If you are a member of the ordinary middle class you get the feeling that the educated class is done with you. Peasants!
I can understand that. If you are an educated person and you consume media that is meant for your consumption you agree with President Obama that the ordinary middle class is just a bunch of “bitter clingers.” Or with Hillary Clinton that the ordinary middle class is a “basket of deplorables,”
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that.
What both these headline Democrats and leaders of the educated class are implying, in my view, is that the ordinary middle class is done for, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
But I, on the other hand, prophesy the End of the Age of the Educated. I say that we are entering the decline from the supremacy of the educated class over the last century, with its world wars, its gubmint programs, and its wall-to-wall economic regulation.
So while Obama and Clinton look for the collapse of the ordinary middle class, I see the educated class hitting the wall. I see the Obama campaign to marginalize the Tea Party with Lois Lerner as an attempt to stop an organic movement that was reasserting middle-class rights and culture. I see the Clinton election denial of 2016 and the weaponization of the “intelligence community” against Trump as an effort to interfere with the arc of history moving towards middle class justice — to coin a phrase.
After all, if the educated class and its agenda are going strong, it doesn’t need to go after Trump; it just lets the Trump bubble pop and get back to business. It doesn’t have to create the J6 Narrative that Trump and his supporters are “armed insurrectionists.” It doesn’t have to pump them up as an existential threat to “our democracy;” it just ignores them as being beneath its notice.
But then I was reading a piece at Circulation of Elites about the differences between the revolutionaries and the peasants in the French Revolution. Says he:
The left — i.e. the revolutionaries — had its origins in the French Enlightenment, emphasizing progressivism, universalism, individualism, and rationalism. Its biases lay in the direction of science, scientism, monadism, centralization, homogenization, technocracy, social engineering, and bureaucratic paternalism.
You mean the Rule of the Educated Class?
Sure, the revolutionaries were there to “oppose the entrenched traditions, customs, and institutions of l’ancien régime.” But, despite the usual narrative, the peasants rebelling in the Vendée and elsewhere were not the supporters of the old regime.
[W]hile the peasants were, understandably, keen on the abolition of (at least aspects of) feudalism and reforms that would give them control over their land… they weren’t so keen on the assault upon their ancient communities, customs, and traditions.
Any more that the ordinary middle class of today is not so keen on the rise of LGBT, DEI, and wokism.
Now, I have a book by a couple of lefties on Captain Swing: a social history of the great English agricultural uprising of 1830. What was the big issue for the agricultural laborers? It was a demand for “the abolition of agricultural machinery, especially threshing machines.”
Actually, the workers in the countryside had been starving for at least three centuries, as the great landowners got involved in “improvement,” the upgrading of their landholdings from the feudal open-field system to farming-for-profit that needed less labor. So the Captain Swing riots — in the post Napoleonic Wars deflation — was really the last gasp of the old agricultural world before everyone trekked to the new towns of the industrial revolution and got jobs, and the population boomed.
So here is my reckless suggestion. Maybe the Russia Russia shenanigans and the curious case of the mail-in voting surge in 2020 and the J6 Insurrection gambit are all desperation plays by an educated class that is reaching the end of its rule.
Or maybe the ordinary middle class is reaching extinction and bitter clingers cling to their guns and deplorables and TEFRs rail against transgenders, and a new era is about to dawn with EVs and light rail as far as the eye can see.
You make the call.