I live inside the Washington, D.C. beltway but I do not live and breathe politics. My interests are varied and skew more to the pleasures of mundane routines. But when political ideologies become dominant, they can affect all aspects of life and make anything political. For that reason, seemingly non-political occurrences can attest to a […]
I live inside the Washington, D.C. beltway but I do not live and breathe politics. My interests are varied and skew more to the pleasures of mundane routines.
But when political ideologies become dominant, they can affect all aspects of life and make anything political. For that reason, seemingly non-political occurrences can attest to a political ideology’s virtues or failings.
Liberalism remains the dominant ideology in this country, and I believe its effects on our society are disastrous. That is evident all around us, not just in policy.
In that spirit, I argue that within the realm of ordinary daily life, nothing does more to exhibit liberalism’s moral and social failing than food delivery services.
Summer humidity in Washington, D.C. makes commuting home from work feel more like a swim than a walk. My awareness is heightened during the daily slog from office to apartment because every delay, every inconvenience, on that commute is another hurdle to the reprieve of air conditioning and clean clothes.
And it is in that drenched mindset that I often pick up take out on my way home.
Without failure, I see the same thing play out every time I wait for my food to be ready.
A food delivery driver walks into the restaurant and makes a beeline for the pickup counter. He invariably does not speak much English and as a result will not talk with the cashier.
Rather, the driver shoves his smartphone in the employee’s face. This act assumes that the cashier, who often only speaks English marginally better, can read the order information clearly on a screen mere inches away from his face.
Every day, I see two hardworking Americans unable to have a job-bearing conversation about whether a customer’s food is ready.
In the moment, I am furious that two individuals not knowing how to ask if and confirm that the bag on the counter is Derek’s French fries makes me wait longer. The same thing probably happens when I order from these delivery services, I think.
But those momentary frustrations are trivial in the grander scheme of things.
To understand why these failed conversations exemplify liberalism’s negative consequences, it is necessary to understand what separates – what alienates – the two individuals. It is not just language.
It’s the smartphone – or rather what the smartphone symbolizes.
Smartphones, iPhones most commonly in these interactions, are play-things for this country’s liberal elite, which pursues convenience in accordance with its classed moral code.
The same liberal elite that shuns making English an official language is also too preoccupied with the feel-good optics of multiculturalism to consider seriously the practical benefits of assimilationist policies.
Codified incentives that would help legal immigrants learn English and participate enable these working-class individuals to gain greater social mobility without robbing any person or group of their language or culture.
It’s pathetic that hard-working Americans are held back because they face a language barrier that their political leaders will not lessen through pro-assimilation legislation.
The smartphone, as a result, is not a luxury to them; it is both a tool for and barrier to making a living wage.
Just as in the visual of two workers standing on opposite sides of a smartphone, multiculturalism, as a set of policies, operates as a force that keep groups separate. Multiculturalism rewards ethnic separateness and disincentivizes the formation of community bonds between groups living beside one another.
“[M]ulticulturalists create another yawning inequality in our society,” the writer and anti-affirmative action advocate Kenny Xu wrote last year, “between those who believe in and benefit from America’s cultural melting pot and those who reject it and become strangers in their own land.”
The multiculturalist liberal elite constructs its classed moral code that enables the most affluent to virtue signal at the expense of working – and middle-class Americans.
Technological virtue signaling impacts our daily lives – as is the case between the driver and cashier – but it is most apparent in the liberal elite’s environmental crusade.
In 2015, the Broadway actress Ruthie Ann Miles held up her iPhone while accepting the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for The King and I and told the audience to “please recycle” as she proceeded to read off her acceptance speech.
The funny line received its due applause.
But the incident betrays the unethical and anti-environmental way in which the liberal elite’s favorite gizmos are manufactured for those that can afford to enjoy them away from conflict.
In 2019, the International Human Rights Advocates sued Apple and other tech giants on behalf of “Congolese families who say their children were killed or maimed while mining for cobalt used to power smartphones, laptops and electric cars.”
“[T]he quest for [the Democratic Republic of the] Congo’s cobalt has demonstrated how the clean energy revolution, meant to save the planet from perilously warming temperatures in an age of enlightened self-interest, is caught in a familiar cycle of exploitation, greed and gamesmanship,” The New York Times reported in 2021.
The global economy is where the American liberal elite’s classed hypocrisy comes into view.
So long as the bad things are happening to people out of view and out-of-step with woke Americans’ priorities, the liberal elite calculate, the abuses do not actually count.
President Biden’s energy policy exemplifies this head-in-the-sand approach.
Biden was president barely a week before he started halting oil and gas leases to advance the liberal elite’s green agenda.
This summer amid 40-year record-high inflation, however, he failed to convince Saudi Arabia to produce more oil to alleviate working Americans’ suffering at the pumps.
Biden’s politicking was shameful.
Oil is bad because it harms our environment, but it is key to American prosperity when its production only compromises brown people’s environment a continent away?
That attitude may be what progressives accuse conservatives of thinking, but in actuality it displays American liberalism’s rank paternalistic hypocrisy.
Beyond the transactional nature of consumerism and vote-getting, the American liberal elite does not carry about anyone outside of its own class.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro recently demonstrated how the liberal elite’s aloofness operates.
On July 27, Bolsonaro tweeted back at Leonardo DiCaprio after the Hollywood start criticized deforestation in Brazil’s rainforest.
“[G}ive up your yacht before lecturing the world, but I know progressives: you want to change the entire world but never yourselves, so I will let you off the hook,” Bolsonaro replied.
The Brazilian president was nearly right.
Progressives are uninterested in changing themselves while telling others how to live their lives, but they also believe other people should be more like them. They invite people into their ranks, but on terms that make the invitation only practicable for those with ample funds.
As gas prices soared in June, Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow (MI) said that more Americans should be like her and buy electric vehicles so they can stop worrying about gas prices.
Her comments were blissfully out of touch. Electric cars are still more expensive than gasoline-powered vehicles, which puts them even more out of reach for families choosing between food and other necessities during record-high inflation.
Who did Stabenow think should buy an electric vehicle? The food delivery drivers in front of me at the restaurant?
The $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act is not going to help them. Ford and General Motors just raised prices on their electric vehicles by roughly the same amount.
There is nothing in this new law that makes converting to an electric vehicle easier for the most economically vulnerable gig economy workers.
Stabenow sounded like Marie Antoinette when she uttered her remarks, and the tax credit is just the frosting on the cake of conceited virtue signaling the liberal elite offer working Americans as policy solutions.
The mundane aspects of our lives should not have to be political. But daily life is politicized when political thought shapes how people relate to one another.
The liberal elite mistake their hypocritical global outlook for sophisticated cosmopolitanism and in doing so undermine community bonds in this country.
Ordinary life will continue to be shaped by liberals with extra-ordinary power so long as liberalism continues to undervalue social cohesion and localism in favor of the relative few who can thrive in an increasingly isolated digitalized world.
