A few days ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates got a clarification from Ross Douthat from one of his readers on the "meritocratic vs democratic ideal" issue:
To put my point another way, if I said, "The average American voter simply can't understand complicated national issues." Your response would not be "You're wrong; Barack Obama understands complicated national issues." A response like that would make no sense--Obama is is a singularly talented individual; he's not just a representative American voter. In order to have faith in democracy, we have to believe that a majority of us, not simply the best of us, are capable of making the right call.
Obama doesn't work as Mr. Smith because Obama is not just your local boy scouts leader from next door. Obama is a brilliant man. His talent can't give me faith that my neighbor is making good decisions in the voting booth because Obama is much smarter than my neighbor.
That's why Obama's triumph isn't a victory for the "democratic ideal".
This doesn't help Douthat's argument, it simply makes it more irresponsible. We don't have to believe that a majority of American citizens are capable of being good presidents to have faith in democracy any more than I need to believe I'd make a good CEO to believe capitalism works. What we need to believe is that we're capable of making good, educated decisions about our leaders and picking capable ones--this essentially endorses the idea that political contests should be about authenticity rather than policy.
Conservatives would never argue that a person of color with Palin's background was qualified to be President--we simply can't meet that standard of authenticity. I once compared Palin to 50 Cent because like 50's nine bullet wounds, Palin's background trumped any consideration of her actual abilities. Douthat's argument makes the comparison increasingly apt--like self-sabotaging concepts of black authenticity, Palin's intellectual shallowness only makes her all the more "real," and therefore more qualified to be president. But like the self-appointed arbiters of black authenticity, the lives Palin's boosters in the conservative media live don't resemble hers in the slightest: If going to a state school is so essential, why did Douthat go to Harvard? Shouldn't he be quitting his job and telling the Times to find someone who better resembles the democratic ideal? In order to have faith in journalism or opinion writing, don't we need to believe that a majority of us, not just Ivy League grads from Connecticut, are capable of making the right call?
Years after preventing black folks from gaining access to elite institutions in order to exclude them from positions of power and authority, conservatives have now decided that having excelled at such institutions is disqualifying for people of color because it makes them elitists. Or in Sonia Sotomayor's case, no amount of Ivy League pedigree can mitigate the inherent inferiorities of her being Puerto Rican. The idea that Sotomayor's background would make her a better judge is patently offensive. The idea that Palin's background would make her a better president is gospel. It's all pretty convenient.
It's also worth noting, that Douthat's "us" is merely a gentler rehash of the "real America vs. fake America" argument. The "us" is exclusive to an idealized form of white identity that Palin represents--is one someone like Obama could never be a part of. It's also a myth, and one that should be abandoned. The fact is that our increasingly brown and urban nation identifies more with the worldview of the biracial black man in the White House than it does with the form of idealized whiteness that Palin represents, the election proved that. This realization has prodded the Right into a kind of existential crisis--hence the continued attempts to paint Obama's rather incremental policy changes as part of an alien set of values and pseudo violent calls for "restoration" of what once was. But it's the right's ethnocentric white worldview that is increasingly alien to what this country is becoming, and they should learn to deal with it.
I, for one, am not mourning the loss of an America where a mediocre white person is considered more qualified than an exceptional person of color simply because of who he or she is. You'll find me at the wake doing the electric slide with the old folks.
-- A. Serwer
