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    The Revolt Against the Elites, Part I

    By P.J. O'Rourke

    We're in the midst of a global rebellion against the high and mighty – political elites, intellectual elites, and the elites of international finance and banking. We're sick of the supposed experts, the so-called authorities, and the self-appointed cognoscenti. We're tired of people who think they know what's best for us better than we do.

    You can see the revolt against the elites in our presidential election. Donald Trump may be a rich guy, a member of the 1%, but there's nothing "elite" about the way he sounds. He sounds like the rest of us. (Unfortunately, he sometimes sounds like the rest of us after we've had a few drinks.)

    Meanwhile the political, intellectual, and financial elites of the Democratic Party couldn't find a decent nominee. Their "applecart of experts" was almost upset by Bernie Sanders, a low-level New Lefty who got hit on the head with the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 and never recovered.

    The elites ended up running Hillary Clinton, a certified elitist whom nobody – including the people who will vote for her – can stand. Hillary might be the most dislikable major party candidate to ever run for president.

    Trump, in my opinion, is something of a jerk. But you can imagine playing a round of golf with him. (I have it on good authority that he doesn't fudge his score any worse than most of the rest of us.)

    Imagine playing a round of golf with Hillary. She has 20 Harvard graduates as caddies who have read a lot of books about golf but have never been on the links. They spend the whole match telling you, not her, what club to use. Secret Service is there to make sure you take the suggestion and hit from the fairway with a one-iron.

    After you take your chip shot, the cup and the pin somehow get moved closer to Hillary's lie. (Lie – what an appropriate term to use in any game that Hillary's involved in!) And the scorecard mysteriously winds up on Hillary's personal e-mail server.

    The revolt against the elites isn't confined to the United States. Elite opinion in the U.K., among most Labor and Tory party leaders, was strongly in favor of Britain remaining in the European Union (EU). The voters said to hell with that.

    The Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden have seen the rise of nationalist, protectionist, anti-immigration, EU-skeptic political parties that horrify the elites.

    In France, Marine Le Pen's National Front is now the largest political party.

    Parties similar to the National Front have been victorious in Poland and Hungary.

    Elites call these parties "right-wing fringe," but some places seem to have more fringe than cloth. The elite political fabric is coming unraveled. Also, as with Bernie in the U.S., the revolt against the elites isn't coming from just one political direction.

    In Austria's May presidential election, the "right-wing fringe" candidate, Norbert Hofer, was narrowly defeated by another outsider, the "Green fringe" candidate Alexander Van der Bellen. (The election was so close that the Constitutional Court of Austria has ordered a do-over.)

    Brazil is in the process of bringing indictments for corruption against practically every one of its politicians – left, right, and middle-of-the-road.

    The Philippines has elected a Trump-like president. Rodrigo Duterte is prone to saying things aloud that most us keep to ourselves. But it's unclear where on the left-right political scale Duterte (or Trump, for that matter) stands.

    Duterte was elected, over the protests of Philippine elites, for being tough on crime. The Philippines has a lot of it. When Duterte was mayor of rough-and-tumble Davao City, he was known as "Duterte Harry."

    On the other hand, Duterte favors gay rights and equality for women. He's critical of America, and he's conciliatory toward China about conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea.

    Canada's prime minister is the rich kid, former substitute teacher, part-time actor Justin Trudeau. He may have had an elite dad, Pierre Trudeau, but Justin has none of the other standard elite qualifications for high political office.

    Even the usually staid politics of Australia have been in a roil. Australia has had five prime ministers in the past six years. The Aussies sure know how to throw the *******s out!

    Although they keep letting them back in again – a revolving door of Labor Party center-left elites and Liberal Coalition center-right elites. But the revolving door may get stuck. The latest Australian elections almost resulted in a hung parliament.

    A hung parliament? What a tempting idea! Although I suppose hanging legislators is immoral. And it's probably also illegal, except maybe in parts of Queensland if parliamentarians are caught chasing sheep.

    Why are ordinary people around the world so mad at the elites?

    Because global elites have been wrong about practically everything.

    But let's define our terms. Elites aren't necessarily rich or famous, let alone accomplished or skilled. Elites are, first and foremost, people who boss us around.

    Long before Hillary was rich and famous, before she was even a Democrat, back when she was a Goldwater Girl in 1964, I'm sure she was just as bossy. I can hear her as chair of the prom decorations committee saying, in a strident and grating voice that brooked no objection, "The theme of the Senior Prom is Au H2O!"

    Secondly, the bossy elites have to have a means of bossing us. Politics is the best method. It can be electoral politics. Or it can be organizational politics, where elites snake their way up the ladder of political institutions such as government departments, regulatory agencies, and central banks. Mainstream media outlets are political institutions, too.

    Politics has the advantage of requiring little or no merit – just egotism, persistence, and cunning. Being a bossy elite on the basis of merit – the way bosses of real companies, drill instructors, and our moms are – demands accomplishments and skills.

    Politics is easier. Politics is also a more powerful way to be bossy. Politics has the full weight of government police powers behind its bossiness. If Hillary doesn't get her way on the prom decorations committee, she can make our lives miserable in high school. If Hillary doesn't get her way in the Oval Office, she can make our lives miserable in jail.

    We have plenty of reasons to hate the global elite just for being who they are, never mind what they've done.

    But what they've done has been awful.

    Elites, with their love of politics, have expanded political systems until the web of government became a huge dragnet pulled through the sea of our lives entangling every little aspect of personal existence.

    I've interviewed a lot of Trump supporters. Many were not all that fond of Trump himself. But all of them wanted to say "F You" to the government – especially to the spread of government regulation.

    One small-business man said, "Nobody in government ever stops to think that every time they pass a new business rule or regulation, that means a pile of paperwork for me. I don't have big legal and human resources departments. It's just my wife and me. I can stand the expense of something like Obamacare. I can't stand the paperwork. It's time taken away from my business. There are only so many hours in a day."

    A gas station owner said, "I can't get the federal, state, and local permits to take my old gas tanks out. I can't get the federal, state, and local permits to put new gas tanks in. What am I supposed to do with the gasoline... hold it in my cupped hands?"

    A logger said, "I run into all sorts of political problems – zoning, wetlands, endangered species, road weight limits, OSHA. Then I turn on the TV and the politicians are talking about transgender bathrooms. We don't have any bathrooms in the woods."

    The global elites are bad domestically. Internationally they're a disaster. A lack of a firm and coordinated attack on Islamic terrorism (and a lot of elite dithering) is causing people to be murdered all over the world. How much farther away from the quarrels and hatreds of the Middle East could a person get than to be at Latin Night in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida?

    The elites permitted chaos in the Muslim world, and the chaos has sent hordes of refugees into Europe. What do the elites care? The refugees aren't crowding the halls and jostling the elites in the European Parliament in Brussels. The refugees aren't building shantytowns on the tennis courts at the elites' country clubs. Some young refugee men commit sexual assaults in public places, like the Cologne train station, on public occasions, like New Year's Eve. That's the public's problem. Things like that don't happen at the private dinner parties the elites give.

    The elites are just as careless about immigration. To them, immigration brings cooks, nannies, and gardeners. How is Trump's plan for a wall along the Mexican border so different from the gated communities where elites live?

    Americans don't hate immigrants. We're an immigrant nation. But we want a system of immigration. Why can someone who sneaks over the border into California get a driver's license, while an MIT grad student from India can't get a green card? Maybe a wall isn't a good system, but it's better than no system.

    The elites embrace free trade, too – without, of course, ever having to touch it. Their jobs can't be outsourced to China.

    Free trade shows that elites can be wrong even when they're right. Free trade does provide a net benefit to the global economy. But this benefit can't just be a race to the bottom of the pay scale with elites holding the starter pistol.

    The purpose of jobs is to add value to material. Jobs that don't add much value – like attaching a sleeve to a t-shirt – ought to go where wages are lower. But those jobs need to be replaced with other jobs that add more value – like attaching a wing to a flying car. Free-trader elites haven't bothered to link free trade with the kind of tax, regulation, and investment-incentive policy changes that ensure a new economy rises in place of the old.

    The elites prefer to pursue policies that are economically destructive. Politics is the elite's way to the top. The way to stay on top in politics is to bribe your constituents with ever-larger entitlement programs. This has led to almost every political system in the world carrying astonishing amounts of debt.

    If that debt load collapses, the world economy will be destroyed. Even if that debt load doesn't collapse, it represents a gross misallocation of capital. The capital tied up in government debt could have been used to make things. Why don't we have flying cars? We have Obamacare instead.

    And bad elite fiscal policy goes hand in hand with bad elite monetary policy. Central bank elites just keep printing the stuff.

    Where will it end? I'll cover that in my next column, "The Revolt Against the Elites, Part II – The Effect the Rebellion Will Have on Your Pocketbook."

    Regards,

    P.J. O'Rourke
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