Brendan O’Neill writes:Many observers, especially Obama-cheering observers here in the UK, will look upon Obama’s victory as a win for the little man over the big corporate interests that lined up behind Mitt Romney. Romney, we were frequently told, represents “the 1 per cent”, the implication being that Obama speaks for “the 99 per cent”, for Joe Average. Where the modern Republican Party has become beholden to business and religious elites, reliant on them for funding and moral backing, the Democrats under Obama are more of a mass party, we’re told, bringing not only the working classes but also the young and black people into the political sphere.
In truth, as articulated in a most interesting pre-election article by Joel Kotkin at the Daily Beast, in recent years the Democratic Party has become as much an elitist machine as GOP has.
Obama’s main source of funding was not donations from millions of Joe Averages but handouts from “the tech sector, government and the academy” – his top five funders were “the University of California, Microsoft, Google, the US government, and Harvard”. Executives at Craigslist, Facebook and Google gave maximum donations to Obama’s campaign. As Kotkin points out, these people make their fortunes “not through tangible goods but instead by manipulating and packaging information”, and so they are “generally not interested in the mundane economy of carbon-based energy, large-scale agriculture, housing, and manufacturing”.
As such, he says, unlike much of the masses who make a living getting their hands dirty in carbon-based industries, these extravagantly wealthy elitists can “afford to be green and progressive, since they rarely deal with physical infrastructure or unions or the challenges of training lower-skilled workers”.
Although this New Clerisy uses populist rhetoric, talking about the desires of the working man and the needs of youth and blacks, it is fundamentally oligarchical, says Kotkin. It believes that “power should rest not with the will of the common man or that of the plutocrats [who support Romney], but with credentialed ‘experts’”.
And so this expert class – brainier than Joe Average, more eco-enlightened due to its being cushioned from big, grubby industry, and more “aware” on issues such as gay marriage and racial equality – lords it over the ill-informed oiks who make up mass and especially Middle America. They really do see it as their role, in Coleridge’s old words, to “school the rest of society on values and standards”.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100188325/the-election-is-over-and-the-elitists-have-won/
