Quoting Thomas B. Edsall in the NYTimes today:
Countless analyses have demonstrated that Trump won the election by combining support from traditional Republican voters with a surge in backing from constituencies that contemporary economic and cultural developments have left behind.
But Trump did not campaign against economic elites. Instead, he built a fire under animosity toward what has been called “the creative class” by Richard Florida, the demographer; the “plutonomy” by three analysts at Citigroup; and the “cosmopolitan class” by Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale.
In recent decades, this class has become increasingly influential in setting cultural standards and in shaping contemporary values. Its success has provoked deepening resentment, to say the least.
“The New Elite marry each other, combining their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the benefit of both,” Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Coming Apart,” wrote in the Washington Post:
Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them — which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege.
Chrystia Freeland, a journalist-turned-politician who is now Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, described this class during President Barack Obama’s first term as
hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition — and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a trans-global community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home.
