Although they essentially agree on the 2nd Amendment, Senator McCain capitalized on the Supreme Court ruling yesterday (June 26) to label Senator Obama once more as an “elitist.” Just how that connects to gun ownership rights remains unclear, but we are getting a reminder of the campaign to come. At every opportunity detractors will seek to brand Senator Obama as an “elitist,” implying that he somehow opposes equality.
Only in the nasty and upside-down world of campaign politics could such a champion of the middle class and working poor be identified as representing and advocating inequality. Obama is thoroughly committed to policies that would lessen the greatest inequality in America today, the vast distance in access to social goods between the privileged haves and the have-nots. And Obama’s biography couldn’t show less privilege. Obama’s father, for instance, was neither President (like George H. W. Bush) nor an admiral (like John S. McCain, Jr.), but a Kenyan farmer.
To aspire to join the genuine elite is not, in fact, to advocate or justify inequality. It is part of the American dream. Students want to be accepted into elite schools; soldiers want to qualify for elite forces. In its core sense, to be elite means to have earned something, to have merited recognition of excellence. This is what that most egalitarian President, Thomas Jefferson, meant by “natural aristocracy.” Unlike those born into wealth and privilege, “natural aristocrats” succeed because they have natural abilities, work hard and rise to excellence. So what’s the problem?
Perhaps what’s being confused here is the border between democracy and meritocracy on which the political and ethical value of equality is poised. The American philosopher Michael Walzer helpfully distinguishes between what he calls “simple” equality (everybody gets the same) and “complex” equality, where social goods are distributed according to relevant criteria. For instance, medical care ought to be distributed through the criterion of need (you need it, you get it), access to higher education through ability (you can go if you pass the tests, even if you can’t pay), luxuries through the marketplace (you can have them if you have the money), and respect and honors through desert, or merit (you’ve earned it). As a value, equality is not confounded when a publisher rejects a manuscript as not good enough nor when the race goes to the swift. Barack Obama’s magna cum laude J.D. degree from Harvard and his election as president of the Harvard Law Review place him among the elite, but they do not make him undemocratic unless he makes too much of them.
The connotation of elite confers positive approval, but what of elitism and elitist? Here the waters are murkier, for an unequal distribution of social goods according to inappropriate criteria is being defended. An elitist in this sense may suggest that her superior learning and vocabulary means her
values are therefore superior or that his social class and family ought to get him into Yale.
Obama’s opponents hope for some traction by tying him to snobbery, the elitism in which education, taste, and language are used to assert a more general superiority. “My tastes—in wine or sport or cuisine—are informed, and yours are ignorant.” “I know better than you, and you should defer to me because I’m better educated and speak more properly.”
No Americans like being patronized, so when their speech is mocked or their hobbies (like hunting and fishing and football) are ridiculed, they get angry. Many on the Left don’t fully understand this phenomenon, though Bill Clinton certainly did and does. As “Bubba” Clinton, chewing the fat and eating barbeque and chasing girls, he won over that segment of the working class that Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy and John Kerry never could. The Left has delighted in George Bush’s malapropisms, but it erred in making too much of his use of language. W’s late-in-life southern accent and simple talk appeals to those whose self-interest lies precisely and properly in policies directly opposite to his. Traditionally and ideologically, class issues may belong on the Left, but in recent American politics the Right has successfully reversed the field by decrying liberal elitism. Never mind the elitism that confers upon the wealthy all manner of virtue. Anyone can hope to get rich (consider the popularity of the state lotteries), but the intellectual snob’s elevated status is beyond reach and therefore perceived as unfair.
My counsel to the Obama campaign? Condemn elitism, including the form that confers power and respect upon the wealthy. Defend the genuinely and pertinently elite. Stand for excellence and achievement but not the elevation of the culturally relative.
And do not confuse the two. Consider Senator Hruska’s argument in 1970 in favor of the nomination of Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Carswell was assuredly not among the elite. He had, most senators agreed, a mediocre record. Hruska declared, "So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?”
No, they aren’t, not on the Supreme Court any more than in the White House. What Americans want is the best, and the 2008 Presidential election ought to concern sorting out who fits that bill. Let’s stick to the topic.
