Maybe Our Elite Rulers Don’t Like Us

To understand where our nation needs to go, let’s look first at where we are.

The Spectator’s Dominic Green writes about America’s upper class. Green’s article uses a Greek word — oligarchy — to describe them. A French word —elite — works better. As Green himself says, “Our oligarchs are the social elite.”

And America's social elite rule us today. Says Green:

Our universities sell credentials for membership in a class system that has hardened into a chasm, with the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans on one side, and the desperate majority stranded on the other. The Democrats .   .   .  are firmly on the side of Silicon Valley. Our corporate media, with the exception of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, overwhelmingly support the Democrats. Social media, which has functionally replaced the town square and the local paper, is so confident of its progressive principles that it can silence the president of the United States.

Green has the evidence. Those who live in ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000 or higher donated $486 million to Joe Biden, only $167 million to Donald Trump. In ZIP codes where 65% or more graduated from college, $478 million went to Biden and $104 million to Trump. The ZIP codes where Trump outraised Biden were below the national median. Trump led by $53.4 million. In those with fewer college graduates, Trump led by $40 million. Green sees “Two nations, divided by a common understanding of what [elite rule] is, how it works, and who it works for.”

The elite represent only 20% of American households, but they have more than 85% of national wealth. The top 160,000 households hold 22%! The rest of the top 10% have between 55-60%. It’s in accumulated assets, not chronic debts. Green describes them as “marrying well” and able to transfer assets “down the generations.” The outcome of assortative mating and wealth consolidation is that the upper elite are “taller, thinner, healthier, whiter and better-educated than the bottom 90%.”

The bottom of the top 20% (11-20%) is less secure. They have only 3-8% of national wealth. Here is the true American upper-middle class, living and dying by hard work, driven by the market; in Green’s words, “fighting harder and harder against longer and longer odds.” The winners are able to send wealth on to their children. The losers fall into the middle class.

Much of the pressure the top puts on the rest of us comes from this elite lower half. They engage in “opportunity hoarding”: building a floor under their children’s futures by putting a ceiling on competition from below. They guard their privileges through zoning laws, private schooling, and extracurricular enrichment in pursuit of admission to a select university.

We see the awful result of lower elite pressure locking out those attempting to rise from below. Instead of promoting equal opportunity based upon hard work, today’s elite dole out to the lower 80% “equity” distributed by a permanent bureaucracy.

They do so according to arbitrary criteria.

Earlier this month, the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices showed how the elite practice their American version of arbitrary terror. Terrorist Stalin killed people for no logical reason; he wanted Russians living in permanent fear of his power. In the U.S., the Advisory Committee recommended that the first COVID-19 vaccines go not to those most at risk — the elderly — but rather to non-whites with their higher mortality rates. Had the Advisory Committee succeeded, we would have had higher deaths among the elderly, regardless of color, leading to a higher total death count.

Understand — the Advisory Committee liked that their justification was explicitly non-medical. In the name of fighting “systemic racism,” they wanted us to know they had the power to kill without regard to science.