What has distressed the American critics of the free economy is not private property but the private property of others.

 From Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands by Roger Scuton.  Emphasis added.

The triumph of the United States Constitution was to make private property, individual liberty and the rule of law immovable features, not only of the political landscape in America but also of American political science. Almost all left-leaning American philosophy in recent times has been founded in those classical liberal preconceptions, and very little of it has challenged the fundamental institutions of ‘bourgeois’ society, as the Marxists conceive this. Instead it has directed attention to the pathology of the free society – to ‘consumerism’, ‘conspicuous consumption’, the world of ‘mass society’ and mass advertisement. From Veblen to Galbraith what has distressed the American critics of the free economy is not private property – which is the cornerstone of their own independence – but the private property of others. In recent times it is the spectacle of property in the hands of ordinary, gross, uneducated people that has troubled the domestic critics of American capitalism.

Far from seeing this ‘consumerism’ as the necessary result of democracy, the left has tried to show that consumerism is not democracy but a pathological form of it. Property is, in America, too palpable, too physical a fact, and while one may deceive oneself about the hearts and minds of the common people it is impossible to remain deceived about the trash that they scatter about their yards. To the visitor from the East Coast cities, the suburban sprawl of Texas is an appalling affront to civilization: through property, advertising and the media the ordinary American puts himself on display, and thereby undermines the illusion of equality. He is plainly of another species from the liberal who stands up for him, and this is a hard truth that must nevertheless be swallowed.

Academia, Deep State, and mainstream media are having a harder and harder time hiding their class condescension towards ordinary Americans.  They espouse a left-leaning world view but it is their condescension that bring them low.  What passes as a race problem or a polarization problem in the US always boils down to a class problem.   Academia, Deep State, and mainstream media dislike the success ordinary Americans can and do achieve through the Classical Liberal model.  

Leftist philosophies (Socialism, Marxism, Social Justice Theory, Post Modernism, Critical Race Theory) are not adopted by the chattering classes due to their empirical reality or logical integrity.  They are adopted, usually unconsciously, as a weapon against ordinary Americans.  As a means of protecting a class status quo.

As Scuton points out, what distresses the American the chattering class is not private property but the private property of others.  It is not free speech, it is the free speech of others.  It is not equality but the equality of others.