'Them vs. U.S.': Study Exposes Profound 'Threat' Authoritarian Elites Pose to Ordinary Americans
Seldom do we find a single report that confirms a thousand disparate impressions. Still less often do we see one that quantifies the precise conditions that could drive us toward another revolutionary moment.
Last month, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity released a report that achieved both.
Most readers will review the report — pointedly entitled “Them vs. U.S.” — with astonishment, and some might even grab their pitchforks.
In September, pollster Scott Rasmussen conducted surveys of 1,000 Americans whom CUP described as “members of the elites.”
Crucially, the report provided a very specific definition of “elites” as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile.”
In other words, modern elites boast not only wealth but an urban residence and lengthy exposure to higher education. Conveniently, this describes about 1 percent of the U.S. population — the proverbial “top 1 percent.”
The surveys also identified a subset of super-elites: those who “attended Ivy League schools or other elite private schools, including Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.” This applied to approximately half of the elites surveyed.
Rasmussen asked those 1,000 elite respondents to answer questions about how they viewed the world. The CUP report then compared their responses to the answers given to the same questions by registered voters surveyed between May and September.
In sum, the report found that elites “live in a bubble of their own construction.”
Furthermore — and far more alarming — CUP concluded that elites “represent an existential threat to America’s founding ideals of freedom, equality, and self-governance.”
Based on their survey answers, that might qualify as an understatement.
The Surveys: All Voters vs. Elites and Ivy League Graduates
The report used pie charts and bar graphs to illustrate gargantuan differences in the attitudes of the three groups surveyed: 1) all voters, 2) elites and 3) that subset of elites consisting of Ivy League graduates.
For instance, the surveys asked, “Are your personal finances getting better or worse these days?” Only 20 percent of voters answered “better,” compared to 74 percent of elites and 88 percent of Ivy League graduates.
Perhaps those numbers should not surprise us. After all, those who have money tend to regard their financial prospects as much brighter than those who lack it.
The remaining questions, however, exposed something far more sinister about America’s elites. In short, it seems that wealth and education either produce or reveal authoritarian impulses.
Indeed, the next question spoke volumes. It asked respondents to assess whether Americans enjoy too much, too little or the right amount of individual freedom.
Only 16 percent of voters replied that Americans have too much individual freedom. By contrast, 47 percent of elites and 55 percent of Ivy League graduates channeled their inner tyrants. Americans, those elites replied, have too much freedom.
Elites’ authoritarianism manifested in several ways, most notably in their obsession with climate change.
As one might expect, ordinary voters bristled at extreme, prosperity-killing remedies to fight the climate change bogeyman, such as rationing, higher taxes and banning certain consumer items.
Only 28 percent of voters favored “strict rationing of gas, meat, and electricity.” But 77 percent of elites and 89 percent of Ivy League graduates hoped their inferiors would starve in the dark.
On taxes, 28 percent of voters — probably the same 28 percent who favored rationing — said they would support paying $500 or more per year to fight climate change. Among elites and Ivy League graduates, that number rose to 70 and 75 percent, respectively.
Finally, the surveys asked respondents about their willingness to ban five common consumer items: gas stoves, gas-powered cars, non-essential air travel (defined as vacations), SUVs and private air conditioning.
On only one of these items (gas stoves) did even a quarter of voters support a ban. And just 13 percent — one can hardly believe a number even that high — wanted to ban private air conditioning.
By contrast, at least two-thirds of Ivy League graduates supported a ban on all of these items. Eighty-one percent favored a ban on gas-powered cars, 70 percent on non-essential air travel and 68 percent on air conditioning.
Among elites in general, those percentages came in slightly lower. Between 53 percent and 72 percent of elites favored a ban on those five items.
Thus, for the sake of fighting climate change, the vast majority of your elite superiors want you stranded and sweltering.
Elite authoritarianism extended to education as well. Here, the specific wording of a question made a big difference.
“If you had a choice between a candidate who said that teachers and other education professionals should decide what students are taught and a candidate who said that parents need more control over what their children are taught, for whom would you vote?” the surveys asked.
Thirty-eight percent of voters chose the candidate who touted teachers and professionals, compared to 45 percent who supported parental control.
Among elites, however, 67 percent chose the candidate who touted teachers and professionals, while only 26 percent chose the parent-friendly candidate. For Ivy League graduates, those numbers were almost identical.
The education question tapped into the strongest elite prejudice. As we shall see, nothing unites the elites more than their confidence in government and veneration of the establishment.
For most of the 20th century, Americans generally associated the Republican Party with private wealth and business interests. But times have changed.
In fact, 73 percent of elites identified as Democrats, compared to only 14 percent who called themselves Republicans. That difference showed in elites’ responses to other questions.
For instance, the May-September surveys of regular voters produced a 44 percent approval rating for President Joe Biden. That number, of course, has declined in recent months.
The elites, however, gave Biden an 84 percent approval rating.
When asked if they had a favorable opinion of lawyers, union leaders, journalists and members of Congress — the so-called “talking professions” — fewer than half of voters responded in the affirmative. Lawyers earned the most respect (49 percent), while members of Congress earned the least (28 percent).
Elites, on the other hand, loved the talking professions. At least two-thirds of elite and Ivy League respondents reported a favorable opinion in all four cases.
Most notably, 86 percent of Ivy League graduates expressed a favorable attitude toward members of Congress. That number defies belief until one realizes that those elites move in the same circles as elected representatives.
The report’s authors, in fact, described the elites’ world as a “fraternity culture.”
Finally, nothing is more American than a healthy suspicion of government. And here the chasm between regular voters and elites revealed itself most ominously.
Seventy percent of elites — “more than twice the nationwide average” — trusted the federal government to “do the right thing most of the time.” Among those elites described as “most politically active,” a mind-boggling 89 percent reported the same faith in government.
“That level of trust likely comes from the fact that leading government officials are drawn from the same cultural background as the Elites. Additionally, unlike most voters, Elites can easily access and influence government officials on issues of concern,” the report concluded.
Interest, as well as culture, explains the elites’ love of big government. Indeed, “by their own admission, [they] benefit from more expansive government policies.”
Perhaps most depressingly of all, the future looks dismal.
Among elites 55 and older, only 10 percent responded that Americans have too much individual freedom. But 54 percent of elites under 35 regarded Americans as too free.
No statistic better illustrates the damage inflicted upon younger generations by woke universities.
In sum, the elites hold “views and attitudes that are wildly out of touch with the American people,” the report read.
And this probably tells us most of what we need to know about current political alignments.
“This Grand Canyon-sized chasm between where every day Americans stand on the state of the country, expanding government power, draconian climate change solutions, and Joe Biden’s job performance may partly explain the Donald Trump phenomenon and his high approval ratings among working-class voters, who feel wholly connected with the rebellion against the arrogance of the ruling class Elites.”
Conclusion
Decades ago, as a history graduate student, I heard of a professor from another department who asked the following question about a conference paper she planned to compose:
“What theory should I use to write about the poor?”
That is, of course, an extreme example of a condescending academic lacking even rudimentary self-awareness. But it also amounts to one of those “thousand disparate impressions” to which I referred at the beginning. And it pretty well reflects what I came to recognize as the unfiltered elite attitude toward non-elites.
Furthermore, the distance from detached silliness to rationing meat and banning air conditioning strikes me as much smaller than it once did. Indeed, that elite attitude — often so silly in its particulars — threatens Americans with the darkest possible authoritarianism.
Legendary Christian author C.S. Lewis once wrote that “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” and that “moral busybodies” will “torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
How much more “torment” might we expect from wealthy and detached “busybodies” determined to save the planet? If the natural tyrants of Lewis’ day thought well of themselves for acting — so they thought — in their neighbors’ interests, then surely the elites of our era find their professed mission of global salvation all the more agreeable to their own consciences.
Above all, of course — as the report’s authors concluded — the elites pose an “existential threat” to American freedom.
In the last surviving letter he ever wrote, Thomas Jefferson celebrated the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution as signals that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately.”
The elites’ survey responses show that they perceive themselves as the “favored few.”
Now, the question is whether Americans want to restore their constitutional republic. It has vanished. In its place, an oligarchy has risen, one that cynically deploys the language and forms of democracy to entrench itself.
We may thank the Rasmussen surveys for helping to quantify the chasm between Americans and their oligarchic ruling class.
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