10.14.16
With the swells of the meritocracy
Bits from the Hollywood Reporter:
“Tickets for the event started at $33,400 and went as high as $100,000 …
“The dinner marked yet another campaign stop by the Clintons in the area. Former President Bill Clinton was the last to circle through town when he hosted a $100,000-per-couple event at the home of Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg on Sept. 13 …
“Clinton has received much more public support in Hollywood throughout the election than rival Trump, who found himself defending yet another round of sexual assault claims on Thursday.”
Stronger together. And “I’m with her.” But only in a very specific way with regards to California. The state where I live is not in play. But it is very useful for tons of cash money because, obviously, it’s where so many of the swells of the meritocracy are.
Elton John performed and furnished a ringing endorsement. In the Hamptons a month or two ago it was Jon Bon Jovi, Paul McCartney and Jimmy Buffett.
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To refresh your memory, the Vermont senator is an independent who likes to call himself a “democratic socialist.??? He ran for the nomination on a platform of New Deal–style economic interventions such as single-payer health insurance, a regulatory war on big banks, and free tuition at public universities. Sanders was well to the left of where modern Democratic presidential candidates ordinarily stand, and in most elections, he would have been dismissed as a marginal figure, more petrified wood than presidential timber. But 2016 was different. It was a volcanic year, with the middle class erupting over a recovery that didn’t include them and the obvious indifference of Washington, D.C., toward the economic suffering in vast reaches of the country.
For once, a politician like Sanders seemed to have a chance with the public. He won a stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, and despite his advanced age and avuncular finger-wagging, he was wildly popular among young voters. Eventually he was flattened by the Clinton juggernaut, of course, but Sanders managed to stay competitive almost all the way to the California primary in June.
Now, consider the recent history of the Democratic Party. Beginning in the 1970s, it has increasingly become an organ of this [Washington Post professional] class. Affluent white-collar professionals are today the voting bloc that Democrats represent most faithfully, and they are the people whom Democrats see as the rightful winners in our economic order. Hillary Clinton, with her fantastic résumé and her life of striving and her much-commented-on qualifications, represents the aspirations of this class almost perfectly. An accomplished lawyer, she is also in with the foreign-policy in crowd; she has the respect of leading economists; she is a familiar face to sophisticated financiers. She knows how things work in the capital. To Washington Democrats, and possibly to many Republicans, she is not just a candidate but a colleague, the living embodiment of their professional worldview.
In Bernie Sanders and his “political revolution,??? on the other hand, I believe these same people saw something kind of horrifying: a throwback to the low-rent Democratic politics of many decades ago. Sanders may refer to himself as a progressive, but to the affluent white-collar class, what he represented was atavism, a regression to a time when demagogues in rumpled jackets pandered to vulgar public prejudices against banks and capitalists and foreign factory owners. Ugh.