The Party of Snobbish Elites

A gentrified cocoon of progressive privilege has cost Democrats the middle class.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

 

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14 thoughts on “The Party of Snobbish Elites”

  1. Marshall Keyes, MD

    The trouble with the progressive privileged is that, in most cases, their silver spoons are located in the wrong (or, perhaps, right) orifices.

  2. The Eagles had a song making fun of tract homes. I remember thinking they have the money to live somewhere else.

  3. Another problem with many progressives is that they have no qualms about using the coercive force of government to force people to do things against their will, like hand over 50 percent of their hard earned income. These progressives rationalize that if they are willing to give up a significant portion of their earnings for what they believe is in the country’s best interests, everyone should be required to do so. They just don’t seem to appreciate the fact that forcing people to do things against there will is generally wrong and, therefore, the justification to impose the coercive force of government must be far greater than merely the progressive’s belief that it’s good for the country. Before the government takes away its citizens’ freedom, its objective must be unequivocally good for the country and there must be no other, less coercive means to achieve the objective.

    1. Taking the long view of the biblical saga you will discovered that the most important feature God created in humans is free will, since that paves the way for a person to freely choose to love God or not. Hence free will which can conceptually be translated to liberty, which can then be further translated to the power to choose, is problematic to liberals who want to restrict your choices in life! Hence, many liberals which can conceptually be translated to dictators, love to violate a person free will.

  4. Empathy for the working and business owning middle class isn’t nourished by the wealth and power vapors in which most of the professional political classes and their supporters live and breathe. Middle class workers and business owners buy the products and services from the wealthy while paying the taxes and fees that support every government worker and pay for the freebies to the often mis-defined poor and downtrodden. They do that without the financial buffer from sacrifice that the wealthy enjoy and without the freebie guarantees given to the often mis-defined groups. Has it become impossible to have an empathetic middle class Congress and President?

  5. Aristocracy has many names: Count, Earl, First Citizen, Dictator, President-For-Life, Czar, Fuhrer, Sultan, Shah. Here they like to be called “Progressives”.

    1. Well put. They believe if you have several degrees you are entitled to rule. The Aristocracy of Degree. Since they think people are stupid they are entitled to lie, deceive and insult and bully and coerce to force people to live as they think they should.

  6. It’s a long way from John L. Lewis, who was born in a mining camp, and did work as a miner before becoming a union leader.

    It is no bad thing that the great American middle class is moving away from the Democrats, because of the long Democrat association with racist policies (Copperheads, KKK, and southern segregationists were all largely Democrat).

  7. The rise and fall of Nations is never in doubt, only the timing. The top has aquired wealth beyond the mind’s ability to comprehend, right alongside government debt ballooning to unpayable levels. and still rising. Thievery on a burn-in-hell scale has China and Russia reeling and capital flight is ongoing. Saudi Arabia unleashing oil pricing as a weapon against murderous regimes— does the Saudi dynasty continue, untouched by the lunatics their surrounded by. Only another French revolution will halt America’s ceaseless movement towards full blown banana republic. Google “” the dollars 70-year dominance is coming to an end””, by the telegraph in july 2014. In the USA, it’s finance— in an interconnected world.

  8. Sadly, the powers that be in the GOP will miss an historic opportunity to garner the vast support of the disaffected middle class Dems shunned by their party. They, it would seem, have succumbed to the allure of being included in the ruling class.

  9. Democrats don’t upset me any more that scorpions, sharks or leaches upset me. They are what they are.

    Which is worse? My enemy who wants to destroy me? Or the turncoat posing as my friend, who holds the door open for my enemy to destroy me?

    Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, same on me. Fool me every election for a generation, and I must be a conservative Republican.

  10. The fact that the Democrats have lost the middle class is (sadly) almost irrelevant. The fiddling around with unemployment statistics, identity politics, and the coastal elites’ dominance of huge urban chunks of our country make the opinions of the middle class an academic affair. As an academic, I like academic affairs. However, the left has so “gender-dized” and racial-ized politics that the middle class trembles in fear of violating the orthodoxy of identity politics. The shrinking of the middle class as a dominant political force is due to the cultural and numerical effects of increased numbers of people dependent on government either through assistance or through crony capitalist government contracts and the relative decrease in numbers of those more self sufficient.

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