In the first flush of AP victory on Friday Joe Biden said that the American people had “given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism.”

Well, I don’t think that any “action” is needed on COVID and the economy; President Trump had got those pretty well on track, no thanks to the media and social media, and no thanks to the Democrats.

But whatabout climate change and systemic racism?

I remind you what Irving Kristol said half a century ago. If you want to help the poor, he wrote, you have to deal in the middle class. If you want to help the poor in old age, then Social Security and Medicare must include the middle class. Likewise free education.

Earth to Democrats: climate change and systemic racism are Jobs for Gentry programs that stick it to the middle class and do nothing for the poor.

Now I recognize that back in the day clean air and clean water and civil rights were a magnificent achievement of the educated class, to clean up the environment and make it illegal for the government to discriminate on the basis of race and sex. When the great-great-great-grandchildren of Elon Musk are colonizing Alpha Centauri, people will still reminisce about the good old days of clean water and civil rights activism and the evolved, educated heroes back on Earth that made it happen.

But climate change and systemic racism are examples of Eric Hoffer’s maxim that “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” Our ruling class had such a good time cleaning up the environment and liberating the traditionally marginalized that they just can’t give it up. And now they are a racket to benefit the educated supporters of the ruling class.

Climate change politics is all about jobs for climate scientists and regulators, magnificent subsidies for renewable energy and electric cars, and much more expensive energy costs on the middle class and the poor. Anyone see a political problem with that?

Systemic racism is all about DIE administrators and cancel culture and seeking out the dreaded “white oppressors” wherever they can be found. Fairly obviously, it is a nuclear weapon aimed directly at the white middle class. As for the “oppressed peoples,” show me the settled science that quotas and Affirmative Action have helped them. Anyone see a political problem with that?

But I get it. If you are in politics, you are looking for some problem that can only be decided by force. Otherwise, who needs the government to address it? The market and social-animal behavior will take care of most everything except the Nazis and the Commies.

Now, I’m an extremist. I don’t think it was wage-and-hour legislation that raised up the workers; it was the industrial revolution and technological invention; otherwise the workers would have starved as the peasants had been doing for centuries despite various Poor Laws enacted by the great and the good.

I don’t think that anti-discriminatory legislation is all that helpful: if minorities are being paid less than they are worth, then someone with an eye on the main chance will hire them and make a ton of money just like the meat packers that hire illegal aliens.

Environmental cleanup? The Economist wrote 20 years ago that nations start to clean up the environment when they hit about $10,000 per capita annual income.

So, in my extreme view, the glorious Narrative of the Heroic Educated Elite that saved the world from poverty and oppression and environmental destruction is, as they say out West, a “social construction.”

And I thought that all those educated people understood Hume’s argument that correlation isn’t causation.

And because our present educated Gentry is not what it was in the days of Rousseau and Marx, it doesn’t have the intellectual heft to come up with some new apology for government force that has an appeal beyond the bureaucratic Barnacles and the activist Stiltstockings of the educated elite.

The “tell” of course, is that to stay in power the educated elite has to cheat. It has to turn the court system into a legislature of, by, and for the educated elite. It has to steal elections. It has to whip the lower orders into a frenzy with fake police-brutality panics in election years. And it has to marginalize ordinary middle-class Americans as racist-sexist-homophobes.

But still, I’ll bet that Democrats are patting themselves on the back this week. They increased their presidential vote by 9 million over 2016, and Trump only increased his vote by 8 million. The “Most Extensive And Inclusive Voter Fraud Organization In The History Of American Politics” aside, that must be because they successfully taught their voters to hate Trump, all his works and all his voters. Expect more of the same in the next four years.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Lori Erickson