Lecturing America on its shortcomings while exempting themselves.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

If one believes that charter schools and vouchers weaken the public-school system, then an effective way to counter such challenges would be to put one’s own children in public classrooms rather than to deny the poor the ability to disconnect from the public schools for the same reasons that so many elites have. One of the most surreal paradoxes of Washington, D.C., is the number of progressives (including the former president of the United States) who put their children in Sidwell-Friends while passionately opposing charter schools and vouchers.

The list of progressive paradoxes is limitless: handgun possession by the law-abiding is a supposed catalyst for violence, but not for security details who surround Hollywood and political celebrities. Elites lecture Americans on their supposed – isms and -ologies (sexism, racism, nativism), but when such sins are endemic to Middle Eastern societies abroad or indeed among immigrant communities inside the West, they are paternalistically excused or ignored.

Common themes in rap music are misogyny, racism and calls for violence against police — the sort of career-ending lyrics for most other entertainers.

...All these hypocrisies raise the question among fly-over Americans about the entire politically correct progressive agenda of elites: Has it become reduced to a cynical sort of indemnity insurance that elites take out to lubricate their own privilege? (Will Bill Maher survive his use of the N-word, given his loud liberalism?) Al Gore got rich by creating a veritable global-warming-alarmist industry, only to offload his largely failed cable channel (in a fire sale timed to help him beat anticipated higher capital-gains taxes) to the gas- and oil-exporting autocracy of Qatar. He got away without criticism because he was Al Gore, liberal environmental-justice warrior.

In sum, the progressive Left’s problem is not elitism per se, at least in the sense that it’s now the party of wealthy people, investors, professionals, academics, the media, and celebrities. Rather the rub is the Left’s grating habit of lecturing America on its shortcomings while exempting themselves.

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