The Election Was a Referendum on Elitism
The Republican sweep in the national elections this November is a reaction to a brand of leftist elitism that became so distasteful to most Americans that they carried their angst with them into the voting booth. Americans cast their votes for the candidates who made more sense, who didn’t talk down to them, and who didn’t tell them how they should think. They voted for the party that is now apparently for the people, the “common man.” But the “uncommon” elites are not a cut above the rest of us –arguably, they’re the cause of most of the problems Americans face.
You’ve seen the charts and graphs highlighting that it was the “uneducated” who carried Trump and his Republican allies across the finish line. How dare these deplorable people care more about inflation than about gender fluidity! How dare they bypass a fine arts degree for a manufacturing job. The presumptuous elites, who rode the “educated,” high-society lie straight to defeat, have some learning to do. They need to understand that education is not synonymous with insight or understanding.
In traveling across my district this election season, it was clear to me that people were more informed this time around, and that many of these “uneducated” voters without college degrees knew the issues inside and out as well as any other group. They didn’t get their facts from the mainstream media, the least trusted institution in America, but from their own research and analysis. It didn’t matter to them if “experts” had opinions; it mattered if the politicians they were voting for made sense and spoke their language.
But even more than that, Americans of every class, creed, and background have realized that elites and their mainstream media and academic compatriots hold them in contempt. They call us stupid and deplorable, they racially profile us, and they patronize us. But as most Americans came to see, the elites were the ones driving anti-Semitism, disorder, and the policies that are ruining America. The elites’ Orwellian plan to censor and chastise those who deviate from the “narrative” backfired. The American people would not follow the final command of the Party in Orwell’s 1984: “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”
No amount of spin could convince voters that the economy was flourishing or that Kamala Harris, upon taking the helm, would suddenly change course and usher in American prosperity and prestige after residing over economic chaos and an open border for four years.
Common sense prevailed over institutional media trying to drive political discourse. People turned off ever-leftward legacy media giants that continued to talk down to an ever-shrinking viewership and readership. They proved not just biased, but flat-out wrong much of the time.
The legacy media isn’t the only institution complicit in the downfall of elitist American news. I wrote in late 2022 about Twitter’s repeated censorship of conservative voices. Twitter wasn’t alone in this endeavor—Meta, YouTube, and Google have long favored certain political thought in their delivery of news, while preventing conservative content from being seen. Then, in one of the most momentous events of the last decade, Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X. Free speech has returned to the platform, making it wildly popular again, while exposing legacy media outlets for their blatant manipulations.
The media can share the blame with the academic Left. Last year, I wrote a rebuttal to Dickinson College’s dean after her fantastically ahistorical claims at a Martin Luther King dinner about Abraham Lincoln and his abolitionist record. In a quest to adapt American history retroactively to conform with present ideological motives, college history departments are trading facts and research for political whims. This kind of thinking on our campuses helps explain why universities have failed to protect free speech and in turn have bred antisemitism, as I wrote about last year.
The elitist collective, in all its pomp and pride, lost big earlier this month. Humility would demand self-reflection and a plan for change. Pride would double down, continue to accuse and demean more than half the country, and blame others for why they lost. The ball is in their court. If making America great again is such a detestable goal to them, maybe they should try to explain why.
