Elites again

Earlier this month, the Daily Howler critiqued a Frank Bruni NYT column criticizing Gingrich attacks on “elites.” As Bruni points out, Gingrich—political insider, highly educated, wealthy—constitutes a member of the elite. Bob Somersby at the Howler seemed to find Bruni wilfully blind: Obviously when Gingrich talks of the elites, he’s “talking about the type of people who look down on average Americans and their values.”
This is a theme Somersby brings up a lot: Too many people on the left look down on conservatives and assume the worst possible interpretation of their politics and attitudes. A lot of times there’s merit to this point, but this time it feels like he’s the one who’s forcing an interpretation on Gingrich and his audience. Admittedly, I’m no more a mind-reader than Somersby, but there’s nothing implausible in Gingrich denouncing the elites even though he is one: Career politicians have been condemning Washington DC and the “inside the Beltway” mentality for as long as I’ve been voting. And if conservatives can forgive Gingrich’s adultery while still condemning Bill Clinton’s, why shouldn’t they decide Gingrich is an acceptable elitist?
And while it’s true “people who look down on us” is one interpretation of his remarks, so is “people who don’t think the right things.” Having lived in the Bible belt for well over 75 percent of my life, and watched the tone of right-wing punditry and Internet debate, I’ve seen how that for some right-wingers (not all), the mere fact some politicians and pundits do and say non-conservative or even liberal things is taken as a sign that the country has been taken over by its enemies.
As pundit Charles Murray puts it, when some conservatives reference “elites,” they’re referring to anyone who doesn’t understand “real Americans”—which Murray specifically defines as the one-third of the population still living in small towns and rural areas. But I don’t think it’s just about understanding: For some of that one-third, there’s no difference between not understanding them and not passing the laws and rules that they think God intended.
It’s the logic by which one local columnist back in Northwest Florida explained once that Gore didn’t really win the popular vote in 2000: Sure, he won the most votes, but that’s because all those liberal cities voted for him; the real America, the small towns and farms, went for Bush. So he won all the votes that really count.
Curiously, in a more recent column, Murray discussed how the upper class should stop being nonjudgmental and lecture the poor on their moral failings (which he proclaims the real cause of poverty). Now he has a book switching back to how elites are just jerks who don’t understand Real Americans, and even provides a quiz to check your understanding. The quiz was soundly and deservedlymocked here: Among other things, Murray’s doing a lot of cherry picking. One test is if you’ve eaten at one of America’s top ten chain restaurants, except it’s only nine because he doesn’t think Chipotle is a Real American kind of restaurant (the same way New York voters don’t really count).
Murray also insists that this is a one-way deal: It’s important for elites to know how blue-collar, small-town America thinks, but it’s not important for Real Americans to know how anyone else lives. Elites who don’t know any evangelical Christians are frowned upon, but it’s no problem if evangelicals don’t know any atheists, Jews or Muslims.
Which shows the complications of figuring what Gingrich and his audience mean. In different venues Murray evokes the elite as more moral people than the poor, in another he makes them out as snobbish phonies. The working class are shiftless and immoral, except when they’re hardworking and all-American. Possibly his thought is incoherent. Possibly he’s confident his target audience will assume that they’re part of the hardworking lower classes, not the shiftless poor (plenty of people see no conflict between getting federal flood insurance or Medicare and condemning “welfare.”). Gingrich may be able to pass as non-elite because he expresses the right things to his audience. As I note here, years of right-wing propaganda about evil liberal elitists probably help (he’s not liberal, so he’s not elite).
Thoughts?