“American culture gives medical doctors a status it does not assign to other doctorates, and many with the other doctorates are resentful, esp. in the humanities and social sciences.” And as an engineering PhD I could have been resentful, too, especially when I learned that in the Soviet system engineers were more highly paid than medical doctors. Then again, 12 years ago when I had a mild pain around my belly button*, I was glad my PCP was astute enough to recognize it was probably appendicitis, and ordered the scans and surgical procedures to correct what could have been a much more serious situation if I had neglected to obtain an appointment with him that day.

“… in the Western nation-states. Almost everyone we see a highly educated, highly idea-focused, highly abstract elite class struggling to impose their vision on a resistant general population, and the latter increasingly pushing back.” The Australian blogger Lorenzo Warby (lorenzoofoz.com ) suggests this is because their focus on abstraction and a vision of a better future has no measurements or metrics of success or feedback from said future, while normal folks face real world feedback all of the time and know or learn to rely on the signals it provides. Warby indicts the economics profession in particular for adopting an overly mathematical approach (starting in the 50’s?) and treating all people as interchangeable “econ bits” without regard to the various aspects of human psychology that the earlier students of “political economy” were noticing.

*I.e., not in the lower right torso where I might have expected such pain to occur.

They want their education to be a source of direct power and authority and status. But America will only grant that conditionally.

To put it another way, to use fictional people as examples: America respects both Archie Bunker (honest blue collar laborer) and George Jefferson (successful self-made businessman) more than they do Michael Stivak.

We might be seeing this in things like the tempest in a teapot about whether it was disrespectful not to use ‘doctor’ as a title for Jill Biden. American culture gives medical doctors a status it does not assign to other doctorates, and many with the other doctorates are resentful, esp. in the humanities and social sciences.

Hoffer argued the intellectuals as a class long for power and authority and respect, for the ability to put their abstract ideas into effect, and America is hardwired to resist that desire. So their resentment builds up and they become ever more alienated.

In modern America, class intellectuals have now managed to become precariously dominant in the Democratic Party…and as they have done so, the popular perception has grown in tandem that the Democrats hate their own country. Hoffer would argue that this perception is dead on accurate.

The same dynamic appears to be operating around world, at least in the Western nation-states. Almost everyone we see a highly educated, highly idea-focused, highly abstract elite class struggling to impose their vision on a resistant general population, and the latter increasingly pushing back.

They have the freedom to renounce their USA citizenship, leave the USA – permanently – and move somewhere they supposedly admire (e.g. Cuba, Gaza, China, Danny Ortega’s Nicaragua, etc. ).

But they don’t.

Then again, the organized provocateurs rioting / demonstrating in MN, are also free to leave; but they don’t either.

Jeez, I wonder why that is.

“If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.” James Madison

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams

Real History with Matt Walsh confronts the lies used to rewrite America’s past. It challenges decades of propaganda, questions untouchable stories, and reexamines the history generations were taught to reject.

In March 2022 , Britain’s Daily Telegraph and GB News channel both reported that the National Museum of Wales would be relabelling a replica of the first steam-powered locomotive, unveiled by its Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick in 1804. Trevithick had no links to slavery, but the amendment has apparently been included anyway as part of the museum’s commitment to “decolonizing” its collection. In a statement defending what it described as the addition of “historical context,” the museum said: “Although there might not be direct links between the Trevithick locomotive and the slave trade, we acknowledge the reality that links to slavery are woven into the warp and weft of Welsh society.”

I responded to this assertion, and other similar ones, in an article I wrote for Quillette:

https://quillette.com/2022/07/21/steam-electricity-slavery-and-societal-sustainability/

you would think a well developed intellect, would shield one from such ridiculous abstractions, chris rufo uncovering them, well that won’t do, where beard and jacobsen
who popularized his analysis as hofstadler did the frankfurt school, howard zinn, and chomsky surpassed them all in influence