Every now and then, liberal elites bluntly say what they think about Americans who support former President Donald Trump. Barack Obama accused them of “cling[ing]” to their religion and guns. Hillary Clinton placed them in a “basket of deplorables” (“racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic”) and advocated their “formal deprogramming.” President Joe Biden has called them a “threat” to democracy. Keith Olbermann said that Trump supporters “must be removed from our society.” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough claimed that Trump supporters “hate America.” David Frum simply called them “jerks.” In the New Republic, Brynn Tannehill wrote that Trump supporters “love fascism.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says that Trump Republicans “fit the definition of fascism.” Sportscaster Bob Costas branded Trump supporters as a “toxic cult.” Most recently, former NBC television host Katie Couric described Trump supporters as “anti-intellectual.”

Trump supporters are blamed for their “whiteness,” their “nationalism,” and their devotion to Jesus Christ. Amanda Tyler, described as a “religious liberty expert,” told the Center for American Progress that Christian nationalism is “the single biggest threat to religious freedom in the United States today.” University of Northern Iowa professor emeritus Steve Corbin called “white Christian nationalism” a threat to democracy. Trump supporters’ resistance to “woke” policies and illegal border crossings are symptoms, according to the progressive elite, of their uneducated, cult-like following of Trump. Those citizens who support an “America First” foreign policy are derided by progressive globalists as “isolationists” and xenophobes.

Trump, to be sure, is the immediate target of all of the Left’s derision of his supporters, but the ultimate targets of the progressive elite are those Americans who choose to resist the progressive agenda in all of its forms — transgender ideology, unrestrained immigration, enforced secularism, globalist geopolitics, and rule by a progressive one-party state. Tablet’s Michael Lind has called modern-day American progressives “Jacobins” whose ideology and tactics resemble the leaders of the French Revolution. Today’s progressives, Lind writes, promote the “decline of religion,” “the expansion of politically correct, mostly economically worthless higher education,” and the “accelerating disintegration of the American family” that will result in “the expansion of core Democratic voting blocs.” Lind believes that the Democrats are counting on demographic trends coupled with their progressive policies to institutionalize one-party dominance. He calls it “Democratic hegemony.”

More than 80 years ago, political philosopher James Burnham in his indispensable book The Machiavellians described the reality of the struggles for power that are the basis for all politics, regardless of the formal political system. Borrowing from Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels, Burnham explained that every form of government — including democracy — has a “ruling class” and a class that is ruled. Pareto wrote that the best forms of government permit and encourage a “circulation of the elites” in which power periodically changes hands among elites, and the elite class is open for non-elites to someday join. According to Lind, today’s ruling progressive elites in America want to end the “circulation of elites” and maintain their power and privilege indefinitely.

Why, after all, should “deplorables” or people who “cling to their religion and guns” or members of a “toxic cult” or “fascists” or “white Christian nationalists” or xenophobes or anti-globalists have any say in how this country should be governed? Totalitarian rulers first publicly denigrate their political opponents, then attempt to cast them out of polite society, then expose them to public ridicule, then look to reeducate them and, failing that, persecute them. This often involves “show trials” that imprison political opponents. That sends a loud and clear message to the supporters of those political opponents: accept the state’s political agenda — or else.

It was Abraham Lincoln who questioned whether government of the people, by the people, and for the people would endure. When a ruling elite categorizes half of its citizens as unworthy of participation in the political process, Lincoln’s question also endures.