We plebs are tired of being stomped on. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:
When I was a kid — and the same with my parents when they were young — you could count on certain fundamentals in politics. The Chamber of Commerce represented business, and business generally favored free enterprise. Not always, but mostly.
Small businesses could become big and big could become small, but they generally opposed socialism, big government, regulation, and high taxes. For this reason, they generally supported the Republican Party.
It was also a time of class malleability, with people moving in and out and up and down. There were always gaps between rich, middle, and poor but they were not as wide as now, and there was a healthy rotation among them.
In the last ten years, and accelerating dramatically in the last three, this has changed. Big business consolidated and centered on tech and finance. Then it became entrenched. The laptoppers educated at woke universities ported their values into the workplace, gained managerial control, and deployed HR departments as their mechanism of control. The politics of these industries followed, and now it is the base of the Democrats.
It’s strange because I’m old enough to remember when everyone on the left defended: civil liberties, freedom of speech, the working classes, schooling, small business, the poor, public accommodations for everyone, peace, and democracy. It opposed witch hunts, segregation, class privilege, big business, war, and dictatorship. Or so it seemed.
Anyone paying a modicum of attention to modern political trends knows that this is no longer true, and that accounts for why so many on the left are disaffected (and that includes many writers at Brownstone). The evidence is everywhere (the apostasy of Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein come to mind) but sealed by two reliably left publications: The Nation and Mother Jones. The former’s push for forever lockdowns has been relentless while the latter just launched an anti-trucker campaign against what everyone used to think were basic civil liberties. (Both sites are hard to navigate for all the pop-up ads and commercial pushes.)
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