To America's Elite: Stop Committing Class Suicide!

America's urban, credentialed, professional elite has become one of history's most detached, oblivious, callous, cruel nobilities. That can't end well.

Cri de Couer

This essay is a cri de coeur—an impassioned plea from the heart and a call for self-preservation.  It’s directed toward my fellow members of America’s elite, though I expect few to read it and fewer to resonate.  To cut to the chase: We’re killing ourselves and destroying a great thing.  We’ve become one of history’s most detached, least responsive, most indifferent, cruelest nobilities.  That will not end well.

When I talk about America’s elite, I mean the cadre that sets agendas and dominates decision-making.  I mean urban, credentialed, professionals—more affluent than average but far from all wealthy.  I mean people who publish their thoughts.  I mean “my people.”  To personalize matters even further, Jews constitute a small but overrepresented and highly visible minority within this American elite.

These people are my people whether they agree with me not (most of them don’t).  They’re my people because when they bring the wrath of the masses down upon themselves, they’re going to drag me with them.  I know.  I read my history.  There are two things that no mob has ever liked: Jews and intellectuals.  I am both. 

Mobs aren’t subtle.  The flavor of mob rarely matters.  No mob will review my resume, my writings, or my personal beliefs to decide whether I’m a sympathetic or unsympathetic Jewish intellectual.  It will take me out first, wonder whether it made a mistake second (if at all).

The same is true for each of us.  If you think you can differentiate between “mobs on your side” and “mobs on the other side,” you’re delusional.  We’re the elite, each and every one of us.  The only question is whether you’ll be marched to the guillotine shouting “You’ve got the wrong guy!  I’m with you!” or “Ha! I’ve always known you were evil incarnate!”

Stop Empowering the Mobs!

My message is simple: Stop empowering the mobs!

Don’t think you’re empowering mobs?  You’re kidding yourselves.  You’ve got two clear strategies of empowerment, one for the mobs you like (i.e., those aligning with the left) and one for mobs you hate (i.e., those who don’t align with the left). 

You’ve been lucky.  To date, you’ve identified with nearly all of America’s mobs.  The only two clear exceptions—Charlottesville and January 6—shook you to the core.  You elevated a tiny number of ineffectual losers and people caught up in the moment into a fearsome force.  They weren’t.  But keep trying!  You’re making great headway towards creating precisely the force you claim to fear.  When you succeed and a dangerous non-leftist mob movement does arise, you’ll take it as confirmation.  Here’s a smarter idea: Stop working so hard to create forces committed to our destruction.

Think you’re not empowering mob violence?  Let’s start with the easy one: Your promotion of left-aligned mobs.  What do you do?  You downplay the danger, eliminate deterrence, and condemn those who try to play defense.  Remember all those “mostly peaceful” protests in 2020?  Want one of them on your block?  Maybe just outside your kids’ school?  No?  Then maybe call them what they are.  Maybe support a guy like Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man who tried to protect his community from their predations.  Any chance?  Nah.  Your NIMBY strategy has never been put to greater effect.  Rising crime, rampant shoplifting, anarchic occupation zones, hate marches—all fine as long as they avoid your neighborhood.  Let other, less enlightened, less entitled people, deal with them.  After all, if it doesn’t hit our zip codes, it doesn’t much matter.

Empowering Those We Most Fear

Now let’s look at your subtler strategic empowerment of the mobs you claim to hate. 

One thing you do quite well is strangle all non-violent avenues for expressing displeasure with your callous rule.  That violates the first rule of dominance within a democracy.  Even Bismarck understood that if you’re going to let the peasants vote, you’d better first give them a stake in regime stability.  Otherwise, the first item on the ballot always takes the form of: Let’s kill all the rich people and take their stuff!  It tends to pass by very wide margins.  That calculus is the origin of the welfare state.

So, sure.  Go ahead and squeeze those hateful deplorables.  Make them poorer.  Drive energy prices through the roof, shut down the industriesthat employ them, make food scarcer, screw up the supply chain.  Tell them their faith is stupid, their history is racist, their desires for their children constitute privilege, their sons are girls and their daughter boys.  Tell them that they lack the cognitive skills necessary to appreciate your brilliance, that you want only what’s best for them, that you are their intellectual and moral superior.  Tell them that they owe you gratitude and homage.  Peasants love that kind of stuff!

Undermine the integrity of elections so that they’ll never feel like they have the opportunity to select the leaders they want.  Enmesh them in rules and regulations so complex that they’ll have to hire one of us just to exist.  Call them domestic terrorists for having the audacity to question your agenda.  Mock them for thinking that their own values and beliefs are relevant to the upbringing of their children.  Shut down their businesses, force them into protective gear, expose them to unnecessary medical experimentation, then dehumanize them if they balk.  They might be sad at first, but they’ll come to appreciate that it’s all for their own good.

Invent desires and priorities for people whose lives you can’t begin to fathom.  Insist that minorities worried sick that the children of their community have gone hopelessly astray want nothing more than to let those feral youth prey on their own communities.  Eliminate public safety, skewer educational choice, destroy local businesses, and deter investment as threats to the cultural integrity of minority communities. 

Retreat behind private security while defunding the folks who keep the streets safe and the border secure.  Beef up enforcement against local small businesses without elite accountants, peasants who have an occasional good year, and rogue elitists who dare to speak out against our marvelous system.  After all, such people are criminal threats to the common good!  Their continued existence threatens us all.

Deride any distinctions between supporting stable nontraditional families and opposing the sexualization and mutilation of children.  If the masses are too dense to get it, that just proves that they need to spend more time taking the right seminars!

Call their sports backwards and barbaric.  Defame their cultural preferences.   Mock the way they speak.  Tell them that you’ll ignore their demonstrations unless the décor includes Klan hoods and swastikas—then report only the troubling resurgence of Klansman and Nazis.

And just when you thought we couldn’t get any denser or more detached, we found a way!  Let’s all muse openly about overpopulation.  Know what’s wrong with the world?  Too many damn peasants draining our resources!  Because who doesn’t love learning that their selfish indulgences in things like the survival of their families are antisocial threats to the existence of humanity? 

Most importantly, take every opportunity to remind them how lucky they are to have us watching out for the common good.  Granted, we wouldn’t appreciate any of those things if they were done to us, but that’s because we’re smart and sophisticated.  Unwashed deplorables need that sort of condescending paternalism.  It’s the only thing their type understands.

Reaping the Whirlwind

In the words of leading elitist Chuck Schumer, we are reaping the whirlwind. 

By the end of the twentieth century, the American system had handed us the finest, freest, most prosperous environment that had ever blessed any elite class.  The world was our playground.  We were richer than almost anyone who had ever lived anywhere.  We faced fewer restrictions on our activities.  We could take our society in almost any direction we might choose.

What direction did we choose?  We became smug, detached, contemptuous, and cruel.  It wasn’t enough to live better than the masses that surround us.  It wasn’t enough to enjoy the literary, artistic, and technological opportunities our ample leisure time afforded us.  No, we had to lord it over those still mired in the ancient anxieties of survival. 

We had to insist that we’re morally superior:  We’re enlightened; they’re worthless.  Our values constitute unassailable progress; theirs are backward and degenerate.  We act selflessly for the common good; they remain selfish and self-centered.

Do Better!

The path we’ve chosen can only end poorly.  I implore you, change that path before you kill us all.

Restore integrity to elections, dignity to work, joy to culture, respect to faith.  Remember that every individual possesses inherent value whether or not they possess advanced degrees.  Listen to what people want rather than hypothesizing what you might want if you were (shudder) in their shoes.  Be responsive.  Engage.  Find your compassion.  Accept that they have values, beliefs, aspirations, and dreams that may be very different from ours. 

As I noted at the opening, I expect this plea to fall on deaf ears.  America is a society mired in a deep spiritual crisis.  Our elite has jettisoned understanding and compassion in favor of smug superiority. 

Far too many of my people will find solace is in believing that when the mob does come to the door, it will serve only as proof that their kind understands only brutish violence.  We are indeed their moral superiors.

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For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see:  The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at

https://coalition4america.com/

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.