This week we saw a few perfect examples of why liberal coastal elites are so resentful of middle America: It’s because the supposed rubes and rednecks aren’t more resentful of the elites — or, more specifically, the elites’ “success.”
From New York Post
They don’t aspire to be like their self-appointed betters.
Some Americans just don’t need much; they don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to have a 1,500-square-foot house, watch football and go to church on Sunday. They don’t want to leave their hometowns to come to Silicon Valley or Washington, DC, or Manhattan. They place great value on community and living near family and carrying out family traditions.
That’s not hate, that’s not stupidity, that’s not racism — it’s their own version of the American dream.
On Monday Ned Resinkoff, a senior editor for the progressive ThinkProgress, wrote in detail about how rattled he was that his plumber, “a middle-aged white guy with a southern accent,” may have voted for Donald Trump.
The idea that his plumber may have different political beliefs left Resnikoff so rattled he “couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger.”
Two days earlier Melinda Byerley, founder of a Silicon Valley-based tech startup that does “free-range, artisanal, organic, customized marketing” with “Birkenstocks-on-the-ground expertise,” tweeted her expert opinion on Middle America’s jobs-`attraction problem.
It wasn’t very nice.
First she said Middle America needs to realize “no educated person wants to live in a s- -t-hole with stupid people,” which is why she said more big corporations don’t move to the Heartland: “Those towns have nothing going for them,” with “no infrastructure, just a few bars and a terrible school system.”
Educated people such as herself wouldn’t live in rural areas because they won’t sacrifice their superior tolerance and diversity to do so. Nor do her highly educated friends want to live in states where the majority of residents “don’t want brown people to thrive.”
And of course there was Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes acceptance speech, railing against Trump and his voters — delivered in a bejeweled dress in the company of people draped in clothing worth millions of dollars in an auditorium that looked like Versailles.
Her rip on people who prefer football and mixed martial arts as entertainment over high-art film was also telling.
Their comments are the exact kind of sneering condescension that provoked the election’s anti-elitism backlash, said Bruce Haynes, a GOP strategist in Washington. “And what is interesting is that we always suspected that these people felt this way, but now they are not even hiding behind the façade anymore,” he said.
Most Americans simply don’t want or desire the same things that these people hold up as valuable; they don’t need a mansion, they don’t rack up frequent-flyer miles. They want different things — a place to live, a decent job, education for their kids.
It’s more than enough for most people.
But Streep and Byerley and Resinkoff and the people who were cheering on their screeds cannot imagine being satisfied with any of that, because their universe is so different.
Read Full Story At New York Post
