We are still there, immersed in the old people-elite dichotomy that a recent research by New York Times it now paints as a structural fact. After all, sociologists and political scientists have been telling us this for years: the divide is not just political, it is a sort of social fault, a clear border that separates two universes, two geographies of modernity. People and elite, a scholastic simplification, of course, but which perfectly describes the new fabric of our cities: on the one hand those who live on the margins, on the other those who hide in the centres. Where margins and center are not just “geographical” borders.
In short, the study signed by Celinda Lake and Amanda Iovino for the NYT, it is more than an election report: it is a fresco of an America in complete conflict. On the one hand, <a href="https://www.world-today-news.com/donald-trump-whats-behind-the-us-presidents-baltimore-attack/" title="Donald Trump: What's behind the US President's Baltimore attack”>Kamala Harrisvoted above all by women graduates, from the progressive world that sees rights and the environment as the cornerstone of future society. On the other, Donald Trumpwhich carries on its shoulders “the cross” of a male, working-class, poorly educated electorate, the forgotten America, betrayed by a system that grows but does not know how to redistribute. And so Harris boasts 61% approval among the voters donne laureatewhile Trump – the billionaire dressed as a street cleaner – takes 55% among the non-graduate men and economically fragile: plastic synthesis of a paradox.
This is nothing new, mind you. In the words of Pierre Rosanvallon and Jérôme Fourquet, it is one “culture war” made of irreparable fractures, two increasingly distant worlds: on the one hand, “the urban elite”cultured, cosmopolitan and, on the other, the “provincial people”who lives an existence almost exiled from public discourse. The left, once a symbol of social redemption and workers’ struggle, is now the cultured elite of the historic centers, the party of museum ideas and reserved rights.
Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehar, two political scientists who have dissected the new forms of “soft authoritarianism” they talk about “populist backlash”that is, a reaction to that modernization that enriched the elite but excluded those left behind. And Trump, with his crude rhetoric, offered himself as a symbol of those who feel left on the margins, embodying the revolt of those who “no longer count for anything” against a poorly concealed paternalism of the elite who have evidently given up on that world.
The script is also repeated in Italy: the left has lost its “sentimental connection” with the suburbsof the factories – of what remains of them -, finding refuge in the strongholds of the “hated” ZTL. Thus, while central Milan turns red, the Roman suburbs and provinces remain lands of conquest for the right.
“The cultural and political elite left the right flank of society exposed, where social fears exploded,” he writes Paolo Segatti. The sociologist and author of Apocalypse of democracy he describes a left that has become “the party of urban security, culture, civil rights,” but which has lost contact with the backbone of the country: small traders, workers, in short, anyone experiencing perennial economic uncertainty. It is a change of perspective, a reversal that Segatti recognizes in the pragmatic “new European right”, which speaks to those who no longer feel represented by an elite that appears increasingly closed.
But in this theater there is a more subtle note, a thread that accentuates this dialectic even more: the fgap between civil rights and social strugglethe rhetorical illusion that separates those who can talk about rights from those who would like to experience a real battle against social and existential precariousness. An illusion: rights are not for the few, they do not belong to the elite alone, they are the basis for social emancipation. Yet, for some, it is easier to keep this fracture alive, to let the dialectic of rights become or appear exclusive.
In short, the clash between the people and the elite continues, becomes deeper, to the point of seeming unbridgeable. And the American elections, in a few days, could mark a point of no return.
