May 13 2008
Time for some elitism
I haven’t commented much on the election lately, due to that burnout I’ve mentioned before. But now that things are winding down, time for some random musings.
Regarding Hillary and “uneducated white voters”… I can understand the angle coming from “electability”; there are obviously more of them than not, but to look at it from a different angle, what does that say? We want the candidate that uneducated people prefer? We’ve had that for the past 8 years.
And that brings me to another point, that rampant American anti-intellectualism that I bitch about so often. As I’ve said before, Republicans have been good at a lot of things; unfortunately all of them are bad for the well-being of the nation. And one of the biggest Republican success stories is somehow promoting the idea that intelligence, complexity, and cultural refinement are all things to be scorned, not something to strive for. In Republican world, you’re not a real American unless you like country music, watch NASCAR, drink shitty beer, eat iceberg lettuce, pray to the Sky Fairy daily, and don’t think too hard about anything. As I was getting firewood with my neighbor last weekend, I was saying how we really have this strange existence in which the ruling class in this country consists of millionaires and rednecks, basically, with the former setting the agenda with the help of and to the detriment of the latter.
When we hear the punditry go on about how Obama can’t relate to Americans because he eats arugula, there’s something very wrong here on so many levels. First, the implication that one’s salad green choice is in some way an indicator of how good a president one will be. Second, the fact that some people actually take this seriously. But the big one is that somehow it implies that the president must somehow really relate to the Bubba vote on a fundamental level. Lemme tell you something: it’s the hardest and biggest responsibility job in the world. I don’t want some uneducated hick in there. I don’t care who I most “want to have a beer with”, because I have news for you: the President is never going to have a beer with you.
Now I certainly don’t mean that a president can’t or shouldn’t come from humble working-class origins. If anything, it is undoubtedly an asset, for they can relate to the struggles of working-class Americans. The last thing we need is another elitist, and I mean that in the real sense of the word, a person born into privilege who’s never had to go without. I don’t mean someone who eats arugula. And yes, there are undoubtedly more fine, good working-class Americans out there than not. But the current frame of thinking completely marginalizes urban dwellers (last time I checked, most people lived in cities). Those urban hipsters with the funky eyeglasses are no less American, and we do a great disservice to our country when we continue to frame what is “American” in such a narrow frame. We don’t have to be redneck nation.
Posts
