Prerogatives..................

 Fred Siegel pointed out how the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer some seventy years ago could see the future contours of a working class regulated, controlled, and yet ridiculed by a new intellectual and bureaucratic elite.

      "The masses are on the way out," he wrote.  "The [elites] are finally catching up with us.  We can hear the swish of leather as the saddles are heaved on our backs.  The intellectuals, and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us."  Hoffer foresaw the New Class that would try to govern the working people much as the colonial officials governed the natives.  "They are," he wrote, "an army of scribes clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated.

-Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen:  How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America