In a previous post I talked about merit. It seems this election ability and expertise are hot topics. McCain has decided to attack Obama as Elitist. One wonders if he has any idea what that means.
To be utterly dismissive about it, it seems to mean that Obama speaks with an educated accent, uses words precisely, and refrains from talking to his audience as though they had only an eighth-grade education.
Unfortunately, we can’t be dismissive about it, because this sort of attack has historically played well in this country, and not always for the same reason.
Let’s start with Websters, though:
Elite: Those who are choice or select; the best; a kind of typewriter having twelve characters to the linear inch.
Elitism: The practice of rule by the elite class; the belief that this practice should prevail; a pride in belonging to an elite class.
Aside from the typewriter, what we have in those definitions is a mix of something being described as the best and an implied structure that separates members of a class from everyone else. In latter case, we tend to be suspicious of such folks because, as we all know, membership in a group does not automatically equate to possession of all the traits of that group. Meaning simply that just because everyone else is competent, brilliant, talented, good-looking, and popular doesn’t mean junior will be. But the group will defend junior’s privilege to pretend to be all those things, unto the detriment of the group. Often. This leads to potential disaster, as we have seen time after time.
As for members of an elite being the best, well, the way that should work is from the outside in—the best become part of the elite rather than being presumed to be the best because they were born into it.
This comes up strikingly in the current campaign. Garrison Keillor recently weighed in on McCain’s tactics over at Salon.com
And it’s an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.
Good luck with that, sir.
The elite to which McCain belongs seems to be of the born-into variety, at least under the terms of his attack on Obama. We can take nothing away from the man based on his war record, nor should we even attempt it. Personally, I’ve never put much stock in the whole “mediocre student” argument, even in the case of Bush. I was a mediocre student. If people choose to judge me on that basis, well, as far as I’m concerned they have a very narrow scope. But that’s personal anecdote, which is always dangerous. Nevertheless, McCain became a fighter pilot, and one does not get to do that if one is in general mediocre. In spite of the family managing to get him into Annapolis (which only goes so far—getting junior into Annapolis does not mean the family can keep him there, nor does it mean that, because daddy was an admiral that the Navy would let junior go through fighter training if he displayed indifference to training).
We do, in this country, make the mistake often of assuming skills in one area translate automatically to skills in another. It does happen. Many people are multi-talented. Ability is somehow raw and polymaths do exist.
But it’s not automatic. You have to work at it.
Obama has a demonstrated willingness to work at things. He’s had to. The question is, does this make him an elitist?
Taking Bush as an example, the claim he makes (or has had made for him) is that he is not an elitist. The logic may be something like the following:
“Just ’cause we got a lot of money and influence and can buy our way into positions designed to move us along the path toward power (and you don’t) doesn’t mean we’re elitist ’cause, really, look at me—I’m just as dumb as you are.”
This is the argument from the “I’m one of you” column of political tactics.
On the other hand…
“I came from a modest background, without the money to buy my way into anything, but I applied myself to my studies, I strove to shape myself into a capable person with certain skills, and earned my way into the positions I’ve had. Despite my more commonplace background, though, because I use my intellect I’m not one of you because I’ve made myself smarter than you. I am an elitist.”
Pause. Consider these two arguments. Which seems to be the truer description?
It is an interesting paradox in this country that parents charge their children to do well in school, get good grades, go to college, all so they can do well in life. It would seem that there is some grasp as to the value of learning. But we can also make the argument that learning is utterly beside the point, that the only thing of value in getting the good grades etc is the Good Housekeeping Seal one receives at the end and it has less to do with what junior ends up knowing and everything to do with the fact that junior was able to make the right associations.
Associations. Isn’t that the basis for an elite?
So if the latter reason for good grades is in fact the case—and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t—doesn’t that mean parents are trying to lever their kids into an elite?
Which, if this is the common understanding of the process, means that, really, the kid whose folks can buy his or her way through everything, regardless of ability, really isn’t one of “us” but part of a different elite and the kid whose parents urged, encouraged, and abetted an earned degree really is one of us (whoever the Us in that instance may be, but definitely common).
Which would kind of make McCain’s charge of elitism true—but it is an elitism of ambition and application, something we should all recognize as part of who we are.
Here’s the problem with all of this, though. It reduces the equation to one of Sets—which Set does the person in question belong to—and this threatens to render any personal qualities irrelevant. In this game the only thing that matters is the appearance of belonging. It doesn’t matter who or what the person is, only the characteristics of the group to which they ostensibly belong. It takes the individual out of the equation.
We have a history in this country of distrusting people not of Our Group, and for a long time that applied to intellectuals. Adlai Stevenson is a famous victim of the kind of reduction to moronism national politics likes to play. He was erudite, gifted, profoundly intelligent, and refused to pretend to be something he wasn’t. According to the Republicans, he was an “egghead”—a label that seems to have lost currency in recent years, which makes me hopeful. At the time, a college education was rare, certainly rarer than it is now. The great wave produced by the G.I. Bill and the subsequent embrace of higher education as the mark of social status that came with the Sixties had not yet occurred. People didn’t like being made to feel ignorant—not that they were, but in the hands of a virulent breed of politico they were told that people like Stevenson thought they were too stupid of comprehend their own interests.
But you can see it on a basic level, socially. I don’t know how many conversations at parties I’ve shut down cold by contradicting a cherished myth with solid information or addressing an issue from a position of knowledge. Party conversation, of course, is more ritual than actual discourse, so maybe that’s not fair, but if you go on up the continuum you find that certain myths never get debunked. You can poke a hole is them all you want, wait a week, and the same people are repeating the same canards.
McCain understands this about people. At least certain people. That’s why, foolish as some of his assertions are, he knows those folks will respond.
What he has miscalculated, perhaps, is the effect this will have when it comes to the public apprehension of his opponent. Because Obama is so clearly not the traditional target of such barbs. People are having to do double-takes, rethinks, and self-examinations this time, because, while McCain’s tactics would probably work perfectly well against someone like John Kerry, they possess a patina of patronization about them when aimed at Obama.
If Obama plays this carefully, he may succeed in making the voting public feel that McCain is impugning its intelligence by casting aspersions of elitism on someone who by every cultural metric of the last century cannot possibly be an elitist. Obama may along the way instill a notion, finally, that being competent is not a bad thing, that knowing something and being unafraid (or unashamed) to say it, clearly, and not dumb it down is better in the long run for the country than pretending to some agrarian myth of American yeomanry, uneducated but instinctively intelligent, the model of Jeffersonian Arcadia.
That person doesn’t exist, not in any numbers that matter. McCain is playing to something that faded out of existence as a national constituency half a century ago. Obama is talking to the Americans that replaced that model, but who may only now be realizing it for themselves.
That’s an elite I wouldn’t mind being counted among.
