America's Super-Elite Disconnect
Last month came a fascinating new report from the institute of Scott Rasmussen, founder of the famed Rasmussen Reports polling center. Its aim was to, for the first time, quantitatively define the true ‘elite’ of society, which control most of our social narratives, politics, and general ‘orthodoxy’.
The first-ever survey research defining the characteristics and beliefs of an Elite 1% who are the root cause of political dysfunction in America today.
It has been picked up by a variety of publications, from NYPost:
To Boston Globe, and others:
The full report centered on a members-only webinar presentation by Rasmussen, but the provided PDF file summarizes the most salient survey graphics and point breakdowns.
For those interested, Rasmussen appeared on Newt Gingrich’s podcast to discuss the results, where he eloquently summarized his chief findings, as well as how he first stumbled on them.
The NYPost article summarized the dataset best:
The United States has a wealthy, partisan elite class that’s not only immune from and numb to the problems of their countrymen, but enormously confident in and willing to impose unpopular policies on them.
This is a recipe for disaster.
And this supplemental Newt Gingrich writeup describes just how Rasmussen first got wind of it all:
While doing their two weekly national surveys, Rasmussen and his team noticed an anomaly. Out of every 1,000 or so respondents, there would always be three or four who were far more radical than everyone else. After several months of finding these unusual responses, Rasmussen realized they all shared three characteristics.
The radical responses came from people who had graduate degrees (not just graduate studies), family incomes above $150,000 a year, and lived in large cities (more than 10,000 people per zip code).
What’s more, is that amongst this 1% ‘elite’, there is an even more radicalized subset Rasmussen calls the ‘super-elite’, which are characterized by primarily attending one of twelve identified elite schools:
Gingrich adds:
Charles Murray in his classic work, “Coming Apart,” analyzed zip codes and proved that graduates from “dirty dozen” universities that Rasmussen described live, work and play in the same zip codes. They are an isolated set and create a “power aristocracy” that has no knowledge of the rest of us – and contempt for most of us. This perfectly explains Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” line.
But more on those later.
First, who are these garden variety 1% elites in question? Rasmussen breaks them down into three prerequisites:
Postgraduate degree
Make more than $150k per year
Live in a densely populated urban area
Their other basics come down as follows, which reveals they are ‘surprisingly young’:
Granted, much of this may come as fairly self-evident to most of us. But the data has rarely been collated in so intuitive and presentable a fashion.
Let’s first look at the actual disparities between the normal population and the elites at the heart of the analysis, before extrapolating that outward.
The first revolves around perceptions of individual freedoms:
Nearly 60% of regular voters believe there is not enough freedom, while only 21% of the elites do so. A shocking nearly 50% of elites believe there is too much freedom, while only 16% of voters think so.
In the Gingrich interview, Rasmussen elaborates on this tack, explaining that many of these haut monde strongly resent how the bellyaching hoi polloi acted during the Covid ‘pandemic’ era, in particular—not only their refusal to mask, but the subsequent consolidation of their anti-vax stance. This deepened the rift between the two sides, with the ‘elites’ further consigning their estranged underclass to the ash pile of entitlement. As always, there is nothing more effective than fear of bodily harm in forging visceral resentment between people.
But the mechanism most strongly behind this fault-line has the following wellspring: 70% of elites trust the government, while only a miniscule less than ~20% of the public does:
Even more staggering is the vast gulf between each side’s trust in the ‘professional class’:
Check the figures: Only 6% of voters have a favorable opinion of Congress, 10% in journalists, and 17% in professors. Amongst the 1%-er elites, these numbers average above 70%; this alone tells virtually the entire story.
Another:
77% of the elite would impose restrictions on gas, food rationing, etc., due to “climate change”, while 63% of regular voters oppose such measures. In fact, the elite in general roundly support bans of gas-powered vehicles, wood stoves, SUVs, non-essential air travel, and even air conditioning while the vast majority of voters are totally against.
Here’s one of the twelve mentioned universities from which the majority of 1%-ers sprout:
On the topic of institutions, it’s no surprise that the twelve keystone mostly Ivy League schools form a sort of conduit which filters the elite into pedestals of power in society. It’s a well-established pipeline that feeds a narrow, pre-selected segment of society increasingly higher through an ideological purification strainer meant to weed out any pesky nonconforming slip-throughs.
Anyone who’s studied the history of the 20th century’s rise of transnationalist institutions will know that from the early 1900s, cohorts like that of Milner and Rhodes established various programs and fellowships like the ‘Rhodes Scholarship’ precisely for this purpose. Such ‘pipelines’ have pullulated throughout the Western world, and include the modern day grooming lab known as the ‘Young Global Leaders’, of Klaus Schwab’s extraction.
These institutional programs serve as a winnowing mechanism for the global financial elite to distinguish the candidates with the right genteel pedigrees, sociopathic leanings, philistine and transnationalist compositions in order to find groom-able candidates for future leadership appointments. Take a look at the bonafides of any top globalist leader or policymaker—whether they’re from financial institutions like the ECB, IMF, Federal Reserve, or security organizations like NATO—and you will invariably find longstanding membership or distinctions from the handful of established ‘Old Order’ programs. The unelected cronies, which are in fact hand-selected and appointed by the nameless nomenklatura above, almost always originate from the same small clique.
It’s well known that the top economists, hedge fund directors—for firms like Goldman Sachs, for instance—constitutional lawyers, etc., all originate from this exiguous collective of schools, like Harvard. This is designed to allow the elites to precisely control the small pool of vetted loyalists before inducting them into their rarefied and closely-guarded ranks. It’s a closed loop system, and is central to the regulation of the upper strata which serves as the fabric of the elite’s control mechanism.
When it comes to Rasmussen’s report, it’s clear that the ‘super elite’ serve to become pillars of influence-making in society, acting as the enforcement guardrails to further manage and regulate the interests of the most exclusive managerial class, tied to the old banking families. In short: it’s a well-oiled, highly-selective pipeline which continually funnels the “right people”—ambitious, but malleable and servile to globalist interests—to the top.
Rasmussen’s survey reveals just how out of touch they are with regular society. Given that their milieu remains their own closeted cohort, these people never truly intermingle nor experience the cares or frustrations of the average worker in the street. They exist solely in a parallel simulated reality, which is reinforced for them on a daily basis through the confirmation bias generating engines of leftist social media, and liberal-controlled-and-dominated big tech corporations, which filter society for them like a pair of AR glasses.
The extremes of their out-of-touch stations are witnessed daily, e.g.:
The one seeming contradiction is that these elites predominantly “live in zipcodes exceeding a population density of 10,000 people per square mile.” This misleading implies they live in large cities like New York, where they would in fact be forced to endure daily commingling with the peasantry. In reality, we know they sit entrenched in highly sequestered aristocrats’ quarters within these cities—like the Upper East Side in Manhattan, or Kalorama in D.C. Being shuttled in swank car service to and fro, they rarely deign to cross paths with the commoners for whom they have nothing but contempt, apart from some token quick-grab at the corner coffee-and-bun kiosk to reassure themselves that they’re ‘in touch’ with the slipstream of society.
No better representation of this class has been put to film in recent times than the DeLillo-adapted, Cronenberg-directed Cosmopolis.
The film perfectly metaphorizes the idea of the elites’ siloed reality by setting the entire plot in the imponderably wealthy CEO’s luxe limo; his only connection to the real world, for which he neurotically hungers, is through the bullet-resistant panes which surround him like digital screens. Of course, beyond that, the film likewise deals with the many issues of the elite-pleb disconnect, ending in a violent turn with one of the CEO’s own pathologically disgruntled and underappreciated grunt workers.
In many respects, this is an age-old problem: elites have always existed in parallel societies. However, the advent of digital and social media technologies have allowed them to encase themselves in an ever-impermeable confirmation bias bubble like never before. Listen to interviews with top Washington policymakers, corporate bigwigs, etc., and note how they exclusively mainline the most mainstream corporate publications like WaPo, NYTimes, etc. It becomes its own hermetic self-referencing feedback loop increasingly shut-off from the real outside world of human experience.
As the earlier NYPost article described:
If America is to avoid a tailspin into this toxic feedback loop, its elites will need to step outside their bubble, stop conforming in an effort to blend in with their myopic peers and start addressing the legitimate grievances of their fellow Americans.
This explains such things as the elites’ obsession with climate change, as that is one issue that exists solely ‘on paper’—as an abstraction—and is not realistically felt in the common quarters. The aristos who repeatedly reflect their own shrill echochamber alarmism on this issue get increasingly radicalized, particularly given that—as reported earlier—they put far more store in institutions of authority than the average prole. This results in the calcification of their blind belief in specters like climate change, despite their paying only lip service to it, and not acting accordingly in light of such an existential ‘threat’.
The problem is exacerbated by social ills which create divisions along gender lines, disproportionately giving weight to female-centric concerns, as per the Longhouse theory:
The Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.
Women are naturally wired to be more sympathetic—and thus suggestible—to the social engineering imperatives co-opting the current narrative. Men are being increasingly pushed out from higher education, which means that even among the elites funnelled upward, the stances skew increasingly to the ‘Longhouse’:
This feminization of the managerial class can be seen from a variety of vantage points:
As everyone is now aware, unmarried women by far make the most disproportionate jump into Democrat Land, as well as increasingly radicalized hyperliberal policies—which reflects in other interesting ways:
As an aside, one X user had a topically cogent comment about the screenshot below:
Most of the bluecheck unpacking of the collapsing male college enrollment story focuses on how worrisome it is that these men won't espouse elite political opinions
But one of the most revealing disparities in the Rasmussen survey showed just how out of touch the elites are specifically to economic issues which affect the plebs most—as opposed to the airy abstractions of fringe intellectual culture war issues:
Here you can see that a whopping 82% of elites believe Biden is succeeding on jobs—which by extension means approval of the economy. Only 41% of voters think so.
This is particularly revealing because jobs and the economy are the one lifeblood issue directly felt by regular voters first hand. The elites have little connection to it, as no matter how big or small the unemployment numbers get, they remain secure in their entrenched upper-strata affluent lives.
The last area which Rasmussen says shocked even him, was the question surrounding the elites’ amorality. He found that nearly 70% of the super-elites would be fine with their candidate cheating rather than losing an election. Only a tiny 7% of regular voters harbored such amoral predilections:
Rasmussen said that this project has revealed the scariest single polling number he has seen in nearly 35 years of studying popular opinion. According to his data, 35 percent of the elite 1 percent (and 69 percent of the politically obsessed elite 1 percent) said they would rather cheat than lose a close election. Among average Americans, 93 percent reject cheating and accept defeat in an honest election. Only 7 percent reported they would cheat. -source
This is most stunning if only for the reason that it presents by far the widest margin of difference of any of the other questions. It alone explains many of society’s ills, including how readily the influence-wielding elite were already proven to use their considerable wealth and reach to put a ‘thumb on the scales’ of the 2020 election.
It’s not surprising, then, that this pervasive culture of amorality reflects in all the current narratives leading to the 2024 election:
The above article from Foreign Affairs—the official journal of the Council on Foreign Relations—is particularly emblematic in this regard, specifically because the CFR in many respects represents the 1% super-elite totem pole under discussion. The conclave is made out of not just one particular class—like world leaders—but seeks to network and uniformize the entire fabric of the upper echelon, from business elite, bureaucratic royalty, and even top pop culture influencers like Angelina Jolie, who’s held membership for years.
The article is a testament to exactly the types of hypocrisies inherent to much of the ruling class. They speak of ‘worthy goals’ being pursued via ‘unworthy means’ for the sake of ‘liberal’ and democratic objectives, but the problem is: who decides on these ‘worthy goals’? According to their estimate, toppling a variety of unsavory, or simply ‘incompatible’, leaders around the world was a ‘worthy goal’. But inherent to ‘democracy’ and the very liberal ideals they claim to champion is the citizenry’s democratic approval of such policymaking directions.
In the ‘liberal’ West this tiny consort of elites pass off their own self-serving agendas with phony euphemisms couched as ‘democratic ideals’, when in reality the people have no say in any of it. That’s why this version of ‘liberal democracy’ is nothing more than a counterfeit guise to carry out geopolitical objectives necessary for the continued dominance of the world banking and financial elite.
To enslave your own citizens in a dragnet of lies is not a world of ‘freedom’ at all—it is intellectual and moral enslavement, even if your citizens happen to unwittingly enjoy the material comforts of a system built on hideously disguised and predatory exploitation. The problem is, such circumstances are never sustainable in the long term: sure, they can create semi-utopian conditions for your own brood, but the rest of the world eventually catches on to the fraud, demanding their pound of flesh as recompense. It would serve the elites better to cease the charade and simply tell the truth: it has nothing to do with lofty, ersatz ideals like “freedom” and “liberalism”, but rather the preservation of Western primacy and a favored way of life; that’s all.
The article is a burlesque travesty of hypocrisy: it belabors the point about Russia and China’s putative ‘aggression’ and ‘illiberal’ policies—like the Ukraine ‘invasion’—while cretinously ignoring U.S.’ own far more numerous transgressions, invasions, and occupations of various sovereign states, not to mention the current facilitation of full-blown unmitigated genocide in Gaza, for which the U.S. just delivered another huge batch of bombs to Israel as of this writing. China and Russia’s elections too have proven far more democratic and ‘liberal’ than that of the phony U.S. electoral ‘production’, which saw an obvious stolen ‘victory’ for a reviled candidate in 2020, or even that of today’s charade of the coordinated invasion of millions of illegals for the purpose of upending another “democratic” election in 2024. The breathless jeremiads of establishment footsoldiers are nothing more than desperate backstops meant to levee and dike the crumbling edifice of their superannuated Old Order.
Just behold the ideals of ‘liberal democracy’ the elites so steadfastly preen about:
Who knew Democracy was so complicated?
And ‘liberal’ ideals, which were supposed to stand for personal freedom, are all the rage these days:
In reality, all of these terms and concepts are merely the artifacts of the shibbolethic facade erected to serve the elites’ control paradigm. It all ties back to the subject at hand: the 1% class from Rasmussen’s poll have created a suprapositioned tier of institutions which serve as the The System’s dominance preservation gearwork. The self-referential design is a purposeful ideological enforcement mechanism meant to flue the ‘correct people’ to the top of the pyramid structure, while gate-keeping undesirables not blue-blooded enough for the exclusive soiree.
Ultimately, the author of the Foreign Affairs piece on amorality above, Hal Brands, is a fitting example of this very pipeline. A glimpse of his wiki shows he not only bears the ‘distinguishing’ mark of some Henry A. Kissinger plaudit—precisely the type of Rhodes Scholar pipeline-for-the-elites I spoke of—but that he even attended not one, but two of the 12 ‘chosen’ institutions singled out by Rasmussen:
That makes Mr. Brands the poster child of this insulated elite class. Sitting on their endless plush NGO stipends and sinecures, figures like Brands hack away their lives penning screed after dishonest screed pushing the most radical of globalist agendas for their Olympian coevals, all distantly detached from the lowly concerns of commoners beneath the clouds.
For another exemplary showcase of the disconnect, look no further than this new MSNBC clip about the upcoming barn burner titled White Rural Rage:
Naturally, the authors are representative of Rasmussen’s intellectual and affluent beau monde—one of them a political science professor at University of Maryland, the other a WaPo writer and fellow at some beltway NGO-linked ‘foundation’ which incubates precisely the type of establishment flacks in question.
Such people usually end up coronated as ‘senior fellows’ or, even more risibly, ‘scholars’ at these dubious foundations; ambiguous and self-styled monikers meant to evoke erudition and authority, in actuality standing for nothing more than empty anointment by corporate-globalist institutions who’ve designated them as reliable factotums and Co-Glo agenda disseminators.
Unfortunately, there is no solution for the societal split. Institutions receiving corporate funding of any kind can be deemed captured, as there are always strings attached. This leaves the only way forward as to shun, desecrate, and vilify any and all institutions so that the break can eventually resolve into a total decoupling from original and authentic society. Once a parallel system is developed, the empty ‘institutions’ of former consequence should desiccate and shrivel into flaky carapaces, to be trampled underfoot like locust crusts.
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How many are Jews?
White men are excluded from these colleges.
This post also helps explain the fanatical hatred of Trump, and the easy willingness to go after him with lawfare cases based on little more than hot air. It's not just that Trump has views counter to the elites, but he actually IS an elite. And hence, a traitor to their class. This enrages them. That a once iconic New York City billionaire should somehow end up the champion of the proles is basically inconceivable. This is why so much of the rage against Trump is mindless sputtering. And for the love of god he likes his steaks well done and eats them with ketchup!
So yes, our lovely elites will stop at NOTHING to stop Trump and rid him from their sight for good. The only thing that surprises me is that they haven't managed it just yet. But they will, one way or another.