Washington Post Wakes Up to Why People Hate Elites. Will the Lesson Stick?

If the powers that be continue denying the simmering rage of their arrogance and hypocrisy, they may soon face a reckoning they’re ill-prepared to handle.

Hell may just have frozen over as five days before the election, a major news outlet published an article excoriating the chittering elites and at least attempting to understand why conservatives are pissed off at the powers that be. 

I don’t agree with everything in it, but Megan McArdle’s op-ed for The Washington Post, articulates for WaPo’s liberal readership just why Trump has such a strong grip on power, and why the right might just be willing to follow him to the ends of the Earth. 

McArdle highlights several incidents that many conservatives, myself included, saw as peak hypocrisy and solidified that so-called experts couldn’t be trusted with power. 

From the article:

I watched former Never Trumpers I knew become radicalized by the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, in which journalistic norms were relaxed to promote unverifiable accusations — and “innocent until proven guilty” suddenly gave way to the #BelieveWomen norms of #MeToo. That was at least until Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her, at which point a healthy skepticism once more became warranted.

I too remember the Kavanaugh hearings and how desperately I wanted him to be confirmed in the face of the accusations. As I sat next to a sea of liberals at my Portland, Oregon school job, I distinctly recall the disconnect between their rapturous joy and my utter revulsion. I realized then that this was a turning point, that if Democrats were able to successfully tank the career of a noted conservative on nothing more than a spurious sexual he said, she said, any chance at the right gaining power again would be dead. 

McArdle later talks about the hypocrisy surrounding the expert approved racial justice protests during COVID, the refusal of experts to acknowledge the obvious politicization of science with regards to gender ideology, and expert hand waving of President Biden’s obvious mental decline. Each of these incidents caused a little more of the right’s trust in these institutions to wither, for short to non-existent gains for those liberal experts.

There’s a growing sentiment that vibes matter more than actual policy for the American voter. McArdle briefly addresses this in her op-ed when she bemoans how conservatives seem not to care much about the riot at the Capitol on January 6th. 

“To a liberal, these examples might seem small in comparison with the public disgrace of Jan. 6, and I largely agree,” McArdle writes. 

But here too lies the disconnect conservatives have with the general vibes of the country versus the honeyed words of experts from the left. To us, January 6 could be bad, but it’s small potatoes in comparison with the Summer of Love riots all throughout  2020. How many times have Republicans been asked to denounce the violence on January 6? How many times has that one day been used as a cudgel by mainstream liberals and democracy experts and fingerwaggers in their ivory towers?

Meanwhile, no one asks those liberal experts, including the current Democratic nominee for President, about their support for the far more destructive riots done with their consent. Rioters burned police stations and courthouses, destroyed thousands of businesses and caused millions in property damage. They conquered neighborhoods and set up so-called autonomous zones (cough cough insurrection). They ripped down statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and erected statues to a thug. 

And these experts, our “betters” cheered them on all the way. 

McArdle argues that Trump is not the right horse for conservatives to hitch their wagons to should they hope to enact real cultural change. I happen to disagree. I think that Trump, more so than any Republican in my lifetime, understands the nature of conservative rage. 

It is not the racist, bigoted, vile nonsense the left ascribes. It is a perfectly human response to decades of political power being vindictively wielded against us. In a fantastic Substack article from 2022, author N.S. Lyons argues that the current situation the right finds itself in is comparable to the samurai and the serf in feudal Japan. 

The samurai could spit upon, strike, or slay the serf at his leisure. The serf risked death if he did the same. 

Now that McArdle, one of those excoriated elites I’ve been ragging on, has tentatively dipped her toe into the conservatives’ justified anger at her class, the obvious question looms. Will the Washington Post and its jabbering cohort actually listen, or is this just a fleeting glimpse of self-awareness? 

If the powers that be continue denying the simmering rage of their arrogance and hypocrisy, they may soon face a reckoning they’re ill-prepared to handle. Americans are tired of being told what to think by those who view themselves as untouchable. The elites may not believe in consequences, but consequences are coming for them. 

They thought Trump was bad? What comes after that?