COMMENTARY: Who runs America? The survey says …
f you haven’t figured it out yet, the red states differ from the blue ones. The city dwellers are different from the folks who live in the country. And the rich, as F Scott Fitzgerald put it, are different from the rest of us. So, when one of them says something nice about Donald Trump, listen.
Jamie Dimon, J.P. Morgan’s CEO, probably made many of the other 1-percenters uncomfortable recently by admitting Trump had been “kind of right” about many things.
“Just take a step back and be honest,” he urged his fellow autocrats. Trump “was kind of right about NATO. He was kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about China.”
That’s quite a statement. And he didn’t hedge by backing Joe Biden afterward. If it’s a shift, it’s significant because Dimon, like his fellow 1-percenters, has an outsized influence on what America does and what it talks about.
Polling conducted for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and released as a report, “Them vs. U.S.,” shows how, in many essential ways, these elites are different from the rest of us.
In the area of personal financial security example, the data showed nearly three-quarters of these elites — defined as people making more than $150,000 a year with at least one postgraduate degree who live in a high-population density area — said they are better off today than when President Joe Biden took office.
The economy has improved lately, and unadjusted growth last quarter broke the 3 percent mark. Biden consistently gets poor marks for handling it. Real wages are down over the long term. People are forced to buy less with more.
That’s likely why most ordinary Americans surveyed for the study said they were worse off now than they were in 2021.
The differences are not limited to kitchen table and pocketbook issues. As to climate change, something that occupies us all these days, 70 percent of the elite said they would pay $500 or more annually in higher taxes and costs, “up to whatever it takes,” says pollster Scott Rasmussen, who constructed the survey. Among average Americans, $100 or less per year was as high as they would go.
Members of the elite go on television and talk about climate crisis solutions that cost billions, even trillions of dollars over many years, and kill jobs with a straight face.
The elite American is three times more likely than the average American to say we enjoy “too much individual freedom.” That’s worrisome, as a large number of them endorse rationing of meat, gasoline, and other essentials.
America is two countries living side by side, on top of and next to one another. One consists of people holding views common to middle- and working-class voters. The other is comprised of people who consider themselves more public-spirited and virtuous than the rest of us and talk about politics more. They’re separated by status, income, education and neighborhood, not political parties. Some very smart folks have missed that, which may be why they also can’t understand Trump’s appeal to the working man and woman.
They need to get outside their bubble once in a while.
Peter Roff is former U.S. News and World Report contributing editor and UPI senior political writer now affiliated with several D.C.-based public policy organizations. Contact at RoffColumns@gmail.com and follow him on X @TheRoffDraft.