Class—the Word We Dare Not Speak

The Left does not wish to admit it has become the party of wealth.

By Victor Davis Hanson July 14, 2021

 

How often during the last year of woke, have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions? 

• Million-dollar-a year university presidents virtue signal on the cheap their own sort of “unearned white privilege.” 
• Multimillionaire Meghan Markle and the Obamas, from their plush estates, indict Americans for their biases. 
• Former Black Lives Matter founder and cultural Marxist Patrisse Khan-Cullors Brignac decries the oppressive victimization she and others have suffered—from one of her four newly acquired homes. 
• Do we need another performance-art sermon on America’s innate unfairness from a Hollywood billionaire such as Beyoncé, Jay-Z, or Oprah Winfrey—or a multimillion-dollar-per year Delta Airlines or Coca-Cola CEO? 

During the 1980s cultural war, the Left’s mantra was “race, class, and gender.” Occasionally we still hear of that trifecta, but the class part has now increasingly dropped out.  The neglect of class is ironic given that dozens of recent studies conclude class differences are widening as never before....... 

States like California have bifurcated into Medieval-style societies. The state’s progressive coastal elite can boast of some of the highest incomes in the nation. But in the more conservative north and central interior nearly a third of the population lives below the poverty line, explaining why one of every three American welfare recipients lives in California. 

California’s heating and cooling, gasoline, and housing—the stuff of life—are the highest in the continental United States. Most of these spiraling costs are attributable to polices embraced by an upper-class elite—in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and marquee universities—whose incomes shield them from the deleterious consequences of their utopian bromides. The poor and middle class have no such insulation...............

The two parties are switching class constituents. Sixty-five percent of Americans making over $500,000 are now Democrats. Seventy-four percent of those who earn under $100,000 are Republicans. Gone are the days of working people voting automatically Democratic or Republicans caricatured as a party of stockbrokers on golf courses. 

By 2018, Democrats controlled all 20 of the wealthiest congressional districts. In the recent presidential primaries and general election, 17 out of the 20 wealthiest zip codes gave money overwhelmingly to Democratic candidates. 

Increasingly, the Democrats are a bicoastal party of professional elites of corporate America, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, universities, entertainment, and professional sports. All made out like bandits during 21st-century globalization. .........The wealthy leftist elite has mastered the rhetoric of ridicule for the lower middle classes, especially struggling whites. Multimillionaires Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden wrote off their political opponents as supposedly crude, superstitious, and racist, in smearing them as “clingers,” “deplorables,” irredeemables,” “dregs,” and “chumps.” 

Class is also fluid; race is immutable. So by fixating on race, the Left believes that it can divide America into permanent victimizers and victims—at a time when race and class are increasingly disconnecting.   The wealthy of all races are the loudest voices of the woke movement. Their frequent assumptions of  “victimhood” are absurd.  Americans who struggle to pay soaring gas, food, energy, and housing prices are weekly berated for their “white privilege” that is “unearned,” by an array of rich network and cable television news hosts, well-paid academics, media elite, and corporate CEOs.