Glenn Reynolds "Instapundit"
In the old days, Russia would send communist agitators to rile up the working class. Nowadays, they don’t have to. The West’s ruling class is happy to do the agitating.Over the past few years — and, really, the past few decades — we’ve seen a steady assault on the well-being, and the social standing, of the working class, and a decline in upward mobility. And as people start to notice and object, the response has been to double down.
While the upper and upper-middle classes, what demographer Joel Kotkin calls the “Gentry Class,” flourished from the initial tech boom to the present, income and general well-being for the middle and lower-middle classes stagnated or declined. Manufacturing jobs went overseas, and those left unemployed were snidely told to “learn to code.”
Occasionally the mask slipped, as with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark, or Barack Obama’s snide reference to people “bitterly clinging” to their guns and their religion. Increasingly, though, the mask wasn’t there at all. The upper classes draw a lot of their self-esteem from a claimed superiority to the working class, which requires a lot of put-downs for its maintenance.
Then came COVID. The widespread lockdowns were nice for members of the Gentry Class, who fired up their laptops and worked remotely. They stayed home “keeping safe” while members of the working class brought them stuff.
There were a few glimmers of gratitude — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even told people to thank truckers — but those didn’t last long, nor did they conceal what turned out to be the biggest transfer of wealth in human history, as big businesses like Amazon and Walmart thrived while mom-and-pop businesses failed under the lockdowns.
And sometimes when the mask slipped, it literally slipped. As many have noticed, we developed a new convention in which the servant class is masked, while the celebrities and the oligarchs go free, something demonstrated at gatherings ranging from the Met Gala to the Oscars. Elsewhere, stars and politicians flouted the mask laws while small businesses were shut down.
Then the mandatory vaccine rules proliferated even as the vaccines appeared to underperform. Canadian truckers who protested were smeared by Trudeau as racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, etc. Trudeau, who took a knee to violent, destructive Black Lives Matter protests, invoked virtual martial law to put the working-class protesters in their place. By arresting people, seizing bank accounts and threatening to take drivers’ trucks, Trudeau was creating his own martyrs.
Polls indicate that most US Democrats support him and would do the same here.
Want the working class to feel isolated, angry and ill-used? The West’s own leadership is doing a better job than any Soviet agitators did.
In the end, Trudeau blinked. Maybe he remembered something important: It’s not the laptop class that brings food to the grocery stores. But will American leaders remember that?
