“The Elites Had It Coming”, according to Thomas Frank in The New York Times, explaining how the Democrats lost touch with working-class Americans and became addicted to “’90s-style centrism”. NYT conservative columnist David Brooks, in an article headlined “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”, described how “the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores” had veered toward “identitarian performance art”.
“Trump’s win is a repudiation of elite condescension,” wrote one contributor at The Hill. At Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, we learnt, “With Trump’s win, ‘ordinary’ Americans declared independence from the elites.” In the UK Telegraph, we were told, “Trump’s triumph is a disaster for [UK Prime Minister Keir] Starmer and the self-regarding, virtue-signalling elites.” Here, once-credible Sky News talking head Chris Uhlmann was watching how the “Elite world scrambles as defiant chaos returns“. “Sneering elites trumped again,” the Courier-Mail editorialised.
So who are these “elites” who have been humiliated — there is now universal agreement — by the return of Donald Trump? Alas, no-one who used the term ventured any description; it was assumed readers would know who these “elites” were. Brooks was describing the Democrats, rather than the elites, but either way, it’s not a very useful guide.
Is having been to university an indicator of elite status? Voters with only a high school education or a sub-bachelor’s degree were more likely to vote for Trump, according to an NBC exit poll. But 45% of voters with a bachelor’s degree voted Republican, and 38% of people with postgraduate degrees did so too. That’s a lot of elites voting for Trump.
If university education makes you a member of the elite, it’s puzzling why many of the most senior MAGA figures have multiple degrees. Trump’s top trade official, Robert Lighthizer, has an arts degree and a law degree. Kevin Roberts, head of Project 2025, has a master’s of arts and a PhD in history. Previous Project 2025 head Paul Dans has a degree in economics and a master’s degree in, erm, city planning.
Steve Bannon also has a degree in urban planning, as well as a master’s in national security studies and a Harvard MBA (admittedly another prominent Trump whisperer, Jason Miller, only has one degree, in political science). Around 38% of all Americans over 25 have a degree or postgrad degree, and another 10% have a college degree. Nearly half of all adult Americans can’t be “elite”.
What about affluence? Does having money make you “elite”? According to the NBC poll, 47% of people with total family income of US$100,000-199,000 and 45% on more than US$200,000 voted Republican, so affluence is more a vague allusion to elite status than a firm guide. Clearly money doesn’t make Donald Trump, who inherited millions of dollars from his father, “elite”. Clearly it doesn’t make the tech billionaires who funded much of his campaign “elite”. Nor other super-rich Trump donors.
Nearly 60% of business CEOs donate to the Republicans and less than 20% to Democrats, so being part of the US corporate elite clearly doesn’t mean being “elite”. Nor, it seems, does owning your own media company make you “elite”. Who levels the charge of “elite” at Elon Musk, or Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch? Who levels the charge at highly paid media commentators, especially those who live in out-of-touch urban centres like Canberra?
So we’re still unclear on who makes up this “elite”. But Democratic politicians surely must? Except the Biden administration — surely the best possible example of an “elite” — rather than “sneering” at the American working class, as critics charge, retained Donald Trump’s tariffs against China and threw billions of dollars at onshoring manufacturing. This “elite” had such contempt for the working class that they created nearly a million more manufacturing jobs than existed when Trump was president. Joe Biden was the first US president to join a union picket line.
In contrast, Trump has a long record of hostility to workers and unions. Musk also hates trade unions. Does that mean being pro-union is a characteristic of the “elites”? What about union members who voted for Trump? Were they members of the elite who didn’t know they were elite?
This is the definitional quicksand you get into when you use terms like “elite” and link it to attitudes of the working class. It applies similarly in Australia: if the Albanese government somehow represents a sneering anti-working class elite, it is doing a bad job of it, what with its much-criticised panoply of pro-worker industrial relations changes and the billions it is wasting on manufacturing jobs. Perhaps the construction workers of the CFMEU, which decries the Albanese government for selling out workers, is the really authentic non-elite labour movement?
In which case, what does that make the Greens, the Platonic ideal of sneering inner-city elites, who backed the CFMEU and incurred the wrath of the right-wing press for it? And when Peter Dutton commits to tearing down Labor’s industrial relations reforms or cutting Labor’s manufacturing spending, is he demonstrating some deeper, more profound commitment to working-class values, and it’s only coincidental that he’s implementing the agenda of the business elite?
Maybe when governments like Biden’s or Albanese’s create working-class jobs and support unions, it is mere “manual labour performance art”, cloaking an elitist contempt for workers. As Brooks argues, Biden might have created jobs, “but there is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect”. Basically if you don’t have the right attitude, it doesn’t matter if you spend billions creating working-class jobs.
Indeed, all this discussion of “elites” seems to boil down to perceived attitudes. You can’t determine elites by education, by wealth, by economic or industrial relations policies. But the picture you get from reading at least the more coherent think pieces from right-wingers is that the “elite” is composed of affluent, educated knowledge workers who have thrived in the globalised economy and share values with people like them in other countries, while being indifferent or hostile to the worldviews of people in their own countries who have failed to prosper in the neoliberal economy.
The funny thing about right-wingers lashing such “elites” — who in no meaningful way are elites, culturally, politically or economically — is that many of those same right-wingers were, until Trump came along, fully signed-up warriors for neoliberalism, who demonised workers and trade unions as at best unhelpful impediments to the smooth operation of free markets and championed the very economic conditions that so alienated working-class voters.
The “elites” now railed against by such commentators are the bastard offspring of the neoliberalism championed by those very commentators — until Trump and Brexit opened up a new path to attack the left for having betrayed the working class by accepting the victory of neoliberalism. Brooks speaks of “an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself”. He might more accurately refer to conservatives like himself who look in the mirror and refuse to see what they’ve done.
