Liberals And The Welfare State

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Road to the Middle Class

Thursday October 23, 2025

by Christopher Chantrill

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The liberal elite fight at every opportunity for the expansion of the welfare state and its political patronage and corruption.

Ever since the emergence of the first proto-state, government has been organized as an armed minority, occupying territory, taxing people and goods, holding power by rewarding its supporters. If the feudal state maintained itself by rewarding its feudatories and the absolute monarch maintained his territorial state by rewarding the great merchants whose credit financed his standing army, then the modern democratic welfare state maintains itself by buying the support of the voters.

Often enough this armed minority has experienced itself as a ruling class, “uniformly conscious and organized” over an empire1, as in the Roman Empire, or a multi-state region, as the warrior aristocrats in medieval and early-modern Europe, and this ruling class developed a self-conscious ruling-class morale to sustain itself in power.

Our modern ruling class, the gentry liberals, is such a self-conscious ruling class, sustained by a class morale that celebrates itself as an educated and evolved elite called to create a just and peaceful world to replace the cruel and unjust predecessor regimes ruled by kings, bishops, landed aristocracies, and bourgeoisies.

As part of its governing agenda, and to reward itself for its goodness, our modern ruling class seeks to create a pleasing aesthetic world in the lands it rules in the way described by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State; it is a ruling strategy first conceived by absolute monarchs in the early modern period. It seeks to simplify society and make it legible, and it deploys an administrative welfare state to regulate and control its people, in their own best interests, as 18th century British aristocrats employed Capability Brown to create, out of the profits of slave plantations, grand estates pleasing to the eye. The modern ruling ideology culminates in a spiritual and aesthetic project to save the planet from environmental and climate disaster; it is a project that gives the ruling class of gentry liberals a sense of meaning and provides a satisfying scope for scions of high-born liberal gentry to live a meaningful life trajectory in politics, the academy, the media, the foundations, and activism.

But underneath the spiritual and aesthetic superstructure of any ruling class is its power project, the means it uses to maintain itself in power by rewarding its supporters. In pre-modern societies the ruling class offered security from the real threats to its retainers from marauding bandits in the borderlands. In the modern state the ruling class offers security from the uncertainties of life in the market economy. It sequesters up to one half of the productive labor of its people in taxes and offers in return a modicum of security with its government-administered social insurance programs. The retainers trust the government to maintain the programs and fear any modification or reform, much as feudal retainers before the modern era must have feared the removal of their traditional rights and benefits.

Of course, the ruling class does not just bind its retainers to it with promises of security; it also attracts support with direct offers of loot. In the United States the ruling class buys the support of African Americans with welfare, affirmative action, and race politics of the kind that President Obama executed so consistently during his two terms in office. It buys the support of women with abortion politics and “affordable healthcare” and women’s liberation politics. It dazzles sexual minorities with gay marriage and gender-neutral bathrooms. And this is tearing the nation apart. Of course, the gentry liberal ruling class possesses not only political power but also cultural power, as its votaries set the agenda for the culture in the schools, the universities, and the media. It neutralizes opposing cultural memes with its “politically correct” power of naming and shaming cultural heretics that fail to kow-tow before its ruling-class orthodoxy.

The various ruling classes have operated for centuries in accordance with the strict Marxian meaning of a class, as a self-conscious group of humans organized in active pursuit of its class interests. But the rise of a self-conscious merchant and trading class in medieval Europe and the rise of the bourgeoisie in the early modern period has meant that class consciousness has now leaked out from the ruling class to the rest of society, first of all to the middle class. The French Revolution was a revolt of the middle-class Third Estate against the ancien régime led by the First and Second Estates. Following the example of the middle-class revolutions Marx sought to spark class consciousness in the workers that were thronging into the cities to work as factory hands in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, thus encouraging class conflict between the capitalists with their middle-class consciousness and the proletarians of the working class. In our day the ruling class of gentry liberals uses so-called identity politics to create class-consciousness in the latest groups to be included in the universe of class consciousness: minorities, young people, and women, and sexual minorities. The ruling class likes to think of itself as an enlightened elite benevolently presiding over society and protecting the marginalized groups from the exploitations of the rich and white patriarchal supremacists. Its regime shock troops are taught to think of society as a class society of oppressors that dominate and exploit the oppressed. They, the shock troops of social justice warriors, are called to challenge and “resist” the white privilege of middle-class Americans. The whole operation is designed to produce a class consciousness among the supporters of the regime that separates them off from the great American middle class, and barracks them away, as soldiers in an army, from the American mainstream.

In this book we have proposed to explain the world with a different class system, my reductive Three Peoples theory. In our model, the ruling class consists of the people of the creative self allied with the people of the subordinate self. In the middle are the people of the responsible self.

Thus the gentry liberals have created an over-under coalition, on the feudal model of the Middle Ages. The gentry liberal class moves forward on a creative project of modernization, administration, equalization, institutionalization, in which its members are to obtain satisfaction in the aesthetic project of societal improvement, a Sisyphean task made bearable by the usual ruling-class perquisites of money, power and the love of beautiful women. Part of this project administers pensions and privileges for the members of the under part of the coalition. These unders are, according to the Three Peoples theory, people of the subordinate self; they are soldiers in the army of the gentry liberal class, and as soldiers have ever wanted, they expect free stuff in return for their vote and their support for the regime. They are the clients in a patron/client relationship, and as long as the free stuff continues they willingly play their part to keep the gentry liberals in power.

But we have seen that in the modern age a large section of the population has moved away from living as people of the subordinate self and as clients of great patrons, and instead has aspired to individual responsibility, to live as people of the responsible self that go to work, obey the laws, and follow the rules. And we have also seen that the modern economy cannot succeed on the feudal model where the landed lord directs the traffic upon his estate and the feudal retainers touch their forelocks and wait upon the lord’s orders, expressed through his stewards. That is the point of George Eliot’s uber-responsible hero Adam Bede and the Garth family in her Middlemarch. Carpenter Adam Bede and estate manager Caleb Garth doggedly seek honorable employment in early 19th century rural England not as clients to great lords but as diligent individuals sustained by their class morale as people of the responsible self.

But for many the 19th century was terrifying, particularly for the sons of self-made businessmen, and so the original political program of the welfare state proposed that these self-same sons would obtain status and stability as lordly politicians and experts, acting as social physicians, and would treat the raging fever of capitalism with social insurance programs legislated and administered by government for the benefit of subordinate and exploited workers. In the role of social physician, the sons of the middle clas worried about the lives of workers in the mines and the factories and rewarded these workers with state-funded benefits. But they found, once the working class started moving up into the middle class and started to live and think and vote like people of the responsible self, that there were really not enough subordinate victims of capitalistic cholera occupying beds in their fever hospital to guarantee ruling-class jobs and sinecures in the future. It was the genius of the Frankfurt School Marxists to grasp that the concept of exploited victims, that worked so well in the early years of the welfare state, could be extended from the working class to other groups. Women, racial and sexual minorities were people of the subordinate self and also had their grievances. They could be enticed with political favors, could be indoctrinated with class consciousness in identity politics boot camp, and could be enrolled into the great army of progressive voters. And it was the practical good sense of politicians to see that the declining ranks of workers needed to be replenished with fresh recruits for the army of the people of the subordinate self: immigrants from Central and South America, and Muslims from the Middle East.

We have argued, from the first chapter, that the administrative state that has grown up following this political dispensation cannot thrive. It claims to protect the people against hardship, it claims to assist them in obtaining health care, it insists on educating their children, and it does it all very badly. This is because the welfare state turns back the clock on social cooperation; it sets humanity on a road to serfdom, in Hayek’s felicitous phrase. Humans are social animals; we minimize force and compulsion among “us” and thrive best when the cost and the cruelty of force is minimized. As human society has developed from small nomadic groups that fought every day for survival into a post-industrial society where it is routine to trust and cooperate with people on the other side of the planet, the need for force has radically declined. So we have argued that the authoritarian administrative welfare state that operates on a principle of force, where its subjects are forced to pay for security with swingeing taxes on labor, are forced to pay for childhood education and mandatory schooling with swingeing taxes on their suburban homes, must pass away into history, to be replaced by a welfare state that is not administrative, not dominatory, but social, in the sense that security will be secured by horizontal social and economic relationships rather than vertical, hierarchical relationships in pensions, in health care, in education, in the relief of the poor. Vertical, hierarchical provision of social goods just doesn’t work very well; it takes too much force.

But what about the gentry liberals, today’s ruling class? As the “over” part of the over-under coalition between the people of the creative self and the people of the subordinate self that we know in the United States as the Democratic Party, they will be out of a job in the world that is to come, because nobody will need the politics of entitlement and race/class/sex division that binds the administrative state’s supporters to the ruling class. This will be a big change for them. Where will they go? What will they do?

You know what? They will do just fine, just as Scarlett O’Hara probably did just fine after Rhett Butler finally gave up on her. And there is this: As people of the creative self the gentry liberals ought to be equal to the task of living lives of creative endeavor that are not grounded in the conceit of political power and the injustice of government force. In any case, who ever got creative working at a government job?

The question is: what will make them go? The answer, of course, is: nothing short of revolution, the revolution that will occur when the ruling class runs out of money with which to bribe the voters and reward its supporters. Meanwhile it is the duty of every responsible individual to deflate the conceit of the gentry liberals, their apology for power, and the conceit that things are so bad that only force can fix it.

The argument of this book is simple; it urges us merely to remember every moment that government is force. Since that is true, every argument for more government is making the argument that things are so bad that only force can fix them. The opposing argument is: Really? You mean to say that things are really so bad that only force will fix them? Are you sure? Every day in every way we people of the responsible self must ask the question: why must our rulers resort to force? They say they believe in inclusion; they say they believe in compassion; they say they believe in creativity. Why then is every problem an excuse for force?

The whole argument of this book is that when bad things happen in the modern world, a world where wealth is found in knowledge rather than in land, then almost always force is not the answer.

But we admit that this is a new thing, a radical notion of almost incomprehensible novelty.

For the chimpanzee, we saw, territory equals food, and the males are properly engaged upon a perpetual border war. For the human nomad upon the Asian steppe fierceness and war is the only way to guarantee access to pasture for the flocks. For the agricultural empire, the marcher lords must patrol the border and keep the nomads from looting the temple granaries. For the trading nation-state the navy must keep the oceans clear of pirates and the arteries of commerce must be kept safe for merchants and travelers. In the industrial city the police must keep young single males just off the boat from preying on ordinary people going about their daily life. These are, we propose, valid and necessary uses of social compulsion and necessary deployments of force against other human groups.

But in this day and age, how much force is really necessary, and how much is the conceit of people that have responded to the ancient instinct to seize power if they can? How can they be reeducated to decide that they can’t seize power and would rather not be ruled by other men? This book argues that modern society needs less government because it needs less force. It needs less force because the modern world runs not on access to land but access to knowledge. The modern individual is not like the First Individual of George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian Essays myth, staking out his plot of land and its harvest of life-giving food. Today’s imperative is the search for knowledge and, even more important, the exploitation of knowledge through innovation: the knowledge of how to serve others, how to make things for others, how to cooperate with others. Today’s typical human is the Responsible Individual. The responsible individual does not search for the shelter of a powerful patron; the responsible individual does not experience himself as a victim. The responsible individual does not experience himself as a genius in the making. The responsible individual asks only how he can be of service to the world.

What we are saying is that there will be less demand in the future for great political leaders, government experts, central banks full of economics PhDs, activists running NGOs, universities full of “studies” departments, investigative journalists, artists bashing the bourgeoisie, community organizers, activists, advocates, social justice warriors, and the rest of the left-wing culture. In other words, gentry liberals will have to go and find something else to do. People that want to live lives of “expressive individualism” will have to fulfill their creative destinies in ways other than as creatively thinking up and acting out creative uses of government power. There would be two reasons for that, both adapted from liberal philosopher Charles Taylor. First of all, government power does not contribute to human flourishing. Second, we too often find that government power tends to “crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity.” In recent times, all too often, it has been the educated class, the people of the creative self, that have acted upon the idea that the transformation of society through politics and government — compulsion and force — was the highest and best way for them to express their creative impulse and yearning. This goes against the fundamental experience of the age of knowledge that has succeeded the age of agriculture. It must change.

But if the gentry liberals are to be eased off their seat of power, we must develop a bill of indictment, a Declaration of Independence for our own time that sets forth the crimes and misdemeanors that disqualify the ruling class of gentry liberals from continuing their cruel and unjust rule. What then is the crime that the gentry liberals have visited upon us? It issues from the very thing on which gentry liberals have congratulated themselves: their activism on behalf of the people of the subordinate self. The grain of truth in the left’s program since its discovery by Marx on tablets in a British Museum reading room is that the bourgeoisie, the middle class, called here people of the responsible self, are cruel and unjust towards the workers, the proletarians, called here people of the subordinate self, in ripping these marginalized groups out of their traditional collective societies and dumping them into the hell of individualism in soulless factories, mines and offices. Marx’s indictment is still the motor that drives our politics and our culture.

But we here indict the gentry liberal ruling class for a crime more premeditated and more deliberate than the almost accidental crime of the bourgeoisie which also accidently set in motion the 200 years of the Great Enrichment from per-capita income of $1-3 per day to amounts north of $100 per day. The gentry liberal ruling class, like ruling classes down the ages, has recruited people into its regime army with promises of loot and plunder. That is what recruiting sergeants have always promised to the yokels thinking of going for a soldier. But the fate of soldiers everywhere is to die, sick and wounded by the side of the route of march, used up and thrown away. The free proletarians were “hurled” off the land onto the labor market by landowners that no longer needed them. The white working class of the mid 20th century was thrown away when gentry liberals went for the votes of minorities and women instead of working stiffs. The cruelty and the injustice of the gentry liberal ruling class is that the people of the subordinate self they originally recruited to their power project and used as soldiers in their army of progressivism, have now been cast aside and are mouldering away in cultural collapse. As described by Charles Murray in Coming Apart the underclass is characterized by two pathologies: the women don’t marry and the men don’t work. For that the ruling class must be indicted and removed from power.

1Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. I, Cambridge UP, 1986, p. 528.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.christopherchantrill.com.

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Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Government and the Technology of Force
If you scratch a reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government

Business, Slavery and Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

Humanity’s Big Problem: Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history has lacked religion.

A Critique of Human Mechanics
When governments tried to govern on mechanical principles.

The Paradox of Individualism
People that believe in individualism experience individualism as an advanced form of socialization.

From Multitude to Civil Society
Softening the hard edge of instrumental reason.

The Answer is Civil Society
Civil Society: the joint development of the market, civil society, and nationalism.

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power you must limit power.

Conservatism Three by Three
Balancing tradition with adapting to changing times.

Imagining a Culture of Involvement
You must suggest an alternative.

The Poor Without the Welfare State
What would happen to the poor without a welfare state?

The Middle Class Without the Welfare State
Can the middle class thrive without the supervision of the welfare state?

Liberals and the Welfare State
Liberals ought to be equal to the task of living lives of creative endeavor without political power.

From Freeloaders to Free Givers
But are we too wedded to freeloading?

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

Why We Fight
We must fight for our “shining city on a hill”

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