Earlier this year, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked voters a simple question: “Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?”The answers he got back were, as he put it in a Daily Signal podcast last week, “the most terrifying poll result I’ve ever seen.”Among all Americans, just 7% said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. As Rasmussen put it, he’d rather see that number lower, but that’s not bad.But more than a third of the elite 1% he surveyed would condone cheating. And among those who are “politically obsessed” – meaning that they talk about politics every day – that number shot up to 69%.
They go on to list several other views that this group espouses at rates quite at odds with ordinary Americans.
- Nearly 60% say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans.
- More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of energy and food to combat the threat of “climate change.”
- Nearly three-quarters (70%) of the elites trust the government to “do the right thing most of the time.”
- More than two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.
- Nearly three-quarters (74%) say they are financially better off than before COVID, compared with 20% of the general public.
Now, democracy -- rule of the many -- is often said on the right to be a corrupt form of government (following Aristotle, wisely) because it allows the majority to override the rights or interests of the minority. However, a democrat would at least admit that a view held by only a minority should not govern.
Here we see majorities of the 1% differing from the majority of the 99%, which means that the 'general public' view is the one with democratic legitimacy. Yet the same 1% are disproportionately likely to be fine with cheating in order to see their undemocratic view enacted on the majority, especially those who are interested in politics.
Whatever that view is, it is not democratic.
8 comments:
How were the "elites" selected in the survey?
I had that question as well. If you watch the podcast, he says that they are those who (a) make at least $150,000/yr, (b) live in a dense area, and (c) have a post-graduate degree, a heavy concentration of whom went to one of 12 elite schools.
It's interesting how Ramussen arrived at the characteristics of 'elites'....they were determined inductively..the pollsters noticed that there was a set of people whose views seemed like outliers and they then identified the demographics of those people.
I would imagine that a person with an expensive advanced degree & student loans, making say $170K & living in a high cost-of-living areas, doesn't really feel all that elite, but likely believes he deserves to be.
Regardless of the specifics of the definition of "elites," their attitude, at such stark conflict with the rest of us, and so suggesting their contempt for the rest of us is thoroughly consistent with the attitude of one of the founders of the modern progressive movement, Herb Croly:
[T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.
And that is, indeed, a very serious threat to American republican democracy.
Eric Hines
CS Lewis, 1943, seems to be worried about the masses at first, but keep reading. "I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure… The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters."
Our elites have absorbed the first part of that statement but not the second.
Related post: What, Precisely, is the Issue with 'Elites'?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/21332.html
David, that's an interesting question. I think you make movements toward the answer several times in your post and do answer the question when I look at your full post. However, I think your answer lacks something. Since I was part of the Tea Party movement and have long objected to elitism, I'll give you my answer.
Here's the question from your post:
Conservatives/libertarians and especially Tea Party supporters often speak about “elites” in pejorative terms. Why is this? I doubt that many among us would argue in favor of mediocrity (a la the senator who famously argued that mediocre people also deserve representation on the Supreme Court) and/or of extreme egalitarianism and social leveling. Indeed, quite a few outspoken conservatives and libertarians could themselves be considered to have elite status in view of their professional, economic, and/or scholarly accomplishments. So what is the critique of elitism all about?
I think a simple way to understand what many of us mean by objecting to elitism specifically and often elites in general is to look at the definitions of these terms.
From the Free Dictionary:
e•lite or é•lite (ɪˈlit, eɪˈlit)
n.
1. (often used with a pl. v.) the choice or best of a group, class, or the like.
2. (used with a pl. v.) persons of the wealthiest class.
3. a group of persons exercising authority within a larger group.
...
adj.
5. of the best or most select.
So elite can be a noun or an adjective. As a noun, it often denotes the wealthiest, most powerful people in a society. These are the elites we object to; they heavily lean toward cosmopolitanism and disdain those of their own culture who are not equally cosmopolitan. These non-elite monocultural types are seen as less intelligent, misguided, even deplorable. The result of having a cosmopolitan elite in a society is destruction of the defining characteristics of their home culture. Cosmopolitanism reduces all cultures to clothing, food, music, these sorts of interchangeable aspects that are really the products of culture rather than culture itself. (I might even say it prizes the accidents and eats out the substance of culture.)
No one is complaining about the adjective form of elite. We all want our doctors to be elite, our rocket scientists to be elite, our mechanics to be elite. I greatly value and respect high levels of skill and craftsmanship. Those things, however, have nothing to do with elitism.
Again from the Free Dictionary:
e·lit·ism or é·lit·ism (ĭ-lē′tĭz′əm, ā-lē′-)
n.
1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their superiority, as in intelligence, social standing, or wealth.
2.
a. Behavior arising from or indicative of such a belief.
b. Control, rule, or domination by the members of an elite.
Elitism is not rule by some super-qualified and capable group of people (although these people certainly see themselves that way). Rather, it is the belief that social elites (the wealthy, powerful, connected) should run the lives of the non-elite, often because the non-elite are seen as inferior and unable to effectively run their own lives. In addition, it is the belief that these elites deserve special privileges and immunities; they don't have to play by the same rules as the rest of us.
In other words, elitism is just another name for oligarchy, and in our current political situation, it is a culture-destroying cosmopolitan oligarchy that is happy to implement policies that trade the lives of non-elites simply to maintain the their own power, identities, and favored treatment as elites.
Briefly, that is the issue with 'elites,' as I see it.
I tend to substitute Thomas Sowell's "the anointed" for "elite." The self-anointed people who believe that they have the right to make choices for the rest of us, because they are better than other people - pedigree, education (Ivy League or similar), employment via connections, what have you. Or they are the children of The Anointed and feel that it is their duty to save the world or something by afflicting the rest of us.
LittleRed1
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