Causes of the Great Rejection by Commoners
So it was for this that our betters hounded President Trump for four years and then Did Not Fix the election of the political hack Joe Biden: a standard issue stimulus package, with all Democratic interests squared, and a $15-an-hour minimum wage. With various climate-change regulatory manipulations to follow. Wow. Real “save the world” stuff!
It shows, as if we needed telling, that our ruling class has No Clue, except how to Keep the Fix In.
Back in the day, all educated people had an opinion on “the causes of the French Revolution.” Or the War of 1812. I wonder what they will say about the Great Rejection by Commoners that just couldn’t take the dumb-as-posts educated administrative rulers anymore.
It depends, of course, on who the next ruling class is, and how the professors and bestseller historians suck up to the new rulers. Anyway, they are unlikely to blame their educated forefathers for the End of the Educated Class.
I was driven to imagine a Great Rebellion back at New Years, and then found I had been writing about it for months, and had even linked to Joel Kotkin in 2016 in a post about Hillary’s emails when Kotkin announced the Great Rebellion, “the rejection of the neo-liberal crony capitalist order that has arisen since the fall of the Soviet Union.”
But I wanted more; I wanted to craft a Narrative -- just like all the special people do -- of a slowly growing repudiation by ordinary American Commoners of their stuck-up educated betters.
And I started with the stolen election of 1960 that denied the presidency to Commoner Richard Nixon, whose father ran a grocery store and gas station. Then in 1968 Nixon won the presidency against the elite’s fake “revolution” of the Sixties. But the elite did for him in 1974 with a faked-up impeachment.
Then, in 1980, the Commoner Ronald Reagan, son of a store clerk, won the presidency and reversed the incompetent inflation and recession of the Seventies.
Then, in reaction to the orgasms of the faculty wives over the First Black President, the up-from-nothing Tea Party, that President Obama hindered with the IRS’s Little Lois Lerner, helped to switch the House in 2010.
Then rich kid Donald Trump, son of a landlord, took up the banner of the Commoners, the first man in the republic to insult the precious educated elite face to face: How Dare He.
And now for the next episode of the Great Rejection. Oh wait! Amazon canceled the rest of the season. Thanks Jeff!
But the Cause of the Great Rejection? Isn’t it obvious? Our ruling class lords live by jabbing ordinary Commoners in the ribs. Because racism. Because sexism. Because homophobia. Our lords give meaning to their lives by vaunting over the Commoners, because bigots. The idea that ordinary Commoners have the right to live their lives according to their lights, their religion and their guns, just doesn’t register with our lords. The very idea!
The wants, the needs, the dreams of ordinary Americans just do not register with our rulers. What matters to them is to smite the evil of racism, to bend the arc of history towards justice. And Save the Planet.
In other words, the rulers are incapable of experiencing ordinary Commoner Americans as ordinary Commoners just trying to live their lives. Instead, the Commoners must be drafted as stage villains in the rulers’ moral drama, which rich-kid Marx wrote up as Communists and the workers against the hated bourgeoisie. Now, of course it’s rich-kid allies helping oppressed peoples fight the white oppressors.
So where do the Commoners stand in all this?
Obviously, Commoners can’t be allies: too deplorable. They can’t be oppressed peoples: too white. So they must be white oppressors: QED.
Now I think, in my naiveté, that the point of worldviews is to tell a story that explains reality as close as possible, while granting that “we,” whoever “we” are, are probably the good guys. But our liberal friends insist on a black-and-white narrative: Good People are for us; Bad People are agin us.
Worse, it is a lurch to the primitive, as I have written before at AT, quoting Mircea Eliade:
The primitive… cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault… or from his neighbor’s malevolence… but there is always a fault at the bottom of it.
Liberals as primitives? That’s what I maintain with my Great Reaction idea.
You can see this primitive faith all through the left. The workers are unemployed? The employers are at fault. Blacks discriminated against? White supremacists are malevolent. Women suffering? Patriarchs are to blame. College girls nervous and unsafe? Microaggressions are at the bottom of it.
What can you do against such a ruling class? In the end you must rebel.
