On Jan. 18, my local newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, published an opinion piece by a social worker named Tyler Firth entitled: “Dear populists: Time to give us our word back.” Not a brief letter to the editor, it was more than 10 paragraphs in length and clearly deemed of some significance by the paper’s editors. The word which populists have apparently hijacked is “elitist,” Firth’s article suggesting those “elites” disdained by the political Right are in fact accomplished people utterly deserving of their power and status. Pierre Poilievre, he says, “stormed his way to the Conservative party leadership descrying the influence of the “elites” in journalism, or the tweedy scholars from the country’s leading universities.” Indeed it is mainstream journalists and academics, constantly assailed with “sneers” and “snarls” from the Right, that seem to be Firth’s main concern.
The term “elite” as used today is almost always a pejorative. For the Left, those who have accumulated wealth and influence are by definition guilty, their accomplishments never attributed to their industry or intelligence but always to their abuse of power. These, Firth assumes, are the “privileged elites” who need to be duly constrained by our “progressive” governments. But why, he wonders, should journalists and academics be consigned to the same category? This very question and indeed his entire article suggest a level of ideological bias if not abject stupidity that is truly frightening.
What Poilievre, Trump, and “conservatives” in general loathe about contemporary academia and its media minions, is their utterly unwarranted claim to be purveyors of the Truth while in fact being no more than a collection of apologists for the Left. At the heart of this bias, of which most of them appear to be unaware, is the arrogant assumption that the general public [i.e., “populists”] are just too stupid to understand the complexities of their Neo-Marxist world view, a world view in which human morality has been replaced by gross generalizations based on wealth, skin color, gender, etc..
But if the word “elite” is meant to imply a group that enjoys a level of influence utterly unwarranted by its achievements, most academics and journalists are absolutely of that category, having dominated political discourse here in the West for decades now, while “sneering” and “snarling” at anyone who dares disagree with them. Yes, among those deemed “populists” there are some who hold views that are utterly reprehensible. But the vast majority of those so designated are decent people of simple common sense, people who believe “identity politics” to be pseudo-intellectual nonsense, people who see the Left’s constant demonizing of “populism” as a hypocritical assault on Democracy itself.
As you are no doubt already aware, the viewership of MSNBC and CNN has declined dramatically over the last few years. The new owners of the latter, obviously concerned with the financial well-being if not the very existence of their network, have clearly tried to purge it of those on-screen personalities most associated with its reputation as little more than an organ of Left wing propaganda. Recent developments in the careers of Don Lemon and Brian Stelter exemplify this trend. Upon his release last year, Stelter, whose smugly condescending smirk I always found obnoxious, claimed he was fired simply for promoting human decency. He was in fact admitting that he was not so much interested in reporting the News as in promoting his particular world view, a world view given to the belief that those who continue to believe in human morality and personal responsibility [i.e., “conservatives”] are really not “decent” people. The inordinate degree of influence granted to he, Lemon, and so many other media simpletons over the last several years, perfectly epitomizes what the Right has come to loathe as “elitism,” the exalted status given to journalists and academics not for the profundity of their insights but for their subservience to the dominant political Ideology of the day. The irony of Tyler Firth’s article which suggests that “populists” have somehow perverted the very meaning of the term “elitist,” is that it too is rooted in the simplistic, ideological biases which have come to dominate our era.