Elites in media, academia, bureaucracy, and politics have developed a deep, visceral contempt for "common sense." They treat it as a dirty word — something naive, reactionary, prejudiced, and dangerous. According to them, ordinary people's shared instincts and lived experience are not wisdom forged through generations, but a problem to be educated out of the population.
This isn't just snobbery. It's a defensive reaction. Common sense keeps exposing their grand theories as disconnected from reality, and they hate it.
What Common Sense Actually IsCommon sense is the accumulated practical wisdom of communities. It draws from real-life experience, family stories, cultural traditions, and plain observation. It's not anti-science or anti-expertise. It simply insists that abstract theories must pass the test of everyday life.
You don't need a sociology degree to know that flooding communities with rapid, large-scale immigration without proper integration strains housing, wages, services, and social cohesion.
You don't need an economics PhD to understand that shutting down cheap, reliable energy sources while worshipping intermittent renewables will make power expensive and unreliable.
You don't need a gender studies professor to tell you that men cannot become women, or that biological sex matters in sport, prisons, and changing rooms.
You don't need climate models to see that families struggling with electricity bills and grocery prices care more about immediate affordability than apocalyptic predictions 80 years from now.
These are common-sense conclusions. Millions of Australians reach them naturally. And that terrifies the elites.
The Elite Playbook: Demonise, Pathologise, "Educate"The ruling class response is always the same:
Label it "populism" (as if caring what normal people think is an insult).
Call it "misinformation" or "disinformation."
Frame it as emotional, uneducated, or "far-Right."
Demand more "expert" intervention, more censorship, more re-education.
Frank Furedi nails it: elites fear common sense because it represents the "lay epistemology" of ordinary citizens, the shared understanding that binds communities. Their technocratic worldview, by contrast, is abstract, top-down, and often immune to feedback from real people.
They push:
Net Zero policies that hurt the poor and working class first.
Identity politics that divide people by race, gender, and sexuality while ignoring class and community.
Open borders rhetoric while living in gated suburbs or inner-city bubbles.
"Defund the police" or soft-on-crime approaches that ordinary citizens pay for with their safety.
Biological denialism that confuses children and erodes women's rights.
When voters push back, whether through One Nation, Trump, or any populist movement, the elites don't reconsider. They double down and declare the voters need "deprogramming" or a "vaccine" against wrongthink (as we've seen in recent university events).
Debunking the Elite BSMyth 1: Common sense is just prejudice. No. Common sense is filtered through lived reality. It evolves over time but remains grounded. Elites replace it with ideology that fails basic reality tests.
Myth 2: Experts are always right. Experts in narrow fields have value. But when "experts" enter politics and culture, they frequently substitute models, projections, and incentives for wisdom. History is littered with expert consensus that proved disastrous: eugenics, lobotomies, certain economic models, dietary guidelines, and more recently, extreme COVID policies and gender medicine.
Myth 3: Populism is a threat to democracy. The real threat is when elites treat democracy as a problem to be managed whenever the "wrong" people win. Trump's "revolution of common sense" was scary to them not because it was irrational, but because it was rational to millions of ordinary citizens tired of being managed and lectured.
Myth 4: Ordinary people are too stupid for self-government. This is the core arrogance. The same people who can't define a woman, can't balance a budget, and can't keep the lights on, claim the right to rule over the instincts of truck drivers, nurses, farmers, and tradies.
Why This Matters in AustraliaWe see the same pattern here. Cost-of-living crisis? Blame external factors. Housing shortage? More migration. Energy prices? Renewables transition. Crime and social tension? "Far-Right" concerns. Universities host events treating One Nation voters (often 20-25%+ in places) as a disease needing a union "vaccine," when in reality these universities need to be defunded.
Common sense says: fix the basics first. Affordable energy. Secure borders with sensible immigration. Protect women's spaces. Prioritise integration over division. Reward work and family. Tell the truth about biology and statistics.
The elites fear common sense because it's accessible to everyone. It doesn't require a university degree or subscription to the right newsletters. It democratises truth and judgment, and that threatens their monopoly on "correct" opinion.
Real progress doesn't come from sneering at the wisdom of the people. It comes from listening to it, testing policies against it, and respecting the lived experience of citizens.
The revolution of common sense isn't the problem. The elite allergy to it is. And the more they dismiss it, the stronger that revolution becomes.