Revolt of the Self-Loathing Class

When the Elites Devour Their Own: The Self-Loathing of America’s Ruling Class

Something remarkable — and profoundly self-destructive — has taken root in modern America. Many of the most passionate crusaders against “white privilege” are themselves white, middle-class professionals. They occupy government offices, classrooms, and university departments, spending their days condemning the very civilization that made their comfort and careers possible.

It is a strange phenomenon: a cultural revolution led by the beneficiaries of its success.

The New Clerisy

In past generations, Americans admired hard work, independence, and civic virtue. Today, a new clerisy has emerged — a credentialed elite that preaches moral superiority through self-denunciation. They condemn capitalism while thriving on its rewards, lecture about equality from positions of lifelong security, and denounce “whiteness” as an inherited sin.

Their worldview thrives in institutions largely insulated from market realities — the education system, public administration, and corporate HR departments. Their salaries are steady, advancement depends on ideological conformity, and moral language substitutes for measurable achievement.

To this class, “equity” and “inclusion” are not ideals to aspire to — they are bureaucratic tools to enforce obedience. Hammers against the masses.

The Moral Comfort of Condemnation

Why do so many well-off white Americans turn on their own cultural roots? Because moral guilt is easier than moral effort. To denounce one’s “privilege” is to purchase absolution cheaply — without having to sacrifice comfort, property, or influence.

Declaring allegiance to fashionable causes costs nothing. It earns social currency and professional safety. Meanwhile, those who dissent — often working-class Americans who still believe in merit, faith, and individual responsibility — become the new heretics.

This inversion of values is not driven by compassion but by narcissism. This narcissism allows educated elites to feel virtuous while standing above the very people who make their institutions function: the truck drivers, contractors, farmers, and mechanics they now deride as “reactionary.”

The Paper Fantasy of Socialism

Many of these same voices cling to the perennial illusion of socialism, a system that looks magnificent in theory and catastrophic in practice. Socialism promises equality but delivers scarcity. It preaches fairness but enforces dependence.

Those who worship it from the safety of universities or government desks never experience its failures firsthand. They live off the wealth created by the capitalist engine they publicly condemn. The irony is historical and endless: the ideology of equality always collapses under the weight of human nature.

It is easier, after all, to comply as professionals — to go to the same parties, attend the same conferences, and repeat the same rhetoric — than to stand apart and speak truth against the fashionable lies of the age.

The ultimate truth is parasitic: socialism, Marxism, and communism all need capitalism to survive. But like every parasite, they eventually kill the host that sustains them.

The Real Divide

America’s crisis is not fundamentally racial — it is identity politics, the use of personal and group identity as a tool for moral authority. It is a struggle between those who build and those who merely moralize; between those who remember the hard-won lessons of history and those who wish to rewrite them from air-conditioned offices.

The new progressivism, dressed up as virtue, is in fact a luxury belief — affordable only to those protected from its consequences. Think Hillary Clinton. It asks citizens to apologize for their inheritance while continuing to enjoy its benefits.

Not all academics, bureaucrats, or professionals participate in this moral theater — but the majority do, and they wield vast influence over culture and policy. Their contempt for the traditions that sustain the Republic has become both fashionable and dangerous.

A Path Back to Reason

The way forward is not resentment, but recovery. America must reclaim a language of gratitude — gratitude for opportunity, for order, and for the imperfect but remarkable civilization that has lifted more people out of poverty than any system in human history.

We must stop mistaking self-loathing for moral insight. The survival of the American republic depends not on endless apology, but on the courage to defend the principles that made it possible: work, fairness, and freedom without hyphenation. Think Charlie Kirk.

When history looks back on this age of moral theater, it will not ask how loudly we denounced ourselves — but whether we had the courage to defend the civilization that made such freedom possible.

-- Gene D. Johnson Jr., Chair, Republican Party of Merced County