Writers and public intellectuals Matt Goodwin and Rob Henderson rail at the new elite (Goodwin) and their luxury beliefs (Henderson) that are woefully out of step with the masses. Henderson defines luxury beliefs as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. The elite class’ naval-gazing solipsism reflects their intrinsic narcissism, which is insistent on uprooting social norms as though norms are mere playthings, balls to be juggled in the air, with no consideration on how these balls will come crashing down for the masses. For example, the Defund the Police movement, a brainchild of the elite, was less than enthusiastically received on the ground in low-income and/or black neighborhoods. The masses do not have the buffer of luxury to be able to withstand the minor and major earthquakes perpetuated by the ruling classes’ propensities and compulsions to distort, fabricate, and socially engineer crises. Kitchen table concerns like paying the rent and a stable, functioning society are more top of mind for the masses. Meanwhile, the rich entitled elite use their status to dodge any unforeseen consequences for the implementation of norm-changing luxury beliefs. In 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) infamously headed to balmy Cancún, Mexico to flee frigid temperatures after a recently privatized Texas electric grid system failed to provide power and water. His elite cynicism was exposed for all the world to see when he was photographed hatching his escape at the airport, leaving the masses to fend for themselves. We only have to look to 2016's case of sexual assaulter Brock Turner's “affluenza” or the 2019 college admissions scandal where elites bribed college officials into enrolling their children, to be reminded of the elite’s entitlement run amok amongst countless scores of other examples. Unfortunately, in this climate, parsing out the values of the masses from the elites is a tricky endeavor as the masses emulate the elite (think Kardashians) and are captured on many levels, as the masses utilize and are inculcated by the elite’s technology such as television and social media. There's no way to get out from underneath the elite’s thumb, no matter how antisocial one is. Antisocial impulses can be observed in anti-authoritarian social movements such as punk rock and/or hippie movements, yet never become mainstream as a function of the limiting principle of their raison d'être. A central theme of Professor of Politics at Kent, England, Matt Goodwin's writing is that populist uprisings world-over, and in particular in Europe, are a result of a disconnect between the values and priorities of the masses and the elite. In other words, populist revolts are proportionate to the disconnect with the elites. From the viewpoint of narcissism, it is the forced enmeshment or smothering perpetrated by the elites through manipulations intrinsic to narcissistic abuse that there is not enough oxygen for the masses to breathe and function with their own traditional values and as such, the masses are butting heads with liberal, progressive and cosmopolitan values of the elite. Goodwin writes that we are in a “crisis of moral legitimacy and authority.” The old elite were part of an era of a strong, accountable, and responsive nation-state and/or unitary state (Britain), which was unified against a common threat of communism during the Cold War and into the 1970s. After the 1970s, this perception of a competent, legitimate, and authoritative elite drained away as Western states grappled with an array of new disruptive forces —the rise and relentless spread of hyper-globalization, European integration, deregulation, devolution, and the onset of so-called ‘governance’, whereby power and influence were sent to a new expert class of unelected technocrats and supranational elites. Power was increasingly pushed upwards or sideways, away from the masses. Elites actively participated in this, of course, because it chimed with their liberal universalist values, magnified their influence, and imbued them with a greater sense of social status, esteem, and moral righteousness. As Christopher Bickerton has written, increasingly elites derived their sense of social status, authority, and moral legitimacy not from their vertical relationship with the ordinary people below but rather from their horizontal relationship with other members of the new elite. -Goodwin In the 21st century, we have entered into what Colin Crouch has called the era of ‘post-democracy’ — a distant, self-serving, technocratic, elite-led style of politics in which the expert class conspired to marginalize the masses, all of which hollowed out a genuine grassroots democracy. Peter Mair has warned that elites in the West were increasingly ‘ruling the void’, congregating in institutions like the European Union that were insufficiently democratic, accountable, and transparent while losing touch with ordinary people. The age of party democracy, the age when elites were connected to the masses, argued Mair, was now over. The old parties had become so disconnected from the wider society that they no longer seemed capable of sustaining democracy. Instead, they had morphed into what Mair would later call ‘cartel parties’ —movements and leaders that no longer relied on the people for support but now relied on the state for money, resources, and an image of authority. This widening gap between the masses and the elites not only posed a crisis of moral legitimacy for the elite but now also began to drive growing support for national populist rebellions against the elite. -Goodwin However, the plot thickens here as the elite’s home base of the left continues to merge and fuse the role of the individual to the collective to the state to the point where both the individual and the collective are bypassed and overlooked in favor of the agency of the state, most pointedly realized in state-sanctioned “gender-affirming care” for minors in California. In an effort to globalize and homogenize the world and render threatening cultural, societal, and political differences anachronistic and obsolete, the narcissistic elite are vanishing distinctions in a consumptive envy-ridden greed tirade against “the other.” This manifestation is ironic, hence the confusion of whether the elite are disconnected or merged/fused with the masses, considering the narcissist’s ineptitude around seeing others as distinct, separate, and individuated. Narcissistic abuse is known to be crazy-making. It is true that the elite are disconnected from the masses even as they endeavor futilely to hoist the masses up to their level, “if only they could evolve” so the elite thinking goes, to their pedigree. The narcissistic elite then cram their agenda down the traditionalist masses’ throats and resulting populism ensues after some degree of cultural adaptation and some degree of rebellion. From the masses’ perspective, there is no winning formula to appease their irascible and exacting elite masters. And so, as is pro forma with narcissistic abuse, the inevitable people-pleasing codependency and ardent revolt eventuate, all fists and elbows. Typically, people will endeavor to please first and rebel later when pleasing becomes ineffective due to shifting goalposts. The underclass pleases the overclass through merger and fusion with the narcissist (as represented by the elite) and adopts narcissistic defenses to cope. The masses’ merger and fusion with the narcissist, as embodied by the elite, is achieved through a manipulation called coercive snapshotting, whereby the masses are compelled to conform to the elite’s value system, which, owing to the impossibility and fantastic aspiration of such a sustained merger, lays the groundwork for a spectacular separation and individuation, i.e., a populist uprising, through the devalue and discard phases of narcissistic abuse when the masses fail to live up to the unrealistic and rigged expectations of the out to lunch and in this sense disconnected elite. As a result of living in the void as Mair terms it, voters began to feel as though they were no longer in the conversation. As a result, academics began to talk about the emergence of an era of de-alignment, a volatile, chaotic, polarized, and unpredictable era in which voters were no longer tribally loyal to the main parties. -Goodwin Chafing at the oppressive mandates and strictures of a narcissistic elite, the masses with their native intrinsic values squirm and retaliate against the oppositional, antagonistic, extrinsic values of the elite (see chart below). As a function of their narcissism, the elite are unable to see the masses clearly and resort to denigrating them as racist, bigoted, and backward for adhering to traditional values. The reality is more nuanced, but the result is in keeping with narcissistic abuse, that the masses effectively have no voice, aren't seen and heard, and are marginalized, all of these dynamics leaving in its wake a polarized and fractious populace ripe for revolt. The second point is the elite have been failing to deliver, which has been exacerbating this crisis largely because they sent power on authority away from the center to other institutions. -Goodwin The chief story of the last 40 years in this country and many other Western democracies is a story of elite failure: the great financial crash, stagnant economies, inequality, spiraling national debt, the failure to see inflation coming, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the Middle East. Prof. Matt Goodwin Yet we're told again and again to return moral legitimacy in authenticity to that same elite. Yet the last 30 to 40 years have been a consistent story of eli
