Democrat elites despise many of their constituents. That's why many of their constituents are saying sayonara.

Arrogant and clueless is no way to win elections.

A BLM rally in Portland, Oregon. Will progressivism’s disdain for the masses reduce them to “Weirdos R Us?. Photo by Tito Texidor III on Unsplash

This past week, Congress finally passed some long overdue legislation that defunded PBS and NPR, something for which I and others across the political spectrum have advocated for some time. In an era of endless digital content streams on television, PBS is an archaic enterprise whose content already is (or soon will be) available elsewhere without taxpayer subsidies. NPR, aside from becoming a taxpayer-funded mouthpiece for the elitist left, is principally notable as the most effective 21st-century method known to medical science for a non-surgical lobotomy.

NPR displays near-daily blatant contempt for and hostility toward about 75% of the taxpaying public, who have recently signaled their own disdain in the other direction by abandoning public radio in large numbers. The only thing that a lot of people who pay for NPR know about it these days is that it seems to be in the news a whole lot for inexplicably bad reasons.

If MSNBC wants to cultivate a market-supported audience of progressives, good on ‘em. No one bends anyone’s arm up their back to pay for MSNBC. But NPR—that’s another story. It’s time to find out how true their often-stated claim—that only 1% of their funding comes from taxpayers—happens to be. If this claim is true (which, given NPR’s reporting on COVID, the environment, politics, science, and just about everything else, seems unlikely), the transition to an open market with every other media outlet should only be a minor inconvenience.

Don’t let the screen door hit you in the fanny on the way off the taxpayer dole.

The attitude of NPR and the progressive elites they represent toward the vast majority of Americans outside of blue enclaves on the east and west coasts is a microcosm of the attitude of the modern left towards everyone who is not them: Eff you. And you know what? A lot of people have noticed. The left thinks that they keep losing elections because the rest of us are uncouth, unwashed, ignorant bigots who don't have a clue as to what constitutes an equitable and just society. Perhaps it’s because we all figured out how much they hate the rest of us apostates. That, as much as anything, I think, explains Donald Trump.

In lieu of political power, the left may roll out all of the snarky memes on social media they want. They may feel free to mock people they do not know or understand, even if those folks represent a significant portion of this country, as much as they like. The left may confabulate over intersectionality and driveway moments rather than the pedestrian concerns of the hoi polloi all they want. But there’s a catch. As long as the left keeps losing national elections to spectacularly flawed characters, like Trump, that a decisive majority of Americans still think represent a better choice than they and their “vibes” candidate, the joke’s on them.

The most intriguing (in a train wreck way) thing about modern progressives is the evident disdain with which they hold their historically most reliable supporters: women, minorities, recent immigrants, gays, the poor, and the working class. Alienating the folks you claim to support and represent has been, outside of totalitarian enterprises, a winning strategy exactly never.

Consider the progressive abandonment of women. Title IX was originally part of a 1972 federal civil rights law that was enacted specifically to prohibit discrimination against women in any higher education program that received federal funds—basically all of them. Title IX was meant to secure equal opportunities for women in all of higher education but has become synonymous with opportunities for women in collegiate athletics. Although most schools have come up well short of equal opportunity in athletics during the Title IX era, at least opportunities have increased for women athletes.

Back in the early 1990s, I was a new faculty member at a state university and a part-time instructor at a nearby winter ski area. The federal government was pressuring the university, known for its large and expensive men's basketball and football programs, to broaden the scope of opportunities for female athletes beyond golf, tennis, track, and softball. The circumstances for female athletes at this institution were so dire that those on track scholarships had to buy their uniforms. Eventually, the word came down from the Feds to either expand women’s scholarship sports or eliminate some of the men’s.

The athletic department was desperate. And at one point, they reached out to me, of all people, to coach a women’s ski team based on, as far as I could tell, a single private ski lesson that I gave to an administrator in the athletic department on wedge turns. It made no difference that I had zero experience coaching women’s sports, zero experience coaching ski racing, and basically no business having anything to do with scholarship collegiate athletics. The powers that be were interested in the letter of the law far more than the intent of the law. I declined. The men’s golf team is probably still pissed off at me.

It was my first hint that university administration, which is generally a reliable leftist enclave, wasn't the bastion of principle it was cracked up to be—a theme that became painfully clearer over time.

Now, three decades later, Title IX has been transformed into a cudgel against women athletes who aren’t exactly sanguine about competing directly against their biological male counterparts. The left was at one time (at least in principle) all about protecting women’s rights. That lasted until progressive orthodoxy morphed to allow men to become women and forced women who objected to become TERFs. Do you know what those women, abandoned by the left and then slandered, said? Sayonara.

The left’s disdain for the very marginalized groups they claim to champion has always been a matter of wonder. Marginalized communities, according to the left, are simply unable to succeed without extensive help in the form of affirmative action, equity, and many other forms of discrimination against everyone else. This mindset has permeated every institution controlled by the left, most notably academia and the arts (where you can create and publish any kind of junk that you want and be lauded for it as long as you claim to represent the struggle of some marginalized group).

Nowhere is this disdain for one’s own people more evident than in the elite left’s outright refusal to believe that ordinary Black Americans are perfectly capable of educating themselves, buying their own homes, obtaining good jobs, and leading happy, productive lives without intervention. The modern left asserts that Black citizens lack the necessary abilities to succeed on their own merit. I consider this to be a remarkably offensive assertion and patently untrue. I suspect most Black Americans feel exactly the same way.

Just in my lifetime, from the scandal of Pruitt-Igoe (where Black homeowners in 1950s St. Louis had homes in which they had equity condemned in order to relocate them as renters to public housing) to affirmative action being practiced in most public institutions decades after the Supreme Court began dismantling it (and in blatant disregard for the law since 2023), progressives have held Black self-enterprise in contempt. The political left has treated Black Americans as electoral vassals.

You know what I think Black Americans want? The same as everyone else. I think that Blacks want safe, pleasant neighborhoods with good schools—something that is at odds with progressive policies that produce decaying welfare states and defund the police initiatives. I think they want the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. No more and no less. I think that Black Americans want equal access to work, accomplishment and the success of the American Dream. I think that Black Americans want race to be a non-issue in anything other than genealogy.

I wonder if the discrepancy between progressive priorities and the priorities of Black Americans is the reason Trump doubled his support among Black voters from 2020 to 2024. Sounds like sayonara to me.

Ditto for Hispanics. You want to know who objects to illegal immigration across the southern border more than Americans who emigrated from Europe in previous generations? Hispanic Americans. When people endure the things that many first-generation Hispanics had to endure to arrive here and still manage to build successful businesses and communities, one ought not be surprised that they might object to watching what they built become subsumed in waves of illegal immigration often characterized by none of the work ethic or desire to assimilate that they brought with them when they came.

This probably goes a long way to explaining why Hispanics increased their support for Trump from 36% to 48% in four years. If you look up “sayonara” in the dictionary, it might not be someone Japanese waving at you. It might be a Hispanic businessperson.

And poor whites? Well, those are my people. My family hails from Appalachia, which is the third world in America. I recognized every character in Hillbilly Elegy from firsthand experience. But you know what? Everyone I ever encountered from back in the hills, far from the centers of power and enlightenment in this country, understood the distinction between a man and a woman. And those who managed to bootstrap themselves to success somehow got by without the benefits of imposed equity or the faintest notion of intersectionality.

As an aside, I’ve noticed that my people’s odds of success in business, academia and politics are far greater than the odds of the average elite-progressive-NPR-listening wanker getting by in a coal mine for even a single day. You may take that disdain for my people and perch on it.

The gay community will be the next to abandon progressivism. Every gay person that I know thinks that the trans identity movement is not only lunacy but also a direct threat to their hard-won social acceptance. If that exodus occurs, the progressive movement may soon represent little more than pronoun freedom and disdain for anyone who isn’t very weird.

You can only get by showing open contempt for most of the country and a good chunk of your own political coalition for so long until it’s all over but for the slow walk and sad singing. History is full of examples of political and social elitists who were sure that their run of control would last forever and who found out differently sooner than they could have imagined.

That’s progressivism in this country right now. Can you say “sayonara”? Sure, I knew you could.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com