Posted on 08/22/2022 4:44:45 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Our elites are now viewed with the disdain they have earned on their own merits. And they are none too happy about it.
Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence.
Yet the divide has grown far wider in the 21st century. Globalization fueled the separation in a number of ways.
One, outsourcing and offshoring eroded the rust-belt interior, while enriching the two coasts. The former lost good-paying jobs, while the latter found new markets in investment, tech, insurance, law, media, academia, entertainment, sports, and the arts making them billions rather than mere millions.
So, the problem was one of both geography and class. Half the country looked to Asia and Europe for profits and indeed cultural “diversity,” while the other half stuck with tradition, values, and custom—as they became poorer.
The elite found in the truly poor—neglecting their old union-member, blue-collar Democratic base—an outlet for their guilt, noblesse oblige, condescension at a safe distance, call it what you will. The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes, and romance of the far distant underclass.
Second, race became increasingly divorced from class—a phenomenon largely birthed by guilty, wealthy, white elites and privileged, diverse professionals. For the white bicoastal elite, it became a mark of their progressive fides to champion woke racialism that empowered the non-white of their own affluent class, while projecting their own discomfort with and fears
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
The leftist elites seem to base all of their actions on narcissistic belief systems. Can they manage your life better than you can?
VDH ping
—one of his best—
The problem of the Political Elite who think they can run your life better than you can run your life has been with us for a long time.
In addition to that, I think that in recent decades we’ve had an increase in The Peter Principle. I do remember (long ago) having bosses who knew what they were doing, and who cared about the workers. I remember good teachers who knew their stuff and were excited to open new fields of knowledge to children. I remember administrators who worked with people to build teams and make the enterprise a success.
What happened?
Maybe I need to hang out with a better class of person these days, but I have a hard time thinking of anyone “in charge” of anything at any level who seems to know how to “manage”. Team building is “feel good” crap from California, everything is about being “woke”. The “leaders” look at budget and schedule and they stop right there. The business? The customers? The workers? The quality of the product? They don’t know how to focus on such unimportant things. They build pie charts for a living. Now go away and stop bothering The Boss.
I think it’s an issue in Politics, in Business, Everywhere. People cannot manage, they cannot administer, they cannot lead. All they really know is how to bully the peons beneath them.
I don’t know how we got here.
Hair shirts, no matter how well crafted, are none too comfortable to wear on a daily basis, as the guilt-ridden “privileged” class seems to think will give them some sort of expiation.
This is the dumbing down of all of us. Deviancy soon follows. Nobody wins.
Who is John Galt?
VDH bump
They are skipping movies at theaters. They are passing on watching professional sports. They don’t watch the network news. They think the CDC, NIAID, and NIH are incompetent—and fear their incompetence can prove deadly.Millions increasingly doubt their children should enroll in either a four-year college or the military, and they assume the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department are as likely to monitor Americans as they are unlikely to find and arrest those engaged in terrorism or espionage.
An enormous change has been the discarding of a Christian worldview, for a nihilistic "I, or the Government, am God" worldview.
Christianity requires humility, hard work, treating other people as you would treat yourself, leaving a legacy for your children.
The nihilistic view trends toward hedonism, with a "use it all up by the time I am dead", view.
Into the void left by rejection of Christianity, is Gaia worship, with all the Deep Green problems.
(The former lost good-paying jobs)
Happened to me. Under Bush II, too.
2nd term.
His website: Victor Davis Hanson
The Naked Emperors’ Furious Search for Fig Leaves
The war between blue and red and mass versus elite is really grounded in the reality that those who feel they were the deserved winners of globalization and who are the sole enlightened on matters of social, economic, political, and military policy have no record of recent success, but a long litany of utter failure.
They have become furious that the rest of the country sees through these naked emperors. Note Merrick Garland’s sanctimonious defense of the supposed professionalism of the Justice Department and FBI hierarchies—while even as he pontificated, they were in the very process of leaking and planting sensational “nuclear secrets” narratives to an obsequious media to justify the indefensible political fishing expedition at a former president’s home and current electoral rival to Merrick Garland’s boss.
The masses increasingly view the elites’ money, their ZIP codes, their degrees and certificates, and their titles not just with indifference, but with the disdain they now have earned on their own merits.
And that push back has made millions of our worst and stupidest quite mad.
Please let me know if you want on or off this new VDH ping list.
As a reminder, Professor Hanson has asked that we do not post the full article of his writings.
Same here.
My Dad used to get furious with McNamara and the hundreds of little, stupid decisions they made that ultimately decided the course of the Vietnam War.
Mankinds' leadership hasn't really progressed since our days living in caves - a few good ones here and there, but most are there for the glory not the hard self-sacrificing work required.
If I were see an Ivy League school come across my desk in a resume, I would reject them just based on where their parents chose to send them to school.
It says a lot about their family's mindset ...
The gem, Victor Davis Hanson, nails it yet again. 🙂
Me too. I don’t even trust doctors and health care workers anymore.
Christianity requires humility, hard work, treating other people as you would treat yourself, leaving a legacy for your children.
MT, you hit it on the head. I see our "leaders" still fighting the battles from the 10 Commandments - they hate their parents, lust after what others have made and have no compunction about killing life if inconvenient.
If they can't stand any sort of authority in their own home, what kind of tyrant will they become?
If they steal from others because others have "too much", how different is that from imposing taxes on the select few that are not in their circle?
If they willingly kill their own, what will they do to others?
Man, this sounds like the history of the Old Testament writ large, or maybe Gibbons The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
No wonder Gibbons has been banned from universities.
All of this very true.
The words incompetent/incompetence are used eight times but not one mention of evil. I also haven’t really seen VDH talk much about the global aspect of it. The leaders and upper class of all Western nations are acting the same.
They all locked things down and mandated masks while they traveled and went maskless. Is that incompetence? They all cry racist if the middle/lower class makes the observation that many of the recent imported men are rapists. Is that incompetence?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.