Based on the election results from 2016 and 2020, it seems clear the GOP has become the party of the working class. Even though he “lost” in 2020, President Trump continued the strong trend of garnering the working-class vote, while the Democrats captured the upper class and the Wall Street wealthy.

That shift has more to do with philosophy and ideology than politics, because, you see, collectivists have always been technocrats and technocrats always hate working people.

My good friend Surse Pierpoint highlighted the review of Paul Embery’s book (Embery is a firefighter from the UK), “Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class”, by Johnathan Rose of the Wall Street Journal. Rose notes:

“George Bernard Shaw, though a Fabian socialist, brushed aside anyone who called him a “friend of the working classes.” He scoffed that he “had no other feeling for the working classes than an intense desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible people.” A century ago, Britain’s Labour Party brought together the Fabians (who supplied the policy wonks) and the trade unions (who supplied the voters). The party had been founded to give working people a voice in politics, but gradually control passed to the university-educated, who were internationalist, technocratic and supremely confident that they could plan the future.”

George Bernard Shaw was steadfast in his love of socialism and respect for the Soviet Union. He was also a loathsome individual, someone who believed people should stand in the dock and be forced to explain why they benefitted society and if that could not be done satisfactorily, they were better off dead, saying (in a recording):

“You must all know half a dozen people at least who are of no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight, if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”

But Shaw was little more than a precursor to the progressives of our times.

If you remember, during the Obama years, there was a feeling that America had simply failed our first black president, a man so blessed with goodness and light that he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize fully 11 days after he was inaugurated for things he MIGHT do. I am sure that I am not alone in saying that often he, his wife and their spokespeople came off as bitterly disappointed he did not have a better country populated with better people to rule. We just never fully appreciated his magnificence and the only reason, and I mean THE ONLY REASON, you did not appropriately worship him was that you are obviously all racists.

It is also instructive to recall that the Democrat Party continues to remind everyone else that they are the party of “smart” people, that they have the support of college graduates, academia, scientists, doctors, and the like. They seem to never miss a chance to tell you how much smarter than you they are.

John Kerry, the failed presidential candidate, Obama’s failed Secretary of State and now Resident Biden’s Climate Czar, is the personification of the modern progressive. A rich man through no effort of his own (he has a penchant for marrying rich women), has said that if you do not go to college, you are so dumb that you end up in the military in Iraq, and that skilled tradesmen who build oil pipelines can just go get jobs assembling solar panels after their projects are crushed by government fiat. The disdain this man has for working people is palpable – and he is not alone.

It is not surprising that collectivism is designed to be a technocracy, as it depends upon planners, theoretically the “experts” in their respective fields, to make decisions for the masses, simply because the masses do not possess the expertise to make those decisions on their own. Yet, in another contradiction, technocracy immediately creates the very class conflicts collectivism claims to eliminate because it sets the “experts” in a position superior to the other members of society.

In such a system, it is inevitable the “experts”, a class which will always include the monied and powerful whether they possess any expertise or not, will come to look upon the working class as raw material, the fodder for the clanking government Leviathan.

Shaw was unabashedly and brutally clear about how such a scheme would work. He said:

“I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly feed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.”

Contemporary Democrats are progressives – or worse – and the modern American progressive movement proves it shares Shaw’s perspective of the working class. It is far from the movement of the people, it is smug, self-aggrandizing, self-righteous, and generally very self-important. The claim the progressive agenda is “for the people” could not be more laughable and obvious in its disingenuousness.

They hate you.