Michael Smith’s ability to explain the unexplainable is right up there with Victor Davis Hanson’s. His recent essay on wealthy progressives is worthy reading. Although you already know it you’ve likely not encountered it laid out as well. Ayn Rand would be proud.
For me, the contradiction of the wealthy progressive is one of the strangest and most revealing phenomena in modern politics. It is a movement increasingly populated by people who denounce wealth while enjoying it, condemn privilege while benefiting from it, and romanticize collectivism while carefully insulating themselves from its consequences. The rich progressive is no longer an outlier on the modern Left. In many ways, he has become its defining symbol.
Examples are constant. Millionaires publicly demanding “higher taxes on the rich” while employing armies of accountants to ensure they surrender no more than absolutely necessary. Celebrities preaching climate austerity while crossing oceans on private jets to attend conferences about reducing carbon footprints. Affluent activists proclaiming solidarity with “the oppressed” while living in neighborhoods protected from the very social disorder their policies encourage. Increasingly, the children of privilege — people raised with wealth, access, influence, and safety — attach themselves to radical redistributive causes they themselves never seem willing to experience personally.
The paradox is impossible to ignore. If capitalism is fundamentally exploitative, if wealth itself is evidence of injustice, and if privilege is inherently immoral, then why do so many wealthy progressives continue to enjoy every benefit of the system they condemn? Why do they advocate redistribution while rarely redistributing their own wealth voluntarily? Why do they champion collectivism while maintaining lifestyles that would be impossible under the systems they romanticize?
As he concludes, for modern wealthy progressives this is not a movement, it is just a luxury belief.
“What many of them seek is not equality at all. What they seek is moral absolution and social status disguised as compassion.
The whole thing is worthy of your time: Aristocrats of Redistribution.
Posts
