Kevin Williamson of National Review Online ponders the political left’s favorite target.
The American Left is not beyond practicing race hatred, religious hatred, national hatred, or any other kind of hatred, but if prefers class hatred, as, indeed, does the American Right at the moment. Class hatred is useful because class in the American context is infinitely plastic. That isn’t the case everywhere else in the world: In England, for example, class lines are as plain to most people as racial differences are in the United States — no Englishman has any more trouble seeing that Boris Johnson is posh than any American would have had seeing that George Plimpton was white. … But because the United States has such a weak sense of class — patrimony and provenance do not matter nearly as much to us as plain old crass gobs of money do — we can get away with abusing the notion.
That is the origin of our strange little gold-plated haters of “elites,” the peculiar situation in which American “elites” are denounced by private-jet hectomillionaires such as Sean Hannity, sneered at by Ivy League–educated rich men such as Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, lectured by Enron advisers such as Paul Krugman or by Walmart board members such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, howled at by Yale deans and MacArthur fellows, while “the Real America” is represented by Manhattan-based employees of multi-gazillion-dollar global media conglomerates, salt-of-the-earth-type figures such as Laura Ingraham of Dartmouth and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a white-shoe law firm with a name Charles Dickens would have blushed to invent.
Among the greatest and saltiest of these anti-elitists is Senator Elizabeth Warren, the phony Cherokee princess who holds forth on the plight of the dispossessed from her Cambridge manor while negotiating tax cuts for rich metropolitan property owners such as herself.
