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In 1845, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli published Sybil, or The Two Nations, a literary exposition of the social and economic changes that followed the industrial revolution, especially the travails and squalor of the urban working class set off against the aristocracy–– or ‘“the rich and the poor.’”

These two classes, as one character famously describes them, comprise “‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’”

The political polarization graphically on display during the recent presidential election season–– particularly the unhinged hysteria of the “woke” Democrats after Trump’s victory ––calls to mind Disraeli’s influential novel, for it captures our country’s great divide between not just the economic classes and political ideologies, but also mores, morals, values, tastes, cultures, and sensibilities. Not since the Civil War have such stark differences among the pluribus threatened the American unum.

America, of course, has always been divided by its complex diversity of ethnicities, languages, dialects, manners, customs, faiths, beliefs, cultures, and numerous other defining folkways. Our Constitutional structures are the Framers’ response to that contentious diversity: the Bill of Rights to protect diverse citizens, federalism to protect the diverse states, and a tripartite national government divided and mutually balanced to protect our freedom from the tyranny of any concentrated power attempting to dominate everybody else.

Starting in the later 19^th century, for a while, new technologies both of communication such as radio, movies, and television; and of transportation like railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, distributed regional and ethnic cultures across the nation through entertainment, magazines, and tourism. Also, consumer capitalism and mass advertising more widely sold products and fashions that now became the tokens of identity in the homogenizing of America’s regional cultures, and the weakening of all those myriad ethnicities and their distinctive folkways accelerated this process.

Another change that contributed to the refashioning of identities was the postwar expansion and availability of higher education to a more diverse citizenry. Moreover, by the Sixties, colleges and universities were more liberal and left-wing than the nation as a whole, making a college education another marker of identity as well as social status. The influence of the left increasingly made political affiliations signs of elite status too, one with its own tastes and fashions in entertainment, clothes, travel, cuisines, and especially more liberal and hedonistic habits and behavior regarding sex and drugs.

By the Seventies, our “two nations” and their identities were easily recognizable as the major source of divisiveness. One nation was still churchgoing, traditionalist, patriotic, and conservative, the “moral majority” that could be identified by their vehicles, pastimes, clothes, values, morals, and, most significantly, their political opinions and preferences that opposed the expansion of the welfare state and its erosion of character and families, as well as crime and urban squalor that followed.

The other nation comprised those who fancied themselves the “cognitive elite,” “progressives,” the “counterculture,” “brights,” the “woke,” and globalist “citizens of the world.” This “new class,” as jurist Robert Bork called it, “followed the science” and trusted in credentialed “experts” rather than the Constitution. They dismissed religion as a Marxist “opioid” or Freudian “illusion,” and scorned patriotism as xenophobic, if not racist. Both faith and love of country––like traditional mores, virtues, and morals––were actually, the left claimed, capitalist lies and ruses for keeping the unenlightened, philistine rubes docile and submissive to the plutocrat capitalists’ control.

This increasing endorsement of technocratic inclinations was a consequence of the rise of Progressivism during the early 20^th century. A major goal of that movement was to rewrite the Constitution to eliminate or weaken its guardrails protecting our rights and freedom from the tyranny of a minority of technocrats who want a centralized concentration of powers unaccountable to the citizens.

From Woodrow Wilson’s to Joe Biden’s administrations, progressive assaults on the Constitution have steadily proliferated and found its home among Democrats, who don’t believe ordinary Americans are capable of self-government. Instead, like their Progressive forbearers, they want so-called “experts” armed with “science” to control the government rather than the citizens, whom the Constitution has given the means to hold leaders accountable. We saw how well the technocracy worked during the Covid crisis, when politicized protocols and policies like lockdowns, “social distancing,” and masks did more harm rather than good.

This Progressive anti-Constitutionalism, blended with old-fashioned class snobbery and arrogance, has made for a toxic political brew that was obvious in the Dems’ and NeverTrump Republican establishment’s scorched-earth attack on Donald Trump starting in 2016. Trump’s election by “bitter clingers” and the “deplorable” canaille ––cartoonish caricatures of people whom neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton had any actual experience of–– was a grievous affront to the progressives’ inflated egos and preening self-regard.

The divide has widened even more this election season, and the Dems’ lunatic reactions are more intense than in 2016. Indeed, the woke lefts, to paraphrase Disraeli, are as “ignorant of [conservatives’] habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”

We have seen this dismissive prejudice recently in the Dems’ reaction to Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a decorated veteran who served in Cuba, Baghdad, and Samara, and experienced combat in Afghanistan, Hegseth has been excoriated for his lack of DC administrative experience.

But as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “He could hardly do worse than the so-called adults in the room of recent years. The armed services can’t make their recruiting quotas, America’s military industrial base has been exposed as inadequate with little protest from Pentagon leaders, and no one in the civilian or military ranks was held accountable for the Afghanistan debacle.|”

Hegseth’s real offense, however is being a conservative who works for FOX News, and an outspoken critic of the progressive “woke” establishment and its “managerial elites’” long record of foreign policy failures, and the current degradation of our military. The bipartisan guild of technocrats or “perfumed princes of the Pentagon,” as David Hackett put it, vehemently dislike Hegseth because he, like Trump, isn’t one of the agency clerks climbing the bureaucratic greasy pole of promotion and retirement to the lucrative corporate boards of the “military-industrial complex.”

What’s remarkable about this whole state of affairs is that the Democrats, in their arrogant conviction of class and cognitive superiority over Republicans, obviously didn’t learn anything from 2016 after Trump’s trouncing of establishment Republicans in the primaries, and his shocking defeat of consummate insider Hillary Clinton. As The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker wrote recently, the legacy media “discovered they knew as much about their country as they did about North Korea.”

“So,” Baker continues, “like 19th-century anthropologists venturing into the undiscovered interior of Africa, passels of metrosexual journalists sallied forth into Flyover Country. They sat down—warily, we can assume—in diners and bowling alleys with people who had never even been to Harvard or eaten a slice of avocado toast. They listened in rising amazement as men and women without either gym memberships or nannies from Guatemala talked about God, the importance of national borders and something called patriotism.

What did they learn? Eight years later, we can now hazard a guess. From how many of them reported on the 2024 election it seems they concluded that these people were fascists or semifascists with reactionary views about race, sex and everything else, ready to vote for a fascist presidential candidate.”

For anyone who has spent time in professions dominated by cognitive elite leftists and progressives, Baker’s satire brilliantly captures the haughty arrogance and superior airs of the cognitive and economic elite, who try to camouflage their privilege by morally preening about their championing “social justice” and DEI policies that patronize the “victims” of callous and selfish conservatives.

Finally, these two “nations” are not morally equivalent. The core of the radical difference is the Democrats’ long embrace of progressive anti-Constitutionalism, and willingness to degrade as well the Bill of Rights and other obstacles to tyranny. One “nation” is the champion of freedom and the Constitution; the other comprises the agents of a “fundamental transformation” of our founding charter that guarantees our Constitutional rights and freedoms. For now, it seems that we the people have chosen the nation of freedom.