There used to be a joke about the British middle class requesting "no sex please, we're British." I suppose the joke was that the married-with-children middle class that we associate with "the Fifties" was not looking to be titillated with sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It has other things on its mind.
You can see the wisdom of that attitude, 50 years after "the Sixties." What was the point of the sexual revolution, now that women are demanding safe spaces from any man and his patriarchal sexual harassment, now that drugs are now coming to mean the white working class dying of despair in the opioid crisis, and peculiarly sexless girl singers bump and grind their wailing songs in an advertisement of availability that is absolutely forbidden by #MeToo.
What the average middle-class American would like today would be "no politics please, we're normals." The promise of middle-class life, after all, is to live free of subordination to some scion of a ruling-class landowner, to be responsible and independent of his power, making your own way in the city.
But the last two centuries has seen the rise of a new ruling class and a new politics, and a new subordination. Whereas the old ruling class just ruled over a subordinate peasantry that it both protected and exploited, the new ruling class reinvented politics by separating the protection and the exploitation. It would protect its selected classes of victims, "little darlings" that it determined to champion. It would exploit the middle-class bourgeoisie and use revenues from middle-class enterprise to buy the votes of its protected "little darlings."
Thus the middle class is subordinated to the new educated ruling class by constant ideological warfare that makes the middle class into, first, exploiters of workers, and now racist sexist homophobes whose bigotry must be named and shamed into oblivion.
The "little darlings," first the workers, and now women, minorities and the sexual experimenters of the ruling class, are subordinated as the protected class championed and patronized by the educated ruling class.
If you are a middle-class normal you just want to live your life with a minimum of politics. You feel mildly prejudiced against racial minorities and aggressive feminists and sexual experimenters from a natural and healthy desire to trust only those likely to be trustworthy.
On this strategy minorities and women would be co-opted bit by bit into the middle class and everyone would live happily ever after. But his obviously runs counter to the political agenda of the educated ruling class for whom living happily ever after is nothing to do with the case, because for the new ruling class the meaning of life, the universe, and everything depends on using ruling class political power to dominate society as every ruling class aims to do.
If you are in politics you need to "raise awareness;" you need to mobilize your supporters. And you need to cast your political opponents as monsters and bigots. You cannot allow things to settle down and for everyone to just get along.
That is why, 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts, we are obsessed with racism. That is why, with women earning just about the same as men, we are obsessed with sexual harassment in the workplace. That is why, with gay marriage a fact, we must hunt down people that don't bang their heads on the ground in celebration of LGBT. Thus the Trump election "should be analyzed less in terms of what he offered as a candidate and more as a reflection of the public's surly mutinous mood."
Well, yes, per Suzanne Fields. The public would be "surly and mutinous" when the educated ruling class insists on poking and tormenting it with its "monomaniacal intensity of causes" that are all about the political power of the ruling class and nothing about the needs of the average middle-class normal.
So that's the state of play today. The ruling class is obsessed with its political causes, and the middle class is surly and mutinous.
But only because the ruling class wants it that way.
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