Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Who’s the Elitist: McCain versus Obama?

Angela Winters:

So we all know that Cindy McCain is loaded. She’s an heir to the Anheuser Busch fortune and has millions upon millions. I love how the McCains & Clinton’s have 10-100X the millions that Obama has and he’s the elitists. Whatever.

I want to challenge the idea that money is what defines whether one is a member of the American Elite. In doing so, I rely mainly on Christopher Lasch’s work The Revolt of the Elites.

According to Lasch:

The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called “symbolic analysts” — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. “They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them,” Lasch writes. “In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life.”

As Lasch further explained: “[T]he new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension.” They regard the values of “Middle America” as mere mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, and retrograde views of women. “Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing.” (28) “A skeptical, iconoclastic state of mind is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the knowledge classes.” (215)

So understood, elitism is not just a question of money. Instead, it must be understood in a broader socio-economic context. Put another way, money may be what opens the door to membership in the modern American elites, but acquiring a certain set of sensibilities and attitudes is equally essential.

The question before us thus is not whether McCain has more money than Obama. The question is which of two better exhibits the sensibilities of the modern American elite. (Of course, Hillary Clinton is a virtual paradigm of the elites as defined here.)

I think it is fairly obvious that Barack Obama is far more likely to be at home in “an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities” than would be John McCain. I also take it that, as the West Virginia results suggest, white Middle Americans worry that Obama shares the opinions of “makers of educated opinion” about their values and beliefs. Certainly, his infamous Pennsylvania speech hinted that Obama regards them as “hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television”:

“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 be sure, no one can deny that there is more than a little overt racism in those results, as well.)

I also think it will be instructive to revisit an Obama comment about the goals of his campaign:

I believe in our ability to perfect this union because it’s the only reason I’m standing here today.

This phrasing fails to account for the critical difference between striving to create a “more perfect union” and perfecting it. Apropos of which, it’s been said of Lasch that:

Lasch sets himself against the ideology of “progress” ultimately because progress is incompatible with the idea of limits, either natural or moral. It therefore leads not just to silly forms of utopianism, but to dangerous ones as well. The petty bourgeoisie, Lasch believes, are or were inoculated by their experience against such perfectionism, at least in its secular forms. This is simultaneously an attraction of the philosophy of this class and a reason why its cultured detractors include those elites for whom the commitment to secular progress is essential because, in the Western intellectual tradition, progress is mobility.

Lasch stresses, however, the positive side of this petty-bourgeois project. In the place of progress, Lasch says, the lower-middle class traditionally embraced the virtue of hope, a virtue precisely because it arises out of a recognition of limits. For those, this reviewer included, who reject today’s liberal progressivism because it is essentially immodest, Lasch’s rejection of progress in favour of hope generated by an acceptance of limits is enormously appealing. It strongly recalls (though Lasch, the staunch Americanist, does not say so) the liberal modesty, moderation and limits that Camus urged at the end of L’Homme revolte.

I’m not at all sure that John McCain is adequately “inoculated” “against such perfectionism.” I’m positive, however, that Obama isn’t. Instead, he is the epitome of “those elites for whom the commitment to secular progress is essential.”

Words matter. Ideas have consequences. If this election is to be a contest between the petty bourgeoisie and the elites, understanding what those words really mean is going to be essential.