I have to confess, I don’t understand the absolute allergy to populism — the denunciation of elites, or the romanticization of the poor and struggling — in certain corners of the American right. Lately, I’ve seen it in evidence in the tut-tutting reaction to Oliver Anthony’s viral-on-the-right tune, “Rich Men North of Richmond” — which, in its sneering at politicians and complaints about inflation, seems at least somewhat compatible with traditional conservatism. Anthony doesn’t even really quite blame his boss. The modern conservative movement has been denouncing or trying to convert a liberal elite from its founding.
I also don’t understand it from the perspective of Christians. Obviously, Scripture contains a great deal of wisdom literature that encourages hard work, saving, and moderation and sees wealth as the blessing appropriate to virtue. But it also contains the minor prophets’ writings, which are littered with warnings aimed at society’s elites: the rich, the judges, the priests — and so on — for their failure to give the poor their rights (Amos 5:11-12); for their wasting away the people’s rightful inheritance and their exploitation and violent expropriation of the poor (Micah 2-3); and for using unbalanced scales and then bragging about wealth (Hosea 12), etc.
The whole of this tradition of moral warning and apocalyptic prophecy is given epic summation in Mary’s response to Elizabeth at the Visitation:
He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
So long as we are inheritors of a Judeo-Christian imagination, we will always have an anti-elite strain of rhetoric running through our public discourse. It was the pagans who made gods of the ruling class. It is those who inherit from Jerusalem who know the truth of the Beatitudes, who know that God humbles the proud, and that He calls the ruling class back to the awful truth that He alone is sovereign.