It’s the Hypocrisy, Stupid

VDH:

Some concerned Democrats are worried that their party may have lost the key blue-wall states because of its elitism, manifested as disdain for Americans between the coasts.

Perhaps emblematic of their worry is the strange metamorphosis of Hillary Clinton’s two presidential campaigns. In 2008, as Bill Clinton 2.0, she drank boilermakers, bragged about bowling and shooting, boasted about her resonance with the “white” working class, and clobbered Obama on his Pennsylvania clingers speech.

But after Obama’s win — and his assumed new formula of registering record numbers of minority voters and seeing them often vote in a bloc on the basis of racial solidarity — Clinton thought she too could follow this new pathway to Democratic victories. So she made the understandable political contortions

This time around, Clinton was bent on out-Obaming Obama’s “clingers” with her own “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” Her campaign was based on pandering to identity-politics groups — while she had cashed in on Wall Street in what can be fairly called a payola scheme with Bill to enrich the Clinton Foundation and thus indirectly themselves. The result was both a cultural and economic affront to what used to be the bedrock of the Democratic party.

Americans neither hate nor envy meritocratic elites. Here in one of the poorer areas of the nation in rural southwestern Fresno County, the poor admire the skilled surgeons who operate on their children. Most of the new agri-barons are up-by-their-bootstraps ethnics: Basques, Punjabis, and descendants of the Okie diaspora and the 1960s waves of immigrants from Mexico who may now farm more than 2,000 or 3,000 acres of orchards and vineyards and on paper be worth $10 or $15 million, though they dress in old clothes and drive run-down pickups. They are looked upon as success stories worthy of emulation because most talk and act like the people who work for and with them.

So perhaps what drives proverbially average Americans crazy is not the success and money of others, but the condescension and hypocrisy of what a particular elite says contrasted with how it lives: The disconnect recalls the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, the televangelist who on Sunday mornings three decades ago used to break into tears as he loudly condemned the sins of the flesh, while he privately indulged his worldly appetites.

Elites, whose lifestyles lead them to burn lots of carbon, rail about the Paris accords to those who get by burning lots less. What is galling is to see how little the elites’ green rhetoric is backed up by their green behavior. Could Hollywood celebrities at least for a year swear off the use of their private jets that emit more carbon emissions in a year than entire small towns in Ohio?

Why do not college professors who are strident activists for climate change agree to limit their intercontinental jet trips to one a year? Could our pundits and politicians who warn Middle America to brace for radical changes in their lifestyles at least agree to live in houses smaller than 2,500 square feet?

How do our elites square the circle of identity politics and big money? The notion that reparatory admissions and hiring are based on race and gender presupposes that past endemic bias has led to oppression that in turn had hit hard the livelihoods of the Other. But what happens when after a half-century of affirmative action, many who receive preferences are richer than those whom they accuse of white privilege?

Or is it more ironic than that? Wealthy white college kids chant about the demon white privilege, going so far as to help demand racially segregated safe spaces, dorms, and, in one case currently in the news, temporary expulsion of white people from campus. They rage against a privilege that they enjoy and that their perceived targets — the unenlightened middle of America — do not. Yet one easy way of ending white privilege, to the extent that it exists, among elite enclaves would be to send one’s children to public high schools rich in diversity.

One wonders how many hecklers and disrupters at Middlebury College, to take one example, chose prep school when there were better opportunities to mingle with minorities at inner-city schools? And if they really wished to address culpable whites, shouldn’t the college sponsor field trips to rural Pennsylvania or southern Ohio where such chanting demonstrators might more directly address the targets of their ire?

If one believes that charter schools and vouchers weaken the public-school system, then an effective way to counter such challenges would be to put one’s own children in public classrooms rather than to deny the poor the ability to disconnect from the public schools for the same reasons that so many elites have. One of the most surreal paradoxes of Washington, D.C., is the number of progressives (including the former president of the United States) who put their children in Sidwell-Friends while passionately opposing charter schools and vouchers.

The list of progressive paradoxes is limitless: handgun possession by the law-abiding is a supposed catalyst for violence, but not for security details who surround Hollywood and political celebrities. Elites lecture Americans on their supposed – isms and -ologies (sexism, racism, nativism), but when such sins are endemic to Middle Eastern societies abroad or indeed among immigrant communities inside the West, they are paternalistically excused or ignored.

Common themes in rap music are misogyny, racism and calls for violence against police — the sort of career-ending lyrics for most other entertainers.

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