The man making $60,000 a year who can’t afford health benefits for his family looks at you, the liberal elite—sorry, guys, but let’s call a spade a spade—and sees that the fix is always in. You went to the same private schools. You graduated from the same handful of Ivy League universities. You live in the same exclusive urban neighborhoods, and you summer in the same exclusive enclaves. Your children—like us—network through your pre-established connections to the top of society. You prescribe conduct for others that you will never have to follow yourselves. You pass laws that will never apply to you. You turn on your own constituents, like public-school teachers, at the drop of a hat. You sell out the middle class by passing legislation that makes it almost impossible to declare bankruptcy. You make the middle class pay with soaring premiums for expanded Medicaid programs that will bankrupt state treasuries, thus fueling the backlash against the push for universal health care.

The man you think is a “sucker” because he votes for Republican candidates who don’t seem to give a hoot about him will vote for them every time. He looks at you, the crowd of The-Fix-Is-Always-In, and he casts his lot with the crowd of wealth and initiative…

What you tell him is that he should put his life in your hands. Yet you scorn his religion. You mock his faith in the sacredness of conception. You deride his belief in family. You tell him that his love for hunting makes him a murderer, and that his terror at being economically displaced makes him a xenophobe and a racist. Then you emasculate his hope for the future by telling him that if his ship comes in—that dream of a ship that makes the grinding disappointment of daily life worth living through—you’ll help yourself to a big slice of it. And you expect him to believe your rhetoric about fairness and equality when, all the while, you are accusing him of gullibility in his politics and bad faith toward the least fortunate of his fellow citizens. When, all the while, you are living untouched by your own policies. When you are cushioned against life’s hardness, not by government, but by simply knowing other people in your class. You expect him to buy your talk about equitable distribution of wealth when you are sailing through tax loopholes off into the sunset. For this man, his emotions make all the rational sense in the world.