Covid fallout: technocrats rule.

“God help us from the planners.”
— Larry Kudlow, Trump economist

Our two parties have shifted identities. Democrats are the elite, in power and fighting to hang on. Republicans represent the restive masses below, itching for freedom from elite domination.

University of Texas professor Michael Lind describes how elites took control during Covid. Professionals are elite: the three occupations with the greatest proportion donating to Democrats are professors, librarians, and therapists, along with nurses and teachers. By contrast, Republicans have relied on small-business donations.

The lockdowns devastated small business; they are furious, many out of work. But progressives
favor the lockdowns, 6-foot social distancing, and mask mandates. Many work for government agencies, school districts, universities, nonprofits, large corporations, and banks. They enjoy actual or implicit tenure, and are able to operate remotely from home with groceries delivered.

Our privileged elite follow an ideology that supports their high positions. During progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s presidency a century ago, intellectuals thought U.S. society was threatened from above by rapacious capitalists, and from below by the ignorant, dangerous masses. Their answer: a planned society guided from above by highly educated, nonpartisan, altruistic experts informed by social science truths.

The 1930s Great Depression seemed to progressives the time to reorder America. But non-intellectual President Franklin Roosevelt instead built a Democratic Party coalition of Southerners, family farmers, and trade unions whose rural “courthouse gangs” and urban working-class machine bosses sidelined the Ivy League eggheads in favor of “interest group liberalism,” which continued under Truman, the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson.

After the Vietnam disaster, progressives gained ground within a weakened Democratic Party, benefiting from U.S. population changes. In 1953, private sector union membership peaked at 33% of employment, with 15% still on farms. Only 8% of American men and 5% of women had finished four years of college.

Today, less than 7% of American private sector workers belong to labor unions. On-farm jobs are only 1.3% of total U.S. employment. Meanwhile, 35% of men and 37% of women have completed four years of college — providing a progressive elite base.

Lind writes that as university graduates enter business, finance, and media, they carry their college-learned technocratic, progressive values with them. Its the ideology that supports Covid’s:

delegation of power to technocrats insulated from the public

— powerful, authoritarian bureaucracies imposing progressive priorities on America, without the bother of persuading citizens, winning elections, or passing laws, while idolizing “secular saints” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former FBI chief Robert Mueller, and Dr. Fauci;

top-down, comprehensive plans 

— the incredibly complicated Green New Deal, the “equity anti-racism” restructuring of all social institutions—government organizations, corporations, universities, media companies, even classroom reading lists—so that each sub-population matches the last census’ U.S. population; 

invention or exaggeration of emergencies to justify radical reforms

— only 16.4% of Covid fatalities have been aged 45-64, under-45 victims only 2.5%, yet lockdowns brought with them denunciations of any who questioned “the science,” even as science showed Covid mostly targeted people over 65;

justification of “state of emergency” censorship.

—There’s no time to waste, false information is dangerous, it’s an emergency, people are dying from “climate change,” “systemic racism,” “sloppy gender definitions,” “questioning lockdowns.”