What people “hate even more is to be patronized”
Andrew L Seidel (“The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American“) notes that the framers of the U.S. Constitution were for the most part not religious men. At least, not in the evangelicals’ sense. Where they referenced morality and religion as necessary to an orderly society, the two were separate things. For men such as themselves, morality was the product of their elite educations and deep inquiry. For the masses, religion was a pale substitute and ripe for abuse and exploitation by the unscrupulous.*
To guard against the latter, the framers revered almost as secular saints were elitists in a groundbreaking way by wisely separating church and state. Thus, they wrote “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” into the U.S. Constitution even before the First Amendment was added.
On that note, Tom Nichols in his The Atlantic newsletter addresses the very different elitism of Fox personalities.
The MAGA right loudly whines, Nichols observes, that they’ve been looked down on while describing opponents “as traitors, perverts, and, as Donald Trump himself once put it, ‘human scum.’” In MAGAstan, “Fuck your feelings” works only one way.
Nichols owns being elitist insofar as he believes “some people are better at things than others.” In fact, that “some opinions, political views, personal actions, and life choices are better than others,” he writes:
In this, elitism is the opposite of populism, whose adherents believe that virtue and competence reside in the common wisdom of a nebulous coalition called “the people.” This pernicious and romantic myth is often a danger to liberal democracies and constitutional orders that are founded, first and foremost, on the inherent rights of individuals rather than whatever raw majorities think is right at any given time.
The American right, however, now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.”They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics.
Nichols may hold to elite views. He has argued them with Trump populists. But never patronized them as elites at Fox and the GOP:
Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. Fox, and the Republican Party it serves, for years has relentlessly patronized its audience, cooing to viewers about how right they are not to trust anyone else, banging the desk about the corruption of American institutions, and shouting into the camera about how the liars and betrayers must pay.
Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.
You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and “critical race theory.” These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right.
They are shameless about it.
It is not condescending to tell people when they are wrong, Nichols insists. But what people hate more than condescension “is to be patronized.”