The Elites Have Failed Us

Though I cannot wait for this election season to be over — if you can watch this in its entirety, I commend thee — I cannot help but notice that this one differs from previous election cycles in my lifetime. For the first time in my short life, the electorate appears to be neatly split down class lines. It is the college-educated, Vanguard index fund-having elites battling against the working class “basket of deplorables” this November.

I think these so-called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” individuals thought that by electing a political outsider to the highest office in the land in 2016, their liberal bedfellows would finally realize that the common man was not buying what they were selling. Unfortunately, soul-searching never materialized. Instead, liberals have elected to engage in one long brow-beating session of the middle and lower classes. According to these elites, it is the lower classes who failed them, not the other way around.

I encounter this snobbery in my workplace often. It comes out in brash comments like “nothing could make Republicans change their minds,” “people do not have critical thinking skills anymore,” or “if only they could understand the science.” These folks do not ever think that their policies and pronouncements could be erroneous. They do not guess that a fellow coworker may not be on their side. Instead, they believe that the common pleb would easily come to their understanding if only they had a few more facts and brain cells on board. 

One author describes this phenomenon well:

“Political conflict, to the modern liberal, is not about struggle for finite resources, insoluble moral differences, or fundamental divergences in our conception of what America ought to be. It’s only a failure of half the country – a bunch of dumb hicks – to know what’s good for them. The grand liberal challenge has been recast as an effort not to improve the material conditions of the unwashed masses “clinging to their guns and religion,” but to enlighten them so hard that they rewire their minds. Compromise is now impossible, because only one position is correct.”

Indeed, understanding why working and middle-class people have left the Democrat party is now a dizzying task for the modern liberal. First and foremost, they are enraged that these rubes do not find Donald Trump as odious and Satanic as they do. Due to their blind rage, they cannot break through to the working class, are confused when they receive backlash for saying that black men choosing to vote for Trump is “unacceptable,” and are baffled by the fact that regular Americans just want a middle-class lifestyle, replete with a job, a home, and a decent retirement. 

The reality for most Americans is that these goals seem more and more out of reach, especially if one wants to rely on one income so they can raise their children at home. Even according to the mainstream media, it is becoming difficult to break into the middle class and thereby realize the American dream. The “strong” economy we have — according to national data —  is in actuality a strong stock market, not an affordable and plentiful housing or jobs market.

To paint a complete picture, we have to dive deeper. Firstly, the cheapest US products have seen the fastest increase in price level. Grocery store prices have risen substantially. The asset-poor are not jumping for joy over their investment portfolios; they are worried about their job security and carrying higher balances on their credit cards. Crime is not down in our cities, but up. I say all this because if you only look at specific subsets of national data (like our liberal economist friends), you would erroneously conclude that working-class people are just watching too much Fox News. While that could also be true, such hand-wavey remarks deny the lived experience of millions of people, a lived experience that liberals used to claim to appreciate.

It is no wonder that large worker unions have stopped endorsing and straight up abandoned the Democratic party — it’s now the party of the CEOs, the college-educated, and the laptop class. Working-class folks are not stupid — they see the policies that harm their communities for what they are, especially the Democrats’ prioritization of cheap, foreign labor over paying a living wage to Americans. Indeed, America’s open border has affected people I know; one friend had to move away from my state because low-paid immigrants were enabling business owners to slash construction wages to unlivable levels. As a rebuttal to these stories, our elite journalist friends say that unskilled immigrants are a boon to the lower class: “Think of a working family with an immigrant caregiver or gardener, or an immigrant working in a hotel or restaurant.”

This argument bakes in a mistaken assumption that corporate billionaires and free-market liberals have been repeating for as long as I have been alive: that Americans will simply not do certain jobs because they are “above them.” These CEOs complain about not finding the “skilled staff they need.” But this is a misdirection. Our manufacturing sector was booming before it got shipped overseas to China. American young people are not eschewing the trades because they have a superiority complex or are unwilling to work, but because there are not enough well-paying jobs on offer.

Faced with this status quo, a special kind of bigotry can emerge that usually results from having grown up privileged. It begins as an old-hat criticism of capitalism and a horror at the jobs working-class people are “forced” to do. Would it not be better, these people think, if we could replace these menial jobs first with cheap, immigrant labor, and then with AI and robots so that everyone — most especially the poor wagies — could paint, write novels, or enter into a polycule?

This desire ignores the value of the almighty dollar in helping people eat, live, and work in this country. There are those of us who cannot fathom that people may not want to “change the world by following their passion” and instead want to work a good, honest job that makes ends meet. Polls illustrate this: While upper-class Americans want their kids to be able to go to Ivy League schools to follow their dreams, middle and working-class people desire for their children to be able to find good jobs close to home.

I highlight this divergence because I foresee that our nation will fracture if there is no course correction on the part of the out-of-touch upper class. Our national mission will be confused and the country will no longer be better for our children. Perhaps we’re already there. For example, the Democrats insist on subsidizing childcare, when what parents want is for the mother to be able to stay home and be supported by the father’s income. Since the upper-class family deprioritizes childrearing in favor of both parents working high-powered jobs, this desire of the normie family falls on deaf ears.

This was not always the case. Throughout history, elites had duties to the lower classes that were encouraged and mediated by Christian values. The kings and queens of old knew that their wealth was predicated on the labor and taxation of their citizenry. Unless the monarch was a raving tyrant, this understanding led to mutual respect between the gentry and the peasantry: the peasant could petition his grievances before the king, and in return, he at least had to pretend to listen to you.

What we have in America today is an elite class that not only does not acknowledge their duty to the lower classes but is actively hostile toward them. Our (mostly elderly) congressmen and women balloon the national debt because they figure, “Who cares? I’m almost off this rock anyway.” Our presidents and legislators posit economic policies that will line their pocketbooks, while simultaneously attempting to kneecap the lower classes’ retirement portfolios and any tariffs that may benefit homegrown manufacturing. They set aside $2 million to house illegal migrants while stepping over homeless veterans on the street.

It may take a mass exodus from the Democrat party and a populist, conservative re-work of the Republican party to make any substantial change to this lunacy. In the meantime, all of the classes — but especially the elites — have to call the wealthy to charity, love of God, and love of neighbor. Unfortunately, I do not have any winning ideas on how to make our wealthy friends listen (but maybe you do). Electoral beatings may have to continue until morale improves, and I predict that a severe beating is coming this November.

Further Reading:

“This is What Elite Failure Looks Like” by

Oren Cass

Podcast: “How the Working Class Became America’s Second Class” by

The Free Press

“On Millennial Snot” by

Dudley Newright