"New-Class" and Cumulative Trend Explanations of the Liberal Political Attitudes of Professionals

Recent discussions of political divisions in American society have sometimes highlighted the rise of a "new class" of salaried professionals and technically trained managers. New-class theorists have depicted these "knowledge workers" as engaged in a contest for power and status with traditionally powerful business elites. However, the liberal attitudes of knowledge workers may also be interpreted as the result of a conjunction of several general trends in American society that have had little to do with class antagonisms. According to this paper, even though left-of-center attitudes are not uncommon in the salaried professional categories, these attitudes tend to be more ferormist than antibusiness in character. Such dissent as exists is concentrated in particular occupational, cohort, and sectoral categories and has varied considerably over time. Only the younger specialists in social science and arts-related occupations beging to fit the image of an "oppositional intelligentsia" used by the theorists to characterize the new class at large. The data are more consistent with cumulative-trend explanations of upper-white-collar liberalism and dissent. Nevertheless, the consistent net association of the key new-class category, the higher levels of education, with political liberalism leaves room for continued thinking about political cultural conflic within a new-class framework.