The elite establishment and 'the great unwashed'

I've written several times this year (see, for example, here) about the political and economic establishment - which turns out to be the rich, in so many words.  Money is power;  power is money.  It's an old cliché, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Now Peggy Noonan underlines that reality.

This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist.

. . .

It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling.

On Wall Street, where they used to make statesmen, they now barely make citizens. CEOs are consumed with short-term thinking, stock prices, quarterly profits. They don’t really believe that they have to be involved with “America” now; they see their job as thinking globally and meeting shareholder expectations.

In Silicon Valley the idea of “the national interest” is not much discussed. They adhere to higher, more abstract, more global values. They’re not about America, they’re about . . . well, I suppose they’d say the future.

In Hollywood the wealthy protect their own children from cultural decay, from the sick images they create for all the screens, but they don’t mind if poor, unparented children from broken-up families get those messages and, in the way of things, act on them down the road.

From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.

There's more at the link.

This is why you can get Chris Cuomo, a CNN reporter (and son of a prominent Democratic Party politician), saying baldly on the air, not caring how many people hear him, "We couldn’t help [Hillary Clinton] any more than we have, she’s got just a free ride so far from the media, we’re the biggest ones promoting her campaign..."  He literally didn't care who heard him, or whether they might care about much-ballyhooed 'objectivity' in journalism (currently visible more in the breach than in the observance).  He's part of the elite, the establishment.  The opinions of 'the great unwashed' are meaningless, as far as he's concerned.  Almost the entire mainstream news media appears to think likewise.

This is why you can get social media like Facebook, and Twitter, and the like, openly favoring one side of the political spectrum and censoring the other, even going so far as to silence those whose opinions differ too widely from their own.  It's the establishment protecting its favored sons and daughters, casting into outer darkness those who won't get with the program (like, for example, Milo Yiannopoulos).  They don't care whether people like you and I agree with their actions and attitudes or not.  We don't count.  We're not part of the 'inner circle'.

One hopes most sincerely that, this November, the US electorate will deliver a stinging rebuke to such supercilious condescension (known, in the language of common people like you and I, as 'bullshit').




Peter