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Few columnists are better at wielding the knife than Jon Chait, and watching him hack-and-slash his way through George Will and all the other besuited, investor class Republicans who laughably stood tall in populist outrage last week is a joy. But amidst the trail of bow-tied bodies, Chait leaves some serious points laying around:
Blue-collar whites now occupy the same position in American politics that people of color hold in the smaller political subculture of academia: a victim-hero class whose positions (usually as interpreted by outsiders) enjoy the presumption of moral superiority.The victim-hero class is the object of competitive flattery and the subject of mutual accusations of disrespect. You can't read a Peggy Noonan paean to real America--"a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality"--without thinking of a junior faculty member extolling the dignity of Guatemalan peasant women. Bill O'Reilly's or Tim Russert's endless invocations of their working-class backgrounds are the equivalent of the campus activist who introduces every opinion by saying "As a woman of color . . . ." (The one difference being that the latter really is a woman of color, while the former are multimillionaires who retain only the most remote connection to blue-collar life.)Since blue-collar whites have been trending Republican, conservatives enjoy a presumptive affinity and have taken it upon themselves to police the political culture for any affronts against their favored class. The rules of the game, understood now by all sides, hold that elitism is defined entirely in social, rather than economic, terms.That last point is particularly important. It was thrown into sharp relief in the aftermath of the 2006 election, when anti-NAFTA, pro-minimum wage, pro-universal health care, pro-Employee Free Choice Act politicians like Bob Casey and Heath Shuler were termed centrists because they were uncomfortable with abortion. But defining a redistributive populist a centrist because he's moderate on a social issue controlled by the US Supreme Court is a bit like calling a business tycoon a Marxist because he's skeptical of organized religion.One abetting institution that doesn't get its due in Chait's article, however, is the media. Living in New York, DC, and LA; believing that the middle class reaches up in the the $200,000 range; and self-conscious about their remoteness from rural life, they eat the "Heartland" bullshit up. And because they don't really know how to prove themselves in touch with the working class, they've outsourced their thinking on this issue to a reductive test mixing social issues with "apparent likeliness to punch someone in the face." The ultimate Heartland politician, it sometimes seems, is a pro-life protester with rage issues. And he's the ultimate Heartland type largely because conservatives keep loudly saying he is, and the media lacks the cultural expertise that would give them the confidence to disagree.
