This presentation is particularly important to watch and review before what will happen tomorrow in Washington, DC on Monday with the inauguration of the populist President Donald Trump, champion of the anti-elitist MAGA movement. Trump achieved an unprecedented, presidential mandate with his monumental victories in both the popular and Electoral College voting.

The presentation is a summary statement on how traditionally the elites have viewed the non-elites throughout American history.

The great disparity in America lies between the professional managerial elites in government, academia, media, and business versus the middle/working classes in their fundamental attitudes, values, lifestyle choices and associations, and how they see themselves and the world about them.

Since the beginning of the Progressive Era (1900-1920) the dominant ideology or world view of the professional managerial class of court intellectuals, opinion leaders and editorial directors of the elite mainstream legacy regime media, bureaucratic functionaries and staff of the administrative state, the federal judiciary, members of Congress, and those persons who comprise the top echelon of the military industrial/security complex and the deep state, has been a synthesis of what has been described as corporate liberalism or proponents of the welfare-warfare state.

The Progressive Era saw the birth of the cult of efficiency, with the new administrative state’s apolitical credentialed experts gingerly guiding public-policy instead of the archaic rule of political bosses and their ethnic urban political machines. Or, at least that was what was supposed to happen according to Progressives such as Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, Robert LaFollette, Jane Addams, Richard Ely, Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.

Their Progressive progeny such as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton still employ demeaning, mean-spirited vituperative terminology in this class war against their non-elite opponents – “garbage,” “deplorables,” or as Obama summarized it:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The insightful attorney and political analyst Robert Barnes in a celebrated “daily brief” at VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com brilliantly encapsulated this reality of elite rule in America.

“Charles Murray’s Coming Apart was like a sequel to the brilliant book The Big Sort. Lived experience now varies as widely and wildly as ever: working class Americans see, feel, and remember a very different narrative of life than the professional-managerial upper middle class who govern us. Who is this class? Those with certifications or licensures, college or more degrees, in a job that manages others. They dominate those with a post-college degree especially. They claim the right to govern others due to those degrees and certifications and licenses, as the credentialed class claims credibility from those credentials.

“Consider what is typical or atypical of this professional managerial class. Most spent their lives amongst other upper middle-class professionals. Quite literally. Their neighborhoods were professional class dominated neighborhoods. No risk of a Mr. Rogers’ or Mr. Robinson’s neighbor. Their schools were professional class dominated institutions. Their churches or organizations are professional class dominated. Their cultural outings are usually professional class dominated. Their parents and siblings and cousins were professional class dominant. They often never lived in a small town. They often never employed in a working-class occupation involving physical labor. They often never served in the grunt units of the military. They know few firemen, cops, or frontline workers. They never experienced poverty or dramatic loss of status. They don’t own guns, smoke or dip tobacco, or even ever walked on a factory floor or construction site. Evangelicals are freaks to them. Swamp people means neither DC nor the excellent reality series; it’s those folks who live in the scary backwoods.

“They see their status as deserved, as they define deserts by professional class standards: approval from teachers in school, and approval from authority figures in life, measured by grades, degrees, credentials, licenses, and public acclaim from approved authority figures. Their over-achieving, teacher-pet mindset surrounded themselves often with like-minded individuals, often not even knowing the kids for whom school was not a match.

“Now, add to that surrounding themselves with other professional class sources of information: medical “experts” approved by the state, judges in courts of law, professional politicians in representative government, professionalized credentialed journalists in big institutional media, and teachers of themselves and their children. Of the professional class, by the professional class, for the professional class. Then add to that censorship of dissident opinions, deplatforming dissidents, taking away their licenses, removing their credentials, defaming their reputation, and picking friends by political alliance and allegiance.

“Middle America ain’t like these folks. For many in the professional class, all of the following is absent: Pickup trucks, cheap beer, old school action films, proud patriotism, all kinds of fishing and hunting, chain restaurants, the local Kiwanis or Awanas more than art galleries and lefty parades, riding the dog, dream vacations to Dollyworld or Branson still await, folks smoke (and not just weed), work that might require a uniform, friends and family in protective services at the grunt level of police, fire, medical, or military.

“In other words, we are governed by an insular elite acculturated and educated to intellectually incestuous intersectionalism at the moral and practical effect of disastrous public policy. Any platform of change must do all it can to reallocate political capital from the professional managerial class to the people as broadly as achievable. Populism provides part of that answer to any problem: reallocate power to the people whenever and wherever you can.”

For over a quarter of a century I taught in what was once an affluent suburban high school. In May 2020 I retired from this position. Because of major demographic changes in student clientele the institution has transformed into a inner city school. This transformation has also resulted in substantial changes in attitudes and perceptions of the students.

Most students today have very little knowledge or interest to historical events that happened before they were born. Their willfully ignorant attitudes on contemporary events are emotional responses, not ones based on real world historical knowledge. Sloganeering for free health care, free college, halting climate change and saving the planet, just sound “fair’ and “equitable.” Fairness and equality are the primary values they see stressed in the greater culture and media. Someone who does not share these mandated “politically correct” values is unfair, mean, and a “racist.” They have virtually no knowledge of how over time Americans attitudes towards social and political equality have dramatically changed. All they know is that in the past everyone supported slavery and racism. They can’t tell either chronologically or by other ways of historical evidence when this occurred or why and how it changed. To them 1865 (when the Civil War ended) and 1965 (when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had become law) are not separate but blend into one amorphous thing called ancient history, of which they have no interest, and do not see how these past events affect their lives today. They are trapped in the perpetual present, not caring about the past or future.

It is five decades since Edward Banfield’s highly controversial The Unheavenly City was published, and the sequel, The Unheavenly City Revisited, four years later.

I have been championing this volume for over 50 years since first encountering it. Murray Rothbard loved this book and devoted a substantial portion of his For a New Liberty, to a detailed examination of it.

Banfield had many brilliant observations on race, crime, and other hot topics in his book.

However it was his innovative redefinition of the concept of social class that is most memorable, and which has drawn the most controversy.

Banfield carefully defined class membership, not in terms of income status, such as government statistical poverty levels, but in terms of orientation toward the future, or time preference.

The more pronounced one’s “future orientation” was, the higher one’s social class.

Multicultural critics of this idea now claim it is “cultural racism” to value or promote “future time orientation.”

Known to economists and other social scientists as “low time-preference,” this is what is called setting goals or encouraging purposeful “middle class values” such as punctuality, thrift, foresight, deferred self-gratification of needs or wants, and self-discipline as opposed to “underclass values” or “high time preference” behaviors such as improvidence, hedonism, purposelessness, immediate self-gratification of needs or wants, and capricious spontaneity or irresponsibility.

The Unheavenly City continues to define the real class struggle in America.

In an extremely perceptive essay, Riots—Not Fun or Profit for the Rest of Us, Lew Rockwell draws upon and cites this seminal work and cogently relates it to the current series of destructive riots sweeping across America in its major metropolitan urban areas and densely concentrated cities.

Here is the actual text from Banfield’s book which still remains the most precise explanation for the riots, crime and turmoil America is undergoing in its major cities today.

The Best of Charles Burris