CHRISTINE ROSEN: The Elite War On The American Middle Class: And How To End It.
Consider the recent cultural and political shifts experienced by the typical middle-class American, shifts dramatic enough to be experienced as whiplash by many of its members. During the Covid pandemic, for example, the majority in the middle was told to listen to elite experts and follow the dictates of the institutions those elites controlled. Most did. But as those same elites mandated harmful business and school closures (while conveniently ignoring such restrictions on their own behavior by dining at the French Laundry, as Governor Gavin Newsom did, or sending their children to private schools that remained open), middle-class Americans watched their children’s educational and emotional well-being suffer as the public schools they attended remained shuttered.
The arbiters of culture increasingly ignore the middle to focus instead on minority groups of every stripe (the smaller and more bizarre the better), or on the tribulations of the luxury consumer. When given attention at all, the middle is treated as a bunch of exotic weirdos, despite still being the majority. Cultural products consumed by the middle—their favorite comedians, music, and television shows—often get only grudging or glancing attention from elite media. Increasingly, television shows depict the very wealthy (Succession, The White Lotus) or the poor or working-class (Dopesick, Maid) more than they do the lives of people in the middle. . . .
Rather than be catered to by the elites who seek to make their living off their tastes and wants, the middle class is more likely to hear the elite talk about it as a problem: Middle-class Americans are racist, they complain too much about how expensive everything has become, and they won’t get on board either with the left’s social-engineering schemes or the populist right’s rage-driven apocalypticism.
They are told that “no human is illegal” and that their concerns about an open border are evidence of their own bigotry. They see the poor and other designated “oppressed” receive sympathetic elite attention and government subsidies and programs, and services aimed at helping them. The elite champion the rights of criminals, illegal immigrants, and destructive Black Lives Matter activists who want to dismantle the police. They tell the rest of the country that they must call the homeless the “unhoused” and ignore any quality-of-life effects from that population’s drug use or instability. When the middle class complains, the elite often chide it for having fallen prey to “misinformation” or excessive “right-wing” media consumption.
The middle class is also frequently reminded that shoplifting is a victimless crime even as they see prices rise and goods placed behind locked cabinets—or, in many cases, entire stores shuttered after being scavenged for too long by thieves who go unpunished. In January, after coordinated groups of pro-Palestinian protesters shut down traffic to tunnels and bridges in Manhattan, disrupting the lives of millions of New Yorkers, the New York Post noted how many of the protesters were students at elite colleges such as Yale and Brown, whose activities were being lavishly funded by “the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation” as well as “a Rockefeller family foundation.”
On the rare occasions when such protesters are arrested, they are immediately released and often valorized for their law-breaking, as Black Lives Matter protesters were in the summer of 2020 by soon-to-be–Vice President Kamala Harris. She urged the public to donate to the pro-decarceration Minnesota Bail Fund to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” many of whom had committed arson, property crimes, and assault; the same fund later secured the release of a man who then murdered someone. As Matthew Crawford observed of these young radicals, many the children of privilege, who have become full-time protesters: “At bottom, we see a refusal of the ruling class to take responsibility for its rule, preferring to [role-play] at the barricades.”
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