Opposition to Trump is rooted in contempt for 'ordinary' voters

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/22/opposition-to-trump-is-rooted-in-contempt-for-ordinary-voters/

Ordinary...get that....ordinary voters....when we are victimized by mediocre and incompetent 'leadership'.  

I listened to Cluck and Bray this afternoon off and on...aka Buck and Clay.   They said, regarding all this court stuiff that us ordinary voters couldn't possibly understand.. 'how can  ordinary voters possibly understand all this'.   LOL  That's our conservative hosts who have allegedly taken up Rush's mantle.  LOLOL  not.  hardly.

from the link:

 A complaint I hear increasingly leveled at contemporary American politicians is that they are out of touch with voters, if not downright contemptuous of them.

In The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004), Gertrude Himmelfarb distinguishes, convincingly, between the French philosophes, who championed reason; the American Founding Fathers, who concentrated on liberty; and the British moral philosophers, who emphasized human nature, benevolence, and our shared, internal moral sense.

While the English reformers showed compassion for the poor and uneducated and treated them as members of the same human race, and the American framers sought to ensure freedom for all classes, most of the French intellectuals looked down on the peasants, dismissing them as bestial and irrational, filled to the brim with the prejudices and superstitions of the Catholic Church. To the philosophes, the common people were neither honorable nor moral, but ignorant and unteachable, enthralled by religion and profoundly non-progressive. They were not citizens but the rabble. Even Rousseau, who extended some sympathy to the masses of the countryside, felt they needed to be guided by those who were enlightened to adopt the “general will.”

“In his article on the Encyclopédie,” Himmelfarb writes, “Diderot made it clear that the common people had no part in the ‘philosophical age’ celebrated in this enterprise. ‘The general mass of men are not so made that they can either promote or understand this forward march of the human spirit.’ In another article, ‘Multitude,’ he was more dismissive, indeed contemptuous, of the masses. ‘Distrust the judgment of the multitude in matters of reasoning and philosophy; its voice is that of wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason, and prejudice. … The multitude is ignorant and stupefied. … Distrust it in matters of morality; it is not capable of strong and generous actions … heroism is practically folly in its eyes.’”    

Diderot, like Rousseau, believed that the masses had to surrender their individual wills to the general will, which would define for them how far they “ought to be a man, a citizen, a subject, a father, a child, and when it is suitable to live or to die. It is for the general will to determine the limits of all duties.” For Diderot and the philosophes, though not Rousseau, what set them above the masses was their superior grasp of reason.

...........Far from the bully, Trump is the champion of those who have been bullied relentlessly and mercilessly by a self-appointed elite who holds them in contempt. In Trump, they have found a modern George Bailey — albeit a crasser and more combative one — who is willing to stand up to the Mr. Potters of the world.

In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Frank Capra, who combined in his work the American fight for liberty and the British embrace of benevolence and our shared human moral nature, raises up an unwilling hero to protect the working families of his town from a man who would manipulate and crush them to fit his vision of, and general will for, Bedford Falls.

......When the majority of Trump supporters listen to him speak, this is what they hear: a spirited defense of the hard-working despised and a fearless denouncing of the fashionable despisers.