Looks like Tempo is not representing the common person.... Really nothing new here ...
https://writing.yaschamounk.com/p/the-paradox-of-infinite-voices-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2709399&post_id=190630360&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1nfyj&triedRedirect=true&_src_ref=com.google.android.gm&utm_medium=emailThe Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides
What happens when elites all believe the same thing.
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But of late, these realities have started to shift, with huge impacts on contemporary politics. It is astonishing, for example, that according to The Economist, the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, most closely resembles the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate, in 1996. (Unsurprisingly, both lost.)
This transformation is even visible in the realm of popular culture. Take, as an example, the most famous American cartoon of the last decades. When The Simpsons first aired, Homer Simpson was likely a Democrat, his pious neighbor Ned Flanders definitely a Republican. But over the three decades that the show has been on air, the nature of America’s partisan divide has shifted so much that any politically astute viewer would now assume these characters to have rather different loyalties. Flanders may be sufficiently alienated by the coarseness of the populist right to vote for the Democrats; Homer would undoubtedly support Donald Trump.
This transformation has been called by a variety of names. Thomas Piketty has described it as the rise of the Brahmin left. David Brooks has written about the rise of the Bobo. Matthew Yglesias has lamented the rise of The Groups. I propose to call it the Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie: New York’s wealthy used to live on the Upper East Side, to pride themselves on their old family ties, to value markers of high culture like the opera, and to vote conservative; today, they live in Brooklyn, believe that they have earned their place in the upper echelons of society thanks to succeeding in a meritocratic competition, are more likely to care about rock bands or microbrews, and think of themselves as progressive.
That same transformation also helps to explain the Paradox of Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds. The population of the United States, and of many other Western democracies, is now deeply stratified by educational achievement. The affluent and highly credentialed are mostly on the political left. The working class is increasingly drifting to the political right. And that has deeply transformed the composition, the values, and even the actions of the professional class.
Plumbers are right wing but lawyers are left wing. Cab drivers are right wing but university professors are left wing. Police officers are right wing but civil servants are left wing. And though many professions claim to be apolitical, the plumbers and cab drivers and police officers increasingly suspect that the lawyers and professors and civil servants are letting their political values influence their work. The decline in respect for “experts” is in part owed to the blatant lies spread on social media; but it also has its roots in the real ways in which the consensus within these professions has increasingly come to adhere to a narrowly progressive—and often lamentably erroneous—set of assumptions about the world.
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It should, then, come as no surprise that, as a recent paper by Laurenz Günther shows, a significant gap has formed between the views of elected officials and those of the voters they are supposed to represent. In Germany in 2013, at a time when right-wing populists had not yet made it into the national parliament, for example, the average politician was much more likely than the average voter to say that it should be easier to immigrate to the country. In fact, even the average member of the Bundestag for the Christian Democrats, the most right-leaning party to be represented in that body at that time, was well to the left of the median voter on this question.
Similar gaps of political representation, Günther shows, also held in other countries and for other topics. They are evident in questions about how severe the sentences for violent criminals should be; in questions about whether schools should teach students to obey social authorities; and in questions about whether politicians should prioritize the fight against climate change over economic growth.
There are many partial explanations for the astonishing success of populist parties over the past decade. The rise of the internet and of social media, for example, clearly made it easier for outsiders to storm the political stage and intensified the public’s tendency to see the world in unremittingly negative terms. But as Günther suggests, the big gap in views about cultural topics between most voters and most of their representatives surely played an important role: The most straightforward reason why right-wing populists have gained so much in vote share of late “is that they fill the cultural representation gap.”
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