https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270760/american-president-london-bruce-bawer
In the U.S. we’ve always prided ourselves on being a society without classes. Yes, we always had rich and poor, and back in the day we even had slaves and masters – and, yes, after that was over we had monstrous racism, plus no small amount of prejudice directed by natives toward newly arrived immigrant groups, not to mention tension among many of those groups. But however unpleasant those tensions, they were generally mild compared to the kind of tribal hatreds that could found almost everywhere else in the world. Moreover, these problems tended to fade rapidly, so that the grandchildren of people who had warred viciously with one another back in the Old Country could sit side by side in American classrooms without ever giving a thought to their respective family backgrounds.
Furthermore, America has always been overwhelmingly middle class, and has always been characterized by a remarkable degree of social mobility. The poor could become weathy. Foreigners could become Americans. Some of the most accomplished and esteemed Americans, indeed, first came to its shores as children of the wretched and tempest-tost. The genius of America was that you could re-create yourself, invent yourself. The classic American hero was always the self-made man – the rags-to-riches Horatio Alger protagonist. Nothing has ever been less American than condescending to a fellow who put in a hard day’s work, kept his nose clean, and took care of his family.
That universal American respect for the responsible solid citizen, however, has disappeared. Its demise was brought about by the rise of a politically lockstep American cultural elite – an elite made up of business, media, and high-culture types in New York, Internet magnates in Silicon Valley, show-business notables in Los Angeles, the great and powerful in Washington, and academics at universities across the country, all of whom share a deep and unprecedented contempt for millions of their fellow Americans. If we can’t let go of Hillary’s word “deplorables,” it’s because it perfectly sums up the profoundly un-American attitude toward ordinary working Americans that defines and unifies our cultural elite.