Some pictures paint themselves.
On Thursday, March 28th, Donald Trump attended the wake of a New York police officer who had been killed in the line of duty. That same day, Democrat President Joe Biden was joined by two former Democrat presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, at a fundraiser where attendees had to pony up $500,000 to get in the door.
The stark difference between the two events illustrates with painful clarity the divide that has gradually emerged in American society over the past 30 years. It is a divide between an increasingly arrogant elite and the American people they look down their noses at with contempt in their eyes.
Donald Trump represents everything they have contempt for, which is exactly why he is the target of an unprecedented campaign of hate—and increasingly bold attempts by the same elite to stop his presidential candidacy, by any means possible.
America has not always been this divided. On the contrary, as recently as in the 1980s, the Democrat was patriotic and generally in support of the values of the American founders. They distinguished themselves from the Republicans by a somewhat more left-leaning political agenda and with earned credentials as a working-class party.
Today, the Democratic party is nothing more than a machine of political power, run by an elite that is socially, financially, and morally isolated from the rest of America. Their understanding of America is limited to glimpses through the windows of their Teslas and private jets as they shuttle themselves between country clubs and million-dollar mansions.
Meanwhile, the Republican party has been transformed—primarily thanks to Donald Trump—into a party for working-class Americans. It has become the party for people who live a ‘simple’ life a world away from the ritzy elite.
The transformation of the Republican party is happening before the very eyes of the elite, but they neither can nor want to understand it. Perhaps the most stunning shift in the demographics of American politics—one that really should have shaken up the elite—is that which is taking place among black voters.
Trump has consistently made inroads here: from 2016 to 2024, the share of blacks who support Trump has more than doubled. This increase is based partly on actual votes and partly on opinion poll results, which is not an ideal comparison. With that said, though, if the current polls are correct and the trend continues with black voters shifting to Trump, he could get 20% of the black votes in November.
There is an ongoing debate among election analysts as to where the swing in the black vote constitutes a ‘breaking point’ for the Democrats. There appears to be some consensus around the 14% threshold: once that share of the black vote, as a national average, goes to the Republican presidential candidate, the Democrats are bound to lose.
Just like the numbers on Trump’s support are a bit dicey given their statistical origin, this one should be taken with a grain of salt—after all, it is based on a national average and, again, by no means a consensus number. Furthermore, presidential elections are—for good reasons—not decided by a national popular vote election, but by an electoral college procedure driven by state-by-state votes.
With that said, the 14% number does have some merit: in 2022, Republicans earned that very share of the black vote—up from 8% four years earlier—and won a majority in the House of Representatives.
Trump is also gaining more support among Hispanics, which is notable since the Biden administration has opened the U.S. border to a massive inflow of illegal immigrants, primarily Hispanics. The presumed purpose of this inflow is to let the illegals become citizens and voters, whereupon—again by presumption—they will vote Democrat. However, with Hispanics leaning more and more toward Trump, the Democrats could very well have shot themselves in the foot with their open-border strategy. One reason, namely, why Hispanics are becoming more Republican is that they do not like how other Hispanics come into the country illegally and tarnish the reputation of their demographic.
While this is happening, the elite is doubling down on their support for Joe Biden and the Democrat power machine. At their disposal, they have cadres of people from the one demographic that has only become more Democrat over the years. This is the segment of the population that author Batya Ungar-Sargon refers to as “over-credentialed college elites.”
She goes on to explain that these people “hate the working class” and “have contempt for them.” I could not agree more. This contempt is essential for our understanding of what the Democratic party actually has become and what it will do to America if given the chance.
There has never been a society in human history where the political and financial elite has allowed the ‘lower classes’ to have any influence—unless the elite stopped looking down their nose at the ‘lower classes.’ It does not matter if we visit Ancient Rome or the Soviet Union: wherever the elite believes that it ‘knows better’ by virtue of being part of the elite, they will keep the populace away from themselves and the means of power.
This is a major reason why the Left in America today is so upset about Trump’s return. Not only does he represent what they hate about conservatives—faith, family, patriotism, and freedom—but he also reminds them of the vast American landscape that is filled with ordinary people. Plumbers, truck drivers, nurses, people who farm the land, who produce, invest, build, ship, sell, and consume things. People who live in a three-bedroom house in a decent but not upscale neighborhood; people who drive a gasoline-powered minivan and maybe even a pick-up truck.
People who will take their kids to a fast-food burger joint after the softball game.
People who care more about their kids’ well-being than whether or not the planet’s average temperature may rise by half a degree over the next century.
These are the people whom the over-credentialed college elites have nothing but contempt for.
One reason why I know that Batya Ungar-Sargon is right about this is that I have seen up close how this elite is formed, gestated, and sent out in society. I witnessed it from inside one of America’s destructively radicalized college campuses. It was my first encounter with America as a resident of this country. I experienced how the machine that produces new American college grads was adamant about not being disturbed by the fact that there was a life beyond campus.
It was implied that I, a college professor, should be to the left on the political scale. As an immigrant from Europe, it was practically a given that I had to be on their side. My native country, Sweden, was held in high esteem among them.
When they gradually came to realize that I was not ‘one of them’ politically, their attitude toward me changed dramatically. I became aware of political discrimination in the faculty hiring process but, more than that, I saw how eerily effective the faculty members were at socially—and, more importantly, professionally—isolating a conservative.
I was not the only conservative on the faculty, though we were few and far between. Those who wanted to get tenure would register as Democrats, dispense Democrat talking points in the faculty lounge, and overall keep their conservative mouths shut until the tenure committee had approved them. Not everyone made it through the six-year tenure track—a slip-up among ‘friends’ at the department could be all you needed—and those who did make it often lost the will to defend their views against increasingly radicalized colleagues.
Since I left academia almost 20 years ago, the process of radicalization has continued. In 2020, a meta-study from the American Enterprise Institute of the literature on college faculty political leanings corroborated this.
What the study does not mention—and as far as I have been able to tell no other study does either—is that the entrenchment of socialism in one form or another among college faculty is self-reinforcing. It leads to a gradual deterioration of academic standards as a direct result of the upgrading of political preferences in college faculty hirings. To get tenure, or even be hired on a tenure track or as a visiting professor, it matters more that you show your loyalty to a generic Marxist hegemony and less what you actually contribute to the subject you are supposed to teach.
Over time, this leads to a deterioration of the scholarly standards that college faculty can uphold. Their merits for holding the positions they do are increasingly political and decreasingly professional. As a result, they neither want nor are able to maintain their teaching at adequate academic levels; to fill the scholarly gaps in the classroom, they inject more politics. This shows up in the choice of course readings, in the syllabi, and in classroom discussions.
By attending college under these conditions, young Americans are given the impression that they, as academically educated, have been given a green light to exercise politics in whatever they do after college. Their professors have given them a license to use their college degrees as a credential in pushing politics in front of them.
If they have been taught to have contempt for the ‘uneducated’ working class, after commencement, these “over-credentialed” college graduates will bring that contempt into their workplaces. If they get anywhere near politics, their contempt will take such forms as questions about our democracy.
Without actually polling the “over-credentialed,” we can safely bet that if they had the chance to do so, they would cut the working class out of political influence entirely. Their vitriolic hatred for Trump is the vanguard of their working-class contempt, which in their view makes it morally legitimate to use whatever means possible to stop Trump from returning to the White House.
The farther they push their contempt and their own self-righteousness, the more means of power they will consider to be morally legitimate. Whether that leads to election fraud or not is a question that I will not address here, but once the mission of stopping Trump makes one politician ride on top of the Constitution instead of abiding by it, then how far will another politician be from doing the same, just in a different format?
The Elite vs. America
Photo: bianca-stock-photos from Pixabay
Some pictures paint themselves.
On Thursday, March 28th, Donald Trump attended the wake of a New York police officer who had been killed in the line of duty. That same day, Democrat President Joe Biden was joined by two former Democrat presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, at a fundraiser where attendees had to pony up $500,000 to get in the door.
The stark difference between the two events illustrates with painful clarity the divide that has gradually emerged in American society over the past 30 years. It is a divide between an increasingly arrogant elite and the American people they look down their noses at with contempt in their eyes.
Donald Trump represents everything they have contempt for, which is exactly why he is the target of an unprecedented campaign of hate—and increasingly bold attempts by the same elite to stop his presidential candidacy, by any means possible.
America has not always been this divided. On the contrary, as recently as in the 1980s, the Democrat was patriotic and generally in support of the values of the American founders. They distinguished themselves from the Republicans by a somewhat more left-leaning political agenda and with earned credentials as a working-class party.
Today, the Democratic party is nothing more than a machine of political power, run by an elite that is socially, financially, and morally isolated from the rest of America. Their understanding of America is limited to glimpses through the windows of their Teslas and private jets as they shuttle themselves between country clubs and million-dollar mansions.
Meanwhile, the Republican party has been transformed—primarily thanks to Donald Trump—into a party for working-class Americans. It has become the party for people who live a ‘simple’ life a world away from the ritzy elite.
The transformation of the Republican party is happening before the very eyes of the elite, but they neither can nor want to understand it. Perhaps the most stunning shift in the demographics of American politics—one that really should have shaken up the elite—is that which is taking place among black voters.
Trump has consistently made inroads here: from 2016 to 2024, the share of blacks who support Trump has more than doubled. This increase is based partly on actual votes and partly on opinion poll results, which is not an ideal comparison. With that said, though, if the current polls are correct and the trend continues with black voters shifting to Trump, he could get 20% of the black votes in November.
There is an ongoing debate among election analysts as to where the swing in the black vote constitutes a ‘breaking point’ for the Democrats. There appears to be some consensus around the 14% threshold: once that share of the black vote, as a national average, goes to the Republican presidential candidate, the Democrats are bound to lose.
Just like the numbers on Trump’s support are a bit dicey given their statistical origin, this one should be taken with a grain of salt—after all, it is based on a national average and, again, by no means a consensus number. Furthermore, presidential elections are—for good reasons—not decided by a national popular vote election, but by an electoral college procedure driven by state-by-state votes.
With that said, the 14% number does have some merit: in 2022, Republicans earned that very share of the black vote—up from 8% four years earlier—and won a majority in the House of Representatives.
Trump is also gaining more support among Hispanics, which is notable since the Biden administration has opened the U.S. border to a massive inflow of illegal immigrants, primarily Hispanics. The presumed purpose of this inflow is to let the illegals become citizens and voters, whereupon—again by presumption—they will vote Democrat. However, with Hispanics leaning more and more toward Trump, the Democrats could very well have shot themselves in the foot with their open-border strategy. One reason, namely, why Hispanics are becoming more Republican is that they do not like how other Hispanics come into the country illegally and tarnish the reputation of their demographic.
While this is happening, the elite is doubling down on their support for Joe Biden and the Democrat power machine. At their disposal, they have cadres of people from the one demographic that has only become more Democrat over the years. This is the segment of the population that author Batya Ungar-Sargon refers to as “over-credentialed college elites.”
She goes on to explain that these people “hate the working class” and “have contempt for them.” I could not agree more. This contempt is essential for our understanding of what the Democratic party actually has become and what it will do to America if given the chance.
There has never been a society in human history where the political and financial elite has allowed the ‘lower classes’ to have any influence—unless the elite stopped looking down their nose at the ‘lower classes.’ It does not matter if we visit Ancient Rome or the Soviet Union: wherever the elite believes that it ‘knows better’ by virtue of being part of the elite, they will keep the populace away from themselves and the means of power.
This is a major reason why the Left in America today is so upset about Trump’s return. Not only does he represent what they hate about conservatives—faith, family, patriotism, and freedom—but he also reminds them of the vast American landscape that is filled with ordinary people. Plumbers, truck drivers, nurses, people who farm the land, who produce, invest, build, ship, sell, and consume things. People who live in a three-bedroom house in a decent but not upscale neighborhood; people who drive a gasoline-powered minivan and maybe even a pick-up truck.
People who will take their kids to a fast-food burger joint after the softball game.
People who care more about their kids’ well-being than whether or not the planet’s average temperature may rise by half a degree over the next century.
These are the people whom the over-credentialed college elites have nothing but contempt for.
One reason why I know that Batya Ungar-Sargon is right about this is that I have seen up close how this elite is formed, gestated, and sent out in society. I witnessed it from inside one of America’s destructively radicalized college campuses. It was my first encounter with America as a resident of this country. I experienced how the machine that produces new American college grads was adamant about not being disturbed by the fact that there was a life beyond campus.
It was implied that I, a college professor, should be to the left on the political scale. As an immigrant from Europe, it was practically a given that I had to be on their side. My native country, Sweden, was held in high esteem among them.
When they gradually came to realize that I was not ‘one of them’ politically, their attitude toward me changed dramatically. I became aware of political discrimination in the faculty hiring process but, more than that, I saw how eerily effective the faculty members were at socially—and, more importantly, professionally—isolating a conservative.
I was not the only conservative on the faculty, though we were few and far between. Those who wanted to get tenure would register as Democrats, dispense Democrat talking points in the faculty lounge, and overall keep their conservative mouths shut until the tenure committee had approved them. Not everyone made it through the six-year tenure track—a slip-up among ‘friends’ at the department could be all you needed—and those who did make it often lost the will to defend their views against increasingly radicalized colleagues.
Since I left academia almost 20 years ago, the process of radicalization has continued. In 2020, a meta-study from the American Enterprise Institute of the literature on college faculty political leanings corroborated this.
What the study does not mention—and as far as I have been able to tell no other study does either—is that the entrenchment of socialism in one form or another among college faculty is self-reinforcing. It leads to a gradual deterioration of academic standards as a direct result of the upgrading of political preferences in college faculty hirings. To get tenure, or even be hired on a tenure track or as a visiting professor, it matters more that you show your loyalty to a generic Marxist hegemony and less what you actually contribute to the subject you are supposed to teach.
Over time, this leads to a deterioration of the scholarly standards that college faculty can uphold. Their merits for holding the positions they do are increasingly political and decreasingly professional. As a result, they neither want nor are able to maintain their teaching at adequate academic levels; to fill the scholarly gaps in the classroom, they inject more politics. This shows up in the choice of course readings, in the syllabi, and in classroom discussions.
By attending college under these conditions, young Americans are given the impression that they, as academically educated, have been given a green light to exercise politics in whatever they do after college. Their professors have given them a license to use their college degrees as a credential in pushing politics in front of them.
If they have been taught to have contempt for the ‘uneducated’ working class, after commencement, these “over-credentialed” college graduates will bring that contempt into their workplaces. If they get anywhere near politics, their contempt will take such forms as questions about our democracy.
Without actually polling the “over-credentialed,” we can safely bet that if they had the chance to do so, they would cut the working class out of political influence entirely. Their vitriolic hatred for Trump is the vanguard of their working-class contempt, which in their view makes it morally legitimate to use whatever means possible to stop Trump from returning to the White House.
The farther they push their contempt and their own self-righteousness, the more means of power they will consider to be morally legitimate. Whether that leads to election fraud or not is a question that I will not address here, but once the mission of stopping Trump makes one politician ride on top of the Constitution instead of abiding by it, then how far will another politician be from doing the same, just in a different format?
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