GOING UNDER WITH THE OVERCLASS:
The cultural enrichment that American elites helped to nurture has been an impressive reflection of the country’s democratic ideals.
And yet, rather than support these institutions as pinnacles of civilizational achievement, many of today’s elites seem determined to undercut them. They gnash their teeth at their own history. They rend their garments at their own complicity. Then they make an active show of ripping apart their charges at the seams: closing the books, covering the art, destroying the monuments, censoring the students, canceling the discourse, and ridiculing the historical mission. Such impulses inform elite behavior across the Western world. This show of cultural weakness has been a provocation with deadly consequences. For those of us still concerned with the preservation of wisdom—an inheritance of culture that transcends politics—the results have been heartbreaking. For those concerned for the fabric of democratic nations, the effects are now all the more horrifying. . . .
Elite attacks are made under the banner of a mutable list of causes: social justice, climate justice, indigenous justice, trans rights, black lives, anti-racism, and so on. Tomorrow it will be a new combination and permutation of progressive politics. The shifting battlelines are a strategy of the offensive. While many of the attacks seem to originate from below, it is easy to miss the fact that the bombs have been placed, timed, and set to detonate by those at the top. It is a culture war largely waged by proxy. Today’s activist elites seek to undermine the cultural legacies of the institutions they control precisely because these institutions have promoted—through their books, their art, their buildings, and their concerns for our well-being—democratic aspirations and cohesion. It is a spirit they now despise and wish to undermine. . . .
Ever more removed from the general population, elite life during this pandemic has never been more rewarding. They have enjoyed their family camp in the Adirondacks, the river that runs through their ranch in Montana, the shifting tides rising and falling by their house in the Caribbean. Their only illness, as the saying goes, has been their ongoing bout of “affluenza.” Twenty-five years ago, at the time of Lasch’s writing, America’s richest 20 percent controlled half of the country’s wealth. As of 2021, the top 10 percent control 70 percent of the country’s wealth. The top 1 percent alone controls nearly a third of the country’s wealth. The top 50 percent hold 98 percent of the wealth. That leaves the bottom 50 percent with but 2 percent, a division that has only grown more stark through the pandemic as inflation, crime, and learning loss now add to the disruption. This all means that, as American cities were looted and burned, and the working classes have had nothing else to do but to mask up and clock in, a pajamaed overclass has stepped happily aside from the final requirements of democratic life. All the while, as Lasch observed, the elites “find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm.”
The elite attack on democracy often comes out of this same fetish for sanitation.
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