Elite Anxiety Is Fueling America’s Toxic Polarization
As successive populist crowbars have been taken to elite power structures—Big Tech, elite university admissions, legacy media, globalization, politics, and on down the line, the nation’s elites are responding in bizarre, chaotic, and revealing ways.
Earlier this fall the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Missouri v. Biden affirmed a lower court ruling finding the Biden Administration crossed the line in pressuring social media platforms to censor voices that deviated from the Biden Admin’s company line on key issues. For the longest time, allegations of political censorship against Big Tech were met with eye rolls and labeling folks “conspiracy theorists.”
In June, the Supreme Court, in a 237-page decision overturning affirmative action, shined a light into the backroom inner workings of elite university admissions, spending countless pages detailing Harvard’s secretive process.
As the digital age rumbles on—newspapers, cable news, and other clubby haunts of legacy corporate media seethe at the success of independent journalism, most pointedly the growth of Rumble, Substack, and independent media figures.
Media fragmentation, and the decline in power of elite-serving corporate media has spawned a censorship industrial complex, with shady NGOs like Bellingcat and companies like Newsguard—known for developing the instrumentality of dystopia: media trust-gauging “Nutrition Labels'' which automatically downrank independent voices in favor of unpopular corporate ones.
In politics, Western elites from Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar to members of the UK’s House of Commons are clamoring for more censorship power, blasting Amazon for its smart speakers citing non-corporate “unvetted sources” and the latter saber rattling at Rumble for refusing to censor on command.
After COVID-19 and the outbreak of war upended the elite consulting class’ “just in time delivery” inventory systems and offshore supply chains, inflation skyrocketed, and we saw first hand the folly of decades of globalization sending the manufacture of essential goods like ventilators and critical technology like microchips overseas.
No doubt, the 2016 election and enduring popularity of the quadruple-indicted former Pres. Trump, a populist, was in fact the ultimate indictment of elite America—showing just how left behind working-class voters had come to feel.
Even people like former Obama and current Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan have begrudgingly admitted to the original sin of the Obama years—decidedly leaving behind uncouth “gun and bible-clinging” (as Obama once infamously remarked) middle America.
Sullivan, in a recent speech said that, “[Globalization] left many working Americans and their communities behind. A financial crisis shook the middle class. A pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains. A changing climate threatened lives and livelihoods. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underscored the risks of overdependence.”
Even Obama himself, the arch priest of the church of elite America, said last year that globalization has “disrupted a lot of traditional societies” and that it “eliminates industries, eliminates jobs, [and] increases the wealth gap not only between countries but within countries.”
In recent years, globalization, long embraced to slash costs by sending production to unfree labor zones, may be on the way out.
Just recently, labor unions, which have long been in decline, notched significant victories when United Auto Workers succeeded in its strike against auto giants, notably not just obtaining wage increases but guiding industrial policy by securing investment in domestic factories, affecting corporate decision making beyond just pay and labor conditions. The Writers Guild of America just waged a successful strike, as well as the Screen Actors Guild.
Populist FTC Chair Lina Khan has waged an assiduous campaign against the shady machinations of corporate America—targeting junk fees, private equity squeeze plays, and gratuitous mergers.
Add it all up, and the establishment has been on quite a losing streak. There’s a palpable sense that unlike generations of the traditional Right-Left lens of our political divide, the veneer has worn off, and the reality has been laid bare—our principal dividing line is actually the economic line between the elites and the people.
Look at the meltdown that ensued when Twitter owner Elon Musk opened blue check verification, formerly the imprimatur of the elite set, to anyone who would pay. The response was bizarre, ranging from failed alternatives like Mastodon, Blue Sky, and Threads that aimed to recreate the old power structure, to people posting screenshots of their old checkmarks as their profile pictures—evidence they had blue checks before their value was tainted by populist access.
Hillary Clinton, always a reliable barometer of establishment thinking, last month was quoted in a CNN interview jarringly calling for a “formal deprogramming” of Trump voters.
If things feel like they are coming apart at the seams, that’s because in many ways, they are. The barriers elites use to maintain their social standing are under attack. As challenges to longstanding power structures have become en vogue, we are watching anxious and heavy-handed elites react chaotically, amplifying the turbulence that has defined recent years.