"Indeed, fashion may be the greatest enemy of survival for America today. Holding a certain set of ideas has been defined as making one seem sophisticated, successful, and admirable. Other ideas are deemed horrible, indicating that the person is a hick, rube, bumpkin, yahoo, racist. In short, the kind of person who hates others because they are different and clings to guns and religion.
One of the great successes of leftism (pretending to be liberalism) in North America and Europe today is that it has made itself so fashionable, so identified with sophistication, intellectual quality, and what used to be called the upper class. Not the old upper class of country clubs and yachts (though Senator John Kerry has a whopper of a boat), but the upper class of merit, the truly good who hate racism and are saving the Earth.
Funny how many of these people are quite wealthy themselves. The message: my money and success is justified by my holding proper attitudes. Al Gore may have a big house and a big carbon footprint, but that’s okay because he talks about how these things are evil.
The true class warfare going on is not that of the one percent reactionary, greedy rich versus the ninety-nine percent of everyone else, but rather a section of the elite that benefits from big government — in supposed alliance with those receiving government payments, plus various groups given special privileges — against everyone else. Per Taine’s words about nineteenth century France, the revolutionaries are no longer “doctors without patients and lawyers without clients,” but rather those who would be without patients, clients, or employment if not for the government’s patronage."
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These are people who can ridicule the masses as an ignorant mob and weep over the poor and downtrodden at the same time. With full good conscience that they are simultaneously superior and compassionate, they look down on those from most American states, small businesspeople, and the hardworking masses as their inferiors. In Marxist terms, they have put the yuppie upper-middle class in place of the proletariat. We are looking at an establishment-approved program of snobbishness as virtue.
But that’s precisely why the current leftism works so effectively. They can romanticize distant peasants — or terrorists — while jeering at anyone who shops at Walmart. They can have a high living standard, feel virtuous, and be viciously arrogant all at the same time with no guilt whatsoever.
It’s a wonderful life.
To agree with anything said on talk radio, for instance, is equivalent to wearing two different colored socks, slurping your drink, or using the wrong fork. And the mass media, many schools, and the entertainment industry — all of which still seem to shape the worldview of roughly one-half of Americans — have worked overtime to intensify that image and to close all the options. Making things like patriotism, religion, love of family, and other such things look like fuddy-duddy nonsense has been their most remarkable treatment.
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