The "Great Rebellion" of the Ordinary Commoners

Joel Kotkin called it four and a half years ago in The Daily Beast: "Why The World Is Rebelling Against 'Experts'." Said he, in July 2016:

The Great Rebellion is on and where it leads nobody knows.

Its expressions range from Brexit to the Trump phenomena and includes neo-nationalist and unconventional insurgent movement around the world. It shares no single leader, party or ideology. Its very incoherence, combined with the blindness of its elite opposition, has made it hard for the established parties across what’s left of the democratic world to contain it.

Kotkin identified five different causes feeding the Great Rebellion:

Class Conflict: as in, upper class for Remain, everyone else for Brexit.

Race and Ethnicity: as in, "Ethnic minorities and immigrants have now become core constituents of progressive parties in many countries."

Geographic Disparities: as in "a chasm between the metropolitan core and the rest of the country."

Nationalism and Cultural Identity: as in, "historic values are also being undermined, as universities and even grade schools seek to replace cherished values with post-modernist, politically correct formulations." 

Governance and Localism: as in, the upper class "increasingly see themselves as rightful rulers, the benighted masses be damned."

 Does he nail it, or does he nail it?

In the US, it seems to me, the Great Rebellion started with the stolen election of 1960, when the commoner-born Richard Nixon was defeated by the shenanigans of Richard Daley in Chicago and Lyndon Johnson in Texas.

It continued with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and the identification of the "Silent Majority" by Vice President Agnew and the campaign against the "nattering nabobs of negativism." But Nixon was put down in 1974 for lèse majesté -- against the special people.

Then we had the election of the commoner-born Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan was so successful that the establishment George Bush inherited his crown, and the liberal Bill Clinton had to run as a New Democrat in 1992. And when Clinton governed as an Old Democrat he lost Congress to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years.

But Bill Clinton only won because Ross Perot, running as a populist, divided the Republican presidential vote.

Things were quiet for a while, especially when George W. Bush rallied Americans to the "nation" after 9/11. So the Great Rebellion was quiet until the radical-liberal Barack Obama was elected. His election catalyzed the Tea Party that flourished in 2009-10 and gave the Republicans the House in 2010. But Obama saw the Tea Party as a threat to reelection and so Little Lois Lerner at the IRS worked diligently to prevent Tea Party entities from registering as non-profit organizations. 

Starting in 2015 we have the Trump phenomenon, first taken as a joke by the ruling class, and then as an insult. So the ruling class has spent the last four years discrediting and obstructing President Trump and his championing of the nation and the commoner.

For now, the ruling class has beaten back the populist-nationalist rebellion. To Be Continued.

Joel Kotkin also had a piece on "The Middle-Class Rebellion" in late 2019. He identifies "energy and housing prices, which threaten to “proletarianize” the living standards of the not long ago decently comfortable."

In the United States, among children born in 1940, about 90 percent grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project; that dropped to only 50 percent among those born in the 1980s.

Housing prices are notably excessive in Hong Kong, and urbanist locations like "Sydney, Vancouver, London, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles." The upper-class urbanist movement thinks, erroneously, that higher urban density will lower carbon emissions. It makes it hard for ordinary commoners to buy houses on the urban periphery.

And then the ordinary commoners get hit by the climate change grift.

The high energy costs derive from zealous climate change politics claiming that any energy source outside solar and wind are inherently dangerous to the health of the planet... This dogmatism underlies efforts by government planners to raise the price of fuel in order to reduce consumption and force people onto transit.

Kotkin reckons that middle-income unrest -- the Great Rebellion -- "will continue worsen as long as policy makers, and the private sector, ignore the basic needs and aspirations of the majority population."

When you look at the Five Causes up above, and the effect on ordinary people, of sky-high housing and energy prices, you would think that some enterprising politician would be able to build a movement, a Great Rebellion against an unjust ruling class that believes the "benighted masses be damned."

Stay tuned.