Just how deep is the nation’s divide? This election season, it feels as though the Left and Right inhabit the same physical space but live in separate dimensions — twin solitudes where everything means something else.
According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 7 million illegal immigrants have entered the country under President Joe Biden — and another 2 million got away. That’s bigger than the population of Los Angeles and Chicago combined. They entered without basic health examinations (let alone vaccines), without criminal background checks, without any knowledge of their education and work skills. The Left asks: Remind me again why we need borders?
After the Black Lives Matter riots caused $2 billion of property losses and 25 deaths and introduced the country to legalized shoplifting, retail stores closed down and moved out, creating food scarcity in poor communities. The response from the Left: Let’s defund the police.
Universities established to discover the truth in science and beauty in the arts now require DEI loyalty statements to pursue either. The Left insists: The true and the beautiful mean nothing without social justice.
These are not policy issues to be resolved within a parliamentary debate. They are competing realities.
Who are these men and women of the left? I can’t say for sure, but I am willing to bet they don’t live in a border town or shop at a Walmart. They have, it turns out, spent a lot of time in high-end universities. That is the finding of a recent survey conducted by Scott Rasmussen’s RMG Research. (READ MORE from Kevin Brady: Joe Biden Is No Dwight D. Eisenhower)
This never-been-done-before survey tabulated the opinions of Americans earning at least $150,000 per year who live in cities and hold at least one post-graduate degree: roughly 1 percent of the population. A finer cut was taken of those who attended Ivy League schools — the elite of the elites — versus the opinions of everyone else, who make up 99 percent of the country.
The results are shocking yet strangely unsurprising.
The elites locate themselves squarely on the left by giving Biden a whopping 84 percent approval rating. No surprise there.
Sixty-seven percent of elites (and 71 percent of Ivy Leaguers) agree that teachers, rather than parents, should have more control over what kids are taught — versus 38 percent of everyone else. OK, that’s a bit of a shock.
More than 67 percent of Ivy Leaguers would ban gas stoves, gas cars, air conditioning, and “non-essential air travel” — versus 25 percent of everyone else. Somewhat shocking.
Ivy Leaguers believe, 55 to 16 percent, that there is too much individual freedom in America. Everyone else believes the exact opposite — that there is too much government control — 57 percent to 15 percent. Totally shocking.
In light of this data, blinkered leftist notions about open borders, the police, and universities start to make sense. Those on the left sound disconnected from reality because they are disconnected from reality — at least as far as 99 percent of the country can see.
Further widening the chasm, only 20 percent of all Americans say their finances are improving. Seventy-four percent of the elite (and 88 percent of Ivy Leaguers) say they are better off.
The gulf between the elites and the rest of the country has the feel of the Ancien Régime, a time before the French Revolution when a thin layer of aristocrats at the top controlled the money, set the fashions, defined the discourse, and, in general, arranged the world to their liking, all while floating on astronomical piles of government debt that benefited them disproportionately. Sound familiar? College debt forgiveness, anyone?
As a surprise to no one, 80 percent of elites (and 90 percent of Ivy Leaguers) hold themselves in high regard, versus half of everyone else.
Positively Marie Antoinette.
Will this end badly? Are our elites headed toward a digital guillotine — or worse?
I think not. Despite congruencies with French aristocrats, we live in the United States, where nobody is in control for very long — and we are good with that. Administrations come and go. Congress faces the voters every two years. New ideas are ruthlessly tested in the free market (at least outside of our mostly non-profit universities).
Consider ESG, the progressive approach to investing, where the environment (E), social concerns (S) and governance (G) trump quaint notions about profit-making. Uber elite Larry Fink, CEO of Black Rock, regularly railed against tar babies like fossil fuels in favor of pets like wind and solar. Then, his clients spoke up. Pension funds voiced concerns that ESG mandates were hurting their financial returns, that they might (gulp) withdraw their money from Black Rock. Fink went down faster than a British heavyweight. In 2023, he abruptly abandoned efforts to jawbone his investees. On Wall Street, nothing falls faster or farther than a spent fad.
Consider Claudine Gay, ousted president of Harvard University. Sure, there was plenty of outrage over her unwillingness to denounce anti-Semitism. Sure, there was plenty of political pressure from the congressional hearings. But nothing changed until alumni started pulling their donations. She was gone over a weekend. (READ MORE: College Presidents and the New Multi-Racial America)
Consider electric vehicles. Despite top-down mandates backed by generous government subsidies, EVs are piling up on car lots. Tesla, the leader in the field, warned of significantly lower growth in 2024. Hertz Car Rental Company sold off 20,000 of its EVs, about 20 percent of its fleet. No matter how many times elites click the heels of their ruby slippers, consumers simply don’t want them at these prices. Car makers are listening. Ford just reduced weekly production of its electric F-150 truck from two shifts down to one. Apple canceled its plans to develop an EV.
Consider the fate of Bud Light, Target, the NFL, and Google’s AI unit, whose woke campaigns clashed with the tastes of their customers. After a brief dustup, all of the sellers capitulated to their buyers.
Feel the invisible hand of the market at work. In the end, Wall Street values assets under management more than virtue signals from the ESG illuminati. Harvard wants donations more than a woke president. Detroit needs paying customers more than attaboys from Big Climate. Consumer-facing companies seek shoppers and fans more than abstract vanity projects. Behold the free market as it analyzes novel ideas and separates out the worthy from the aspirational, the real from the fantastical. This is as it should be. This is how we roll.
By some measures, the Ancien Régime lasted 140 years. It won’t take that long in America to dispatch the current regime. In fact, it may already be on its way out, thanks to the cool-headed logic of the marketplace. The price mechanism may not get the headlines. But it works and it works well — something the French aristocrats did not have going for them.