American ‘Elites,’ Meet ‘Flyover America’
Most Americans don’t live in San Francisco, Hollywood, New York City, Washington D.C or their suburbs. Most don’t live in university towns. Most Americans live in “flyover country” – places like Myerstown, Duluth, Summerville, Roanoke Rapids, Batesville, Modesto, Grand Prairie and Kalispell – areas alien to the nation’s self-styled political, intellectual, media, corporate and coastal “elites” who reserve for themselves the rights to frame opinion and dictate national policy.
But those people are well known among flyover country professionals, businesspeople, workers, the middle class – everyday Americans – who understand the distaste “gentry” elites feel for them and see the contempt in which elites hold the places and principles normal Americans value – communities, neighborhoods, life, faith, personal liberties, respect for constitutional rights and the law.
Political malpractice inspired Tea Parties, a movement America’s ruling class called “bourgeois.” Slandered as “racist” and “fascist,” harassed by the IRS and treated with contempt by both party’s establishments, nonetheless, Tea Partiers gave the GOP House and Senate majorities in 2010/2014 before being betrayed by congressional Republicans who broke campaign promises to shrink government, reduce spending, and block Obama administration policies.
Today, America’s political, intellectual, media, corporate and coastal elites, including some Republicans, are assaulting the values, the rights, even, of Americans, especially the middle class. Ultimately, those aggressions will fail.
In February, National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote: “President Donald Trump represents a genuine crisis in the American political order, but it is not the crisis we hear about from rage-addled Democratic hyper-partisans and their media cheerleaders. The fundamental cause of our current convulsion – studiously ignored by almost all concerned – is this: In the United States, the ruling class does not rule. At least, it does not rule right now.”
It doesn’t, because, in 2016, flyover country voters rejected an unthinkable alternative supported by an off-putting elite that almost-uniformly disregards normal Americans, and upset the economic, legal, legislative and policy perquisites of America’s political/cultural elites. America elected a “disrupter” whose presidency has produced measurable progress.
Since his election, a hostile #Resistance – Democrats and a handful of Vichy Republicans – unable to accept their self-inflicted electoral failure, have constantly attacked and maligned President Trump, eagerly focused on and featured his most trivial missteps. But, normal Americans wish their presidents success. That difference matters far more than Donald Trump’s critics realize.
Regular Americans are very familiar with their self-designated betters’ dismissive, in-your-face deprecations that encouraged them to elect President Trump in 2016. Their scorn may reelect him in 2020. But, then what? By 2025, latest, Donald Trump will be gone. Eventually, so will we all. But America will remain. Accordingly, these questions genuinely matter: What kind of nation will America be then? What do we want for future generations? What kind of country will we leave?
Fly-over Americans know socialism isn’t the answer. As it always has, a growing, prosperous middle class will determine the overall health and vitality of our nation.
America’s political and cultural “elites” will not do it, because the wrong people almost never do the right things.
https://www.ldnews.com/story/opinion/2019/08/20/american-elites-meet-flyover-america/2051388001/
