Yes, I am an elitist. I do not own a car, yet am comfortably nestled in the lower upper-income brackets. I live within walking distance of three live theaters, an internationally recognized art collection (the Phillips), and numerous jazz clubs, not to mention a Whole Foods and more Starbucks than I can count.
I don’t feel guilty about any of this, nor “out of touch”, and there’s no reason why I should. Yet, thanks to Donald Trump’s three million votes short of a plurality win in the Electoral College, there has quickly developed a burgeoning, minor verging on a major, cottage industry among those of us who can type with ten fingers, bemoaning the “out of touchness” of our class.
Robby Soave, writing for “Reason”1 magazine, turns in a more palatable than most take on all this, “What This Journalist Saw During a Holiday Detour Through Donald Trump’s America”, though I won’t refrain from pointing out that the Donald lives in the Trump Tower, not Hillbilly, PA, and I also won’t resist faulting Robby just a bit for pretending (I hope) to be impressed by the virility of some Hillary-hatin’ country bumpkin who changed his tire.
“It took him three minutes to put on the spare tire—something I couldn’t have done in any amount of time. I was uncomfortable even standing outside while he did it, given how cold it was.”
Maybe it’s because I’m a geezer (like Robby’s rescuer) that I know how to change a tire, though not in three minutes, and, since I’ve spent a winter in Chicago, I’ve done that too. Sorry, rural dude. You don’t intimidate me.
But anyway, I’m not really here to score points against Robby, though he sort of asked for it by flaunting his metrosexuality as though it were somehow an essential part of his “detour”.2 The point is, you can live in the city and listen to Mozart and still know what is going on in the country. I didn’t “know” that Donald Trump was going to win, but I was fearful that he would win because the polls were so close. Anyone can read the polls.
Furthermore, it was blindingly obvious throughout the campaign that everyone with “passion” in America—the Trump and Sanders supporters—were convinced that foreigners were responsible for all our woes, a passion that was entirely wrongheaded and, in the case of Trump’s brand, viciously racist.
There’s nothing wrong with loving Mozart and free trade, and nothing inherently ennobling about driving a pickup truck. Robby, and so many others, ought to have the courage of their predilections.
Afterwords
The godfather of all this “If you drink Chablis you may be a sissy” jive was/is Charles Murray, whose banal bundle of pop sociology, Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960-2010 I roundly thrashed here. Let it be said that Murray himself wrote a stunning takedown of Trump.
