This process was already evident before the pandemic, with declining homeownership, a growing concentration of economic power and declining rates of entrepreneurship.įor millions of Americans, the doors of opportunity are closing. Unlike those they order to remain shut down, senior clerics, such as Los Angeles’ top health official who continues to collect a $465,000 annual salary, remain highly insulated from the effects.Īs the clerisy and the oligarchs’ power has waxed, those of the yeoman class, largely small businesses and property owners, have waned.
The successors of the old Roman Catholic Church, the clerisy’s numbers have been growing for generations and, for them, the pandemic has transformed them into decision-makers with huge powers over daily life. The other winner class is the clerisy, consisting of the expert class of credentialed specialists, media mavens and academics. With the shift to online retail, streaming services and greater surveillance, tech stock prices have soared as others have lagged.Īmerican business is now, perhaps more than any time in the past century, dominated by a handful of powerful, well-financed corporations. Once seen as dominated by risk-taking entrepreneurs starting in a garage and backed by credit card debt, tech has been defined by corporate concentration, what one Silicon Valley wag labeled “feudalism with better marketing.” Clear winners have bolstered the technology oligarchs' - the modern version of the medieval aristocracy - already rapidly growing stranglehold over the economy. Even as the upper classes, as today, departed disease-plagued cities, they also looked to consolidate control of now abandoned holdings.Īs in the Middle Ages, some classes have emerged stronger from the pandemic. Disease undermined societies and economies, obliterating trade and nurturing the influence of prelates linking pestilence to human sinfulness. Pestilence has often shaped societies, most notably in the Middle Ages, where populations were repeatedly decimated, particularly among the urban poor. The preexisting conditions of extreme economic concentration, inequality and reduced social mobility already were painfully evident before, but the pandemic has made them considerably worse. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many things, but also accelerated America’s descent into a new form of feudalism.
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