The current political discourse in the West is corrupted by two flawed narratives about the relationship between social class and politics. The first is a fable accepted by many intellectuals, who have found themselves guilty because just enough white working-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin handed Trump his Electoral College win in 2016. Many fear that this year’s midterm elections will once again result in a rejection of “elitism” by the same voters.
In a second, equally flawed narrative — adopted by a segment of both blue-collar workers and intellectuals — the American working class is so victimised that almost none of its members are capable of accepting the responsibility of civic self-education.
These narratives sometimes collide within families. On a trip to Detroit last spring, I met a professor of political science who seemed to believe that “elitist” obtuseness had lost Michigan for the Democrats. He told me that he felt responsible because his aunt and uncle — postal workers in suburban Macomb County — had voted Republican for the first time in their lives, mainly because they believed Trump’s false campaign assertion about New Jersey Muslims cheering the September 11 attacks. He had been unable to convince them otherwise.
Why should he feel guilty, I asked, if his relatives had chosen to ignore extensive evidence that the cheering never occurred? “I guess because I feel I ought to speak their language and I don’t,” he replied. I have frequently heard the phrase about not speaking “their” language from academics, journalists and political strategists. Here is a fact, not an alternative fact: Blue-collar workers speak English. Too many intellectuals have internalised a stereotype, emanating from both the far left and the far right, of fuzzy-headed elitism — as if willed ignorance and intellectual laziness did not cut across social classes. And some in the working class are just as animated by a stereotype of “elites” as people who look down on everyone without a doctorate. Self-denigration among the best educated is particularly harmful because it reinforces this belief.
The day after the 2016 election, Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, wrote in Harvard Business Review that one of many things the “elites” don’t understand about the working class is that the latter “resents professionals but admires the rich.”
The author meant to criticise “elitists,” but her generalisation presents a distorted view of the working class. Some working-class Americans resent some professionals — say, lawyers for slumlords or doctors who won’t treat Medicaid and Medicare patients. But there are surely just as many with an outsize respect for professionals — especially if the professional happens to be their own doctor or their child’s favourite teacher.
Deepest beliefs
The energy expended by many “elitists” on constructing tortuous apologies for their advantages would be better invested in sharing the fruits of those advantages.
While some studies have indicated that people cling even more strongly to their deepest beliefs when challenged by contradictory evidence, it is also true that human beings frequently do change their minds — about everything from sexual behaviour to marijuana to gun laws — if they are treated respectfully by those presenting the evidence.
One of the greatest compliments I have ever received came from a Latino student at Youngstown State University, in an Ohio city often cited as an example of Rust Belt decay. This American-born son of immigrants was working three jobs to pay his tuition. He said that he had taken my remarks about the importance of liberal arts seriously, even though he had previously considered such knowledge irrelevant to his goal of becoming a math teacher.
When I asked why my comments had persuaded him to reconsider, he replied that he was pleased when I began my talk with the words “ladies and gentlemen.” He added, “When I’m teaching, I’m going to open all of my classes with ‘ladies and gentlemen.’ It’ll tell the kids what’s expected of them.”
There is an aspirational hunger in many young people that highly educated Americans can help satisfy — but only by being themselves instead of pretending to be “ordinary folks.”
The American dream has never been about denigrating education but about seeing that the next generation has greater access to learning. Who is in a better position to help Americans who want that chance than those who already benefited from the generous side of the dream? The “elites” should take practical steps to persuade others not by hectoring them but by working to better the quality of life for all.
First, intellectuals must speak up, not down, to everyone. Americans remember public addresses like the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech precisely because he spoke in elevated English. You won’t find him referring to “folks” anywhere in that speech.
Second, educators must help turn students into educated voters. Too many schools fail to provide students with tools of logic that would enable them to assess the quality of information they absorb from every screen. All schools, for example, should have a curriculum that teaches children how to evaluate online information. Most recently, we have seen the results of this type of education in the forceful, logical responses of student survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Finally, those who have profited from the best schooling the society has to offer must fight to make college more affordable for others. The working-class students I have met — unlike Republicans in a much-cited 2017 Pew poll — know that college has a positive, not a negative, effect on their future. They base their actions on reality rather than ideology, and the reality is that the pay gap between the college-educated and all other Americans is at a historic high.
As I write, I am looking at my grandmother’s diploma. She left it to me in her will as evidence of a life in which I never saw her alone without a book or newspaper in hand. That is positive elitism — embodying the pursuit of excellence rather than money or credentials — for which no one need apologise and to which anyone can aspire.
—New York Times News Service
Susan Jacoby is the author of The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies.
