Elitists Aren't All Bad

Clarence Page

As President Obama pushes his health care overhaul against Republican objections, the politics are beginning to sound like high school.

The president at times lectured to Republicans at his health care summit like a teacher trying to get a point across to hardheaded students. Yet even before the summit various conservative voices were charging "elitism" and "condescension." That's political-speak for the kids who were castigated in high school as the stuck-up snobs.

Before the talks, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky complained that Democrats were still being "arrogant" in their refusal to throw out current legislation and start over from scratch on a bipartisan compromise, as Republicans have asked. At least he didn't call them "uppity."

The last time I saw the A-word used that way was on a T-shirt for sale at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. It displayed "ARROGANT" across its chest with the "O" replaced by the familiar red, white and blue symbol of Obama's 2008 campaign. Subtle.

As the summit began, John Podhoretz, editor of the neoconservative Commentary magazine, live blogged that President Obama could be "startlingly condescending at moments."

That was too much for the liberal New Republic's Jonathan Chait, who counter-blogged, "How can that be avoided when you're trying to have a high-level discussion with people who rely either on debunked claims at best and talk radio-level slogans at worst?"

Podhoretz blogged back. "Here's how," he wrote. "By not being condescending. That's how." Oh. That was helpful. Not.

Forgive my condescension. It's hard for me to keep a straight face when I hear anti-Political-Correctness conservatives bemoan liberal insensitivity.

Since Washington never has provided much of a haven for humility, I cannot help but wonder, what explains the current conservative obsession with smugness?

Part of it is propaganda as usual, tied into what the late Washington Post columnist Meg Greenfield once described as a "a kind of scruffy 'populist' pretense that goes in and out of fashion here." Conservatives have been knocking snooty lefty "elitism" almost nonstop since New York's Republican Mayor John Lindsay was branded a "limousine liberal," ironically by a Democratic challenger, in 1969.

Over time, wrote self-described liberal Democrat William A. Henry III in his 1994 book "In Defense of Elitism," the E-word "has come to rival if not outstrip 'racist' as the foremost catchall pejorative of our times."

And why not? What better way to grab some moral advantage over your adversaries, right or left, than to tap age-old strains of reverse snobbery that have long bubbled beneath the surface of America's political culture?

A recent anti-elitist surge in the chattering classes followed a Washington Post essay by Gerard Alexander, a University of Virginia associate professor of politics, with the audacious headline: "Why are liberals so condescending?" It's a thought-provoker, except Alexander makes the unsupported charge that liberals show this undesirable attitude "to a degree far surpassing conservatives." Sure, conservatives can be overtaken by their own self-importance, too, he allows, but he fails to back up by any metric his notion that lefties are more condescending than righties.

Surely that must disappoint the platoons of condescending right-wing commentators who demean liberals as child-like carriers of dangerous diseases like "socialism" or "Marxism" or, yes, "elitism." Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck with his chalkboards come easily to mind, but they have many fellow travelers.

On the flipside, there are those who take the populist, aw-shucks, "I'm just a regular person" pose a bit too far. Sarah Palin danced dangerously along that edge in her recent interview on Fox News, the channel where she now also works as a commentator. "I'm never going to pretend like I know more than the next person," said the 2008 Republican candidate for vice president. "I'm not going to pretend to be an elitist." Ah, now that would be a bit of fresh air in the world of political commentary, wouldn't it?

Condescension is an easy charge to make since it is in the eye of the beholder. That means we probably will hear more of this lame rap, even when the real condescension is shown by those who think the public is too dumb to see through it.

In many ways, Americans appreciate elites. If you have aspired to excellence and achieve some measure of greatness in this land of opportunity, we admire you. Just try not to get too stuck-up about it.

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Elitists Aren't All Bad | Clarence Page