@blatham,
blatham wrote:
"Elites" as scare word
Quote:And in these attacks, the president-elect and his team are deploying one of the most effective partisan political stereotypes of the modern age. For most of American history, anti-elite sentiment was a matter of up versus down, not left versus right. But about half a century ago, the conservative movement set out to claim anti-elite politics as its own. That meant redefining the term away from class and toward culture, where the “elite” could be identified by its liberal ideas, coastal real estate and highbrow consumer preferences....
The concluding paragraph (above) from the quoted NYT piece well illustrates a related phenomemon entirely missing from the whole article, and that is the very significant rise of the progressive policy elite in government, academia and NGOs since the LBJ term in the late 1960s. During this 50 year period a new elite rose to power in this country focused on the "science" of "improved" policies for education, health care, public and private housing, welfare programs, employment lay and many other sectors of our lives, much of it focused on issues attendent to the civil rights movement that independently rose up during that period and, also independently, ended most of the artifacts (formal and overt in the South, informal and covert in the North) of the Jim Crow period that preceeded it.
The three or four generations that preceeded the 1960s saw the successful assimilation and integration of masses of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish immigrants to this country, while the old Jim Crow segregation had largely stopped the clock on that process for Blacks. This rising new progressive policy elite addressed that process along with a host of other issues.
How well or badly they have done was certainly an undercurrent in the recent campasign and election. NYT article addresses this matter as though a new distorted form of elite has arisen in the form, I presume, of a Trumpian populism that confounds conventonal social and economic norms. The progressive academic political elite that lost the election also confounded those social and economic norms, and that missing element of the NYT article casts an air of deceit over the besic theme of the article.