, and , apparently, with so much influence in the Trump circus, it’s scary.
This is a well written essay, however its reference to America's past is in deep historical error. It refers to a “the Eastern Establishment” plus a handful of inventors and system-builders as if they were in control, or even dominant within, the USA's System between 1870 and 1930, when the basic architecture of the USA's Old Republic made that simply structurally impossible. In those decades you still have fiercely autonomous state and local governments, wildly different corporate and railroad codes, competing reserve-city banking pyramids, and mass-member party machines that run cities and states as their own civic-industrial projects. Capital markets are fragmented by design; New York is a central reserve node, but it is hemmed in by the Independent Treasury, unit-banking rules, blue-sky laws, state-level public utility commissions, municipal ownership of key infrastructure, and a constant drumbeat of agrarian, labor, and Midwestern insurgencies. If a single “techno-nationalist” stratum truly governed America, you would not see the constant rate wars, anti-trust prosecutions at state and even local levels, insurgent third parties, related regional banking events, state-driven experiments in regulation, etc., etc. that characterize this period; you would see something closer to a unified developmental state. You don’t because the system is built to keep any one financial-industrial cluster from fixing permanent roles for the rest of the continent.
What did exist was a somewhat powerful aspirant elite centered in Northeastern finance, law, and big industry, retrospectively labeled the Eastern Establishment. They did built a lot of corporate and financial plumbing, but they built it inside a pre-existing Jacksonian federal architecture that diffused power outward and downward, and they were constantly forced to bargain with state legislatures, local bond markets, party organizations, and hostile blocs in Congress; at their strongest points they were coordinators but not vertical coordinators but rather horizontal coordinators (which is still quite influential in the moment it occurs) but those moments were limited. The very story the essay is telling, contained repeated battles over tariffs, money, railroads, utilities, and later the Fed and New Deal, only makes sense if no coherent techno-nationalist governing class ever fully captured the system. Calling 1870–1930 “rule by a techno-nationalist elite” projects a later, post-WW2 transformation decades resulting technocratic managerial order backwards onto a polity that still ran as a lower case "d" democracy
I am very sympathetic to this critique and think there is not so much distance between what you believe and what I do.
I call them a governing class, not a ruling class, for a reason. The proto-Eastern Establishment was a strong voice--perhaps the strongest--in the dominant electoral coalition. This coalition also included, at a minimum, a huge midwest contingent anchored on Union army veterans and the general prosperous farmers and petty business men of the northeast. This coalition was not always victorious in federal contests and the eastern establishment was not always victorious in inttra-Republican disputes, but the Republican coalition was more often victorious and the Eastern Establishment was more often able to convince its coalition to on the questions that mattered most to it. I do not claim the "system" was ever "captured" by the eastern establishment--for the majority of this era they could not keep control over their most important city!
But.... the agrarian revolts failed. The party systems were forcefully nationalized and had lost their Jacksonian character by Mark Hanna's time (and partially due to his efforts--see Daniel Klinghard, The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), for more on this--you are clearly one of the few people who will understand and find interesting Klinghard's little known book).. The state legislatures that tried to put up meaningful resistance to industrial integration were shut down by the courts (or less commonly, by industrial interests willing to buy the right votes). Regional railroads lost place to national lines. American business was thoroughly "Morganized." Tariffs were never brought down to Jacksonian levels. The gold standard held. Labor movements were put down (right up until Gompers learned how to cooperate with this elite group). If you look at the federal judiciary, executive cabinet, and senate leadership in 1902 you see that the majority of those in leadership positions come from the social strata and even specific industries described. The only real place the establishment's federal policy preferences were completely upended was the failure of reconstruction, and that occurred partially because the "liberal Republican" faction split. (Depending on how you look at it the same thing is true of the progressive movement, where the split was larger).
America was a democracy, but it was a democracy in which a fairly small and culturally distinct group of men and women had a immensely disproportionate impact on national affairs. This group of men industrialized America and ended the old Jacksonian republic (which assumed a yeoman population employed by no men but themselves). They also had the deciding vote in almost every political issue to rise to the federal level--and plenty at the state levels as well. They weren't dictators and they weren't a legally privileged aristocracy of the European sort--but their position was elect, and their influence on American culture, industry, and government can be fairly called "dominant."
One last thing I think I will add to that: the eastern establishment's power was partially dependent on its wealth and legal ingenuity. But a great deal of it was based on their ability to convince the majority of Americans that they could and should be trusted with wealth and power. Not all Americans so trusted, but a slight majority clearly did. This was partially because they generally had a very good track record of governing well. This was partially because they convinced the rest of the country that the things they wanted were good for America writ large. And it was partially because they were skilled at old-fashioned political log-rolling and other party tricks of the era. This is actually one of the lessons I want the Silicon Valley folks to learn from this experience--the old establishment governed <i>by and through</i> democracy, not in opposition to it.
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply! I appreciate the distinction you make between "governing" and "ruling", and we may actually be closer in position than it seemed at first, but when you look at the actual landscape of authorities and in-general decision making across and within the major spheres, I think you may still be overestimating it. I say this because I think you may be inferring “system dominance” from a set of federal outcomes, and that’s where our a perspective give an inaccurate view.
Where I think an analytical error occurs is that you are, unintentionally, inferring system dominance from a set of federal level outcomes. That inference is what becomes a misinterpretation when done with the Old Republic. Even if Klinghard is right about partial party nationalization in the 1880 - 1896 period, and I agree that there were real changes in national coordination, that is not the same thing as the emergence of a post WW2 style national governing apparatus. The United States of this era still operated with deliberately fragmented capital markets, unit banking and competing reserve-city hierarchies, highly variable state corporate and railroad law, municipal bond-finance autonomy, state public utility commissions, municipal ownership fights, and congressional bloc and committee power that routinely overrode presidents and “establishments”, in the later phase this includes Taft and FDR, sometimes simultaneously, in ways a genuinely centralized order simply could not tolerate or survive.
So sure, depending on how narrowly one defines the term, I can accept “governing class” to mean an a group with outsized agenda setting influence on the subset of questions that actually rose to Washington. But “dominant” in the stronger, system-wide sense does not follow from that. Most governing capacity, and most economic, scientific, fiscal, and cultural decision-making, continued to live below the federal and national-private-sector levels. The constant rate wars, state antitrust and regulatory experimentation, insurgent factions inside and outside the major parties, and recurrent bargaining crises are not small noise; they are symptoms of constraint. They are evidence that capture was only ever partial, contested, and repeatedly reversible. This brings me back to my horizontal vs vertical framing, what you are describing is an influential horizontal coordination inside a still-Jacksonian federated architecture, not vertical near-command over a unified developmental state.
RE the Federal judiciary was stationed by the people you referred to when referencing it. In practice, state judiciaries, state legislatures, municipal courts, and state administrative bodies were far more consequential to everyday economic, scientific, and social governance than the federal bench. Corporate law, banking law, railroad regulation, labor rules, utilities, land use, and most contract enforcement lived overwhelmingly at the state and local level. A federal judiciary staffed by elite lawyers does not imply system command when the bulk of legal authority and enforcement remained fragmented across dozens of semi-sovereign jurisdictions with wildly different rules and political coalitions.
On Reconstruction, it’s also far from clear that its “failure” represents a clean defeat of Northeastern establishment preferences. If one looks at the economic and institutional outcomes rather than the moral rhetoric, Reconstruction produced a South that was capital-poor, credit-constrained, politically fragmented, and structurally subordinate in national markets, well, that's the kind of regional configuration that advantaged Northern finance and industry. So that may actually be there biggest victory, I don't know enough to state that, though.
And since you referenced the “Progressive movement” , it should be briefly mentioned as well, I think the idea of a coherent “Progressive movement” operating as a national force is something we have been deeply misinformed about. What we call Progressivism was not a centralized project, but a loose aggregation of state and local level actions, driven by very different autonomous coalitions, using the older lower-case “d” democratic governance structures
I also want to push back directly on the framing that “this group of men industrialized America and ended the old Jacksonian republic (which assumed a yeoman population employed by no men but themselves).” The Jacksonians were never a unitary bloc with a single sociological assumption about universal self employment; they were a coalition of coalitions urban workers, farmers, mechanics, merchants, scientists, artists, professionals, and wide and diversified assortment of local actors that engaged in conscious system-building. Their project was not anti-industry, quiet the opposite as they full throttle led us into modernity (it was the Democrats that moved priority from canals to railroads, several other examples like that, they were they big industrializers, not the Whigs), nor was it premised on freezing a yeoman something or other. It was lower case "d" democracy and about things such preventing any one financial-industrial cluster from fixing permanent roles for the rest of the continent.
Likewise, the people you describe as “dominant” did not industrialize America, they coordinated across a vast number of already-emergent localities, firms, banks, laboratories, and civic institutions that had grown out of a decentralized political economy designed with intentional economic, scientific, and institutional redundancy. That redundancy was not an early-19th-century relic that vanished by 1900; it was still very much present well into the 1930s, often to the frustration of the groups you describe as dominant. The fact that these elites were repeatedly forced to bargain with state legislatures, municipal finance systems, party organizations, hostile blocs in Congress, and regionally autonomous production and research ecosystems is itself strong evidence that the system had not yet crossed the threshold into true centralization
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply! I appreciate the distinction you make between "governing" and "ruling", and we may actually be closer in position than it seemed at first, but when you look at the actual landscape of authorities and in-general decision making across and within the major spheres, I think you may still be overestimating it. I say this because I think you may be inferring “system dominance” from a set of federal outcomes, and that’s where our a perspective give an inaccurate view.
Where I think an analytical error occurs is that you are, unintentionally, inferring system dominance from a set of federal level outcomes. That inference is what becomes a misinterpretation when done with the Old Republic. Even if Klinghard is right about partial party nationalization in the 1880 - 1896 period, and I agree that there were real changes in national coordination, that is not the same thing as the emergence of a post WW2 style national governing apparatus. The United States of this era still operated with deliberately fragmented capital markets, unit banking and competing reserve-city hierarchies, highly variable state corporate and railroad law, municipal bond-finance autonomy, state public utility commissions, municipal ownership fights, and congressional bloc and committee power that routinely overrode presidents and “establishments”, in the later phase this includes Taft and FDR, sometimes simultaneously, in ways a genuinely centralized order simply could not tolerate or survive.
So sure, depending on how narrowly one defines the term, I can accept “governing class” to mean an a group with outsized agenda setting influence on the subset of questions that actually rose to Washington. But “dominant” in the stronger, system-wide sense does not follow from that. Most governing capacity, and most economic, scientific, fiscal, and cultural decision-making, continued to live below the federal and national-private-sector levels. The constant rate wars, state antitrust and regulatory experimentation, insurgent factions inside and outside the major parties, and recurrent bargaining crises are not small noise; they are symptoms of constraint. They are evidence that capture was only ever partial, contested, and repeatedly reversible. This brings me back to my horizontal vs vertical framing, what you are describing is an influential horizontal coordination inside a still-Jacksonian federated architecture, not vertical near-command over a unified developmental state.
RE the Federal judiciary was stationed by the people you referred to when referencing it. In practice, state judiciaries, state legislatures, municipal courts, and state administrative bodies were far more consequential to everyday economic, scientific, and social governance than the federal bench. Corporate law, banking law, railroad regulation, labor rules, utilities, land use, and most contract enforcement lived overwhelmingly at the state and local level. A federal judiciary staffed by elite lawyers does not imply system command when the bulk of legal authority and enforcement remained fragmented across dozens of semi-sovereign jurisdictions with wildly different rules and political coalitions.
On Reconstruction, it’s also far from clear that its “failure” represents a clean defeat of Northeastern establishment preferences. If one looks at the economic and institutional outcomes rather than the moral rhetoric, Reconstruction produced a South that was capital-poor, credit-constrained, politically fragmented, and structurally subordinate in national markets, well, that's the kind of regional configuration that advantaged Northern finance and industry. So that may actually be there biggest victory, I don't know enough to state that, though.
And since you referenced the “Progressive movement” , it should be briefly mentioned as well, I think the idea of a coherent “Progressive movement” operating as a national force is something we have been deeply misinformed about. What we call Progressivism was not a centralized project, but a loose aggregation of state and local level actions, driven by very different autonomous coalitions, using the older lower-case “d” democratic governance structures
I also want to push back directly on the framing that “this group of men industrialized America and ended the old Jacksonian republic (which assumed a yeoman population employed by no men but themselves).” The Jacksonians were never a unitary bloc with a single sociological assumption about universal self employment; they were a coalition of coalitions urban workers, farmers, mechanics, merchants, scientists, artists, professionals, and wide and diversified assortment of local actors that engaged in conscious system-building. Their project was not anti-industry, quiet the opposite as they full throttle led us into modernity (it was the Democrats that moved priority from canals to railroads, several other examples like that, they were they big industrializers, not the Whigs), nor was it premised on freezing a yeoman something or other. It was lower case "d" democracy and about things such preventing any one financial-industrial cluster from fixing permanent roles for the rest of the continent.
Likewise, the people you describe as “dominant” did not industrialize America, they coordinated across a vast number of already-emergent localities, firms, banks, laboratories, and civic institutions that had grown out of a decentralized political economy designed with intentional economic, scientific, and institutional redundancy. That redundancy was not an early-19th-century relic that vanished by 1900; it was still very much present well into the 1930s, often to the frustration of the groups you describe as dominant. The fact that these elites were repeatedly forced to bargain with state legislatures, municipal finance systems, party organizations, hostile blocs in Congress, and regionally autonomous production and research ecosystems is itself strong evidence that the system had not yet crossed the threshold into true centralization
Thank you for this post. Arnold Kling sent me the link because he knew I would appreciate it. I read the book so we could discuss it on his podcast (here's the link for the curious: https://youtu.be/sc2lR_iFp5g?si=lKhK2QjEdA20aKWQ).
This book is a fraud. It is absolute junk. It is the sort of "book" you get from rich, powerful people surrounded by yes-men. It is an insult to the intelligence of its readers, although a disturbing number of them don't realize it. It is an insult to the intelligence of its authors, although at least one of them doesn't realize it. I am angry that I wasted time reading it. I am more angry that it has blurbs from people who should know better. I am angry that it exists.
More conversation here: https://substack.com/profile/3968187-t-greer/note/c-187120251?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2d1vf
Another central factor in the success of the Eastern Establishment as a techno-industrial elite was the set of foundational inventions they refined, scaled, and commercialized: a set of inventions unlike any before or since in their transformative potential, many made by American inventors but many more by Europeans. Vaclav Smil's _Creating the Twentieth Century_ is great on this. Maybe the most cutting critique of the Silicon Valley elite is that they imagine themselves the heirs of Bell, Edison, Siemens, Marconi, the Wrights etc, but in fact aren't remotely close to the achievements of those titans.
I suggest you read the first three paragraphs of my essay and then look at the source I cited! We think alike.
Not trying to knock the essay, I think its good, however its implied descriptions of the scope of the power and influence of “the Eastern Establishment” is deeply in error. It refers to a “the Eastern Establishment” plus a handful of inventors and system-builders as if they were in control, or even dominant within, the USA's System between 1870 and 1930, when the basic architecture of the USA's Old Republic made that simply structurally impossible. In those decades you still have fiercely autonomous state and local governments, wildly different corporate and railroad codes, competing reserve-city banking pyramids, and mass-member party machines that run cities and states as their own civic-industrial projects. Capital markets are fragmented by design; New York is a central reserve node, but it is hemmed in by the Independent Treasury, unit-banking rules, blue-sky laws, state-level public utility commissions, municipal ownership of key infrastructure, and a constant drumbeat of agrarian, labor, and Midwestern insurgencies. If a single “techno-nationalist” stratum truly governed America, you would not see the constant rate wars, anti-trust prosecutions at state and even local levels, insurgent third parties, related regional banking events, state-driven experiments in regulation, etc., etc. that characterize this period; you would see something closer to a unified developmental state. You don’t because the system is built to keep any one financial-industrial cluster from fixing permanent roles for the rest of the continent.
What did exist was a somewhat powerful aspirant elite centered in Northeastern finance, law, and big industry, retrospectively labeled the Eastern Establishment. They did built a lot of corporate and financial plumbing, but they built it inside a pre-existing Jacksonian federal architecture that diffused power outward and downward, and they were constantly forced to bargain with state legislatures, local bond markets, party organizations, and hostile blocs in Congress; at their strongest points they were coordinators but not vertical coordinators but rather horizontal coordinators (which is still quite influential in the moment it occurs) but those moments were limited. The very story the essay is telling, contained repeated battles over tariffs, money, railroads, utilities, and later the Fed and New Deal, only makes sense if no coherent techno-nationalist governing class ever fully captured the system. Calling 1870–1930 “rule by a techno-nationalist elite” projects a later, post-WW2 transformation decades resulting technocratic managerial order backwards onto a polity that still ran as a lower case "d" democracy
> Maybe the most cutting critique of the Silicon Valley elite is that they imagine themselves the heirs of Bell, Edison, Siemens, Marconi, the Wrights etc, but in fact aren't remotely close to the achievements of those titans.
Um, the Internet, Elon's rockets, AI.
I agree broadly with Peter Thiel's critique of all that. See here: https://scholars-stage.org/has-technological-progress-stalled/
Great review! Also read your American Affairs piece and learned a lot.
What values and overarching vision do you think could animate and bind a new technological elite in the US?
It would certainly need to be welcoming to high-skill immigrants joining its ranks.
I think that means vision or goal-wise to once again make the US the destination for the world’s best talent and dreamers.
It would also mean greatly strengthening at all levels the bar for achievement in education so that people would want to study and do research here and would want their children educated here.
As you point out though, the previous elite greatly expanded the number of schools or drastically transformed extant ones.
But that’s perhaps too concrete. I think the vision, which is considered laughably naive at the moment is some earnest optimism that life can rapidly get better for all Americans.
I feel like Elon had this mantle for a while and then lost it. To me, he first reversed my fatalism that America couldn’t do big new things, particularly with SpaceX. But the quality of his discourse and his self-conduct have rapidly degraded and his embrace of a particular party I think has permanently alienated him from being some new kind of statesman.
My apologies for such a late reply, but I've been thinking about the question you raised, and that came to my mind as well: "What values and overarching vision do you think could animate and bind a new technological elite in the US?" My tentative answer to this and related questions can be found at https://frankhecker.com/2026/01/03/recreating-a-techno-nationalist-elite/
To respond to some of your points: immigration, and America as the desired destination for the world's best and brightest, yes, definitely. I wrote a couple of other posts specifically on this topic, which I link to from the above post. Strengthening education, especially for the talented, yes. I name-check Alpha School and its spin-offs and imitators as a potential 21st century rival system to the private schools that Tanner Greer mentions.
Also, I name-check Elon Musk briefly in the course of discussing how a new techno-nationalist political coalition might be formed. Suffice it to say that I think his particular approach is not going to work.
How are we different from China might help frame it?
Perhaps we tolerate more individuality, more variance, more fun.
I think while China conceives of itself as righting historical wrongs and ascending to its rightful place, America is adrift, timid, and more scared of decline than believing in its ability to rise to the challenge of producing broad-based growth and once again leading the world order.
Having grown up in California, I think I may have a biased take on general American sentiment, but do have a better feel for what might inspire the Californian tech elite and broader coalition.
I think maybe something like what Casey Handmer argues for might be what this looks like.
Aggressively optimistic about the bounties technology can give us. Pro-natal, pro-human development, pro-YIMBY, pro-speed, pro-environmental intervention, anti-bureaucracy.
He’s also lived a kaleidoscopic life, hitchhiking around central Asia, playing the organ, getting a physics PhD from Caltech.
Ah, Casey is also very pro “immortality” which Elon has never embraced, but is distinctly transhuman and I think something a lot of the tech elite privately support, but is regarded with revulsion by the general populace.
And then there’s the whole space thing, which I think will also be part of the vision, particularly as a race with China. Who will get to shape the image of the society that settles the solar system?
This may sound exceedingly naïve, but I think Substack may be better at eliciting these discussions and forming the initial seeds of community that could shape a new elite coalition than Twitter. I think pre-2021 Twitter had similar energy with calm little spaces for people to virtually gather and discuss together.
Now it’s a din of aggressive marketing of ideas. I think many of my favorite people (Tanner included) have shifted over here. I think the center of gravity of where the interesting, generative conversations are has already shifted. Substack certainly has better, calmer vibes.
I read through this as well as the full piece at American Affairs. Very interesting!
One question I have, which is admittedly outside the scope of your piece but seems very important to understanding the conditions under which a durable class of elites will form, is about why an elite didn't form after World War II. If anything, World War II and the twenty or so years that make up its immediate aftermath seem to mark the end of Eastern Establishment (Goldwater's nomination over Nelson Rockefeller is the point at which people typically seem to bring down the curtains on the Eastern Establishment, which is different from your date of 1930). Is the difference that America's fate as a nation did not hang in the balance during this war in the same way as it did during the Civil War? On the other hand, one might have thought that the massive industrial-political machine that formed during the 1930s and that then fought WWII to a victory would create both the a political coalition a shared set of material interests, and the conviction that formed during and after WWII that America was fighting for a particular set of ideas would create the basis for an elite ethos or culture. The combination of these three factors are what you identify in your piece as the essential ingredients for the formation of an elite. So what's different about WWII? Why, instead of 70 years of stable rule by a relatively stable elite class, did we get the antinomian upheavals of the 1960s and then the formation of the non-nationalistic Silicon Valley software elites starting in the 1980s?
We did get an elite class in a way, but it was a more fractured and less culturally cohesive one. More national and meritocratic, less of a distinct “class” however.
The core problem is the failure of Silicon Valley to engage seriously with the discipline of economics: how can you use technology to create functioning markets? Because when those are the sorts of questions you're asking, you naturally engage with the law in its moral (rather than procedural) aspects - and therefore with the nation. AI has always been about a machine god to replace voluntary exchange. Blockchain was about markets, but pointedly about dysfunctional ones, circumventing legal control. This seems implicit in the footnote about deritivatives, but it's worth spelling out.
Excellent critique- and I agree that this was the most disappointing book I read this year
if a "vibe" comment may be allowed, Karp "gives" "male loneliness epidemic:" a person desperate for emotional connection but unable to summon enough genuine self-expression, vulnerability, and fellow-feeling to initiate actual relationships with other people.
Great post. I couldn’t agree more with the substance. The book is shallow, incoherent and badly written. For a guy praised for his intellect, and , apparently, with so much influence in the Trump circus, it’s scary.
I think he is plenty smart. Very possible for a smart man to write a stupid book, especially if said man’s actual job in running a company.
Ok. I guess you’re right. But, still, not a good move in reputation terms.
Karp can't tell you the vision he wants in closer alignment with the State, because it amounts to "L'Etat c'est nous."
Mr. Greer, I posted a comment on this post on your old blog, but it does not show up:
https://scholars-stage.org/making-sense-of-chinese-history-a-reading-list/
I do not see this in the spam, in the deleted comments, or in the pending comments. Can you try submitting again?
Thank you, Mr. Greer, I forgot exactly what I wrote, but the link to the comment was
https://scholars-stage.org/making-sense-of-chinese-history-a-reading-list/#comment-24200 , which is proof that I submitted it. It's no major worry if it's forgotten, but should I try to post a test comment to see if the site works?