Bette Midler is the latest liberal to pretend to care about the ‘average Joe’

I’ve been a puzzle to a lot of my liberal friends. They can’t figure me out. Over the years, more than a few of them have said: “You can’t really be a conservative.” And when I ask why they would say that, they tick off a bunch of liberal assumptions about conservatives. I don’t seem to be a racist, they tell me, or a homophobe or a sexist or any of the other sins they cavalierly attribute to conservatives. So how, they wonder, could I be a conservative?  

My liberal friends may be dense but they’re hardly alone — plenty of conservatives make sweeping misjudgments about liberals and other people with whom they disagree, too. But here’s the dirty little secret about too many supposedly intelligent liberals: They’re either clueless or nasty or both. They not only don’t like conservatives in particular; they don’t like ordinary Americans in general — especially if they come from red states such as, say, West Virginia.

We just got proof of that from none other than a member of the New York and Hollywood glitterati, Bette Midler, who slimed the entire state of West Virginia, a state made up of a whole bunch of ordinary Americans, most of whom had the “audacity” to actually vote for Donald Trump.

After Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he wouldn’t vote for Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar, so-called Build Back Better bill, Midler tweeted, “He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.” 

Before we move on to Midler’s non-apology apology, let me point out that West Virginia ranks higher than New York or California when it comes to literacy. There are a lot more people who can’t read or write in the places Bette Midler hangs out than in West Virginia. But to Midler, West Virginia is where “those hicks” live, the ones who are too stupid and too “strung out” to know what’s good for them. What else explains their support for Joe Manchin — or Donald Trump, right?

You’d have every right to believe that liberals such as Bette Midler care about your average Joe.  Liberals, after all, are always telling us how much they care about ordinary Americans. But a lot of liberal elites would rather walk over shards of broken glass than wash their hands in the same sink as an ordinary American. What Midler managed to do was expose what a headline in the Daily Beast calls “an ugly brand of liberal elitism.”

When her tweet hit the proverbial fan, she went back on Twitter to announce, “I apologize to the good people of WVA for my last outburst. I’m just seeing red; #JoeManchin and his whole family are a criminal enterprise.” With apologies like that, who needs insults?

A lot of liberals talk and think the way Bette Midler talks and thinks — especially when they’re in their safe zone, among friends. 

Remember what presidential candidate Barack Obama said in 2008 about working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses? “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

He never would make such a condescending statement in public — and not only because that kind of talk wouldn’t go over well in places he might need to win the election. That kind of elitist observation would have other long-lasting consequences. It would shatter Obama’s liberal image. But he was among friends when he spoke about those ordinary, working-class Americans who “cling to their guns or religion.” He was at a fancy fundraiser — in San Francisco, no less — and didn’t know his comments would get out. 

Hillary Clinton, who was running against Obama at the time, jumped all over him, saying, “I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America. His remarks are elitist and out of touch.”

In case you’re wondering, yes, that’s the same Hillary Clinton who, in 2016, told her friends, at a fund-raising event in Manhattan — that other mecca of American left-wing supposed sophistication — that half of Donald Trump supporters fit into “a basket of deplorables.” And she was worried about Obama’s “demeaning” remarks? She was upset with his elitism? I’m not sure what Hillary’s strong points are, but self-awareness doesn’t appear to be one of them.

As for Bette Midler, you’d think that by now she would have closed out her Twitter account. When Trump was running for reelection in 2020 and his wife Melania spoke in the Rose Garden on his behalf, Midler mocked her accent, tweeting, “Oh, God. She still can’t speak English,” before adding, “Get that illegal alien off the stage!” 

Wait a minute! I thought only bigoted conservatives made fun of people who don’t speak perfect English. I thought liberals embraced people who came here from another country. And while we’re on the subject, when did liberals have a problem with “illegal aliens”? 

As an editorial in the New York Post put it, “The elite left literally can’t conceive of legitimate disagreement: All of America that thinks differently is defective, a bunch of hicks and addicts. Progressives’ eternal blindness to their own bigotry is a marvel.”

And that’s precisely why Bette Midler’s dopey tweet about West Virginia matters. I mean, who cares what some entertainer thinks? But it’s what she represents that matters. It’s a brand of elite liberal hypocrisy that Midler exposed. 

They can’t stop telling us how much compassion they have for people less fortunate than the top 1 percent. But their compassion extends only to the less fortunate who agree with them. And when they don’t, when they don’t share the worldview of so many liberal elites, they see another side of elite liberalism — the condescending, bitter side. It’s the side the “enlightened left” usually reserves for talk with their like-minded “enlightened” friends. 

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Patreon page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.