Redstate

By TomlinsonDouthat Posted in 2008 — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Stanley Crouch recently defended Barack Obama from the increasingly common criticism of him as an elitist:

Columbia- and Harvard-educated, bad-bowling Obama is an elite, the conservatives—and the Clintons—claim. He is out of touch with the working class, they say.

It has become commonplace for the predictable millionaire puppets of Fox News and their conservative talk radio counterparts to present themselves as the voices of the working class in combat with an educated elite from places like Harvard.

But beneath those clichés fester ideas that are deeply anti-democratic.

They are anti-democratic because they scoff at this basic truth: Education is the key to social mobility in our country. The stereotyped working class has no innate limits. It has produced the majority of doctors, engineers, architects, educators and others who realized the dreams of their families by studying hard and moving into careers quite different from those of their parents and their neighbors.

Crouch is absolutely correct in the last three sentences of this passage, but I think he misunderstands the nature of the charge of elitism. One does not become an elitist by going to an Ivy League school, nor by doing very well there. One does not become an elitist by making a million dollars. One does not become an elitist by excelling in one's chosen profession. Nor does one become an elitist by believing that such accomplishments are worthy of respect, as they very often are.

Rather, in a subtle but important difference, elitism is the belief that the people who have such accomplishments to their credit are more worthy of respect than those who, for whatever reason, do not. Elitism is not a matter of who you are or of what you do—nor of being "out of touch" with people who are different from you—but of how you treat your fellow man, which is the essence both of politics and of morality. Elitism can make itself known in a variety of ways—from a condescending attitude towards one's supposed social inferiors, to treating these supposed inferiors as mere instruments of one's own ambitions, to matters of public policy of great and grave importance. Barack Obama has displayed the full spectrum of elitist behavior.

First, Bittergate:

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

To Obama's credit, he was trying to defend the people he was talking about—and without any political compulsion to do so, since the whole point of all this was that they didn't have the good sense to vote for him. Speaking at San Francisco's Billionaires Row, it is far from impossible that there would have been no objection (outside, it turns out, of Mayhill Fowler) if he had said something to the effect of, "There's no hope for these inbred rednecks, and the Democratic party's better off without them." But he didn't. He tried to strike a more inclusive and unifying tone. But he failed.

He failed because he seemed never to have entertained the notion that people could have legitimate disagreements with his own well thought out positions—at least not the poor, uneducated (and easy to command?) people of rural Pennsylvania. In fact, he seemed to deny that they could have any legitimate agreement with him, since their final refuge, he said, was the same anti-trade sentiment that he assures Democratic primary voters that he shares. Instead, these people were portrayed as less than fully rational creatures, merely mindlessly and sometimes maliciously reacting to the stimuli of their personal circumstances, rather than analyzing the situation and coming to their own conclusions, which they presumably lack the qualifications to do. (Perhaps this explains why they are so easily "distracted.")

Second, consider Obama's habit of blaming many of his own or his campaign's missteps on anonymous staffers—or on named ones, likely soon to be fired—as collected by Jake Tapper.

And in doing so, he sometimes strikes a tone similar to that he took with rural Pennsylvanians. In the course of attempting to seem like he was taking personal responsibility for one such incident, he said, "Our supporters, our staff get overzealous." His inferiors, once again, are motivated by mere emotion. He alone is possessed of rationality.

And look at the grounds Obama gave for finally dissociating himself from the Rev. Wright:

[I]f what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough. That's a show of disrespect to me.

(My emphasis.)

To have accused Obama's country and his government of committing genocide was nothing to get worked up about. But to be disrespectful of Obama personally, that's intolerable.

He takes his supporters in when they serve his convenience for the moment (or for twenty years), and he seems to feel free to cast them off at the slightest inconvenience or affront—at least within the constraints of his personal political circumstance. He is a great man. He has accomplished great things, and he is destined for even greater accomplishments. Next to his, their fates are as nothing.

Of course, this practice and the attitude underlying it are hardly unique to Obama, even if he takes it to another level. But then, you'll never catch me saying that elitism is an unusual thing in Washington.

And third, consider Obama's political positions—nothing, for starters, extraordinary or controversial or that he's tried to weasel his way out of, but instead his entirely unremarkable (for his party) support for Roe v. Wade. What this position amounts to, in essence, is that abortion, as an alleged right, is too important a matter to be decided by the people through their elected representatives—the traditional way. Rather, the only ones competent to address such a fundamental issue are the highly intelligent, very well-educated, and greatly distinguished Justices of the United States Supreme Court. And once they have spoken, their word is law, unalterable by any but the same august body.

After all, many Americans have not even attended college, much less Harvard Law. And yet they are allowed to vote! Absurd. But at least, says the Court (and the Democrats, and Obama), we can keep the masses from getting their grubby mitts on anything important, like abortion.

Elitism speaks to the abortion issue in another, deeper way, as well. For if it is the case that respect is not due to all human beings equally, but rather should be accorded on the basis of their status, which in turn is based upon their accomplishments, then what basis could there be to respect the life of an unborn child, who of necessity has no accomplishments to his credit? And this, of course, is also true of children who are partially born, as well as newborns. And this is true, too, of the likes of Terri Schiavo and Haleigh Poutre, deemed by well-credentialed experts to be incapable of further accomplishments, and hence unworthy of life. The logic of elitism leads inexorably to the culture of death.

But not just there. To take a wider view, it leads to the platform of the Democratic party, and to the politics of Barack Obama. For Obama and his party seem quite uncomfortable with the fact that decisions relating to war and peace remain in the hands of the people through their elected representatives, but would rather they be made by the elite of international diplomacy. They seem disturbed by the prospect that the laws passed by the representatives of the people with respect to immigration—in what surely was a pander to the masses' bigotry—might be accorded the legitimacy of their being enforced. They seem always to think that money can be more wisely spent by people with a degree from the Kennedy School than by the masses, who lack such qualification (and only earned it), and that these same Kennedy School alums are competent to regulate most any aspect of ordinary people's lives. And ten years ago, Obama's party (Obama himself was a mere state legislator at the time—a nobody) argued that Bill Clinton was too important a person to be held accountable to the laws that ordinary people must obey. Elitism suffuses almost every aspect of the modern liberalism to which Obama and most of his party subscribe.

Pace Crouch, this is what an anti-democratic idea looks like. It is one thing to say that education should be cherished, and that it allows the children of the working, or of any, class to fulfill or surpass the dreams of their parents. This is entirely consistent with democracy, though it is hardly its essence. But it is quite another thing to say that the child, having accomplished these dreams, is better than his parents, or that people like this child are better than people like his parents, worthy of greater respect and of greater power. This is the nature of the charge against Obama, and it is utterly inconsistent with democracy.

I sincerely credit the decency of Obama's intentions in his Bittergate comments, for on other occasions he has given us reason to believe that he has an inkling, however slight, of how unattractive his political presuppositions can be. This puts him a step ahead of many Democrats. But he clearly fails to appreciate the full depth of the matter. Until he does and amends his approach, he is unfit to serve as the leader of this great democracy, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.