Fake populists like Elise Stefanik (Harvard ’06) and Josh Hawley (Yale ’06) attack higher ed to protect corporations and the rich
More than a third of Harvard’s graduating seniors are heading into finance or management consulting – two professions notable for how quickly their practitioners “make a bag”, or make money, reports the New York Times*.*
Similar percentages show up in other prestigious universities.
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In this era of raging income inequality and billionaire robber barons, the bags are gigantic. At Goldman Sachs they start at $105,000 to $164,000. At McKinsey, $100,000 to $140,000.
And that’s just the first year.
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America’s corporate and financial elites have flooded American politics with money in order to receive government subsidies, bailouts, tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks – all of which ratchet up their wealth, entrench their power and make it harder for average working people to advance.
Trump and much of his Republican party are deploying criticisms of the educated class to pose as populists on the side of the people.
Consider Elise Stefanik, Harvard class of ’06 and chair of the House Republican Conference, who doesn’t miss an opportunity to attack elite universities and their presidents. Or Senator Josh Hawley, Stanford class of ’02 and Yale Law ’06, who calls the recent student demonstrations signs of “moral rot”.
It’s all a thinly veiled cover for their efforts to help the wealthy make even bigger bags while keeping everyone else – especially average workers – down.
I do wonder how much of the culture that now seems intent on checking off a lot of boxes in games and movies and television is devised to give the people that are easily triggered by “woke” things something to be distracted and upset about (they are trying to cancel cishet xtian white men!!!1111, or, they are trying to ruin <some franchise>, and by extension, my childhood!!!111).
It may be that the money behind the culture machine just so happens to be truly genuine about this. Or maybe they aren’t.
It’s simply a conflict between urban and rural values. Left and right just muddies the waters, everything about the culture war comes down to the conflicting values of those two groups.
Rural people have almost zero cultural influence and it drives them crazy to the point where they use their large political influence as a means of making up for that.
Rural vs urban is just another mechanism to divide people. Most unheard people just want the quiet dignity of a job that pays enough, enough free time to enjoy life, and to be left alone. The loudmouth sycophants and power-hungry sociopaths manipulate and ruin everything, skewing perceptions for the rest of us.