白左 [Baizuo]

R.R. Reno, at First Things, explains why Donald Trump goes up in the polls every time he opens his mouth and says something the establishment elite finds absolutely unacceptable.

When I was a boy, the popular humorist Corey Ford wrote a monthly column for Field & Stream about the questionable activities of a rural New Hampshire sportsman’s club called “The Lower Forty.”

Good old boys Judge Parker, Doc Hall, Cousin Sid, and the undertaker Angus McNab hung out at Uncle Perk’s General Store sipping Old Stumpblower and telling yarns in the intervals between expeditions against deer, trout, and what they referred to up there as “paatridge.” The inveterate adversaries of the members of The Lower Forty were the scheming, miserly, and hypocritical Deacon Godfrey and his reformist allies in the Sisters of Samantha Sewing Circle. I often feel that I have lived to see Deacon Godfreys everywhere in high office and the entire population, male and female, of the urban community of fashion carrying “Sisters of Samantha” membership cards.

The upper twenty percent in America have insulated themselves from the economic and cultural consequences of the last fifty years. Meanwhile, those in the bottom half must live in disintegrating communities and endure the consequences of declining social capital. They sense, intuitively, that our leadership class has a narrow, materialistic view of life and a ruthless, managerial approach to “diversity” that undermines social solidarity, which is why they resonate with patriotic rhetoric that actually envisions all of us together, committed to a common good. Meanwhile, they see that their “betters” have rigged the game, so much so that even the slightest dissent from political correctness brings fierce, disciplining denunciations.

As I’ve written elsewhere (and often) we are living in a remarkable era. Our ruling class has re-invented itself as a technocracy that justifies its power by claiming moral superiority—and which dismisses challengers from below as morally deficient. We haven’t seen this kind of moral attack on working people since the salad years of the Temperance movement, another era when the well-off thought little of entering the public square… to denounce the moral depravity of the working man.