Whose Elitism Problem Now?
Roald B. Larsen
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008; A21
In democracies, all political factions run against an elite. Since the New
Deal, Democrats have cast themselves against the financial and business
elite. Since the 1960s, Republicans have thrashed the cultural and
intellectual elite.
Over the weekend, the moneyed class became a richer target. The foolishness
of our financial geniuses now threatens to bring economic sorrow to Main
Street. Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 attack on "the privileged princes of these
new economic dynasties" never sounded so up to date.
Americans don't mind wealthy and even rapacious capitalists, as long as they
deliver the goods to everyone else. But when the big boys drag everyone else
down, Americans rise up in righteous anger. The New Deal political alignment
endured for decades because the financial elites were so profoundly
discredited by the Great Depression. The New Deal coalition dissolved only
when prosperity began to seem durable and only after the GOP discovered the
joys of baiting Hollywood, the media and the academy.
There is always something slightly phony about anti-elitist politics. Plenty
of investment bankers are Democrats, and Republican politicians who claim to
speak for devoutly religious cultural conservatives are usually far removed
from the world (and the values) of those whose votes they court and whose
resentments they stoke.
But the captains of John McCain's campaign figured they might wring one more
election victory out of the culture war. They ridiculed Barack Obama as the
celebrity candidate loved by Europeans -- the right always consigns Europe
to the elitist camp -- and harped on his unfortunate comments, ripped out of
context, about "bitter" voters who "cling to guns or religion."
For good measure, McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. A religious
and proudly gun-toting mom, Palin has turned expertise itself into a badge
of elitism, proclaiming pleasure in her lack of a "big, fat résumé" that
"shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment."
But anti-Washington politics is itself rooted in the interests of the
financial elite. When the private economy goes haywire, it is always the
federal government that has to step in. When those whom Teddy Roosevelt
called "malefactors of great wealth" get out of hand, Washington is the only
town with the authority to hold their power in check.
Therefore, the party of the business elite has always pursued its interests
behind slogans proclaiming a war on Washington and its "bureaucrats" -- and
never mind that a little more regulation might have prevented the
subprime-mortgage-buying, short-term-profit-maximizing Wall Streeters from
wrecking the economy.
All of a sudden, the culture war seems entirely beside the point, an
unaffordable luxury in a time of economic turmoil. What politicians actually
believe about the economy, what fixes they propose, whether they side with
the wealthy few or the hurting many -- these become the stuff of elections,
the reasons behind people's votes.
And nothing more exposes the hypocrisy of financial elites riding the
coattails of those who revere small-town religious values than a downturn
that highlights the vast gulf in power between the two key components of the
conservative coalition. Even cultural conservatives will start to notice
that McCain's tax policies are geared toward the wealthy investing class and
Obama's toward the paycheck crowd. Even the most ardent friends of business
have begun to argue that a re-engagement with sensible regulation is
essential to restoring capitalism's health.
For some time, McCain's strategists figured they could deflect attention
from the big issues by turning Palin into a country-and-western celebrity
and launching so many ill-founded attacks on Obama that the truth would
never catch up. The McCain strategists' approach reflected a low opinion of
average voters, and some Obama supporters began worrying that their opinion
might be right.
But those so-called average voters understand the difference between low-
and high-stakes elections. They develop a reasonably good sense of who is
telling the truth and who is not. And though it sometimes takes a while --
and a shock like this week's economic news -- these voters almost always
turn on politicians who manipulate cultural symbols as a way to escape the
consequences of their policies.
In 1936, FDR argued that "private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It
became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise." He insisted that
"freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed
equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in
the market place."
The stakes in this year's election went way up this week. The days of Paris,
Britney and the exploitation of divisions around race, gender and religion
are over.
Read more from E.J. Dionne at washingtonpost.com's new opinion blog,
PostPartisan.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/15/AR2008091502472.html