Roger Scruton coined the term “oikophobia” (from the Greed oikos for “home”) to describe the fear of one’s fellow countrymen. And there seems to be rather a lot of it among the gentry liberals who make up America’s ruling class.
In fact, another piece on reacting to the election, by Tim Kreider in The Week, is titled “I love America. It’s Americans I hate.” Writes Kreider, “The public is a swarm of hostile morons, I told her. You don’t need to make them understand you; you just need to defeat them, or wait for them die. . . . A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don’t want the red states to be the only ones armed.”
“A vote for Trump,” Kreider continues, “is kind of like a murder.” Though his piece concludes on a (slightly) more hopeful note, the point is clear: Americans, at least Trump-voting Americans, are “pathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases.”
It’s gotten worse since Election Day, but there’s nothing new about this. I’ve been reading Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, and this categorization of lower and working-class whites as (to coin a word) “deplorables” goes way back. And we’ve certainly seen it before this election.
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