Politics & Power Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia isn’t asking a question so much as staging a cross-examination. The opening “Why” implies there must be a cause, a betrayal, a story of drift. “Arrogantly detached” isn’t accidental phrasing; it paints distance as moral failure, not mere demographic change. The sentence structure does the work of indictment: first, the Democrats’ self-description (“speak for the poor and dispossessed”), then the alleged reality (“increasingly... upper-middle-class professional elite”). It’s a classic populist pivot, turning the party’s brand promise into evidence of hypocrisy.

The subtext is less about policy than about cultural authority. By naming “journalists, academics and lawyers,” Paglia isn’t just listing occupations; she’s invoking gatekeepers of language, norms, and credentialed status. These are people who traffic in persuasion and institutional power rather than industrial labor or local community ties. “Top-heavy” suggests a party built like an inverted pyramid: more managers than builders, more narrators than participants. It’s a jab at a class that speaks fluently about inequality while enjoying the insulation of stable salaries, networks, and cultural capital.

Context matters because Paglia has long positioned herself as a heterodox critic of liberal pieties, especially those rooted in campus politics and media consensus. Her point lands in an era when Democrats became increasingly concentrated in metropolitan, highly educated circles, while many working-class voters, including union households, felt culturally patronized even when materially courted. The quote weaponizes that tension: it frames “ordinary Americans” as the silenced majority and the party’s professional class as an aloof priesthood, guilty less of malice than of self-regard.