From Mines to Mindsets, Civilizational Strife, and Multiple Realities

“The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life-hence their feeble attempt to compensate by embracing a strenuous regimen of gratuitous exercise. Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality ‘hyperreality,’ as it has been called-as distinguished from the palpable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in the ‘social construction of reality’-the central dogma of postmodernist thought-reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate them selves against risk and contingency-against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life-the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.”
—Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites

From Mines to Mindsets

In The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch diagnosed a new ruling class—not grounded in wealth or ownership, but in mobility, credentialism, and moral vanity.

These elites, mostly urban professionals, rejected rooted life. working-class values. and a frontier spirit. They constructed therapeutic bureaucracies to manage behavior, adopted symbolic causes (climate, DEI, gun control, trans) to signal status, and used institutional filters (DEI, ESG, credentialism) to exclude dissenters.

In Colorado, this is the world of Boulder environmentalists, Denver nonprofit staffers, and progressive donors who write climate, trans, or gun bills but can’t change a tire, mow their own lawn, gut a fish or dress game, or explain how a firearm works. Perhaps that last bit may be verging on a strawman, but needless to say, it’s these elites who dominate Colorado affairs.

This capture and influence of these elites requires a big picture dive into Colorado history.

The state once largely ran on coal, oil, steel, cattle, and copper. Its working-class politics were grounded in material solidarity—paychecks, union halls, lunch pails, and shared sacrifice. This however, began to change starting in the 1980s when the state’s foundations began to crack due to a combination of the decline in extractive commodities and the national shift offshoring and automatizing of manufacturing.

The state’s legacy mining industry largely collapsed due to changes in commodity prices and the environmental movement. The boom and bust cycle typical with oil and gas along with a combination of environmental regulations led to a slow decline. This economic erosion created a class and cultural vacuum. Into that space stepped a new elite: credentialed, ideologically progressive, with evangelical views and deeply hostile to the “old Colorado” - the Progressive Colonists.

While Lasch provided a moral psychology into this new elite, James Burnham explains the organizational mechanics. In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that capitalism was being replaced by a new system where control rests in the hands of managers, planners, technicians, and administrators. This managerial class centralized decision making removing democratic checks and balances, and shifted from a focus on production to administration and control. The use of non-elected bodies, NGOs and bureaucratic institutions governance shifted from grassroots involvement to technocratic involvement. In other words, these weren’t owners, but operators—controlling systems, not property. Burnham saw this coming in the 1930s. In Colorado, it became reality in the 2000s.

Colorado’s legacy frontier spirit and cultures lies in its control by a combination of miners, ranchers, and small business owners. But now Colorado is largely controlled by Progressive Colonists the dynamic is entirely different. Instead of setting energy policy by the actual producers and end users, they use appointed boards and climate NGOS. Education is run by union-backed school boards with little ability for dissenters to influence. These same unions and school boards heavily lobby the Progressive Colonists to further expand the state’s control and amount of money taken from the people via taxation, fees, and regulatory burden. Urban planning is largely dictated not by local demands, but by the ideologies espoused by foundation-funded think tanks and professional transportation bureaucracies. While syndicalism played a key role Colorado’s often turbulent and violent labor movement, it largely disappeared as the labor movement fused with the State transforming it from a working class movement to a public-sector lobby.

The Clash of Civilizations

The divide between Colorado and Progressive Colonial Colorado isn’t just political, it’s civilizational.

Lasch saw the rise of this professional managerial class when he said, “[the] thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.” These were the knowledge workers, DEI commissars, sustainability officers, foundation executives, and campus activists whose authority came not from material production or democratic trust—but from credentials, moral jargon, and bureaucratic insulation.

None of this is new insight, consider what

Wes Flynn

said over here.

The capture of Colorado by this professional managerial class, which largely consists of Progressive Colonists was largely engineered, funded, and implemented by the “Gang of Four” as highlighted in The Blueprint.

It’s perhaps interesting to get a glimpse into how this “Gang of Four” acquired their wealth.

• Tim Gill - amassed his fortune through Quark, a desktop publishing software company.

• Pat Stryker - heir to the Stryker Corporation medical technology empire.

• Jared Polis - capitalized on the dot-com boom with ventures like ProFlowers and BlueMountain.com

• Rutt Bridges developed and sold geophysical software.

These are all individuals who’ve obtained their wealth disconnected from physical labor and instead work in more abstract realms leading them to Lasch’s “secession from reality.” They’re able to dabble in what

Rob Henderson

calls luxury beliefs and embrace ideologies that prioritize symbolic gestures over reality based engagement.

Their transformation included others with similar disconnects - the powerful education and other public-sector unions, luxury belief activist nonprofits, the fiat university system, and sympathetic “journalists.” Instead of building a working class coalition, they built a managerial consensus swapping out wages for “equity,” infrastructure to “sustainability,” and safety to “lived experience.”

Those outside this professional bubble remain ignored or punished suffering under Colorado’s increasing cost of living, crime issues, and other quality of life issues. The traditions and values of old Colorado are marginalized in favor of new or imported ideologies. Local autonomy and decision making is sidestepped by centralized control, primarily coming from the Denver area. A greater emphasis is placed on symbolic politics which use performative actions over addressing core and measurable issues.

A State Caught Between Two Realities

A lot could be said about increasing political polarization in Colorado due to division across party lines (there are plenty of disaffected in both major parties) or policy preferences but the state is divided by reality itself.

On one side stand those who still inhabit the physical world with skin in the game who live and work with the unpredictable hazards of life—weather, market swings, bad harvests, economic busts, and personal responsibility. On the other side stands a self-anointed class of managers and moralists, who operate in abstractions, draft legislation from think tank reports, and pursue safetyism and control as ultimate ends.

As Lasch foresaw, the new elite governs not from shared experience but from a removed moral perch, armed with jargon and data models. As Burnham predicted, they do not own—they operate. They do not persuade—they administer.

That is the new Colorado under the thumb of Progressive Colonialism.

The result is a colonized polity: one in which real Coloradans are managed by those who do not understand them, and often do not even care to try. Colorado remains a cautionary tale of how a society can be governed by people who do not live in it—only over it. The real question for another time is, how can Colorado escape this false reality?