The Elites vs. the Masses
A Smothering, Not a Disconnect
Writers and public intellectuals Matt Goodwin and Rob Henderson rail at the new elite (Goodwin) and their luxury beliefs (Henderson) that are woefully out of step with the masses. Henderson defines luxury beliefs as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.
The elite class’ naval-gazing solipsism reflects their intrinsic narcissism, which is insistent on uprooting social norms as though norms are mere playthings, balls to be juggled in the air, with no consideration on how these balls will come crashing down for the masses. For example, the Defund the Police movement, a brainchild of the elite, was less than enthusiastically received on the ground in low-income and/or black neighborhoods.
The masses do not have the buffer of luxury to be able to withstand the minor and major earthquakes perpetuated by the ruling classes’ propensities and compulsions to distort, fabricate, and socially engineer crises. Kitchen table concerns like paying the rent and a stable, functioning society are more top of mind for the masses.
Meanwhile, the rich entitled elite use their status to dodge any unforeseen consequences for the implementation of norm-changing luxury beliefs. In 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) infamously headed to balmy Cancún, Mexico to flee frigid temperatures after a recently privatized Texas electric grid system failed to provide power and water. His elite cynicism was exposed for all the world to see when he was photographed hatching his escape at the airport, leaving the masses to fend for themselves. We only have to look to 2016's case of sexual assaulter Brock Turner's “affluenza” or the 2019 college admissions scandal where elites bribed college officials into enrolling their children, to be reminded of the elite’s entitlement run amok amongst countless scores of other examples.
Unfortunately, in this climate, parsing out the values of the masses from the elites is a tricky endeavor as the masses emulate the elite (think Kardashians) and are captured on many levels, as the masses utilize and are inculcated by the elite’s technology such as television and social media. There's no way to get out from underneath the elite’s thumb, no matter how antisocial one is. Antisocial impulses can be observed in anti-authoritarian social movements such as punk rock and/or hippie movements, yet never become mainstream as a function of the limiting principle of their raison d'être.
A central theme of Professor of Politics at Kent, England, Matt Goodwin's writing is that populist uprisings world-over, and in particular in Europe, are a result of a disconnect between the values and priorities of the masses and the elite. In other words, populist revolts are proportionate to the disconnect with the elites.
From the viewpoint of narcissism, it is the forced enmeshment or smothering perpetrated by the elites through manipulations intrinsic to narcissistic abuse that there is not enough oxygen for the masses to breathe and function with their own traditional values and as such, the masses are butting heads with liberal, progressive and cosmopolitan values of the elite.
Goodwin writes that we are in a “crisis of moral legitimacy and authority.” The old elite were part of an era of a strong, accountable, and responsive nation-state and/or unitary state (Britain), which was unified against a common threat of communism during the Cold War and into the 1970s.
After the 1970s, this perception of a competent, legitimate, and authoritative elite drained away as Western states grappled with an array of new disruptive forces —the rise and relentless spread of hyper-globalization, European integration, deregulation, devolution, and the onset of so-called ‘governance’, whereby power and influence were sent to a new expert class of unelected technocrats and supranational elites.
Power was increasingly pushed upwards or sideways, away from the masses. Elites actively participated in this, of course, because it chimed with their liberal universalist values, magnified their influence, and imbued them with a greater sense of social status, esteem, and moral righteousness. As Christopher Bickerton has written, increasingly elites derived their sense of social status, authority, and moral legitimacy not from their vertical relationship with the ordinary people below but rather from their horizontal relationship with other members of the new elite. -Goodwin
In the 21st century, we have entered into what Colin Crouch has called the era of ‘post-democracy’ — a distant, self-serving, technocratic, elite-led style of politics in which the expert class conspired to marginalize the masses, all of which hollowed out a genuine grassroots democracy.
Peter Mair has warned that elites in the West were increasingly ‘ruling the void’, congregating in institutions like the European Union that were insufficiently democratic, accountable, and transparent while losing touch with ordinary people. The age of party democracy, the age when elites were connected to the masses, argued Mair, was now over. The old parties had become so disconnected from the wider society that they no longer seemed capable of sustaining democracy. Instead, they had morphed into what Mair would later call ‘cartel parties’ —movements and leaders that no longer relied on the people for support but now relied on the state for money, resources, and an image of authority. This widening gap between the masses and the elites not only posed a crisis of moral legitimacy for the elite but now also began to drive growing support for national populist rebellions against the elite. -Goodwin
However, the plot thickens here as the elite’s home base of the left continues to merge and fuse the role of the individual to the collective to the state to the point where both the individual and the collective are bypassed and overlooked in favor of the agency of the state, most pointedly realized in state-sanctioned “gender-affirming care” for minors in California.
In an effort to globalize and homogenize the world and render threatening cultural, societal, and political differences anachronistic and obsolete, the narcissistic elite are vanishing distinctions in a consumptive envy-ridden greed tirade against “the other.” This manifestation is ironic, hence the confusion of whether the elite are disconnected or merged/fused with the masses, considering the narcissist’s ineptitude around seeing others as distinct, separate, and individuated.
Narcissistic abuse is known to be crazy-making. It is true that the elite are disconnected from the masses even as they endeavor futilely to hoist the masses up to their level, “if only they could evolve” so the elite thinking goes, to their pedigree. The narcissistic elite then cram their agenda down the traditionalist masses’ throats and resulting populism ensues after some degree of cultural adaptation and some degree of rebellion. From the masses’ perspective, there is no winning formula to appease their irascible and exacting elite masters.
And so, as is pro forma with narcissistic abuse, the inevitable people-pleasing codependency and ardent revolt eventuate, all fists and elbows. Typically, people will endeavor to please first and rebel later when pleasing becomes ineffective due to shifting goalposts. The underclass pleases the overclass through merger and fusion with the narcissist (as represented by the elite) and adopts narcissistic defenses to cope.
The masses’ merger and fusion with the narcissist, as embodied by the elite, is achieved through a manipulation called coercive snapshotting, whereby the masses are compelled to conform to the elite’s value system, which, owing to the impossibility and fantastic aspiration of such a sustained merger, lays the groundwork for a spectacular separation and individuation, i.e., a populist uprising, through the devalue and discard phases of narcissistic abuse when the masses fail to live up to the unrealistic and rigged expectations of the out to lunch and in this sense disconnected elite.
As a result of living in the void as Mair terms it, voters began to feel as though they were no longer in the conversation. As a result, academics began to talk about the emergence of an era of de-alignment, a volatile, chaotic, polarized, and unpredictable era in which voters were no longer tribally loyal to the main parties.
-Goodwin
Chafing at the oppressive mandates and strictures of a narcissistic elite, the masses with their native intrinsic values squirm and retaliate against the oppositional, antagonistic, extrinsic values of the elite (see chart below). As a function of their narcissism, the elite are unable to see the masses clearly and resort to denigrating them as racist, bigoted, and backward for adhering to traditional values. The reality is more nuanced, but the result is in keeping with narcissistic abuse, that the masses effectively have no voice, aren't seen and heard, and are marginalized, all of these dynamics leaving in its wake a polarized and fractious populace ripe for revolt.
The second point is the elite have been failing to deliver, which has been exacerbating this crisis largely because they sent power on authority away from the center to other institutions. -Goodwin
The chief story of the last 40 years in this country and many other Western democracies is a story of elite failure: the great financial crash, stagnant economies, inequality, spiraling national debt, the failure to see inflation coming, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the Middle East.
Prof. Matt Goodwin
Yet we're told again and again to return moral legitimacy in authenticity to that same elite. Yet the last 30 to 40 years have been a consistent story of elite failure. It doesn't matter who wins the next election, the story will be the same national governments that are constrained increasingly by forces that are beyond their control because they've given up so much power, authenticity, and legitimacy to other actors.
Point three, both of these things, the draining away of power and influence, the draining away of moral legitimacy has led the new elite to search for a new means of moral legitimacy. It's led them to increasingly embrace social and cultural power as a means of their moral legitimacy. They've embraced values increasingly to try and project their authenticity and authority to others, and so the new elite has been searching around now desperately for an ideology that validates the ruling class, but as we can now see through its embrace of social and cultural liberalism and increasingly radical progressivism that only represents 20% of Britain. -Goodwin
Goodwin asserts that this new ruling class is profoundly insecure, narcissistic, and politically intolerant of people who hold different political beliefs. These elites have turned to cultural power to try and give themselves a sense of solidarity with the masses.
Given the penchant for authoritarian narcissism, it's not surprising that the new elite are politically intolerant of dissent. Unless for self-serving goals, narcissists are not natural purveyors of magnanimity.
However, these new values are undermining their authority among ordinary voters. Culture has become the predominant means through which elites understand themselves and that is why it has increasingly lost the support and loyalty of the masses because the cultural values that the new elite are pushing are hardwired to push the masses apart and not pull them together.
The new elite increasingly use their values that inform their ideology as a source of status, their luxury beliefs — mass immigration/weaker national borders, the breakdown of the family, and the erosion of cultural guardrails that used to hold people together.
The new elite now derive their sense of status by projecting their luxury beliefs in order to distinguish themselves from everybody else in society, the low status masses, the gamins, the racists, the ignorant bigots, because it's the only way now they have of upholding and trying to restore their sense of moral legitimacy.
-Goodwin
Being “common” is the original sin of narcissism; the imperative is to be special and unique. This narcissistic imperative is ironic on the face of it considering narcissistic abuse squelches independence of mind and precludes others from being special. There is a sort of incongruence here, a bristling and chafing of competing philosophies, a cognitive dissonance, where the elite assert dominance yet codependently kowtow to the masses in an effort to achieve egalitarian solidarity and simultaneous dominion. It all amounts to strong-arming the masses into a grandiose paracosm or fantastic space.
This collapse in the authority and moral legitimacy of the elite has also been exacerbated by its failure to deliver, by its failure to project competence. Frank Furedi quotes Zaki Laïdi in his essay, who said: 'Power is nothing when it has lost meaning’. And for many voters today the power of the elite has lost its meaning.
-Goodwin
A consequence of the masses’ cultural merging and fusing with the elite is that there remains no daylight between the two groups and without this distinguishing gap, there ceases to be any meaningful distinction to warrant respect; after all, hierarchy, at the urging of the woke elite has collapsed and flattened at the behest and prerogative of progressive ideology. As a result, the masses enjoy an artificially inflated, albeit with insecure footing, narcissistic grandiosity of mass psychosis that they are “on the level” with the elite.
This elite positioning is another subterfuge to throw the masses off the scent of their political and social alienation. The elites have confused the masses by “progressively” restructuring and reordering, nay, dis-ordering and sowing chaos, a specialty of the narcissist, elites and narcissists being virtually one and the same.
There is no core self to the narcissist, no constellated self as Carl Jung would have put it, therefore society, is subject to the arbitrary and capricious whims of the ruling class elites who pretend as though the masses are on their level in a bad case of malignant egalitarianism what with the spurious bones the elite have thrown the masses in the forms of the nation-state, democracy, the vote, and the American dream.
On a visceral level, these bones, these scrap heaps, this chum are thrown to the masses to avoid a barbaric end to their reign such as the decapitations of noblemen that took place during the French Revolution that set the elites back on their heels.
When you change the way society works, values shift in response.
The elites engineer all kinds of social upheavals. Privatization, free markets, austerity —especially for the poor, inequality, and even reactions to pandemics. These situations shift baselines and normalize what used to be abnormal.
Goodwin declares, “The lesson of the last 10 years in politics is that voters won't stand for it anymore. The populist rebellions of the last 20 years do not represent the end of the revolt. They represent the beginning. The era of the alignment is going to be with us, and it will accelerate over the next few years and decades as voters increasingly look at a self-serving, insular, narcissistic, politically intolerant elite who no longer represents the values of the wider majority, no longer gives them a voice, and no longer treats them as legitimate and acceptable members of the wider community.”
Lacking object relations, a narcissistic elite who is inclined to psychological merger and fusion would be incapable of seeing “the other” and as such make for ineffective leaders. As much of the elite are regressed and infantile themselves, yet authoritarian, much like petulant and demanding toddlers, the resultantly regressed masses, who have by and large outsourced their agency to the narcissistic elites at their urging, find themselves in a double-bind, contending with both their own psychological regression and regressive so-called leaders.
Goodwin contends, “Until we restore power to the people and popular sovereignty, the rebellions of the last 20 years are only going to get bigger and bigger.” What he fails to consider is the feedback loop from hell — a paradoxical hopelessness of no adults being left in the room in a haplessly narcissistic age.
For a historical backdrop that frames the current state of affairs of the elites vs. the masses, please see Prof. Sam Vaknin’s video here entitled Watch This to Make Sense of the World (174K views) and/or read the edited transcript below, followed by a chart I have put together that outlines how the values of the elite are different from the masses, at least traditionally. The narcissistic elites pave the way for a narcissistic populace, bequeathing their extrinsic values.
In the last 300 years, a middle class was created. It emerged from the masses and it reverted to the elites. It collaborated with the elites. It compromised itself by collaborating with the elites.
The elites were fine with this because the middle class had always been small and the elites threw them some crumbs to make them feel good and encourage fantasies of social mobility and riches, the American dream and the middle class was happy and the elites were happy.
Then in the last hundred years, the masses could take it no more. We started to see mass movements, which had all the hallmarks of religions, secular religions, and which were founded on ideology. Ideology is the poor man, the ignorant man's philosophy. It's basic; it's demagogic; it's not very sophisticated. You don't have to have too much brain to comprehend it. It's prescriptive. It tells you what to do. And it's dictatorial. It's black and white thinking. There's the enemy and there's you. There's us and them.
So ideologies are a poor, ignorant man's philosophy.
After 1918 and well into the end of the 1960s, empires fell apart and monarchies vanished. The masses started to make demands.
By now the masses were no longer homicidal. They no longer wanted to kill the elites. They tried this. It didn't work. The masses had discovered something about themselves. They are not good at governing.
The masses tried communism. The masses tried fascism. The masses tried Nazism. It didn't work well. The masses even tried labor governance and labor parties in various parts of the world from Italy to the United Kingdom. It didn't work well either.
Masses are not built to govern. They don't have the internal intellectual capital. They don't have a traditional governing and they don't have the necessary skills and knowledge, etc. They also are not well connected.
Governance is about networking. It's about leveraging social capital.
The elites tried desperately because they realized that things were going the wrong way for them. They looked to the West and they saw decapitated noblemen in France. They looked a bit to the East and they saw a royal family, bullet-riddled in Russia. They looked further and they saw the Labour Party taking over in the United Kingdom. The earth was shaking. The elites were terrified. The elites were absolutely terrified. There was a yellow scare (Yellow Peril). There was a red scare.
So the elites introduced a variety of pieces of fiction, narratives, stories, movies, movie scripts, and they tried to sell the masses on these movie scripts.
One of these movie scripts is liberal democracy. Every four years, you get to tell us who will be in the elite.
The elites told the masses you have power. You decide who will be a member of our club, which of course is utter nonsense. Democracy is a sham. It's also an exceedingly bad idea because democracy led to Adolf Hitler and not comparing, but democracy led to Donald Trump. Democracy is a horrible idea. The masses are not built to govern. They don't have the qualifications, the knowledge, the capacity, the mentality, nothing.
But the elites were so terrified, so panic-stricken that they introduced universal suffrage (universal voting) and they included minorities such as women and ethnic minorities and so on and so forth in this sweeping universal suffrage, in this sweeping universal democracy.
And the second idea that they introduced was the nation-state.
So the elites tried to subdue the masses, subjugate them, control them, manipulate them, and channel their energy to derive maximum benefit from the masses by, on the one hand, giving them illusory freedom, illusory mobility, illusory power, like democracy.
And the notion that if you study and if you work hard, you're going to become rich, the American dream and democracy. These were the great levelers.
The idea was to level the playing field, egalitarianism, in other words.
But it became malignant egalitarianism.
The elites introduced liberal democracy. And the second idea that elites introduced was the nation-state.
The nation-state is a very new invention, around 200 years old.
Nationalism and democracy: these were the tools of the elites to subjugate, manipulate, and control the masses.
Both ideas were ludicrous. They were shams. They were utter unmitigated nonsense. There's no such thing as race. There's no such thing as a nation. And there's no such thing as democracy. This is a total psychotic hallucination.
This sham was an effort to structure the surging mobs, to control them, to prevent the inevitable decapitation, dilution in the square, and riots in the capital.
On January 6, the elites didn't want this to happen. The elites didn't want Donald Trump to happen. The elites didn't want Hitler to happen, except a few industrialists.
So the elites introduced liberal democracy and introduced nationalism, very often put together. It backfired because, to the shock of the elites, the masses wholeheartedly adopted and embraced democracy, adopted and embraced nationalism. The elites became immersed in this augmented reality. The masses became immersed in this augmented reality. The masses adopted democracy lovingly. And they regarded democracy as a way to break into the citadel of the elites. The masses adopted nationalism lovingly. They saw it as a way to leverage the power of the masses, take over, and redirect the body politic.
The elite’s inventions — twin inventions, twin shams, twin deceptions, twin illusions of democracy and nationalism backfired on them. The great unwashed, the hoi polloi, and the masses leveraged democracy. They put in the White House their own men, Donald Trump, for example, the latest example. And the same in the Philippines, Duterte, and the same in Brazil, Bolsonaro.
The masses discovered the power of the vote. The power of the vote was supposed to be a piece of fiction. No one had voted. I mean, look at voting numbers. Look at voting rates throughout history. No one used it. No one until recently.
Recently, the masses fell in love with the voting process. This is why “Stop the Steal!” was such a potent hashtag, because the masses are emotionally invested in the vote. They regard the vote as their weapon. And they don't want anyone to take away this weapon from them, to steal it, as they see it.
The new technologies coupled with one man, one vote, gave the masses the first real chance at power, the first real chance at self-governance and control and self-enlightenment. They had this chance in the 1930s and 40s, but they botched it.
The masses had a first shot at power through communism, through fascism, through Nazism, and they failed. They failed miserably. For 60-70 years, the masses had retreated because they had this traumatic experience.
The masses said “When we get to power, we end up with Adolf Hitler. When we get to power, we end up with Joseph Stalin. When we get to power, we end up with Mao. So, better keep away from power. Because when we have power, we end up killing each other. Better keep away from power.”
For 70 years, the masses were in a post-traumatic condition following the mass ideologies and mass movements of the first half of the 20th century, but now they have recovered.
Plus, they had forgotten. The new generations know very little about Stalin and Hitler and the Great Depression and all these things. And the new generations don't read books.
So, now the masses are ready for a second attempt, a second attempt at taking power. And it’s unfolded in the last 20 years all over the world.
Putin is a man of the masses. Orbán is a man of the masses. Bolsonaro in Brazil. Duterte in the Philippines. Donald Trump in the United States. They're all people of the masses.
They're all representatives of the masses in the centers of power in the swamp, in the swamp of the elites.
How do the elites co-opt the middle class? How do they subjugate the masses? What are the secret tools, signaling, and messaging that they deploy when they succeed to regain and retake power?
Because the elites have been challenged thousands of times throughout history. And they never ever failed.
Numerous movements, rooted in the middle class, for example, in 1848, rooted in the masses, for example in the 1930s, there have been numerous challenges to the elites, to the power structures. Numerous challenges.
And the elites saw them off. The elites succeeded to suppress, eliminate, destroy and reverse every challenge ever thrown at them.
The elites are very creative. Sometimes they come up with sham concessions, such as democracy. Sometimes they come with a unifying narrative, such as nationalism.
“Maybe I'm elite, maybe you're a mass, but we belong to the same nation.” They have many ways.
And the elites are not a conspiracy. The elites are not a coordinated bunch. They don't pick up the phone every morning and coordinate actions.
The elites have common interests. And that's enough. Common interests dictate common courses of action, common behaviors, common cognitions, common emotions, common derision of the masses, common contempt, common hatred, common everything.
When you have common interests with someone, you don't need to talk to them. You're both likely to act the same way.
And so the elites are a diffuse mass. They're more like a cloud. And they're a diffuse mass that permeates every crevice and nook and cranny of society.
And they have common interests. Above all, the interests of stability and self-preservation so that they can increase, enhance their wealth and transfer it to the next generation.
That's the main interest of the elite, the selfish gene.
The built-in narcissism of fantasy underpins our government and with this shaky foundation, we are experiencing an earthquake. With its emphasis on extrinsic values, Western society, ruled by the elites, is descending into a pit of narcissism. -GC
Excellent article. Although I would hesitate to say race is fiction or the nation-state is fiction. The nation-state was a recent creation but it has its place because people want to belong. Elites deciding it is old hat may be their undoing. Of all their schemes the destruction of their homelands via mass immigration seems very short sighted.