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Different Rules, Different Americas
New York City cosmetics mogul and multimillionaire Linda Rodin was quoted in the July 28th edition of the Wall Street Journal about her ever-present luxury, vintage, tinted spectacles: “My vision now is always through tinted glasses; I don’t know what the real world looks like anymore.” This comment about her permanent eye-wear accessory perfectly illustrates the disconnect between the way one segment of society lives in and views America, and how the vast remainder of Americans live their day-to-day lives.
It was no more than a blurb in the paper, but it struck me as the epitome of the cultural and political pomposity of metropolitan one-percenters and how clearly different that life is from working-class Americans. This isn’t about a war between economic classes, but rather an observation on the stark contrast between people who write the rules and the rest who are forced to live by them, and the widening chasm between Americans. The late prolific author and journalist Tom Wolfe wrote about the New York City well-heeled society in a famously sardonic June 8, 1970 New York magazine piece “Radical Chic.” He exposed the celebrities, socialites, and “One-Percenters” as no more than frivolous political agitators, only taking on the cause of the moment to advance their social standing and feed the insatiable appetite that is their own shallow vanity. But today that inner social pecking-order amongst our elite has morphed into a farther reaching, more invasive, and more divisive power grab. In a social-media infused world, it’s not enough for the latest “It” celebrity or social-climber to grace the cover of People or have a feature in the New Yorker, now we have the Instagram picture of their breakfast, a Snapchat from their exclusive gym, and tweet about their thoughts on the latest Gucci fashion line. But why stop at imparting this knowledge on the millions of fans and followers when solely by the fact of having a certain ZIP code, obtaining certain wealth, or attending the proper parties, makes one qualified to step into a social cause and be the moral arbiter of political and social views? During the previous administration, and featured prominently in Hillary Clinton’s latest run for president, it got you into the White House, or close to it.
The election of President Obama was arguably the first public fusing of the political and celebrity world. He was the pop-culture president. From the iconic “Hope” poster, to the endless parade of celebrities to White House parties, to appearances on the late-night television shows; even YouTube stars including GloZell (who famously ate cereal out of her bathtub-while sitting in it) went to the White House for interviews at the President’s invitation. During this time, the Obama administration and cultural leaders pushed a liberal agenda on the country despite a reluctance for such drastic change. Americans elected a right-leaning Congress; state houses and governorships flipped from blue to red. But our elites wielded their collective power and the far-reach of their voices to double-down. Fame and fortune were weaponized. Any criticism or backlash was quickly branded racist, homophobic, xenophobic, or bigoted. Any defense of traditional values or even a resistance to the radical infringement of personal rights and liberties was attacked. No one wants to be labeled a close-minded bigot because they support limits on immigration, but we were; even as millionaires sit in their gated enclaves. No one wants to be labeled anti-education, but we do want the choice for our kids to get the best education regardless of address, color, sex, or income; at the same time as the President was sending his kids to the most exclusive private schools. No one wants to be labeled as not caring for kids or advocating violence because we support the Second Amendment, but we are; even as celebrities are protected by armed security. But our political and cultural elites are the ones who get to write the rules, the rest of us have to live by them.
In 2012 Americans re-elected the first African-American president. Even those who didn’t vote for him recognized the historical significance and we celebrated together. But by 2016, many Americans had had enough. Economic recovery was painfully slow, race relations seemed worse, not better. North Korea, China, Iran and Syria all seemed at boiling points with no easy solutions in sight. So Americans moved on and many of the very people that voted for Obama then turned to support a man who was near his complete opposite. Instead of electing the woman who was anointed by the elite class as successor, people decided to vote for their own interests instead of for whom they were told they should vote (by the people who know better, you see).
But revolting from the proper social order, as seen by people such as Linda Rodin, doesn’t go over lightly. They will hold on to their ivory towers with every fiber of their being. Their rarified air mustn’t be exposed to the toxic mouth-breathers of working-class Americans. So they #Resist. Celebrities quickly jumped on the demonize ICE bandwagon. In California, most didn’t need to leave their gated compounds to condemn enforcing the laws that give America a functioning border. The actress Amber Heard (who was married to Johnny Depp and dated Elon Musk) tweeted on July 3, 2018, “Just heard there’s an ICE checkpoint in Hollywood, a few blocks from where I live. Everyone better give their housekeepers, nannies and landscapers a ride home tonight…” She later deleted the tweet. So who’s being racist here? The actress, who sees immigrants as nothing more than cheap nannies, housekeepers and landscapers, and who wants to see the end to enforcement of our border, or citizens who see their fellow Americans being victims of violence by illegal aliens and drugs that flow through our unprotected borders? Ms. Heard has the privilege of branding border control advocates as evil and has the luxury of private planes, secluded neighborhoods, and luxury hotels, while the rest of us deal with violent gangs, street crime, and drugs.
Another glaring disparity is playing out in Portland. A group protesting ICE started an occupation camp in the city near the ICE facility located there. The protestors harassed Scott and Julie Hakes, the owners of The Happy Camper, a food cart across the street from the ICE facility, which raises money for the Hakes’ nonprofit, “Operation Off the Grid.” The Hakes were threatened because they were serving customers who also happened to be ICE agents. They were forced to close. The protesters also yelled threats to their daughter who volunteered at the truck. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler allowed the occupation camp, the harassment of the Hakes, and the threats and harassment of the ICE agents themselves. Law and order, public safety, citizens’ goodwill be damned if there is an opportunity to raise your #Resistance status.
I think most people are willing to have civil conversations about problems in our lives, communities, and nation. Fair-minded people are the best judge of what solutions work for them and their families. But when we are bullied into defending ourselves against false accusations of perceived bigotry and ignorance by those who are furthest from what an average American’s life is like, but instead based on what they think our life should look like, there will be pushback. Take it from a life-long hard-head and descendant of an epic line of stubborn Midwesterners, being told what to do and how to think from people who have claimed the right to know better, results in more disagreements, not less. The sooner we all see ourselves and each other with clear vision, not what we want or assume to see, the sooner we can have honest discussions about solutions instead of blame.
Published in Politics
Great post. I might argue that JFK was the first “celebrity” President, but the country was so different then, and the speed at which information moved so much slower, the effect was much more muted than that of Obama’s election.
What makes you think your vision is truly clear? Everyone thinks they are seeing the truth that is is self evident in the facts, but I see a lot of tinted vision from all sides. The problem is that there is no solution acceptable to all people, and the political will to take the compromised solution doesn’t exist because dedicated factions have out sized power in our political frame work. And there is no incentive for them to compromise and every incentive to blame the other side, because total victory or the nations utter ruin is just around the bend at the next election.
So here is what I propose. You tell me what you will give to the progressives in exchange for what you want to have done? There aren’t solutions just trade offs. So what will you trade?
This is a pretty good expression of the relativism to which we’re increasingly subjected these days. I don’t buy it, but I guess it’s all relative.
Constitutionally, there are supposed to be 50 different Americas.
The problem in 2018 isn’t too many Americas, but too few.
“Operation off the Grid” has indications of Christian involvement. Fair Game.
From the link:
Well, yeah. D’uh!
I actively turn my head away from every person I pass in the street. I don’t want to get sued for harassment.
This is why I think another civil war is coming. I hope I am 100% wrong, but I worry about it. And I buy ammunition and non-perishables.
Questioning whether a person has an accurate description of American Culture is hardly supporting relativism. Valiuth is making an incredibly poingant argument that America is more divided than most partisans are willing to recognize, and it makes many policy discussions into irrational yelling matches.
Partisans for Trump always speak as if they somehow represent all the working class, as if the working class in New York City is the same as those in Topeka. Obviously Trump did not win 2/3rds or working class voters. It’s a fiction. There is a reason why neither party has been able to get supermajorities and that is because the nation has been fracturing culturally, and continues to.
If you want to get actual legislative policy done at the national level there will have to be some compromise. As a conservative partisan I do not like it but it is what it is.
Horsefeathers. Plenty of presidents won their positions by using the mass media of their day to build up their own public personae.
FDR’s “fireside chats” started long before he became President. Teddy Roosevelt was famous long before he became President. McKinley’s campaign was a sophisticated operation of mass media propaganda. Lincoln built up a massive mythology about himself. Folk were making their voting decisions based on image, emotion, and celebrity (as opposed to basing their voting decisions on policy and/or qualifications) long before Kennedy came along.
If anything, thanks to the Internet, voters know much more about presidential candidates’ actual histories, qualifications, and policies today, not less.
Look at the Trump v. Clinton election. The received wisdom is that it was all about celebrity, but off the top of your head can you name one of Clinton’s election promises? Now, how many of Trump’s promises can you name? Trump won, in part, because Clinton didn’t have any policy! Even if you didn’t like all of Trump’s election promises, at least he was offering some!
Again, horsefeathers.
Violent social unrest may be coming, as it has come at many points in the USA’s past.
There was plenty of political violence in the early 20th century, what with anarchist bombings, labour riots, and the so-called “golden age of the KKK”.
Then, again, during the counter-cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 70s. There were literally thousands of domestic bombings between 1968 and 1972 alone.
Going further back, do Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion get counted as “civil wars”? No, they don’t.
If those periods of violent unrest don’t get designated as “civil wars”, then there is little reason the next batch of violent unrest should be so designated.
Still stewing about the “Kennedy was the first celebrity president” notion.
Lots of people like to complain that Kennedy’s campaign ads were such dumbed-down, content-free, light-on-policy fluff compared to Nixon’s:
But that conveniently ignores the dumbed-down, content-free, and light-on-policy fluff that was central to Eisenhower’s campaign:
Kennedy didn’t run an innovative campaign. He ran the same old campaign that had previously won the election for Eisenhower.
I hope you are right…
Her election promises amounted to the following two items:
“If you vote for me, then you are with me.”
“I will reside in the WH because it is my turn.”
The beauty of the above is that had she won the election, no one could then come forward to state she had ever failed to keep her promises.
I too hope Misthiocracy is right.
However, when a person cannot question anything, without being told they’ re a fascist, or a dupe or a White Supremacist, that reactivity tends to make those on this side of politics fear there is not much hope.
And remember, Jews didn’t realize the Establishment of the Third Reich was against them when they were actually forced to board trains and got sent to the camps. They realized it when mobs verbally attacked them and spit on them. Eventually it escalated to having their bodies beaten and their shops and businesses destroyed and boarded up. (Much like those who are outspoken today are not allowed to monetize their presence on the web. Even Scott Adams turned away from certain social media outlets as he was losing numbers of supporters when he knew the real count would have shown a net gain.)
Street hostility by mob action is something various members of today’s young Republicans are experiencing right now. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Candace Owens have recently experienced this type of behavior. And the sad thing is, I don’t know of any liberals who are ashamed of this behavior. Rather they are proud of it!
America has always been divided politically (even right after the Constitution was ratified), but everyone celebrated our country at the end of the day – Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Veterans Day . . .
Now, we have people telling us the US was founded unjustly, that the National Anthem is a song of slavery (thanks, Lew Alcindor), that our nation never was great. No, the yelling matches are almost always started by the left, when their arguments for their policies have holes poked through them. Why do you think the antifa was formed? The Trump election showed the left they are losing the battle. Sure, they’ll still get a bunch of folks elected, but there are enough folks who remember how it was, when we would have neighborhood block parties for the 4th and no one cared if you were gay, an unmarried couple with children, handicapped, or were a color other than white.
Sorry, @jennastocker, I meant to start by telling you what a great post you made!
Not quite what I, nor I believe the OP, were saying, but some good points.
Violent riots are a recurring feature of American history, and they’ve never been a precurser to Civil War. Not even in the 1850s/60s, unless you count Harper’s Ferry.
For a civil war to occur, you need American governments to take up arms against each other.
What you’re talking about is violent repression of incorrect opinion and/or unfavoured groups by the federal government. That’s not an uncommon feature of US history and, again, it can only count as civil war if other episodes such as Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the shooting of students at Kent State, the violent repression of every demonstration and/or strike and/or riot of the past two-and-a-half centuries, etc. etc. etc., also count as civil war.
I hate to smash the illusion of post-war America but the nation was not always like that. There is a reason why the nation has endured a civil war, multiple presidential assassinations, various ethnic lynchings at different times and other grotesque actions. That is not to say that there was a national oppression hierarchy in existence, but there were regional ones.
The USA you remember did exist. But it was the product a Great Depression, progressive social engineering and two world wars that saw the USA united through government intervention, in a way never seen before. It was an abnormality, not the norm. It was no doubt fun but not what the Republic was like at its founding and the USA is returning to its more divided, vibrant and vigorous self.
I can’t imagine a more foolish negotiating technique than making known in advance what you are willing to give up.
How do you build a concensus without agreeing to compromise on something? How do you even negotiate without knowing what you want and what priority you give to them?
Dude, Obama made race relations worse and I’m not even sure that wasn’t intentional.
Polar Bear Hunting
https://nypost.com/2013/11/23/i-was-in-shock-they-were-all-laughing-knockout-game-victim-speaks-out/
I apologize for being MIA(day job causes inconvenient restraints ;-) ). But hopefully I can add to the great, ongoing discussion. One of the points I tried to make was that Americans living in prestigious NYC, DC, LA, have taken it upon themselves to institute social rules of which they’re exempt, on the other 99% of us who do have live by them- often with damaging repercussions. Most people people want to live & be left alone-no compromise So in that sense I agree with @Valiuth we’re made up of 50 America’s. A republic (if you can keep it!).
People who don’t even do the courtesy of reading what I wrote are not people with whom one is going to start negotiating and compromising. A lot has to happen before we get anywhere near that stage.
Circa 1933 to 1937, the actions of the Third Reich supporters against the Jews did not count as any type of Civil War either. Rather it was strictly the “in” group against those deemed to be in the “out” group.
The non-designation of those activities as being a part of a Civil War did not make dealing with the mob attacks any easier.
Now flash forward to August 2018, and we have a “resistance” group that has already agreed that free speech is not necessary and may in fact be dangerous, as unregulated speech can become hate speech. That those persons descending mob-like upon those designated as being “fascists” is fine and should certainly not involve any law personnel breaking up such attacks.
It is fair to say that right now the law does get involved. Candace Owens was very grateful for her recent police protection from the activities of the mob. But should that “resistance” seize power, which is the whole point of the Muller investigation, there might not be police protection.
What year was that, Stad? I’ve been around since 1952 and I don’t remember that year. Maybe after 2012, or something like that…but then we’d have to give credit to the other political side.
Speaking of Obama and his role in the deepening of the black/ white divide in America, in what semi-rational world does the leadership a black-racist movement (BLM) get invited for a “State Dinnner” at the White House?
In my mind, BLM and Obama have several police officers blood on their hands. When did it become the cause célèbre to shoot to kill (white) policemen simply because they are in uniform and standing on ‘the thin blue line’ for the rest of us schmucks? I don’t remember Obama going to bat for our cops during those fun-times post Ferguson, MO; and don’t even get me going on Trayvon “if I had a son” Martin.
Then there is the whole ‘white’ Hispanic connection to America’s endemic racial strife. OMG, stopping to pour a strong drink now. Woe is me.
Simon rarely pours an 80 proof comment if he’s got 101 on hand! Just speaking as a citizen, not even as a conservative or as a partisan, what most disappointed me about the Obama presidency is what it actually could have meant for race relations and ethnic self-pity, if only, if only…
Okay, I’ll spell it out in terms that even an Obama supporter should understand. To quote no less than Mr. Spock, it took Nixon to go to China. If that’s puzzling to some of you youthful Ricos, it’s because there was no more famous anti-Communist than Richard Nixon for twenty-plus years before the outreach to China that would shock the Soviets. It took Obama to go to the the sacred temples of grievance and bluntly declare that the age of affirmative action wasn’t going to last forever and identity politics was a temptation that was slowly poisoning his own political party. Romney, or any white politician couldn’t have pulled that off with any authority among American Blacks. And make no mistake about it, this cross-the Rubicon moment would have price tags attached; transferring Democrat patronage networks to being segregated by income instead of race, for example. Job training programs would be boosted. Military pay could have been sharply increased. The pork barrel would still exist. They’d have adapted. The game wouldn’t be fully over for years.
But the glass of invulnerability would have been shattered forever. Admit it, gang: don’t you think a significant number of independents would have rallied to Obama if he’d done anything like that? By dropping a phony claim to moral authority, the Democrats would look like patriots.
It’s not only social rules. You’re singing my song, with respect to other sorts of rules, right there. I spent almost a quarter-of-a-century of my life working in Hospital IT departments at various levels. An inordinate amount of both my, and my staff’s, time was spent complying with the massive, never-ending, expensive, often nonsensical, conflicting, redundant, pointless, and did I mention, expensive, regulations that came out of Washington DC, and to a lesser extent, Harrisburg PA.
Millions and millions of dollars. A year. And more millions. Next year. I’d explain it a little more clearly, if I could bear to.
For many years, I was the person at the top of the food chain which was responsible for, among other things, making sure that no HIPAA or “red-flag” privacy data left the institution via email, on any sort of storage medium, or via any other sort of nefarious means that there’s really no way to wholly mitigate, no matter what you do. The other piece of that was hardening our cyber defenses so that no-one from outside could just find their way in and steal it. Had such an data leak or theft happened and a patient or patients’ data been exposed to the outside world, the hospital could have been shut down, lost God knows how many millions in revenue from government insurance programs, gone bankrupt, and a bunch of us could have ended up in jail (this was a rather stressful job).
So I will fess up to some very unladylike thoughts, most of them involving grievous bodily harm, or worse, to those involved when I hear about Hillary’s personal email, the server in the bathroom, the millions of social security numbers that seem to be exposed on a regular basis, and the fed’s own breaches of protected healthcare information over the years. With, as far as I can see, little or no consequences to those ignorant of, derelict in, or incompetent at, their job duties who were seemingly unable to prevent them. We lived in mortal terror of “the rules.” Apparently, those same rules don’t apply to the people who write them or vote them into law, or they have no rules at all. It still makes me sick to think about it.
PS–Here’s a Heritage Foundation report on Federal cyber data breaches from 2017 alone. Read it and weep.
You have your own viewpoint that you’re superimposing on the post to which I responded.
That is not “poignant,” but strikes me as exemplifying relativism. “Accurate descriptions of American culture” are not subjective. And it’s relativists that deny this.