Progressive Elites Capture the Democratic Party – The Independent

Progressive Elites Capture the Democratic Party

– By Howard Sierer –

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Let me inform you about the very wealthy. They are completely different from you and me… They suppose, deep of their hearts, that they’re higher than we’re….” His description applies at present to a small progressive elite, the 15% that controls the total Democratic Party.

This elite intelligentsia sees itself as an ethical champion of the oppressed. Therefore, anybody who takes concern with its woke, progressive narrative should, by definition, be immoral: a racist, a homophobic bigot, a misogynist or, encompassing all of them, a fascist.

Because this small elite is drawn primarily from the 20% of Americans in the higher center class, it’s not consultant of our society as an entire and even of the higher center class, nor does it mirror mainstream values and issues. The liberal Brookings Institution calls this separation “dangerous:”

“The American higher center class is separating, slowly however certainly, from the remainder of society. This separation is most blatant when it comes to earnings—the place the prime fifth have been prospering whereas the majority lags behind. But the separation is not only financial. Gaps are rising on an entire vary of dimensions, together with household construction, training, way of life, and geography. Indeed, these dimensions of benefit seem like clustering extra tightly collectively, every thereby amplifying the impact of the different.”

This progressive elite consists largely of prosperous, faculty-educated professionals who migrated to the Democratic Party whereas giant segments of the working class have been leaving it. In 1960, Democratic President John Kennedy misplaced the votes of white faculty graduates by a 2-to-1 margin, however gained the assist of white voters and not using a faculty diploma by the similar margin. For Joe Biden, the outcomes have been the exact opposite.

In 1992, virtually 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters have been whites and not using a diploma, however for Biden the similar was true of solely 27% of his 2020 voters. In 2018 the prime 10 wealthiest congressional districts have been all held by Democrats.

Economist Thomas Piketty describes the exceptional worldwide evolution of left-wing political events “from the employee get together to the excessive-training get together.” Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer crowed, “For each blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we’ll choose up two reasonable Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you may repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

The purpose for this shift is obvious: the Democratic Party has been captured by this self-proclaimed intelligentsia who’ve moved farther and farther left, adopting one radical place after one other. Christopher Lasch’s ebook “Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” describes the thinly-veiled class struggle elites have been waging towards their “inferiors,” that’s you and me.

When its most well-liked insurance policies run towards the grain of opinion, as they incessantly do, the elite initiates media campaigns to win over the “unenlightened” public. The leftist legacy media brazenly “cheerleads” progressive insurance policies and disparages mainstream objections, often calling them proper-wing after they most frequently mirror the public’s majority values and opinions.

Increasingly and disturbingly, the progressive elite has been all-too-able to trample on the very civil rights that it claims to assist. It opposes resistance to its “enlightened” insurance policies by adopting the authoritarian techniques that have been the hallmarks of fascism: suppressing dissent and controlling the stream of data to the public.

The final six years have been replete with progressive media manipulation. For instance, the left-wing media buried the mysterious disappearance of Hillary Clinton’s non-public e mail server throughout the 2016 marketing campaign by concocting a totally bogus Trump-Russia collusion allegation. Ditto for burying the Hunter Biden laptop computer story earlier than the 2020 election; his laptop computer is loaded with details about his father’s monetary curiosity in Ukrainian and Chinese enterprise offers.

During the COVID pandemic, progressive elected officers, bureaucrats and the legacy media put their authoritarian, “we all know higher than you” perspective on show. Lockdowns, college closures, and masking necessities issued by Pres. Biden and progressive governors and mayors have been cheered by the progressive media and prolonged far past any medical efficacy. The progressive media refused to publish or print any non-conforming views, even these from extremely regarded scientists and docs, calling them “deniers” or “anti-scientific.”

By portray itself as victims preventing towards proper-wing extremist oppression, the progressive elite rationalizes its personal authoritarianism. In its thoughts, the cult of victimhood justifies blatantly repressive measures.

Trying to outdo one another, woke progressives have continued to suggest ever-extra excessive insurance policies to take care of and lengthen their self-anointed function as the vanguard of the proletariat. Attempts to implement these insurance policies have develop into more and more dogmatic and undemocratic.

Pres. Biden’s 16 months of progressive policy failures, one after one other, have soured voters on progressive governance normally. If the Democratic Party doesn’t discover a technique to reasonable its insurance policies and discover candidates to match, the coming fall 2022 elections will set the stage for a dramatic break from woke progressivism and place the Republican get together squarely astride the nice reasonable heart of the nation’s politics for years to come back.

Next week: a observe-up outlining some loopy insurance policies of the looney left.

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