Thoughtful article from Victor Davis Hansen. The conflicts in the USA are more rich vs poor than left vs right, but the left distracts the poor by pointing at the right.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/victor-davis-hanson-left-wing-elites-are-our-new-antoinettes
The modern left-wing elite are becoming our version of Antoinettes. Thirty-eight-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is worth over $60 billion. But he enjoys T-shirts, jeans, and apparent simplicity in his many landed estates. He is so worried about the wrong voting tendencies of the clueless middle classes that he poured nearly $420 million of dark money from his vast fortune into the 2020 election—de facto absorbing the work of key precinct registrars—to ensure the “right” result for the unthinking multitudes.
Americans, almost uniquely among modern nations, mostly do not envy, much less despise the rich. But there is a certain sort of privilege that they do not like: the sanctimonious and hypercritical rich whose rhetoric is at odds with their own lifestyles and the methods by which they inherited or made vast sums. And they especially are turned off by those who exude open disdain for the clinger/deplorable/dregs class—to paraphrase the Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden nomenclature.
An especially grating habit of the left-wing wealthy is to lecture the middle class on their supposed illiberality. Often, those struggling are told they need to pay more for what White House economic advisor Brian Deese recently called the “liberal world order.”
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or George Soros, to take a few examples, are multibillionaires who live lives unlike any in the history of civilization. They also fund various agendas through multibillion-dollar foundations and their own personal riches.
Their causes are all deemed critical to the nation and planet, but unfortunately not fully appreciated as so vital by the peasant classes—whether they be global governance, massive restructuring of the economy to stop carbon releases, radical abortion on demand, or the sponsoring of critical legal theory prosecutors who feel crime is but a rich man’s construct.
Indeed, when various pollsters recently asked the public what their chief worries were, they found the culprits were the prohibitive price of gasoline, the ruinous effects of hyperinflation, supply chain shortages, the nonexistent southern border, or the escalating violent crime wave—all of which concerns are of apparent little interest to left-wing billionaires.
In other words, the worries of the Antoinette liberal elite—climate change, abortion on demand, transgenderism, strict gun-control—are not those that terrify the middle and lower classes. The latter, for some reason, first want to survive one more day with enough affordable food and energy and to be safe from criminals.
Why Democrats are currently unpopular transcends even Joe Biden’s daily, dangerous, and tragic loss of cognition. Their low ratings arise more from the implementation of an array of disastrous policies dreamed up at left-wing university departments and think tanks.
As a result, voters have concluded that the Left “just doesn’t care.”
By that, they conclude that the drivers of modern hard progressivism—the billionaire donor class, the highly compensated professional bicoastal elites, the ideologues who have captured and transformed the old Democratic Party—ignore criticism of their policies. Or they claim that their disasters are unappreciated benefits, or mere PR problems, or shift blame to the Russians, the Emmanuel-Goldstein Trump, the toadish media, or the victims of their disastrous policies.
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