In defense of the elite

      In these post-election days, elites have taken a pummeling. They’ve been repeatedly blamed for losing this election, thus sacrificing our democracy. They’ve been variously accused of contempt for “the great unwashed,” for ignoring the needs of the common people, for disdain toward Joe Sixpack and obliviousness to all those blue-collar folks getting their morning coffee in rural Pennsylvania diners.    

      And that’s, apparently, what voters rebelled against.

      Listen to Bernard Goldberg in the Washington newsletter, The Hill:

      “Trump’s win is a rejection of elite condescension…For quite some time, elites have looked down on ordinary Americans. The elites thought they were smarter than the folks who live in “flyover country,” who they often saw as hayseeds who ate at places like Red Lobster. And you got the impression that they not only thought they were smarter than ordinary Americans, but that were better than ordinary Americans.”

      Roger Berkowitz, at the Hannah Arendt Center, puts it this way:

      Trump voters “think that their opinions—I mean, the opinions of the majority of the people—are ignored and disdained by people like me…. Right now, the mood of much of the country is anger and resentment at intellectuals and elites who have built a world that works well for them —I mean for us—but not for the majority of the people.

      “We can travel around the world and live in Europe and visit Iceland and go to weddings in exotic locations. We can debate pronouns and worry about the fate of oppressed peoples in Gaza and Ukraine. We can order in food to be delivered whenever we want. We can dine out in restaurants on a regular basis and we can drink funny cocktails that cost $20 and barely contain any alcohol while sipping oat-milk Matcha Lattes. We have investments and we have a future.” 

      I, for one, have never ordered an oat-milk Matcha Latte or any other kind of latte, for that matter. Of course, I’m not the elite. But let me try to speak up for this abused minority here.

     First of all, who are they really? As the Hoover Institution points out, “Since ancient times, elites have been defined various ways, sometimes by birth (the Greeks’ hoi aristoi), by capital (hoi plousioi), by perceived class (hoi oligoi), by acknowledged influence (hoi gnorimoi), by high culture (hoi beltistoi)—and sometimes by a combination of all of the above.”

      According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the "elite are "the richest, most powerful, best-educated or best-trained group in a society." The European Center for Populism Studies says “the elite are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power or skill in a society.”

      Well, a very large number of those privileged, wealthy, powerful, supposedly contemptuous elitists—many from Wall Street, many from Silicon Valley, all of whom probably travel around the world and eat at Michelin restaurants—were, in fact, actually major Trump donors and supporters. The very rich and powerful and privileged maybe do look down their aquiline noses at the “lower classes.” But these weren’t the elites with the Matcha Lattes and the pronoun conversations.

      Maybe those attacking “the elites” may simply have confused them with progressives, with those they don’t like, with those whose ideas they abhor. Is “elite” for them just a fancy word then for the educated, the urban, the coastal, the left?

      Because many of those elite, if that’s who they are, have not just been debating pronouns. They’ve been defending the rights of everybody to be their actual selves and be called what they want. Maybe they don’t eat at Red Lobster, but they’ve lobbied for increasing the minimum wage of those who do.

      Many of those elite who did go to elite schools and do live in elite places may drink funny cocktails, but they’ve also developed the drugs and designed the agencies that protect our health. Many of those elite may have investments, but many of the best educated and most progressive generally are the ones—not populist demagogues—who support expanding healthcare coverage, increasing the childcare credit and so much more.

      Yes, some of those elite have traveled around the world and may spend some time every year ensconced in the south of France, but they’ve also taught Milton to our children, pondered the mysteries of the universe, thought up the internet, studied the intricacies of the Constitution and so much more.

      Have these elites “looked down on ordinary Americans”? Was it by creating Social Security (a product of that uber-elitist, FDR) or did they condescend by crafting Medicare and Medicaid? What about the big city elites who brought us the Affordable Care Act? Have the best-trained from our elite universities been contemptuous by worrying about a climate that may make parts of this country— yes, some parts in “flyover country”—uninhabitable, and trying to find solutions for those problems?

      Should we be angry with those who can afford three stars from Michelin yet still believe Trump was and is a demagoging conman who has taken advantage of so many? Have many of the highly educated elite shown contempt for those Pennsylvania diner habitués by trying to get their children more early-childhood education?

      Has this elite ignored them? The New York Times, that quintessential mouthpiece of the East Coast elite, did so many stories interviewing potential voters in diners in rural Pennsylvania, rural Wisconsin, rural Michigan and elsewhere that the trope became an internet joke. “Elite” progressive groups who pay attention to their pronouns, like Indivisible and Swing Left, specifically focused their electoral efforts on speaking to “forgotten” rural voters in swing states.

      When you’re looking for culprits for devastating loss, it’s easy to blame “the elite,” because it’s easy to stereotype a faceless group that no one wants to defend.

      Except me. Anyone up for an oat-milk Matcha Latte?