By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Former New York mayor and multibillionaire Democratic
presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, four years ago at Oxford, England,
dismissed farming, ancient and modern. He lectured that agriculture was little
more than the rote labor of dropping seeds into the ground and watching corn
sprout — easy, mindless, automatic.
“I could teach anybody,” Bloomberg pontificated, “even
people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.”
He contrasted such supposedly unintelligent labor of the
past (and present) with the “skill set” of the current “information economy”
that requires “how to think and analyze.” In this new economy, he said, “you
have to have a lot more gray matter.”
Gray matter?
For all his later denials and efforts to contextualize
those remarks, Bloomberg seems to see both ancient and modern agriculture, and
farmers, as either unskilled or not very smart, as if the genetically inferior
gravitate to muscular labor far from the “skill sets” of those like Mike
Bloomberg. He certainly has no idea about either the sophistication of ancient
agriculture or the high-tech savvy of contemporary farmers — much less just how
difficult it is, and always was, to produce food, much less that history is so
often the story of mass famine rather than bounty and plenty.
Bloomberg’s apparent dismissal of rural people might seem
odd, given that Democrats profess allegiance with the working classes and
muscular labor. But, in fact, his disdain is perversely logical and indeed
predictable.
In the earlier 2008 campaign, then-progressive candidate
Barack Obama wrote off the rural voters of Pennsylvania, a state he lost in the
primaries to Hillary Clinton. Of those who apparently did not vote for him, he
claimed: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward
people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment
as a way to explain their frustrations.”
A contrite Obama knew relatively little about rural
Pennsylvania other than the stereotypes he had embraced about country life from
his Hawaiian prep-school cocoon, Occidental College, the Ivy League, and his
subsequent elite, identity-politics cursus honorum.
His then-opponent Hillary Clinton pounced and attacked
Obama as “elitist and out of touch” — and she soon transmogrified, as Obama put
it, into “Annie Oakley” Hillary. Remember that, in those few days of her failed
first bid to capture the Democratic nomination, Hillary drank boilermakers,
talked guns, bowled, and bragged about her solid support among the “white”
working classes.
Of course, eight years later Hillary herself wrote off
the base of her 2016 opponent Donald Trump as “a basket of deplorables.” And
after smearing them as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic — you name it,”
she boasted that some of them were “irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not
America.” When candidate Clinton went to impoverished West Virginia, she
lectured poor and often out-of-work coal miners, promising, “We’re going to put
a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” This from someone who
gave inane 20-minute talks to Wall Street grandees for over $12,000 a minute —
on their expectation that she’d be a compliant quid pro quo political
investment.
Former vice president and current presidential candidate
Joe Biden said of Trump’s working-class voters, “They’re a small percentage of
the American people, virulent people, some of them the dregs of society.”
Biden, by 2019, had also metamorphosed from good ole Joe
Biden of rural and coal-mining Scranton, Pa., to the grandee who could advise
doomed coal miners to learn how to program computers: “Anybody who can throw
coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
A coal miner might have replied to Joe Biden: “Anybody
who cannot do much of anything other than get mired in drugs and illicit
affairs can certainly learn how to make $80,000 a month as a consultant to a
foreign energy company.”
The disdain for the working and middle classes shown by
wealthy liberals who supposedly champion labor is matched by the disdain of
progressive government bureaucrats, media, and left-wing Hollywood celebrities.
In one amorous exchange to his paramour Lisa Page, fellow FBI agent and Trump
hater Peter Strzok said, “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could
SMELL the Trump support.”
Strzok, who was the highest-profile FBI employee in most
of the major scandals of the past four years — the Clinton email fiasco, the
setup of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, the Crossfire Hurricane FBI
investigation of “Russian collusion,” and the Mueller special-counsel
investigation — was apparently representative of the FBI hierarchy. One
anonymous attorney wrote to another in a text disclosed by the inspector
general, “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy
POS.”
Marquee reporters often got caught expressing the same
sort of disdain felt by progressive politicians and the federal bureaucratic
elite. Describing the crowd at a Trump rally, Politico reporter Marc
Caputo tweeted, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get
a full set of teeth.”
The locus classicus of elite progressives’ disdain
for working-class Trump supporters was a recent panel on the show of CNN host
Don Lemon. Pundits Rick Wilson and Wajahat Ali took turns ridiculing the accent
and intelligence of the supposedly Neanderthal rural voter. Or as Wilson put
it, Trump plays to “the credulous Boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump that
wants to think — ” and here Wilson adopted a faux-Southern accent — “‘Donald
Trump is the smart one and y’all elitists are dumb.’”
Then, as host Lemon doubled over in laughter at their
impressions of supposed white trash, his two guests adopted “redneck” accents
and indulged in an extended parody of the allegedly stupid Trump voter:
Ali: “You elitists, with your geography and your maps and
your spellin’ . . . ”
Wilson: “Your math and your readin’ . . .”
Ali: “Yeah, your readin’, your geography, knowin’ other
countries, sippin’ your latte.”
Wilson: “All those lines on the map.”
Ali: “Only them elitists know where U-kraine is!”
Progressive derision of the working class, and especially
lower-middle-class white America, pre-dated Trump. Remember the decade of
hatred that Hollywood expressed for Sarah Palin, her family, and her supposed
class, both during and after the 2008 campaign.
Late-night talk-show host David Letterman joked on his
show that Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter Bristol had been “knocked up” in
the dugout by star Alex Rodriguez during a New York Yankees game — as if rural,
stupid, and inbred Alaskans are eager to be statutorily raped in their groupie
eagerness to seek out celebrities, even in dirty dugouts amid a crowd of
thousands.
The list of disparagement could be expanded — do we
remember how the media assured us that Harvard Law graduate Adam Schiff was to
destroy his counterpart, supposedly hick farmer Devin Nunes — at least until
Inspector General Michael Horowitz found the information in the Nunes majority
report factual, and by implication found that the Schiff minority version was
an assemblage of falsehoods and half-truths?
Why do so many liberal journalists, politicians, and
celebrities harbor such contempt for, and show such snobbery about, the white
working, and often rural, classes of the American heartland?
The most obvious answers are that the media, elite
politicians, and government hierarchy are liberal or left-wing, and the objects
of their hatred are mostly conservative. Just look at any election map,
color-coded by either congressional districts or Electoral College states, and
the nation, geographically, is a sea of red, bookended by two long blue
corridors on the coasts, the home of the nation’s tony universities, network
news, media hubs, the bureaucratic borg, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall
Street.
Second, there is no cultural, career, or political
downside in stereotyping millions of Americans as stupid, crude, and culturally
repugnant. Had Don Lemon’s two guests mimicked the dialect of inner-city youths
and suggested they were uneducated and thus gullible supporters of Barack
Obama, they would have been banned from CNN for life. Or had Peter Strzok
suggested that he could smell Obama supporters at Walmart, federal attorneys
would probably have found a way to have him indicted by now.
Third, politics, academia, the media, and entertainment
don’t necessarily draw in particularly wise people, especially if knowledge is
broadly defined as social skills, empirical education, common sense, and
pragmatic experience. According to the rules of the elementary playground, one
becomes exalted by ridiculing others. High-school dropouts such as Robert De
Niro and Cher seem to appear sophisticated by ranting about Trump and his
supposedly ignorant supporters. Don Lemon’s skills seem mostly limited to
reading a teleprompter — when he ventures into commentary and analysis, he
usually sounds either banal or adolescent. Howling at stupid jokes about the
supposed ignorance of the red-state drawler apparently lend the insipid Lemon
an air of cosmopolitan sophistication. Michael Bloomberg, for all his billions
and cunning, cannot fathom in a debate that, by joking about TurboTax, he only
further alienates millions who use it because they cannot hire his legions of
attorneys to reduce their tax exposure.
Finally, there is also a psychological explanation for
why coastal elites negatively stereotype the churchgoers, farmers, gun owners,
and Walmart shoppers of the nation’s interior. Our elite, especially those of
our white elite establishment, are not especially comfortable with either poor
people or minorities — at least not in the sense of living among them, working
alongside them, schooling their children with them, or marrying among them.
They sense that such concrete unease — their fear and insecurity — is at odds
with their well-meant desire to help the underprivileged in the abstract.
Elites help square that circle of wishing to aid the
Other while not being anyway near the Other through the use of medieval-style
virtue-signaling. That is, they deplore white racism and privilege by
attributing it to supposedly ignorant and less enlightened poor white people,
whose illiberality and un-wokeness they can lazily stereotype as responsible
for the plight of the underclass.
Our best and brightest cannot be the good white
people unless there are plenty of the bad white people. Smearing the
latter is a convenient — and cheap — way of showing abstract solidarity with
the nonwhite. In reductionist terms, those with undeniable white privilege damn
as privileged those who have never been near it, thereby erasing their own
privilege and spiritually placing them at the virtual barricades beside those
they otherwise keep carefully distant.
Of course, there is also an element of fear, even
apprehension, in such demonic generalization, a result of segregation from and
ignorance about the physical world. Barack Obama, who once complained about the
price of arugula and either had never heard or never spoken the word
“corpsman,” knew that he knew nothing about farming or guns or clinging working
people. Did he realize that his food, his safety, the maintenance of his home
and car depended on others who could do things to keep his world viable that he
not only could not do but also could not even imagine? Ask Obama and his class
to replace a 30-amp breaker, or prune a peach tree, or drive a semi, and one
could see that he assumes others who are supposedly less gifted provide his
power, food, and consumer goods, using skills he lacks.
Ditto Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg claims
he could teach anyone on an Oxford stage how to be a farmer. But he knows that
he has no knowledge of farming, ancient or modern, and has no detailed notion
of where or how his fruits, vegetables, grains, and choice cuts arrive at his
various estates and hence his table. He may even sense that while the world
could do without Bloomberg News, it could not survive without skilled farmers.
So he is a bit edgy when he thinks about the physical world of muscle that
allows him to be Mike Bloomberg, multibillionaire Socratic dunce.
We need to move beyond the idea that the elite caricature
the deplorables because they are insensitive and arrogant. True, they are, but
they also do it because they are insecure — and terribly afraid of those they
don’t like, but also sense they desperately need.
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