“Elites vs. Populists”

Like all of you, I was amused by the sight of Taylor Swift getting booed at the Super Bowl. I thought it was a nice little jab at the Establishment, i.e. the little people telling the self-declared elitists that they’re not as popular as their sycophantic groupies tell them they are. It was peaceful and harmless. Leftists shoot you in the back as you’re leaving a hotel; conservatives boo you.

The contrast between the new and the old could hardly have been starker.

At his Washington D.C. inauguration, new U.S. President Donald Trump galvanised his supporters by banging the drum for all of the populist policies that won him the election in November: protecting America’s borders and stopping mass illegal immigration; trashing Net Zero madness and the ‘green deal’; resisting trans activism and woke ideology; ending the political weaponisation of the law; defending free speech vs. cancel culture.

Europe’s governing classes have long been estranged from the real economy – from the world of production, industry and agriculture. To these green-hued technocrats, the economy appears as little more than a set of figures on a spreadsheet, to be regulated and managed towards a ‘better’, ‘greener’ future. To be redesigned according to a schedule of abstract, arbitrary Net Zero targets. All the while, the actual activity of making the stuff we need and use everyday – from energy to food – has remained out of sight and, above all, out of mind.

h/t DS

The left is more closely aligned with socialism and communism than it is with capitalism, and leftists are inherently self-contradictory in their ideological philosophy. They demand equality for all yet set themselves up as elitists who stand above the “masses,” arrogantly telling people how they should feel and live.

There’s a certain irony in this contradiction, especially when viewed through the lens of the volatile 1960s, when protests, riots, and assassinations dominated the decade. It was during this time when cultural and social criticism against the alleged conformist middle classes began in full.

The rise of Eurosceptic, nationalist, populist parties, which are now making the running in France, Italy, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany, has horrified Europe’s political elites.

Take the sneering response by one Berlin-based think-tank to the populist revolt that was so evident in the European Union (EU) elections in the summer.

The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) lamented that ‘the EU’s “whiteness” was on full display’, despairing that ‘drivers of discontent [are] behind [a] drift to ethnic European-ness’.

The real divide is between the people and the elites.

I’d like to spend the time I have mounting a trenchant defence of polarisation – or at least what is often called ‘polarisation’ by our political and media classes.

The narrative that is constantly being spun at the moment is that, as of about 10 years ago, politics was… perfect.

It was consensual. It was moderate.

It might seem as if there were two general elections here in the UK last week. One was staged in the fantasy Britain of the political and media establishment; in this make-believe election, the Labour Party reportedly won an “historic landslide,” giving new prime minister Keir Starmer a “huge mandate for change.”

The other election took place in the real Britain where voters live and work. In this, actual, election, the majority of voters and non-voters rejected both the Tories and Labour as two wings of the old establishment. The sort of ‘change’ millions voted for was best reflected in the overnight breakthrough of Nigel Farage’s insurgent sovereigntist party, Reform UK.