Two vignettes of class conflict from my experience: As a school board member In the 1980s, I advocated an end to high school “tracking” (segregating students by someone’s notion of their finite “ability”). A defiant parent walked up to me, snatched a pen out of my jacket pocket and, pulling it into two sections, demanded, “See this? You can’t have a top, without a bottom!”
During a period in the 1970s, when I worked for the Cooperative Extension Service in Farmington, I listened in as two parents, he in overalls and she in a fast-food franchise uniform, were humiliated by the principal of their child’s high school for the failure of their son to thrive in a school where kids from professional families received the best instruction (only to flee Farmington as soon as they finished high school, while their son and his working-class buddies were fated to stay behind and pay exorbitant property taxes to support schools where their sons and daughters would be similarly hobbled).
In the intervening decades, I have enjoyed being part of the cosmopolitan class – those who travel abroad, appreciate the cultural richness of diverse peoples, visit museums, savor foods from five continents (exempting only Australia and Antarctica), and consider ourselves “citizens of the world,” people who care about the fate of Bosnians, Rwandans, Syrian refugees, Yazidis and the Rohingya. We celebrated the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe and South America, cheered on the European Union, and welcomed the “Arab Spring” during its lamentably short season.
Now we are forced to confront the “culture wars” on issues such as guns, abortion and immigration. I fear the ascendance of “populism” in places like Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Russia and now here in America. And I ask, why are our “cultures” at war? What is this “populism” and why is it rising? And the toughest question, how might my own social class prejudices have helped bring this about?
Wikipedia defines “populism” as “a political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the (ordinary) people in their struggle against a privileged elite.” Has this become the continental divide in our century, separating us irrevocably from our fellow Americans?
“Elitism” is the term regularly applied to those who consider themselves superior by virtue of education, cosmopolitan lifestyles and liberal, secular values. There are, of course, right-wing elitists who hide their wealth in tax shelters, hide their homes inside gated enclaves and oppose as “socialism” any governmental efforts to address inequality. Right-wing elitists (for example, the Koch brothers) often support populism as a way of pitting the victims of social inequality, especially white working-class folk, against educated liberals. Culture wars are often the product of such manipulated antagonisms.
For liberals, “populism” is identified with prejudices such as nativism, racism, anti-Semitism and know-nothingism. Such “populism,” which could be a force to help ordinary people find their voice and to work have a better life (as was the case with the trade union movement in the 20th century) now manifests itself as an attack against the media, an attack against truth and facts, an attack against government, against universities, against people seen as “different,” along with an embrace of authoritarian rulers who whip up hatred in rallies that smack of fascism.
Populists and their right-wing financiers allege that liberal “elitists” – through advocacy for minority rights and spending tax dollars to help the poor – deprive hard-working, church-going, working-class people of their fair share of the good life, especially for their children. It is elites who snatch up the best scholarships to the best colleges for their kids and turn up their noses at those Rust Belt victims who just can’t adapt to the “Information Age.” It is this perceived (and actual?) snobbery that leads to the most caustic reactions. Hell hath no fury like a red-blooded American scorned.
How did America, and much of the industrialized world, get caught between the jaws of these two nasty “isms,” “elitism” and “populism”? How has the history of America – which once heralded the emancipation of civilization from monarchy and tribalism – evolved to embrace such retrograde ideologies?
Or have we been kidding ourselves for decades that, in advocating values that seemed to us to be enlightened, democratic and humane, we have silently heaped shame on those who couldn’t keep up with our expansive ideology and sophistication? When we championed civil rights and women’s rights and immigrants’ rights and the rights of gays and lesbians, how did we manage to make so many white Americans feel left out of the picture?
I want to suggest a painful analogy: lack of concern by liberals for the well-being of our working-class neighbors is perceived by them as a kind of 21st-century Jim Crowism. In place of a Southern elite pushing legislation and policing that disenfranchised and oppressed African Americans, we now have a cosmopolitan, educated elite that disenfranchises working-class white Americans, people now excluded from the best schools, the best colleges, the best jobs, the best neighborhoods, people who are made to feel uncomfortable by the easy sway of cosmopolitan tastes and values.
My fear is that we educated, liberal citizens have walled ourselves into cultural enclaves, separated from our fellows by unwritten but effective cultural biases. Doth not the bell toll for thee and me?
The concern is not that we vilify those whom Hillary foolishly termed “a basket of deplorables” (some of whom do, in fact, act deplorably). The concern is that we have excluded too many of our proud, self-sacrificing and self-sufficient fellow citizens from our caring world. The fact that their incomes are shrinking even as our incomes expand; the fact that their horizons seem dimmer while ours seem brighter; the fact that their kids face meager career options while our kids thrive – these are not reasons to blame ourselves. They are reasons to break out of our cultural insularity and begin to listen empathically to what our “un-elite” fellow citizens have to say about their lot in life.
We cannot, by ourselves, change the world economy to bring back manufacturing jobs to our blighted towns and cities. We cannot ignore the value of higher education just because lots of young people from working-class families cannot afford it. We cannot eradicate drug addiction among depressed people just by understanding what causes it. And we will not turn our backs on those whom liberal and humane values have helped rise above poverty and racism.
But we can begin to care as much about the welfare of our populist-leaning fellow citizens as we do about those with whom we more easily sympathize. After all, the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s working-class Americans fought for our freedom in wars, marched on picket lines for fair wages and working conditions, and helped end institutional racism in the 1960s when it was not in their economic interest to do so.
What else can we do? Hopefully, you will have suggestions that can contribute to a future column. In the meantime, we should each re-examine our own social class prejudices as if the fate of our democracy depended on it.
(Robert L. Fried of Concord is a retired educator who is now a writer, gardener and tinkerer. He can be reached by email at rob.fried@gmail.com.)