The Arrogance of the Elite
18th July 2016
The Antiplanner weighs in.
America needs less democracy to avoid tyranny, says Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine. America “suffers from too much democracy,” agrees Richard Cohen in the Washington Post.
Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor, writes Charles Pierce in Esquire. James Traub in Foreign Policy calls Trump and Brexit supporters “ignorance masses” and says it’s time for the “elites to rise up” against them, or at least to “un-delude them,” perhaps in re-education camps.
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Who are the elites who say these things? They aren’t just the one percent of intelligentsia who live in Manhattan or inside the Beltway. Really, most of them are among the 30 percent of people who make up the upper-middle class: namely those with college educations who earn around $90,000 a year or more per two-person family.
These people are totally out of touch with the realities faced by the other 70 percent. How many people with college educations number among their real friends someone who is working class? How many even talk with working class people other than restaurant servers, retail clerks, and similar workers? How many understand that the policies that benefit the college-educated upper-middle-class often harm the working class?