The 1% versus the Trump proletariat
They’re protesting by the millions against Donald Trump, starting with marches in Washington the day of his inauguration and continuing outside the Trump Tower in Manhattan, outside the White House, at Trump’s “Winter White House” at Mar- a- Lago, and at college campuses across the land. Anti-Trump declarations are de rigueur in venues of all kinds, whether at celebrations marking family events, at academic gatherings or in the hallowed halls of Congress.
Rolling Stone dubs the wave of protests the largest in America since the Vietnam War, but the protests know no national borders. They marched in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Sydney. Trump has been denounced in the U. K. parliament and on its website, which hosts a petition — more than one- million signatures strong — demanding that Trump be barred from meeting the Queen on a state visit.
These aren’t proletarian protests, though, a revolt of the poor and dispossessed against an uncaring ruling class. These are their opposites.
We are witnessing the outrage of the one per cent, of the world’s ruling elite rising in unison at Trump and his blue- collar threat to the social order.
“We are the new American resistance,” Bruce Springsteen declared during his recent Australian tour, echoing the views of Madonna, Rihanna, Katy Perry and legions of others performers who have risen up in staunch de- fence of the establishment status quo.
Meryl Streep well expressed the angst of the entitled at her speech at the Golden Globes, awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The room — packed with screen stars and movie moguls — erupted in applause for her passionate defence of Hollywood’s downtrodden — the movie industry’s supporting staff, which she cast as the “most vilified segments in American society right now. Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
Outside that room, and outside Hollywood, were the other victims of Trump’s America, many of whom, for the first time in their lives, had a cause worth fighting for. The grand anti-Trump resistance movement i ncludes Silicon Valley on one coast and Manhattanites on the other, and in between the beltway of Washington and its suburbs, whose political class of lobbyists, lawyers and regulators now populate the most affluent community in America. Fellow travellers include the mainstream media plus the academics at Ivy League universities, silver- spooned socialists, ecoNGOs and the billion- dollar foundations that finance them.
This is the most wellheeled protest movement in history, all come together to oppose Trump and those they hold in contempt, the blue- collar worker, the deplorables and others who, in Barack Obama’s words, “cling to their guns and religion.” The one per centinstinctively understand at some visceral level that Trump’s Neanderthals — so unfit to rule over the enlightened — represent an existential threat. In Rihanna’s words, her “America is being ruined before our very eyes.”
And this one per cent is right. The America that Trump is preparing to roll out seems set to launch a great transformation, a rollback from today’s cool to the unapologetic love of country and respect for work and family not seen in two generations. Socially, Trump is eviscerating the political correctness that the one per cent sees as virtuous, appointing judges likely to uphold traditional values and repealing a federal law that prevents churches from engaging in political activity. In foreign policy, he’s rebuilding the military, appeasing no adversary and unabashedly backing that pariah of the left, Israel. Domestically, he’s diminishing the very soul of the left — the Government that is its god. Medical savings accounts and school choice will move decisions over health and education to the individual; gutting the regulatory state will move decisions over commerce to business.
The protests have yet to abate but they will, because they are counterproductive — the more that the one per centers protest, t he more they alienate themselves from the mainstream. Trump’s most controversial action to date — the executive order barring travellers from seven Muslim-majority nations — may have only fuelled his popularity: According to a Morning Consult/Politico poll, 54 per cent of Americans support it; just 38 per cent oppose. In a poll released this week of more than 10,000 people in 10 European countries commissioned by Chatham House, 55 per cent agreed and only 25 per cent disagreed with the statement, “All further migration f r om mainly Muslim countries should be stopped.”
Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll shows Trump has the approval of the majority of Americans. The one per cent put on a great show, but they protest too much.