I recall reading a book by Joel Kotkin that posits that the increasing inequality and class divide has a different causation than the conventional wisdom assumes. Many progressive cities (e.g. NYC, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston) are paying lip service for the disenfranchised, and yet are supporting policies that have hindered the new disenfranchised: the working/middle class. These policies have included high taxes, rent control, a maze of housing regulations/zoning laws, stringent environmental regulations that have kept certain industries away, and a NIMBY mindset for low income housing developments.
This new Left, who support such policies, includes the influential Clerisy that make up the media/academic/policy elites, as well as the tech oligarchs that have gotten a free pass from government impediments. While these are not the Wall Street bankers that often get lumped in as protest targets, they are perhaps more central to today’s power brokers in a world that is ever changing.
Beyond economic policies, we also have to consider the cultural issues even more so. Kotkin says, “Secularism, singleness, and childlessness have gained particular social cache for over a generation, especially among the well-educated. Contemporary social thinking, as epitomized by “creative class” theorist Richard Florida, essentially links “advanced” society to the absence of religious values. Indeed, the current fashions in urbanism not only disdain religiosity but often give remarkably short shrift to issues involving families.” And it’s these traditional values that are most needed for working/middle class families to succeed and feel supported in a community. Not to mention, cosmopolitan cultural elites often look down and are often smug when it comes to the working/middle class. That hypocrisy doesn’t go unnoticed. In the end, it creates an anti-establishment resentment that we are now experiencing in the political events of the day.
Yes, we won’t be able to put the cultural toothpaste back into the 1950’s tube, but as Kotkin notes, there may be some hope in the mid-tier cities where the cultural elites have less prominence.
(It should be noted while increasing inequality is an empirical phenomenon, much of the perception around it is exacerbated by human nature: greedy people who don't have that much money envying greedy people who do have money. Also, if we took a deep time perspective, we all benefit from wealth generation.)
Progressivism is very little more than the managerial class pursuing its own class interests under the cover of altruism -- Kevin D. Williamson