Them Vs. Us

A new study shows just how out of touch the elite is

Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 23,500 subscribers in 147 countries each week. Become a paid supporter to access everything —the full archive, unique posts, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent, contrarian writers who are making a difference.

Ursula von der Leyen and former Secretary of State John Kerry attend the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” ——F. Scott Fitzgerald

I write a lot about our out-of-touch elites, about how we are now in the hands of a new ruling class, a luxury belief class, which simply does not share the values of ordinary people and does not make room for their voice in our national debate.

This was the major theme of my last book —Values, Voice, and Virtue— which struck a chord with many thousands of people who have been on the receiving end of this new elite while simultaneously angering many people who belong to that elite.

And it is a major theme of our Substack community, which I specifically started in the year 2022 to help give expression to the values of the forgotten majority and amplify their voice amid political, media, cultural, and creative institutions which either routinely ignore them or, worse, seek to stigmatise their voice as socially unacceptable or shut this voice down altogether.

And now another major new study has found more evidence for what I argue —that the new ruling class in the West has become dangerously disconnected from the people who surround them. Here, exclusively for our paid supporters who help us magnify the voice of the forgotten majority, are the key findings.

I found them fascinating and worrying at the same time and assume they will, once again, be widely ignored by our new ruling elite. Here’s the full breakdown: