Living in the Hate of the Common People

 

Someone at a social media site, who I will not dignify with a link, wrote, “I think we need to find a way to stop the working class from voting altogether.”

This individual, who is in the UK and is obviously a furious anti-Brexiter, also wrote: “Idiots and racists shouldn’t be able to ruin the lives of people who do well in life by voting for things they don’t understand. The problem in this country boils down to low information morons having the ability to vote.”

The above attitude reminds me of something written by that great historian and social analyst Harry Flashman, describing how people of his aristocratic class viewed the workers of the Chartist movement, circa 1848:

You have no notion, today, how high feeling ran; the mill-folk were the enemy then, as though they were Frenchmen or Afghans.

There are people in the US who have similar views of politics, only with reference to Trump voters rather than to Brexit. Many Democrats, and especially ‘progressives’, assume and assert that Trump voters are ignorant people who are failing economically. It is difficult for them to credit that there are quite a few Trump voters who are educated and thoughtful, and who in some cases are quite successful in career/economics terms. If such people exist, it is assumed that they must either be an insignificant minority or devious malefactors who are manipulating the ignorant masses in their own self-interest.

An example of this attitude appeared on MSNBC back in August, with anchor Chris Hayes and Washington Post writer Dave Weigel avidly agreeing about the characteristics of Trump supporters (of whom they don’t approve) … men without a college degree who have enough income to buy a boat (Hayes qualifies it as white men). Personally, I tend to admire people who have managed to do ok or very well for themselves without the benefit of a college credential. (And anyone believing that a college degree necessarily implies that an individual has acquired a broad base of knowledge and thinking skills hasn’t been paying much attention of late.)

The snobbery we are seeing today is partly income-based. it is partly based on a faux-aristocratic contempt for people who work with their hands, and it is — more than any other single factor, I think — credential-based.

Indeed, education-based credentials seem increasingly to fill the social role once filled by family connections. In his outstanding autobiography, Tom Watson Jr. of IBM mentions that in his youth he was interested in a local girl, but her mother forbade her to have anything to do with him because he didn’t come from an Old Family. The fact that his father was the founder of IBM, already a successful and prominent company, evidently wasn’t a substitute. Such ‘really, not our sort’ thinking would today be more likely based on the college one attended than based on family lineage.

Those expressing such attitudes exist in the Democratic Party in parallel with those who talk about their great concern for Working People. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, talked just recently about how physically tiring her work as a bartendress had been (I don’t doubt that this was so) and asserted that Republicans don’t tend to have any experience doing such jobs. Yet this same AOC posted a picture of her staring angrily at Joe Manchin–who one might think she would have considered as a possible ally on behalf of Working People–because he dared to question any Defund the Police policy. And this same AOC helped ensure that Amazon, with the jobs it would have brought for those Working People, was not made welcome in her district.

It appears that a lot of those to whom the we-care-about-working-people message is targeted aren’t believing it.

(I’m not fond of the term ‘working class’, by the way, it implies a fixed social structure and lack of mobility which is alien to American ideas. The fact that Class terminology has become so common is a worrisome indicator.)

Also, the columnist David Brooks, recently asserted that the problem with Rural Americans is that they have no contact with the Expert Class, which class he defines as journalists and academics. Brooks, evidently, believes that he has some form of meta-expertise that allows him to determine who all the other experts might be.

Just a couple of days ago, the newly-elected LA County district attorney, George Gascon, was confronted by a woman whose son had been tortured and murdered and who was understandably upset about Gascon’s go-easy-on-criminals policies. His response? “It’s unfortunate that some people do not have enough education to keep their mouth shut so we can talk.” Again, it’s the assumption of Education uber Alles as a metric of people’s assumed wisdom and their right to participate in the public dialog.

Fifty years ago, the writer and consultant Peter Drucker (himself of European origin) tried to warn Americans of some dangers involving education:

The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history…By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve…I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status…I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can.

Drucker was particularly emphatic about the dangers of giving too much power and influence to the graduates of ‘elite’ educational institutions:

One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…

The US today has come a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for HLS than it had when Drucker wrote the above.

Discuss, if so inclined.

(Classic song reference in the title)

An earlier version of this post appeared at Chicago Boyz; it has been updated to include the Brooks and Gascon references and the Drucker passages. See also my post, Drucker on Education, 1969, for additional education-related thoughts from this perceptive analyst and observer.

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  1. Cow Girl Thatcher
    Cow Girl
    @CowGirl

    Half a century ago, I was in college for the first time. I’d grown up milking cows and hauling hay alongside my father. He was a skilled and talented farmer. We had a nice farm, that supported our large family. He and my mother had built it from scratch and worked really hard to make it successful.

    My roommate was from a large city in Southern California. We traveled down there to pick up a used car her father had bought for her. We met up with him in his office in downtown and he took us to lunch. He was a successful attorney (who was appointed to a federal judgeship shortly after I met him). So, he lived in a very different world than I and my parents lived in. However, my parents were well-spoken and polite, and wanted all of their children to be educated, and I felt comfortable being with this man. 

    As we ate lunch, her attorney father asked me what my father’s occupation was. I proudly stated that my father was a farmer–we had a dairy and sold our milk to a cheese factory that my grandfather had helped to start. “A farmer? Oh.” And that was the end of the conversation. Clearly a farmer was of no consequence to this guy and it was very clear to me from his expression and tone. 

    I had no respect for him from that moment on. 

    • #31
  2. Bryan Van Blaricom Member
    Bryan Van Blaricom
    @BryanVanBlaricom

    David Foster: Someone at a social media site, who I will not dignify with a link, wrote, “I think we need to find a way to stop the working class from voting altogether.”

    Unfortunately for those who think like that, historically, when a population is not allowed to use voting to remove those whose governance has grown intolerable, they choose other means of getting rid of them.

    • #32
  3. Miffed White Male Member
    Miffed White Male
    @MiffedWhiteMale

    Eridemus (View Comment):
    All of the ones I know in the local elitist wannabe class have a fairly limited education beyond something social science related, yet they brag of their faith in “SCIENCE.” They have not a single course in chemistry, biology, physics, physiology, genetics, etc. and yet look down on those who have. It seems to not occur to them that majors in agronomy, various medical peripheral technologies, food science, and industrial, engineering, etc. related fields have had far more direct exposure in their studies.

    I was a bidness major in college, who hung out with a lot of artsy-fartsy types.  I used to hear that stuff all the time – “You business majors don’t get the well-rounded education that we Arts/English/History/Soc/whatever majors are getting.”

    I pointed out that I was taking a lot of general ed psych/english/history classes, in addition to my BBA classes, while I didn’t see any of them sitting in on my Accounting, COBOL, Marketing and Business admin classes.  Never did get them to shut up about it though.

    • #33
  4. CACrabtree Coolidge
    CACrabtree
    @CACrabtree

    Bryan Van Blaricom (View Comment):

    David Foster: Someone at a social media site, who I will not dignify with a link, wrote, “I think we need to find a way to stop the working class from voting altogether.”

    Unfortunately for those who think like that, historically, when a population is not allowed to use voting to remove those whose governance has grown intolerable, they choose other means of getting rid of them.

    Sometimes, I think that it might be a good idea to have framed portraits of the Ceausescu’s (post-execution) displayed prominently in all three branches of our government just as a little extra incentive to conduct business truly, “Of the people, By the People, and For the People.”  Just sayin’…

    • #34
  5. Doug Watt Member
    Doug Watt
    @DougWatt

    Just a couple of days ago, the newly-elected LA County district attorney, George Gascon, was confronted by a woman whose son had been tortured and murdered and who was understandably upset about Gascon’s go-easy-on-criminals policies. His response? “It’s unfortunate that some people do not have enough education to keep their mouth shut so we can talk.” Again, it’s the assumption of Education uber Alles as a metric of people’s assumed wisdom and their right to participate in the public dialog.

    Gascon is an idiot. He sees the perpetrators of crimes as victims, and he sees their victims as impediments to social justice, whatever the hell that means. Any street cop will tell you that the pain will increase for the families that have been victimized by criminals who post no bail, or who are released before serving a full sentence. Homicide detectives, and real prosecutors speak for the dead that have lost their voices due to murder. Street cops clean up the mess by making an initial arrest of those who steal, assault citizens, rape them, and murder them.

    Some of his assistant prosecutors are in revolt against Gascon, as are LAPD officers.

    • #35
  6. Cow Girl Thatcher
    Cow Girl
    @CowGirl

    Miffed White Male (View Comment):
    “You business majors don’t get the well-rounded education that we Arts/English/History/Soc/whatever majors are getting.”

    Since most of their professors were/are rabid Libs, they weren’t getting a “well-rounded” education either.  I went to college as an adult. I was the same age as many of my teachers–I’d call them on it sometimes. Sometimes I’d be the winner, too.

    • #36
  7. Miffed White Male Member
    Miffed White Male
    @MiffedWhiteMale

    Cow Girl (View Comment):

    Miffed White Male (View Comment):
    “You business majors don’t get the well-rounded education that we Arts/English/History/Soc/whatever majors are getting.”

    Since most of their professors were/are rabid Libs, they weren’t getting a “well-rounded” education either. I went to college as an adult. I was the same age as many of my teachers–I’d call them on it sometimes. Sometimes I’d be the winner, too.

    This was the first half of the 80s At UW – Eau Claire.  The lefty Profs there and then would be denounced as right wing fascists today.

    • #37
  8. Saxonburg Member
    Saxonburg
    @Saxonburg

    I may be paraphrasing here, but I think David Brooks said, “I can see conservatism from my front porch.”

    • #38
  9. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    This isn’t really anything that new, other than the elites’ willingness to openly show their contempt for the masses, which got going after the GOP wins in the 2010 midterms, when the people who thought be cowing all the Republican politicians and conservative-leaning pundits in Washington and elsewhere into silence via playing the race card on them if they criticized Obama, they could also destroy an opposition from the sheep-like people in Flyover Country. They were not prepared in 2010 to demonize the masses (in public) when the Tea Party rose up,  but lost their inhibitions rather quickly.

    It also plays to their own egos and sense of identity, in that they believe because they are the Best and the Brightest, they therefore should have the right to tell everyone else what to do and how to lead their lives. That the masses have their own ideas on how to lead their own lives is seen as insolent and something that needs to be repressed, starting with the perceived leaders of the movement and then working its way down the food chain. That’s an attitude that in modern times goes at least back to the totalitarian bent of the Soviet revolution in 1917 and really back to the French Revolution 125 years earlier.

    The intellectual  elites believe that their plans are perfect, and if they fail it’s only because Enemies of the State are sabotaging them, and must be eliminated from the political conversation (in the case of France in 1789-94, you had the royalist elites replaced by the self-appointed intellectual elites of the commune, who were certain of their own righteousness and the evil of anyone who opposed them. The latter were far worse than what came before and, like all left-wing movements, ended up turning on itself, because in the end all the Alphas within the movement think they’re the ultimate Best and Brightest and deserve to have the final say on how everyone lives their lives, or if they should be allowed to continue living their lives).

    • #39
  10. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    I just read that applications to elite colleges are up. Seriously? What is wrong with people? Those universities will charge them through the nose, for what–a worthless piece of paper that will not help them one bit in living a moral and productive life? Okay, I’m done. Good post, David.

    The elites have won. The best path is to join them in the outer party. 

    That is why.

    • #40
  11. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    Many…most…of the people who are expressing such contempt for working people, rural people, etc, are themselves far from Elites, except perhaps in their own minds.  They may be starving adjunct professors without hope of tenure, for example.  A lot of the contempt is really resentment/anger at their own positions, which are a lot more lowly than they had been led to expect.

    See Advanced Degrees and Deep Resentments.

     

    • #41
  12. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    The Universities are just part.  They feed folks into the other part of the problem.  We have this view that the best and the brightest need more power so they can run matters as they should be run.  The Brits showed us by lack of ability to control from the center, the power of ground up effort, and we took it as an insight and purposely built a bottom up society that created modernity.   We’re going back to top down and (putting China aside for the moment) we will return to rot and decay because those bright folks in the center are also human (and not really significantly brighter but are more narrow) so focus on themselves and their own interests even though they exercise excess power that affects everything.  

    • #42
  13. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    Anon (View Comment):

    What makes this chap in the UK think that if there was an intelligence threshold for voting that he’d qualify?

    How much do you want to bet he thinks of himself as the threshold?

    • #43
  14. MichaelKennedy Inactive
    MichaelKennedy
    @MichaelKennedy

    Bob W (View Comment):

    The white working class in America often voted with the Democrats, but it never gave them a permanent governing majority, and unlike the working class in many other countries, it never fell for socialism. The Democrat party has therefore given up on them, and one of the main tools of its agenda as it attempts to assemble a coalition of every other economic and racial group…a coalition which they hope will outnumber the white working class…is to continually demoralize them by endlessly asserting that all the things they love about America are really examples of America’s racism and their own.

    Well put.

    • #44
  15. MichaelKennedy Inactive
    MichaelKennedy
    @MichaelKennedy

    David Foster (View Comment):
    I think our problem is less with the genuinely-learned than it is with he merely credentialed. (Although there are people who are genuinely knowledgeable in one field who assume a faux authority in other fields that they know little or nothing about)

    This is a huge problem, in my opinion, because there are knowledge “silos” that contain people well educated in one  narrow field.  As an example, why were so many nuclear physicists communists in the 1930s and 40s?  Communism sounds good to someone who has no idea of economics.  One of the things that made Feynmann a genius was his interest in things outside his expertise.  The Challenger explosion story is only one such example.

    • #45
  16. MichaelKennedy Inactive
    MichaelKennedy
    @MichaelKennedy

    Fake John/Jane Galt (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    I just read that applications to elite colleges are up. Seriously? What is wrong with people? Those universities will charge them through the nose, for what–a worthless piece of paper that will not help them one bit in living a moral and productive life? Okay, I’m done. Good post, David.

    Wish that was true. But the connections of elite colleges pretty much guarantee those idiots manager job right out of college. The rest of us have to start at the bottom and work up while the elites rain crap and restrictions on us all the way.

    Yes, it has nothing to do with the quality of education they provide.  It is all about networking.  Now, with the obsession of schools like Harvard with affirmative Action, will that continue ?

    • #46
  17. MichaelKennedy Inactive
    MichaelKennedy
    @MichaelKennedy

    Doug Watt (View Comment):

    Just a couple of days ago, the newly-elected LA County district attorney, George Gascon, was confronted by a woman whose son had been tortured and murdered and who was understandably upset about Gascon’s go-easy-on-criminals policies. His response? “It’s unfortunate that some people do not have enough education to keep their mouth shut so we can talk.” Again, it’s the assumption of Education uber Alles as a metric of people’s assumed wisdom and their right to participate in the public dialog.

    Gascon is an idiot. He sees the perpetrators of crimes as victims, and he sees their victims as impediments to social justice, whatever the hell that means. Any street cop will tell you that the pain will increase for the families that have been victimized by criminals who post no bail, or who are released before serving a full sentence. Homicide detectives, and real prosecutors speak for the dead that have lost their voices due to murder. Street cops clean up the mess by making an initial arrest of those who steal, assault citizens, rape them, and murder them.

    Some of his assistant prosecutors are in revolt against Gascon, as are LAPD officers.

    The proprietor of the Patterico blog, who has driven away most of his readers and commenters with his malignant TDS, is an LA assistant DA. I wonder how he likes his new boss?

    • #47
  18. Django Member
    Django
    @Django

    David Foster (View Comment):

    Many…most…of the people who are expressing such contempt for working people, rural people, etc, are themselves far from Elites, except perhaps in their own minds. They may be starving adjunct professors without hope of tenure, for example. A lot of the contempt is really resentment/anger at their own positions, which are a lot more lowly than they had been led to expect.

    See Advanced Degrees and Deep Resentments.

     

    Several years ago a member of ricochet with a — drum roll, please — Masters degree complained that he was working as at UPS loading trucks. He sounded pretty bitter and entitled. Someone who shall not be named asked what specific Masters degree and the answer was political science. Now, unless you have some political connections, what can you do with that degree that will make you rich? 

    • #48
  19. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    MichaelKennedy (View Comment):
    This is a huge problem, in my opinion, because there are knowledge “silos” that contain people well educated in one narrow field. As an example, why were so many nuclear physicists communists in the 1930s and 40s?

    I recently finished reading Rebecca West’s The New Meaning of Treason, in which first she covered the Nazi-supporting British traitors of the WWII era and then the Soviet-Union supporting traitors of the early Cold War era.  Many of the latter were nuclear scientists of one sort or another. She found them to be incredibly arrogant people, confident that their specialized knowledge qualified them to determine how society should be best organized.

    • #49
  20. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    I agree with everything you’ve pointed out in the OP.  Still there seems to be another way of looking at it.  I look at it as, in one way, a difference between the Haves and the Have-nots.  Historically, mankind has been largely the Have-nots, and this spurred social orders of both productivity, and of plunder.  In the twentieth century productivity and ease of survival has increasingly devalued productivity; creating more and more a society and a culture of Haves. In the twenty-first century this ease of survival has remained, and so has a sense of entitlement and societal superiority. However many, if not most, college degrees are by far easy and non-productive exercises that produce unproductive and poorly-employable people, people though who expect such ease to naturally continue.

    But being Haves has not transferred so well to the millennials; leading to a culture raised as Haves but finding (after borrowing heavily for easy college degrees, and living in a society more and more indebted due to entitlements and corporate empowerment) when it does not continue, it breeds and nurtures a thinking of ubiquitous inequity.

    Also, those who have been raised and have retained the culture of Have-nots intuitively embrace hard work and its successes.  While those who have not been raised in this culture, the Haves, have no functional culture to speak of.  And cultural propositions involving disenchantment, disenfranchisement, disaffection and division — to which communism, employing disunity and indentitarianism, so loudly speaks — and provides a new and promising cultural vision that ameliorates these symptoms of disappointment and inequity, and provides a template for repair of society toward everyone being Haves again, with perhaps a smattering of punishment for those Have-nots who unjustly worked their way up and grew into Haves.

    With the Feds decades of QE money printing, which has primarily benefited the Haves through investing money obtained through low-interest loans in stocks and bonds, the cultural chasm between the Haves and the Have-nots has greatly widened.

    We can call it ingratitude or greed, or jealousy or desire for ease, but this is I think one way of looking at the phenomenon.

    • #50
  21. Paul Stinchfield Member
    Paul Stinchfield
    @PaulStinchfield

    Cow Girl (View Comment):
    As we ate lunch, her attorney father asked me what my father’s occupation was… “A farmer? Oh.” And that was the end of the conversation. Clearly a farmer was of no consequence to this guy and it was very clear to me from his expression and tone. 

    Have you read Victor Davis Hanson’s numerous descriptions and analyses of this pathology?

    • #51
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