America's Dysfunctional Overclass

Michael Barone on Feb 16, 2024

This attitude is echoed by the wider group of Democratic voters. A 2023 Pew Research survey shows that while 31% of Republicans, even with their party out of power, think America "stands above all other countries in the world," only 9% of Democrats do so.

It's an unstable and dangerous situation when a largely one-party elite looks, with fear and loathing, across what Rasmussen describes as a "Grand Canyon gap" between it and its multiparty fellow citizens. It's reminiscent somehow of the "let them eat cake" French royalists in 1789 or Russian nobles in 1917. An overclass this disconnected and contemptuous risks disruption.

A better approach comes from an undoubted member of America's elite, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Speaking to CNBC at Davos last month, Dimon recounted a bus trip to Spokane and Boise and Bozeman: "People are growing. They're hungry to grow. They're innovating. It's everywhere. It's not just Silicon Valley."

Perhaps aware the Mountain West votes Republican, Dimon, who calls himself a centrist Democrat, conceded that former President Donald Trump "wasn't wrong about some of the critical issues" and was "kind of right" about NATO and immigration and "grew the economy quite well."

Of elite Democrats' contempt for Trump supporters, he had less to say. "The Democrats have done a good job with the deplorables, hugging their Bibles and their beer and their guns. I mean, really? Can we stop that stuff and actually grow up and treat other people respectfully and listen to them a little bit?"

It's a question other members of our dysfunctional overclass might ask themselves.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.