This is a really interesting and educational piece on the phrase "professional-managerial class".  If the narrative here is right, it emerged out of a disillusionment at the failure of the New Left in the 1960s, and some affection (no, really) for Mao's "Cultural Revolution".  Figures like Barbara Ehrenreich, and more recently Adolph Reed and Nancy Fraser, appear as crucial players.  

It's helpful for me in understanding a certain kind of radical melancholic post-Marxist political view, popular in certain parts of academia and certain cultural centers, but more voluble than voluminous in the number of actual people it guides.  It's still fundamentally revolutionary, not thinking the system will be repaired from inside but that the whole edifice is rotten and needs to be kicked over.  In my limited experience of rotten-edifice-kicking-overism, these edifices are always harder to kick over than you might think.

For me, that suspicion is confirmed by how the essay suggests an at-best the oblique relationship to reality.  For, apart from the ideological genealogy it offers, which is helpful, the empirical data to which this piece refers is remarkably thin.  In fact I can see only one point where it bumps up against publicly available data.  It is in the factual claim, assumed but not backed up, that somehow Barbara Ehrenreich's prediction that the PMC would collapse and disappear is now coming true:

“The continued existence of the professional middle class, as a class, may eventually be in question.” At the apparent end of history, as the PMC was assuming control of a major political party, this must have seemed a counterintuitive prediction.

Yet today it is difficult to think of a piece of political analysis that has been so spectacularly validated.

The piece simply asserts that the "PMC" is indeed disappearing.  But is that so?  I admit when I read those lines, I was surprised to hear that the claim has been "spectacularly validated."  This is not to say that there isn't evidence for some sort of crisis in the middle class; there is, indeed, a common consensus about middle-class stagnation in the US economy.  But stagnation does not mean apocalypse.

There are at least two things to say about this: first, the "middle class" so identified may not be exactly the "professional managerial class" that is used culturally to depict (some might say "tar"--but hey, David Brooks does it on the right, so it's fine to do it on the left) the inner nature of the community so defined.  The "middle class" is susceptible to multiple definitions; this nice piece from Brookings differentiates between definitions based on "cash," "credentials," and "culture," for instance.  It's not clear that the "professional managerial class" picks out, a, you know, real thing that can be measured.  (Caring about the middle class is a big issue, I think--globally, the rise of the middle class, at least on some definitions, is a huge fact about our world.  This discussion isn't involved with that one, yet, but it seems like it should be.)

Second, the stagnation so identified seems not to be a matter of recent years; it began about forty or fifty years ago.  Is that longer time-horizon a problem for the PMC theory?  I mean, if the idea was that the elite middle class was reconfiguring in this way in the 1970s and reasserted its power in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, how come it seems to have been stuck in neutral since the oil shock of 1973?  How do you relate those two things?  Part of the problem may be the idea (was it a hope?), still surprisingly popular on the left today, that the financial crisis of 2007-forward, and the recession of 2008-forward, may have been a much more massive cultural moment than they were.  (We can call this the "Occupy hope.")  I do not think that that is true; if anything, the most important consequence of that crisis was (in part) the ideological purge of the few remaining centrists in the GOP, and the rise of the "Tea Party" and then the election of Trump in 2016.  (Both of those had much more to do with the fact that we white people freaked out about a person of color as President, but white people were feeling a bit more vulnerable because the self-congratulatory story we whites had told about our economic success in the period 2001-2008 turned out to be a snake's tangle of lies.)  This narrative of the "Occupy hope" feels, again, like some ready-to-hand empirical data is being crammed into ideologically pre-hardened frames here.

For my money, which may just be counterfeit money because I have no disciplinary competence in this stuff, a lot more can be explained of the crisis of the middle class in the US today by attention to contingent facts of mundane politics and everyday psychology, rather than any appeal to a set of Necessary Contradictions Deep in the Fundamental Structures of Capitalism.  The basic psychological categories I would use are greed, sloth, habit and status-seeking.  With those, and changes in the world economy in the 1970s forward, and the ways in which wealthy corporations and individuals were able to exploit the 1970s backlash against rising egalitarianism (racial, sexual, gender-based) to accomplish a large deregulatory strategy, you have an account of how we got to where we are today.  Or so it seems to me, at least initially.  What's more, you also have a strategy for going forward: not to wait for an inevitable Revolution, which is always just around the corner, and in the meantime to do nothing but "accentuate the contradictions"; but rather, to work to alter the political-economic imaginary to make such deregulatory reflexes not natural, to offer a better vision of a civic compact and a healthier vision of the political community, to identify the ways in which the wealthy used the white reaction of the 1970s against workers and the middle class, and to help all of us see that that white reaction was itself not healthy (but based effectively on a fear of losing the "wages of whiteness"), and to do all this that will achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

So this piece, for all the ideological illumination it gives me, feels like the discussion still doesn't attend as much as it should to empirical data.  In fact it feels fairly similar to a number of conversations I am aware of in Christian theology, historically and today.  It seems more a matter of extracting empirical-adjacent conclusions from doctrine, rather than trying to see all the data and interpret what is going on from that data.  The data is not given an independent voice, it is used for a serious purpose.  I suspect (though I do not believe I have come across this author before) that challenges to the doctrine are met not with thoughtful response but with defensive outrage and contemptuous scorn.  In these ways, this is an insider discourse, confirming membership in a group, not one meant to convince outsiders.

Nonetheless, I find this piece really educational, at least for me, in understanding a certain line of thinking on the left that I had not appreciated before.  And maybe my suspicions of the operationalizability of the theory can be met.  I'm sure there could be an interesting response.  Anyone who knows me knows I am not a revolutionary--I mean, apart from an investment banker, a tenured professor at a state university has to be one of the least interested in tipping the table over.  This may well be a weakness for me.  But my reading of history, and my reading of theology, suggest that, we should be eschatologically vigilant but not apocalyptically over-eager.  While we should be ready for the messiah's return, which can occur in any instant, it is also a sin to attempt to hasten that return, or turn our eschatological expectations into metereological forecasting.  That's too sloganeering an explanation to why I am like this, and I am less complacent than I used to be, for sure, or so I think so, but still, I don't think I'm a revolutionist and I don't think the middle class is collapsing, certainly not by necessity and even if it does, I don't think the revolution will come, things will only suck harder than they do, so we better not let that happen in the hopes of a long-deferred Marxist messianic age.