MAGA: The Revolt Against the Elites
“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty,”
William F. Buckley, Jr.
“Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.”
Barry Goldwater
The tension between America’s governing elites and the people has likely never been wider, although the quotes above suggest it did not begin with MAGA. However, the rift was not as huge as today, largely because our elites have drifted far to the extreme left and government power is now centered in an unelected bureaucracy which they dominate.
At one time, not that long ago, Progressives and Liberals prided themselves on associating themselves with the common man: industrial workers, farmers, miners, ranchers, and construction workers. This was before they decided they were all deplorables defiling the environment.
Perhaps this was because they saw the world through a Marxist lens, the workers versus the owners and they saw workers and unions as their supporters, as indeed some were. Now they see things through the lens of race, class, and ethnicity.
As part of the New Deal’s emergency relief for the unemployed, millions were spent employing unemployed artists. Franklin Roosevelt put his close aide Harry Hopkins in charge of PWAP or The Public Works of Art Project in 1934, which employed thousands of artists.
It is not quite the same as forgiving the debt of thousands of Gender Studies majors, but it is pretty close.
The New Deal made a big deal of subsidizing a distinctive style of art, a kind of American-tinged Soviet new realism. Often this took the form of murals similar to what we created above. Many of the works of art can still be seen today in older public buildings and older Post Offices.
The common feature was extolling the common man. The New Deal collected songs of rural people and subsidized photographers to record the travails of the people. As we noted before, the New Deal even tried an experiment in collective farming, with a big experiment here in Arizona.
Hopkins was a special character within the New Deal and later played a key role in advising Roosevelt on foreign policy. He was more than just a tad left of center. He quickly advanced from running art projects to being FDR’s closest confident, even living with the President full time at the White House. He evolved to become the most important advisor on important subjects like how to deal with Josef Stalin. He reportedly got along great with Joe Stalin.
We now know why. The Venona Project dispatches, coupled with files from Soviet Intelligence that were open for just a few years after the Wall fell, allowed scholars to tie both sides of encrypted wartime cables together for the first time. This allowed historians to finally get hard evidence on the multitude of Americans working for the Democrat Administration willing to betray their country. This was at the time of Stalin. We don’t mean the Stalin of the early years as a bandit. We mean the Joe Stalin of gulags and kulak liquidations, the mass starvation of the Ukraine, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and proxy wars that killed Americans in Korea. But still, many Americans supported the Communist cause, including Harry Hopkins.
It appears Mr. Hopkins was a Soviet agent who not only had the President’s ear, but apparently his mind, and policy. He was also in charge of art, extolling “the common man.”
But New Deal art was also part of the flavor of the times. Besides government-subsidized murals, others such as American composer Aaron Copland was composing, “Fanfare For the Common Man”, “Appalachian Spring” and “Rodeo.” It was the time of the “Grapes of Wrath”, the great Oklahoma diaspora, and its journey to California.
Incidentally, Copland had his own flirtations with Communism. Although his membership in the party is still in question, it was not uncommon for important Communists not to join the party for tactical reasons. Copland attended Communist meetings, and conferences, and was active in the Composers Collective. If not a party member, he functioned as one would.
Talk to most “common men” today, travel Appalachia, or go to a rodeo, and you will most likely find Trump supporters in great abundance.
How did the Progressives evolve to hate the common man? The connecting thread seems to be education at a handful of elite Ivy League universities.
A recent study of elite opinion by the pollster Scott Rasmussen undertaken by the Committee To Unleash Prosperity is causing considerable commentary. Elite opinion in the study is defined as someone making at least $150,000 per year, possessing at least one postgraduate degree, and living in a population-dense city.
The study starts with this perceptive analysis from a famous novelist of an earlier era, F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
Here are some salient findings from the study:
While most Americans are suffering economically, 74% of this elite say they are doing better, versus just 20% for the general population.
Almost 6 in 10 say there is too much freedom in the US.
More than 2/3 are ready to ration energy to combat climate change.
More than 70% say we should trust the government to do the right thing, most of the time.
Again, more than 2/3 say education professionals should decide what children are taught, not parents.
Between ½ to 2/3 favor banning SUVs, gas stoves, air conditioning, and non-essential air travel to protect the environment.
84% give Joe Biden a favorable job approval rating.
There is much more to the study, but it is clear that America’s elites are not only out of touch with common people of all types, their political leaders have gone out of their way to insult and degrade the common people. Leftwing professors are even out with new books about the danger of rural people such as “White Rural Rage”, by Shaller and Waldman.
We are deplorables, clinging to our God and guns as Hillary and Obama put it, and they have a strong feeling that they are our natural rulers. The so-called pro-democracy crowd of the Democrat Party is not too different from a royal family supporting the divine right of kings.
Critics are correct that modern Conservatism now has a populist tinge to it. The study shows that Republican elites are not quite as extreme, but share many of the same cultural attitudes, hence the existence of the Uni-Party and the resistance to that by the rank and file of the Republican Party.
Perhaps the most disturbing finding was that nearly 2/3 of politically active elites would be willing to cheat in an election to win, versus just 7% for the general public.
They believe they have a natural right to rule and are not about to let democratic processes get in their way.
We also saw their totalitarian instincts at play at the local level with all manner of unconstitutional restrictions on travel, speech, and assembly during the manufactured Covid crisis.
This underscores something we observed some time ago. Progressives argue for “democracy”, and the common man, but by taking authority out of the hands of families and businesses to determine their own destiny, and by creating a giant unelected Administrative State that rules without Constitutional checks and balances, they undermine the freedom and democracy they say they are for.
They do this under the name of planning. Planning by “experts” like them. What that kind of planning really means is substituting their plans for your plans. Your money does not belong to you, your property does not belong to you, your body does not belong to you, and your children are not yours.
They further claim they are not “racists” but recent survey data also shows they are willing to discriminate against white people, and Asians to a somewhat lesser extent.
This chart from a site called End Wokeness shows the stunning racial bigotry of Democrats at large, not just the veneer of elites.
Now the ultra-rich educated have a right to their views and can live the “green life” if they want to. How they spend their own money and raise their children is their business. They can marinate in their white guilt and loathe the American Founding. However, they have no right to impose those views on the rest of us. Bill Gates and George Soros have the means to attempt this, but they don’t have the right. Political legitimacy only comes from the voluntary consent of those governed.
I don’t speak for others but I never voted for Bill Gates, George Soros, or the World Economic Forum.
This election is not so much about party affiliation anymore. It will be about freedom, class, culture, and yes, prejudice against white people. It will be about the freedom not to be dictated to and ruled by this bunch of presumptuous SOBs. It will be, in short, a revolt against the elites, their ideas, their policies, and their arrogance.
