Elitism

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.

Rejecting History – or why Barack Obama will win

Why are so many Americans voting for Barack Obama? The short answer has to do with Obama’s campaign themes – the future, hope, change – each nicely affirmative and innocent. The longer answer is a bit more fraught. All the January candidates, including Mitt Romney and John Edwards, copped the theme of change, but none could so embody the rejection of history, key to understanding this election, as Barack Obama. He sounds like Martin Luther King, but as a young black man, he also looks like a repudiation of the past.

Walt Whitman knew and approved the American principle of the upstart new. In his first bardic pronouncement in 1855, Whitman declared, “America does not the repel the past. . .,” but of course he knew it does. Later in that same sentence the past is “the corpse. . . slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house.” Oh, the past, history, might reside still in the drawing room, where the books are and guests are entertained, but not where people actually live.

Is this anti-intellectual? Yes, it can take that form. Is it risky for America? Again, yes. But so is fear, even fear grounded in history and its precedents, both of which can be misunderstood.
What history is it that informs the war in Iraq—Munich in 1938? Vietnam? And which Vietnam – the one I remember of an ill-conceived imperial interference in somebody else’s civil war, or the one Ronald Reagan described, of an American army betrayed by sissy civilians unwilling to win?

If Whitman has an opposite in American literary history, it is William Faulkner – dark, haunted by the past that “is never dead. It’s not even past.” Yet Faulkner recognized that sometimes the past requires the exercise of conscience to reject it utterly, as does Isaac in Faulkner’s 1942 story “The Bear,” who conceives of America as refuge from “the old world’s worthless evening.”

Alas, the new world has gotten so old and so guilty.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has erred from the start. Her trumpeted “experience” – albeit much of it as someone’s wife – has hit precisely the wrong notes. Experience equals the past. The Clintons have had their turn, and many Americans no more want a continuation of that past than they do the immediate past of the Bush years.

The decisive mood of the American people this year is driven less by a specific set of hopes than by exhaustion, and a consequent desire to escape a history that has become altogether too burdensome for an impatient people. We want to turn from the history book to science fiction. Science, we think, will save us and the planet.

In less general terms, many of us simply want to blot out the last seven years in as dramatic a way as we can. We want to “repel” a recent history marked by a President’s arrogance and willful ignorance. We want to redefine ourselves anew. We want to light out for a new territory.