There was some uncertain moment over the last few years when, for many of us, the scales fell from our eyes. We realized that nearly all of the pushers of the craziest ideas and policies—things that drove the population nearly mad with confusion and anger—were not coming from the grassroots. They were coming from the Ivy League and amplified by the most highly capitalized and powerful institutions in the world in the corporate, government, and media sectors.
Why is this important? Because these ideas were nearly always marketed in the opposite way. They were sold to the population as methods of empowering the marginalized, caring for exploited workers, bolstering the trod-upon poor, helping victimized populations, protecting the vulnerable, assisting small nations, giving voice to the voiceless, and so on. We were repeatedly told that these were merely “common sense” measures to “keep people safe.”
The particular issue could be nearly anything: trans rights, student-loan forgiveness, price controls on groceries, vaccine uptake, aid to Ukraine, the choose-your-pronoun movement, the push for masking, non-stop anxieties about infectious disease, the ravages of climate change, the sad plight of the refugees, virtues and vulnerabilities of public-sector workers, the demand for higher minimum wages, or whatever cause is dreamed up next.
As the media has decentralized and information flows grew, multitudes of people realized something fascinating. In every case, these causes—all variations on the same theme that we needed less freedom and more centralized management of society—were not actually backed by the common person in the middle and lower rungs of society.
They were being pushed by elite sectors of opinion, institutions staffed by people who had a fallback safety net in a trust fund, went to schools no middle-income family could ever afford, and moved in rarefied circles denied to the rest of us. The Progressive voting bloc in our times is more demographically homogeneous than is generally known. And these days, the minority groups that supposedly back their imaginings are becoming fewer, as 2024 results have shown.
It’s like the ending of many episodes of “Scooby-Doo”—the supposed ghost or Phantom was the town mayor all along.
Once you have a bead on this reality, many things look very differently. You begin to ask fundamental questions about this parade of experts that corporate media regularly trots out to back policies pushed by powerful corporate interests. They have gotten away with this for decades but it was the experience with infectious disease and the shots that seemed to have unleashed mass incredulity.
Viewers simply could not believe that staying holed up in one’s apartment for a year was going to achieve anything in terms of dealing with a respiratory pathogen, much less all the protocols concerning six feet, masking, Plexiglas, air filtration, dirty and clean pens, plastic wrap on the the key pads, the rules against singing, the limits on elevator capacity, the banning of house parties, and so on. It was all too much. And yet there was the mass media, proclaiming all of this to be scientific truth.
That experience was a teaching moment for people all over the world. It revealed how the system works: from elite interests through major media into our living rooms and right into our lives, threatening liberties and rights. None of this really emanated from the grassroots. It came from a small sliver of society that was making up rules for the rest of us to follow.
It continued long after the pathogenic threat dissipated. Let me just offer one example. The last time I attended the symphony at the New York Philharmonic in the Lincoln Center and decided to head to the men’s room before the performance. There was no men’s room. There was just one big room marked for all gender identities. I stood in line with men and women, all of whom were boiling mad at this absurdity. You could see it in their faces and feel it all around.
These were people who had paid many hundreds of dollars for tickets, come a long way, dressed up in their finest, and now the institution was humiliating them with forced gender integration in the most intimate actions of our lives. I did not observe a single “trans” person who was overjoyed at their newly found rights. What I saw was a line of people angry at this ritual humiliation.
In the months that passed, I wrote letters and received perfunctory replies. Finally someone called from the Philharmonic who was seeking new donations. I said, as politely as possible, that if they really want to inspire donations, they need to consider their restroom policies. I explained in detail. The person sincerely apologized but admitted that there was nothing they could do. A small group of influential activists have taken charge and they were calling the shots.
There it is—that’s how it always works.
Perhaps we should reexamine history in light of this.
What I had not known is that his critique applies not just to the history of the socialist idea but also progressive policies generally.
In my later investigations of eugenic policy, I found the same dynamic at work: elite intellectuals imposing their vision of the ideal human person and using wicked tactics to impose that. Indeed, I left my reading of this period—lasting from 1890 with an uncertain end—that it is true that the Western world has yet to come to terms with its racist past. But there is a twist: the racism was official, imposed, and had elite origins. It was not a product of the common person.
Other deep investigations reveal the elite/corporate/government origins of a number of institutions and policies that are frequently but wrongly described as populist. That goes for central banking, food and drug regulation, antitrust, the income tax, war and conscription, and the administrative state generally.
This is easier to see in our times than it was in the past, now that we have fast information and who is who and what is what in real time. This was not true in 1913. People back in those days had little choice but to believe everything they were being told. This situation lasted until relatively recently in human history. Now times are different and we have access to a different news stream and different ideas, and they all point to the same new understanding.
And what is that? For centuries, we’ve all been encouraged to believe that the common person is never to be trusted with freedom and decision-making, that social processes are broken and need elite monitoring, that large interest groups need to be in charge of our lives else life itself will fall apart. A closer look at the history of our times and the past shows that the opposite is true.
This new realization accounts for the upheaval we currently see in voting patterns and opinions not just in the United States but all over the world. What is often disparaged as “populism” is really just the common person realizing that they have long been told a stream of untruths by people pushing their own interests at the expense of the public interest. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
