The “world” elite Democrats live in is nothing like the real world of modern America, represented by these observations from the first Obama Foundation summit in Chicago.
“There was a morning meditation and yoga session, and an evening concert with Chance the Rapper and The National,” he wrote. Lucky ducks. He noticed a chalkboard where attendees were free to write down their hopes. “Samples: ‘We speak better and listen,’ ‘Americans will see each other’; ‘my nephews will escape toxic masculinity.'” One speaker asked the crowd, “Is there space among the woke for the still-waking?” (Not on college campuses.) The same speaker also mentioned something called the “starfish illusion.”
A place some liberal referred to as “the sanity bubble.”
The sanity bubble! What a perfect label for the environs of the self-satisfied and righteous, the elegantly appointed ballrooms where the high and mighty, silhouetted in magenta up-lighting, nod reverentially at clichés mouthed by the latest faddish “thought leader,” before tucking into, say, a caprese salad with arugula and pesto, followed by spinach and gorgonzola tortelloni with caramelized pears and bleu cheese cream. Within the sanity bubble life is pleasant, comfortable, and agreeable, its niceties and pleasures and fixed ideas interrupted by only the maelstrom of political and economic change outside.
No Trump voters, I’d guess. No dissenting opinions. No improper proper nouns. So, no real people, with real problems, which is at least part of the heart of the problem with the Democrats and the elite. The author adds,
I live in the bubble. Always have, even if I have come to disagree with what my college professors would call the “hegemonic discourse” of postmodern liberalism, and to gag at the vanity and solipsism of many of my fellow residents. But never, especially after the 2016 campaign, would I mistake the confines of the bubble for the whole of reality. That is the mistake Hillary Clinton made when she decided that she could win the presidency without the support of a white working class mangled by economic stagnation, family breakdown, and drug addiction.
If the reporting from the Obama Foundation event is any indication they still have much to learn.
As racially and sexually diverse as the crowd at the Obama Foundation summit may have been, everyone at the breakout session on “Who Narrates the World?” had, I’d wager, the following in common: a college or postgraduate degree, the mark of distinction and privilege and wealth in our society today.
These are the people Woodrow Wilson was waiting for, minus the racial and sexual diversity bit. Wilson was a racist bigot. But that aside, the seminar on who narrates the world attracted the very sort of Liberal Privilege that Marxist theory pretends should run the world.
And while there may not have been (m)any “Republicans” at the Obama Foundation Summit, there were plenty of ruling class members of the GOP in the water when HMS Clinton 2016 capsized a year ago. People more at home amongst the crowd at the Who Narrates the World seminar than in the basket with the deplorables.
Which brings me (again) to Angelo Codevilla’s treatise on Ruling Class vs. Country Class.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
Donald Trump did not create the division; its existence is why he is President.
Mr. Trump just saw it and tapped into it.
And millions of people who are not part of the ruling class, who hadn’t voted in years out of utter disgust, stepped out of the shadows to send a message to the political class.
Ever since then the political class has done everything in their power to piss those people off, even the Republicans in office because of them.
Those in the bubble, like the weirdoes at the Obama thing, would rule us but know nothing about us. They have nothing in common with us. Our reward for having different ideas or different priorities is to be called names and told we have no right to the views or the words we would choose to express them.
To silence us they call us bigots, racists, white supremacists, Nazis, and fascists, even though we respect the rights of people of all races, sexes, religions, and ideologies, while they hate everyone regardless of race, sex, or religion if they refuse to bow to their one true god of government.
If you were wondering if and when this division will end, it won’t until the ruling class is more in line with the rest of America.
And if you think removing Mr. Trump will make it better from where I sit, it will only make that division worse.
