I’m amazed at how Trump’s “base” hates their so-called “elites,” but doesn’t seem to have the slightest bit of anger or resentment for big business, Wall Street banks, or the super rich—in a nutshell, the top 1%, the modern-day lords of the Cotton Kingdom. Thanks to Donald Trump, with some assistance from Fox News and right-wing talk radio, a new American aristocracy has a substantial portion of the population wrapped around its little finger—more precisely, its big middle finger!
So who are the elites these people hate so much? Back in my day the elites were plantation owners (in the South), industrialists (in the North), and wealthy merchants everywhere. Rather than define the elite based on income, however, Trump’s followers define it by a most peculiar set of criteria. They hate people who make their living based on their education; in other words, they hate the knowledge economy and people who possess the knowledge necessary to succeed in it. Their targets include academics, politicians, the media, most celebrities, doctors, lawyers, the tech industry, and just about anyone on the political left or exhibiting the slightest intellectual bent. These are the people they see as looking down on them, and leaving them behind, in a new globalized, information-based world.