For privileged progressives, ‘we’ means ‘you’. By Gerard Baker.
If there’s a defining feature of modern progressives’ self-image, it’s the idea that — by dint of their supposedly superior education, their association with like-minded members of global elites and their immersion in the various rites of the contemporary secular religion — they are more knowledgeable and virtuous than you, the inferior classes. …
There’s been a social revolution in this country and the wider West in the past 50 years in which, by a remarkable inversion, the left — which used to represent the interests of the outsiders, the disadvantaged — is in almost total control of the institutions of the establishment. …
When fabulously privileged white progressives talk about the evils of white privilege, don’t think they’re talking about themselves. They are morally excluded from such judgments because they subscribe to all the right nostrums about diversity, equity and inclusion. They mean you. …
The annual global jamboree of bureaucracy:
Our masters’ doubletalk will be on full display in the next week or two at the COP26 climate summit, when politicians, chief executives and leaders of environmental groups will deliver their grave warnings about the sacrifices that must be made to save the planet from extinction.
You’ve seen it already in simple acts of hypocrisy such as President Biden driving through Rome last week in an 85-car motorcade to show up at the Vatican for a meeting in which he and Pope Francis solemnly pledged to fight the “climate crisis”.
Or in the spectacle of tens of thousands of people flying into Glasgow, staying for weeks in comfortably warm, well-lit hotels through a darkening autumn, sustained no doubt by a stream of finely produced victuals. Never in the field of human confabs was so much salmon smoked by so many for so few.
With a whiff of corruption:
You’ve seen it too in a president who shuts down natural-gas pipelines in the US not long after his son, on the basis of no expertise whatever, has collected millions of dollars for attending the occasional board meeting of one of eastern Europe’s largest natural-gas companies. …
In the spirit of “let them eat cake”:
The ultimate demonstration of the gulf between our leaders’ alarmist prescriptions and the reality of life for the rest of us can be witnessed in an energy crisis that is pushing up fuel bills for hard-pressed working people, thanks in large part to policies that have prematurely reduced gas production, inexplicably killed off nuclear power in countries like Germany, and made our fragile economy dependent on wind power when the wind doesn’t blow and solar power when the sun don’t shine. …
“Folks, we all have that obligation — that obligation to our children and to our grandchildren,” Mr Biden said last week, addressing the climate crisis. But the words need careful parsing. In the newspeak of progressive sanctimony, pronouns are different. In this case, “we” means you.
Bureaucrats know best. In fact, they should be running the country. Every country. It’s for your own good.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
