There is no hopelessness here. Everyone wears ski clothes, even when they aren’t anywhere in sight of a white powered slope. They counsel low gas mileage for others, but drive SUVs. They build cages for the government lower and middle classes, but live in sizable houses. They ride bikes, but only when they want to. In behavior and attitude, they are mostly indistinguishable from their fellow wealthy liberals. The only difference is the source of their money and the lower productivity.
It is this group that incessantly manufactures crises, constantly comes up with schemes to make a broken system work better and juggles money between private foundations and government grants, moving back and forth between professorships, government consultancies and private foundations until you need a scorecard to keep up.
They aspire to authentic things and eat up working class misery with a spoon. Many have their own hardship tales of the time they worked as a waiter to pay their tuition, because their parents had cut them off, or their time with the Peace Corps in Africa or with Habitat for Humanity in Costa Rica. Religion is a vague thing to them, but they associate anti-materialism with spirituality and use the plight of the well-off as their own private church. Movies like Precious or Winter’s Bone are their poverty porn that they then use to justify their abuses of power. Because people are suffering.
Elizabeth Warren is one of the breed. As are countless others just like her. There is an endless crowd of them, all dressing down, embracing what they think is authenticity, their voice frozen into a lecturing tone, their bookshelves crowded with inspiring tales of white people helping others in the Third World and finding their deeper soul in the process. They all have too many degrees, too many plans and too much power.
Some are dogmatically of the left. Many more are cluelessly so, mouthing dogma that they do not really understand and that has been boiled down for them into simple terms. These don’t see politics, just a nebulous compassion that requires forcing everyone to pay for the good of the less fortunate, even if that money incidentally goes to line their own pockets. And worse still, even the most apolitical of this group, have developed an innate busybody allegiance to rules. They are the six and seven figure hall monitors who have become convinced that people need keeping tabs on and that no community can achieve its best self without people like them to compel everyone to follow the rules.
If they are in a position where they cannot make rules, they will seek one out, in some volunteer capacity, such as a homeowner’s association, that will allow them to do it. They are cheerful control freaks who dress up an innate lust for power in ski parkas, morning bike rides with the kids and lists of rules and penalties so long that a KGB agent would be set back on his heels. They do not think of themselves as the police state, they even like to imagine themselves as rebels and risk takers, but they are the backbone of the emerging progressive police state.
Originally published at Sultan Knish.