David Blaska:

Before their unpaid furlough, the white lab coats at Blaska Policy Werkes had been studying the disconnect between the rhetoric of progressives like Bernie Sanders, Mark Pocan, John Nichols, and A.O.C. and their actions.

Like Marxists everywhere, they purport to speak for the common man but represent the interests of tenured academics, the governing class, professional grievance peddlers, and other elites. They left “the Deplorables” to Donald Trump.

The farmers, tavern keepers, and hairdressers who protested WI Gov. Tony Evers’ rigid economic paralysis were motivated by “fear,” or “paranoia” or “just plain manipulated for political reasons,” Pocan sniffed. (Recounted here.)

The Progressive Dane mayor of Madison was more succinct: “Idiots!” she called them. Pocan, Mayor Rhodes-Conway, Nichols et al have yet to miss a single paycheck during a lockdown that has idled 33 million proud American workers and made them supplicants for Nancy Pelosi’s charity.

Peggy Noonan gets it. “Since the pandemic began, the overclass has been in charge — scientists, doctors, political figures, consultants—calling the shots for the average people. But personally they have less skin in the game,”  Noonan writes in “Scenes from the class struggle.”

“The National Institutes of Health scientist won’t lose his livelihood over what’s happened. Neither will the midday anchor. …

It’s not that those in red states don’t think there’s a pandemic. … they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. …

The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate. … No one sent them to Yale. … The overclass says, “Wait three months before we’re safe.” They reply, “There’s no such thing as safe.” …

⇒ “Wearing a mask is for smug liberals.”

⇒ “Liberals are more fearful of coronavirus.”

Peggy Noonan’s Bottom Line: “Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called anti-lockdown demonstrations ‘racist and misogynistic.’ She might as well have called them ‘deplorables.’”

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Please choose Whitmer as your veep, Uncle Joe!