America’s Elite: A Nobility in Exile | The American Spectator

Instead of taking their ball and going home, members of America’s elite are taking themselves and going abroad. While the actions’ directions are mirror opposites, the principle is the same: Take that! Petulance personified, it’s also elitism embodied.

The latest pending elite escapee is Jimmy Fallon. So incensed by CBS’s recent dumping of Stephen Colbert, Fallon has revealed that he has obtained Italian citizenship and is considering dumping America in return. If he does, America’s gain will be Italy’s loss. (RELATED: Meloni’s Italy: A Refreshing Crescendo to Brussels’ Dissonance)

Fallon is hardly the first member of America’s elite to “go over the wall.” Eva Longoria and Ellen DeGeneres left long ago. Courtney Love’s gone too. While Rosie O’Donnell is in Ireland, exchanging insults with President Trump from afar. Others, such as Cher, Sharon Stone, and Barbara Streisand, all talked about leaving, but as yet, their walk hasn’t matched their talk. (RELATED: What All Americans Can Learn from Ellen DeGeneres’s Disastrous Escape to Europe)

Theirs is a fit of pique. If I can’t have my way, no one can play. The idea that you have something so valuable that others can’t do without it. In the case of America’s elite, the thing they believe to be so valuable is themselves.

Such conceit offers a great insight into how the elite view themselves. And us. Not that America really needed such unguarded candor from our elite. We have gotten it with regularity, in those moments of their frustration with us, the great unwashed.

At the end of the 2024 campaign, Biden called Trump’s supporters “garbage,” saying, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton similarly said Trump supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables.” In 2008, Barack Obama psychoanalyzed their second-class status as being epitomized by their attachment “to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” (RELATED: What the ‘Garbage Controversy’ Says About Democrats)

The non-elected members of America’s elite have been even less circumspect in their appraisals of their perceived inferiors.

Combined, the elite’s disdain is perfectly transparent. So too is their own self-appraisal.

Being elite requires having others to be superior to. We can’t all be elite; if we are, then none of us are. Differentiation is therefore mandatory. And the greater the number who are relegated to inferiority, the more elevated the elite status of those who are not.

Notice that while the elite lash out against the hoi polloi on a regular basis, they never have a breakdown and confess that they’re no better than the rest of us? Even when the elite dress like bums — and do so regularly — their slumming reinforces the fact that they can dress beneath the rest of us and still be above us.

It’s therefore a fool’s errand for the elite’s followers who believe that their fawning will somehow elevate them — especially in the eyes of the elite. Rather, such obsequiousness is the ultimate confirmation of their secondary status. And the elite’s primary one. Which, of course, makes the elite enjoy the fawning all the more.

This is also the reason that the elite are never truly embarrassed when they are caught in blatant elitism. Naturally, there are separate rules for “thee” and me. That’s the whole point. Were there not, there would be no difference between “thee” and me. Again, the distinction is crucial. The occasional reminder of the difference is essential to maintaining the distinction.

Occasionally, the castle dwellers must have the moat dredged: Pelosi with her COVID haircut. Newsom hobnobbing at the exclusive French Laundry, counter to his own COVID advice. The Biden family’s parade of unearned privileges.

The nobility must have their subjects. Yet not too close: To be seen, not approached. But still to be seen. The plight of the deposed exile is to retain the title without the subjects. In the foreign lands to which they flee, they simply pay their bills, but they are like everyone else who can. No longer ruling, they exist as elite only in theory.

So it is for our diaspora of divas. Do the residents of the foreign lands to which they flee even know they’re there? The anguished cry of unrecognized celebrity is always, “Do you know who I am?” To utter it is to answer it: “No.” When you must tell someone you are somebody, you aren’t — just as when you have to explain a punchline, it’s not a joke.

Assuredly, most Americans don’t know when members of their elite have decamped. No one wakes in the morning feeling the absence of Ellen or Rosie, or, if it comes to it, Jimmy. (RELATED: America’s Dumbest Refugees Pick God’s Cruelest Joke)

The irony is that members of America’s elite are leaving America because America left them. By voting Trump into a second term, the American electorate turned their backs on their elite’s advice, pleading, and warning. And their threat that they would leave.

In doing so anyway, despite the admonitions of their betters, America simultaneously rejected the elite as their leaders — the ultimate rejection of them as elite. So, members of America’s elite are decamping from the de classe. Only by this final separation can they hope to hold on to some semblance of their elite status, even if it is only maintained in exile.

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READ MORE from J.T. Young:

Mamdani’s Makeover

Trump’s Supporters Aren’t Going Anywhere

Mamdani Trapped in the Left’s Tangled Web of Race and Gender

J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing, and has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and representing a Fortune 20 company.