The Revolt Of The Masses

Morris P. Fiorina:

No election in recent decades has seen so much attention paid to the “working class.” Accelerating with the splintering of the Democratic Party in the mid-to-late 1960s, the importance of social class as an electoral cleavage slipped behind cleavages based on race and ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. But for many commentators, the 2016 election witnessed a revolt of the masses. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni writes, “The arc of this election has been one of disillusionment, bending toward disarray. Trump’s initial window of opportunity was so many Americans’ belief that Washington, Wall Street and the media had been irredeemably corrupted by self-interested elites.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan writes about those whom she calls the “protected”: “The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully. . . . [The protected] are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers.”

Anti-elitism has a long history in the United States, of course, more so than in some European countries like Britain where the “upper” classes historically had been accorded “deference.” In the late nineteenth-century populist era, anti-elitism focused on economic elites—the trusts, the moneyed interests, those who, in presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan’s words, “would crucify mankind on a cross of gold.” And it was only a short move from there to an attack on the politicians who were controlled by the economic elites.