Dana Milbank noticed a strange phenomenon: some prominent members of the GOP who graduated from Ivy League colleges are denouncing Democrats who graduated from the same colleges as elitists. He wrote this column during the Senate hearings on the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. How dare this Harvard/Harvard Law School elitist expect to win their votes!
Sen. Tom Cotton is what you might call a counterfeit commoner.
The dour Arkansas Republican announced with indignation at this week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings that he doesn’t want a justice who follows the “views of the legal elite.” He later complained that “a bunch of elite lawyers” such as nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson “think that sentences for child pornography are too harsh. I don’t and I bet a lot of normal Americans don’t, either.”
And who is this “normal American” decrying the “legal elite”? Why, he’s a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, a former clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and a former associate at two Washington-insider law firms who now sits on the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate.
He’s part of a Republican Party of 2022 that has flipped the script on populism: The gentry are revolting.
At the same hearings this week, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) decried a “managerial elite” of media, academics, bureaucrats and corporations. “This cabal think they are smarter and more virtuous than the American people,” argued Kennedy, whose bio says he has a “degree with first class honors from Oxford University (Magdalen College).” This man of the people — Phi Beta Kappa at Vanderbilt, executive editor of the law review at the University of Virginia and a member of something called the Order of the Coif — has been heard denouncing the “goat’s-milk-latte-drinkin’, avocado-toast-eating insider’s elite.”
Also on the dais during the proceedings: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law who loves to inveigh against the “coastal elites,” and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a former Supreme Court clerk out of Stanford University and Yale Law School who fancies himself standing with the proletariat in “the great divide” between the “leadership elite and the great and broad middle of our society.”
Three decades ago, Pat Buchanan, himself a Washington insider, ran for the Republican presidential nomination claiming a revolution of “peasants with pitchforks.” The latest Republican revolution seems to be of the trickle-down variety. Call it plutocrats with pitchforks.
Cruz, Hawley and Cotton are all contemplating presidential runs — where they might meet in the Republican primary another man of the people, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. A graduate of Yale and Harvard Law, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Don’t Trust the Elites,” and he rails routinely about “elites” trying to shove this or that “down the throats of the American people.”
These phonies must be onto something, because a new generation of pretend populists aims to join them in the Senate.
In Nevada, Republican candidate Adam Laxalt portrays himself as a modern-day Robespierre. He has repeatedly warned of the “rich elites … taking over America,” “elites in Washington,” the “coastal elites,” the “elites” who “do not believe in our nation” and the “elites” who are “all in one club” while “we’re all in another club.”
“We”? Laxalt is the grandson of a U.S. senator and governor of Nevada and the son of a Washington lobbyist. He is a graduate of prep school, Georgetown University and Georgetown Law School who recently hauled in $2.2 million as a partner at Cooper & Kirk, the same Washington firm that employed those plebeians Cotton and Cruz.
Milbank goes on in this vein, identifying other Republicans who rail against elites. Hypocrisy seems to be in vogue. Beware.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tucker Carlson is also a phony populist; he’s this pampered multi-millionaire elitist who regularly spouts far right wing pseudo-populist talking points and throws raw bloody red meat to his meat-head audience. Cenk Uyghur of The Young Turks recently proposed the shocking theory that Carlson wants to be president and is preparing to make a run. Cenk thinks that TC is smarter (sic) than the other GOP gargoyles and that he stands a good chance of winning. I have to disagree with Cenk on this one, I think Tucker is a light weight and this is just a marketing ploy to boost his viewership and that he’s not serious about running for president. In the past, TC denied any desire to run for president. Why would he run for president when he can make millions night after night spouting far right wing nonsense. Cenk is way off base on this one.
Carlson surely knows how Donald Trump ran for the presidency and, to his great surprise, won. There is little doubt that Trump had only his pocketbook on his mind. He demonstrated the win-win of far right populism: if you win, you can throw a chain in the gears of government, then complain when it does not work. If you lose you can make big money complaining about big government.
What does Carlson want? A more powerful voice for Carlson. What would help us all? A Carlson hog tied and run out of town on a rail.
pointing out that most dangerous recipe: 1) win 2) throw a huge chain in the gears of government 3) wait a while and then complain that government does not work 4) garner thousands of new voters who are mad that the government does not work
They do this because the media allows them to do this. They amplify and repeat the attacks by the right wing pseudo-populists as if they were legitimate and not the height of hypocrisy.
Elizabeth Warren, a self-made woman, and Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Joe Biden did not come from the overprivileged backgrounds that these pseudo-populists did. John Kerry comes closest to having the elite background that so many Republicans have.
And remember, their hypocrisy stops whenever one of their elite folks is running against a self made man like Joe Biden.
For Pennsylvania Senate, you have elite, overprivileged Republicans like hedge fund guy David McCormack or celebrity Dr. Oz running against John Fetterman. In Ohio, you have a Republican hedge fund Yalie running against a guy who went to Bowling Green State U.
The Republicans are more the party of the elite than they have ever been. The elite plus a bunch of know-nothings who are willing to say the nastiest things but will always vote for the things the elites tell them to support.
The media has allowed the Republicans to re-define “elite” to mean “believes in facts and truth” without explaining the Republican definition of “elite” is a very rich and privileged person who attended elite schools who has found it politically convenient to pretend to care about middle class Americans while doing absolutely nothing for them.
Many of the top Republicans are demagogues that say and do anything to manipulate their base. Caring about working families is not on their list of priorities. Remember when Republicans claimed they would create an amazing alternative to Obama Care. We’re still waiting years and years later. Their main strategy is divide and conquer, which, unfortunately, often works for them.
Remember how the media always reminds the public that the Republicans lied to them about having an amazing alternative to Obamacare?
Oh, never mind. When Ron DeSantis starts campaigning for president saying he has an amazing alternative to Obamacare, the NYT will report it as “DeSantis has been campaigning on his new better alternative to Obamacare; partisan democrats are critical of his desire to repeal Obamacare and replace it with his new plan”.
And those NYT journalists will pat themselves on the back for their very informative “fair and balanced” reporting of Ron DeSantis’ desire to replace Obamacare with his superior plan! After all, they included a disclaimer that partisan democrats criticized him for wanting to repeal Obamacare and replace it with his superior plan, so that makes them terrific journalists.
Politics has always been a game for the wealthy. Jefferson, Adams, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, all these early leaders were economic elites. Although he came from poverty, Lyndon Johnson made a lot of money before he grew politically powerful, and FDR was a blue blood of the bluest type.
All of these Cotton/Hawley types know exactly what they are doing. They know that their willing trespass on the liberties of voting and free speech carry the consequence of totalitarianism. Their predecessors: Reagan, Cheney, Bush, Goldwater, etc, were different only in that they were unwilling to destroy the idea of representative government in order to gain the control they wanted on the body politic. This is the new “conservative.” Long in fear of the “other,” they have accepted the idea of manipulating the votes of those who do not understand what they are doing so they can maintain a control over the majority.
Well said! The Republican Party of today is a threat to democracy.
I daresay one other thing they all hate is blatant hypocrisy.
LOL
Sitting here in the UK, their prejudices and clumsy agendas are so blatantly obvious. In an earlier decade it would have been seen as comic and laughed out of the public domain.
Ivy League Republicans know the best way to thwart equal opportunity for women, blacks and/or gays and, to reinforce colonialism and, to provide opportunities for grift by the wealthy, is to insert conservative Christian religion into their messaging. Politicians who attended private or religious schools and who claim God backs fascism are lethal to the rights of Americans and to democracy.
The Tucker Carlson show’s invitation to Patriarch Kiril, Putin’s strategist, would be totally consistent with the Republican plot.
The private University of Chicago deserves a shout out in the context of Milbank’s story.
Rolling Stone posted an interesting article today about University of Chicago graduate David McIntosh. McIntosh champions Josh Mandel for Senator from Ohio. McIntosh was a student of Antonin Scalia. McIntosh is a co-founder of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy and he represented Indiana in Congress. He currently heads the right wing Club for Growth.
I presume news readers and listeners may learn more about Rolling Stone-referenced rumors in the future. Allegedly, Trump and Trump Jr. believed them.
Mandel’s potential voters in Ohio are conservative Christians.
Women won’t be catching a break in Ohio. JD Vance, also running for Senator from Ohio (backed by Tucker Carlson), is funded by Peter Thiel who said women voting in a capitalistic democracy is an oxymoron. Btw- Vance’s investments use immigrant visas, the same ones that Vance condemns.
Also running is Mike Gibbons, conservative religious, attended religious schools where he learned and now uses as a campaign slogan- God gives us our rights not, the government.
This isn’t anything new. I specifically remember Dubya campaigning in one of the Carolinas. He was wearing a white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. He said something along the lines of (referring to Gore), “We don’t need an elite who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.” The good ol’ boys listening to him agreed:”YEAH!”
What’s disturbing is the amount of people who lap up this garbage. Maybe that right there is evidence of the failure of public education. #sarcasm
And as for Mike Gibbons, I guess God has never been interested in giving non-white, non-landowning men and women their rights. How horrible of Him. Thank goodness the government was there and eventually stepped in, after much pressure.