Response to my brother’s post:
I guess if we’re kicking these off with movie quotes, I’ll reach for the high-ground (not a tough climb from “fuck-mooks”)
Brian: Did you know that without trigonometry there would be no engineering?
Bender: Without lamps there would be no light.-The Breakfast Club
But I’ll leave that aside for a bit. Truth is, my first instinct while reading this was to battle back with general snark, and you certainly gave me plenty of reason to do so. But, in the spirit of not being like those fuck-mooks on talk radio or even on DailyKos (both probably the only worthy targets of fuck-mookdom in your post), I figured I might as well just try for a respectful counterpoint. See? Even non-intellectuals are capable of reasonable debate.
Alright, it seems to me that you make a few assumptions here:
1. The entire frame of the Left being intangibly “un-American” (in all those latte-sipping, Georgetown-residing ways) was an invention by the Right and that the only fault of the Left was that they let it stick.
2. That the political and media worlds use the frame of elitism and intellect interchangeably. Also, that this is bad because the most important quality for a leader to possess is high intellect.
3. People who don’t see “beyond their mailbox” don’t care about what happens “beyond their mailbox.” So, ignorance breeds callousness.
4. That a handful of assholes at a McCain rally (and plenty more assholes and fuck-mooks calling into Rush, posting on Free Republic, buying Ann Coulter books, and occasionally being the “man on the street” interviewed in West Virginia which is then gleefully shown on TV as being emblematic of West Virginia voters) justly represents working class Americans.
5. That the money guys who used to stand in opposition to John Q. Lunchbucket discovered ways to actually enlist said Mr. Lunchbucket in a campaign against “elistism,” and therefore against his own economic interests.
6. Something about how this relates to the branding of hate-mongers v. socialists. OK, this one I won’t respond to, ’cause I honestly don’t get what you’re saying.
So let’s start at the top. In The Beginning… the American Left epitomized the nation’s rabble – impossible to consider elite in terms of wealth, policies advocated, or culture. The image changed a bit in the progressive era, when the leaders of the movement were made up of the respectable middle class who saw caring for the poor as charity and as their Christian duty, rather than the realization of justice. This also coincided with the Greenwich Village subculture and the rise of the Educated Outcast. Changed a lot in the ’30s when it became cool and iconoclasty for college professors to oppose corporate leaders and the policies by which they benefited. And on and on and on… New Left in the ’60s, New Democrats in the ’90s, DailyKosians today.
I don’t mean for that to read as a history lesson – there’s nothing in it there that you aren’t familiar with – but just to give roots to the elitism charge that doesn’t originate with some shady group of Right-wingers trying to redefine the elite to serve their own purposes. Obviously, I think that bait and switch did occur, but I also think that if the Left ever wants to seriously reverse it, we have to recognize our own culpability.
Second, there’s a lot of overlap between Intellectuals and Elitists in the mind of the public with good reason, and not just because everyone with an IQ over 130 earns the Elitist tag. In fact, it’s just as likely to be the other way around – where everyone who comes across as culturally elite is automatically credited with having a high intellect and therefore embraced by the pro-intellectual Left. It wasn’t always that way. There doesn’t have to be a choice between tweed-wearing pontificating SmartyPants and the beer-drinking Dumbasses. We used to elect people like Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson – people with obviously high intelligence, but not people for whom the elitist label would ever stick. Somewhere along the way though, we started nominating people like John Kerry: candidates who spoke in three-minute sentences, were just “too good” to boil their message down to a soundbite, and employed the “on one hand” consideration to every fucking issue. Not only were we supposed to embrace the candidate, we were supposed to embrace the approach: I like this guy because he thinks in complete sentences. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that John Kerry didn’t have an appreciably higher IQ than Truman or Johnson; he just talked smarter, and that is the difference between intellect and elitism.
It isn’t a dead breed though – several of the newbies I’ve mentioned as favorites today (McCaskill, Webb) are very smart and also lacking in pretense. Just so you don’t think my line between the Elitist Left and the Anti-Elitist Left is a simple division of the Dems I don’t like vs. the Dems I do, I’ll readily admit that there are Democrats who I like very much who unfortunately fit in with the Elitists (sorry Al, doesn’t make me love you any less).
On to point number three: I remember our trip down to North Carolina a few years back – in the very early days of the Iraq war. Bob was talking to Aunt Lori, and somehow the issue of politics came up: Bob said something like, “I guess you like Bush,” or “I guess you’re a Republican.” Lori answered, “Yeah, but I don’t like war.” I would think that Aunt Lori fits a pretty neat little profile of the kind of low-information voter you’re talking about (or, no matter how many asterisks you use for justification, the kind of person you consider of “low intelligence.”) But even without a well-reasoned argument, the instinct for compassion still exists, and it doesn’t end at the mailbox. I don’t mean that to be overly idealistic – I’m plenty aware of the “drop the bomb on the brown ones” crowd that lacks both information and compassion. “On the other hand” (with apologies to John Kerry), there are enough people out there who certainly know what’s going on beyond the mailbox and still wanna “drop the bomb on the brown ones” – y’know, like the entire neo-con movement.
Still, it’d be stupid for me not to concede that we’re behind on this – clearly at this moment in history, the less information you have, the more likely you are to embrace jingoism. I just don’t buy that it’s inherent, and therefore don’t see why we can’t flip the equation. Instead of writing off and openly mocking these people, why not work to reach them by using emotional appeals? The Right has done it: Fight Them There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Here. And the Left acts as though it’s a good counter-argument to start talking about whether or not Saddam had WMD or the harm done with a unilateral approach, blah blah blah. THEN we wonder why people are just so stupid that they buy into the Right-wing Fear Card. People, regardless of “low intelligence” or “lack of imagination,” understand condescension… and they don’t like it. With the battle lines beginning to be drawn on Iran, I haven’t seen much evidence that the Left has learned that lesson.
As for the nutjobs representing an entire demographic – well, this was more Taibbi’s supposition than yours, but it still seems important to address. I’m an educated, city-dwelling Lefty with a bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge, but I would rather not be lumped in with the DailyKos crowd. I figure I’ll give the same degree of respect to the millions of working class Americans who don’t think that Obama’s anti-American ’cause they read it on the internets. Besides – and this is actually a very sad truth – ignorance and fear and hate may sound different when spoken by educated people who live in supposedly liberal and “enlightened” communities, but the sentiments are very much the same. I talked to Tina the other day. She has been running the canvass office in New Haven, CT and says she has been disheartened by the vague allusions to race and “Americanism” she has heard by people in town (several of them Yale students or alums, and almost all of them college-educated and self-proclaimed liberals). They’ve definitely learned and try to avoid the socially unacceptable buzzwords, but they’ll say things like “I don’t know… there’s something about him that doesn’t sit right…” or “I wish his name didn’t rhyme with Osama,” or “I’m listening to both sides about whether or not he’s a Muslim.” One night, only minutes after having one of these encounters, Tina talked with a woman who argued that Obama may be unelectable because of the “racists in West Virginia.” Tina said that the irony was so great that she shot back, “there are racists in your own neighborhood.” The woman was stunned.
Point number 5: Oh my goodness, the moneyed elites have switched sides and teamed up with the Great Unwashed! Alright, sorry – that was the snarkiness I’d managed to avoid up to now. Still, the fact that this occurred and the motives behind the switch are self-evident. The problem – as I said in response to the first point – is that too many on the Left don’t even try to understand how this happened, preferring instead to consider the success of this realignment evidence of the gullibility and moral failings of those being duped. Or as Thomas Frank summed it up, too many on the Left mistakenly dismiss the “Great Backlash” as a sign of “crypto-racism, or a disease of the elderly, or the random gripings of religious rednecks or the protests of ‘angry white men’ feeling left behind by history.” Forget the fact that as the Left brought in more middle and upper-class supporters, they began shedding the populist (and majoritarian) message that appealed to those “Unwashed.” Forget the fact that the populist rhetoric was blatantly stolen and retooled by the Right who stripped it of all its economic muscle. Forget the fact that the Lefty message-makers were among the most-duped; first ignoring the transition, and later positioning the Left in complete opposition to the Right’s new strategy by abandoning the final remnants of populism (in rhetoric at least).
Viewed this way, the realignment is not an unending “march toward progress,” but the result of very carefully pushed buttons by some very cunning individuals coupled with a complete “lack of imagination” by the Lefties who sit around perplexed that such a switch occurred. But it isn’t irreversible, and if we ever gain an ounce of self-reflection we could (and yes, should) re-earn the trust of our old coalition. For now though, I’ll have to go on reading all the “in defense of elites” diaries that pop up on the lefty blogs.
I don’t know… maybe you and I just disagree on the premise: that people in general and Americans in particular are inherently stupid/selfish/in need of enlightenment, etc…and that the only real definition of an elite (at least in any non-money related way) is someone who has worked to rise above these base characteristics. I use the “non-money related” qualifier, because it has long been out of style to measure the amount of respect a person deserves on their financial assets. But it is more in style than ever to judge them based on their education or other evidence of cultural superiority.
But here’s why so much of this strikes me as “kicking them while they’re down.” Social hierarchy has changed. The upper echelons are no longer populated with the dumb jocks, frat-boys and beauty queens forever ruling over the geeky smaht kids. Those Educated Outcasts are as hip today as they were back in the Greenwich Village days (and again for the brief early ’60s, pre-Vietnam, McNamara-ish technocratic revolution). It used to be enough for the straight-A misfits to think Just wait ten years when I’m a millionaire and you’re laying brick/driving a truck/making a lamp. With that frame, defending the educated elite seemed like a blow on behalf of the underdog and against the societal values that put them on the bottom. But in the new ethic, lamp-making is a fall-back job for those who lacked enough imagination to learn trigonometry. Revenge of the nerds completed. Problem is, the smaht kids haven’t yet realized that they’re moving up that social ladder (probably because we have one of those dumb frat boys in the White House). So just as the moneyed elites have managed to convince their natural adversaries that they’re on their side, the cultural elites have convinced a lot of smart people that there is no such thing as cultural elitism and that its just an invented term used to scorn intellect.
Anyway, sorry for the long response, and I hope I at least kept the snark to a minimum. I really did just mean this as a counter-point.
tl;dr. Seriously, I think the convolutions that you have to go to kind of belie the point. Are we to believe that the rightists “carefully pushed buttons” and the Leftists didn’t pick up on it because they were too busy with blah, blah, blah…or is the real reason that they got duped – because, whether they live in West Virginia or Connecticut, they are dupes? Or, further, that the strict appeal to yokelism and the lack of demands on their intellect have made them so?
On a related point, George Lakoff’s latest seems to bear out my point, tangentially. In order to get people to vote progressively, you can’t appeal to them in the same way – you have to stir in them a higher calling; you have to energize them to think of helping out their fellow citizens and forming (small) communities rather than appealing to self-interest as conservatives do. After all, self-interest is very easy – it’s the dull, instinctive, survival mode that humans fall back on. Being truly progressive requires that you think beyond that to some abstract “greater good”…not the province for the dull – or the spoiled capitalist elite.
I don’t see the contradiction: I said the Left needs to use an emotional appeal and rely on the compassion of your “yokels.” I said nothing about appealing to self-interest. I don’t think self-interest is any easier to understand than interest for others. Both are conscience-based.
First, there is nothing “conscience-based” about self-interest unless you are in the Libertarian Party. (Ooooo…!) Second: what you are and have been saying has contrasted the emotional with the intellectual (or “elitist”, the code word). Sure, one can use both, but there must be a place for both – and if there is a conflict, one must go with the logical as being best for the country. The example for the other way, frankly, is George W. Bush – explaining why Colbert is able to parody him by speaking “from the gut”. One should not be able to display precisely the attributes which should preclude anyone from running anything and somehow claim that, in a reality that exists only in politics, this is how the country should be run.