Now, I really, really, really hadn’t intended to post anything on Palin. I have nothing to add that hasn’t already been said. And most of what has been said would have been better unsaid: the delight in speculation without the slightest basis in evidence is among the worst tendencies of the postmodern commentariat. But an interesting, if rather “meta” discussion, has sprung up in response to Ross Douthat’s New York Times column on Sunday. I think I can contribute something to that.
Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard….All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.
And it has attracted mostly critical responses from bloggers, who have pointed out that the Palins are actually a lot richer than they choose to let on–certainly much more so than many of the ex-Governor’s supporters.
I’m going to leave aside the issue of what this means about Palin’s self-presentation–and about the so-called base of the GOP. Rather, I want to suggest that the conceptual vocabulary Douthat invokes, and that’s picked up by his critics, is inappropriate to the task. The issue here is not class, in the sense of a social group with distinctive economic, attitudinal, and cultural characteristics that persist through time. It’s status, which is acquired by individuals, and is difficult to transmit through the generations.
My objections are inspired by the great sociologist Robert Nisbet. Exactly fifty years ago, Nisbet argued that the concept of class could no longer be applied with any accuracy to America life. The reason, to make a long story short, is that the sociologists who developed the concept used the British landed aristocracy as their model. And, after World War II, there was simply nothing in this country to resemble a group that was not only closed to outsiders, but whose members were immediately distinguishable by speech, dress, and manner from the rest of the population. Certain vestiges of class, Nisbet admitted, might remain in the Northeast and parts of South. But he suggests, I think accurately, that there was little reason to think these could long survive.
For as Nisbet points out the really important thing about class is that group membership was by itself a sufficient condition of a certain degree of influence. When you’re part of a real class, your social and political influence is acquired in virtue of who you are, independently of anything you happen to do. Being invited (or not) to parties may be personally satisfying (or distressing). But once it’s severed from any real power, it loses its interest to any but snobs.
Status works differently. It has to be acquired by more or less arduous effort, and is enjoyed only by the individual and perhaps his or her immediate family. Status is the “meritocratic” replacement for class. It’s precisely because the class system has been so thoroughly effaced that sorting by education has become so so socially important.
Critics of this argument, including Douthat, often point out that status has a way of becoming a proxy for class. Thus the children of people who’ve achieved high status are much more likely to go to Harvard or Yale than, say, the sons of Kenyan goatherders–and more likely to situate themselves properly for further status acquisition by making the right contacts, etc. But the fact that they have to do so–and that getting in requires that kids run an unspeakable gantlet of tests, teams, and internships–only shows how little class in the proper sense is worth these days.
In my view, this means that the distinction between “democratic” and “meritocratic” ideals is badly drawn. Instead, we should talk about the clash between those who accept conventional status markers and those who question them. Each position can been seen as both democratic and meritocratic insofar as it thinks that social influence and dignity should be “earned”. But they disagree about whether fancy degrees, world travel, and certain kind of rhetorical fluency reflect merit–as opposed to, say, success in business or raising a thriving family. Probably, there’s something to be said for both views. But Douthat’s implicit approval of the “ideal” that just anyone should be able to become president? That’s American Leninism.
July 7th, 2009 | 1:00 pm
So you’re right. I said something similar on NLTs. There’s something slippery about that Ross’s self-positioning.
July 7th, 2009 | 6:22 pm
Some nice distinctions, Samuel. Indeed the rivalry comes down to different kinds of “merit” and thus different kinds of “status.” “Fancy degrees” and a “certain kind of rhetorical fluency” tend not to be neutral with respect to the actual content of the notion of a”merit.” The practical virtues that tend to contribute to “success in business or raising a thriving family” are in fact either taken for granted or held in contempt by many of the rhetorically fluent with fancy advanced degrees. Aristotle is still relevant: politics is about rival claims to rule, rival understandings of merit.
July 11th, 2009 | 3:01 am
I found the above discussion about whether Sarah Palin belongs to an aristocratic class or social status to be sociologically unhelpful.
There are two middle classes in the U.S. — the Old Business Class and the New Class (Orwell) of intellectuals, media types, professionals and paraprofessionals (nurses, social workers, teachers).
The “professional” class no longer fights our wars, rescue people trapped in burning high rise buildings, build our infrastructure, aspire to be a middle manager at Wal-Mart, risk failure as business entrepreneurs, or start new voluntary associations such as churches. And they bear, rear, adopt or foster children much less than the working class, having given up or delayed parenthood for a professional career. In the main they are not doers. They are whiners, talkers, techies, coddlers, evaluators, lobbyists, therapists, and media spinners who largely depend on government regulations, licenses, or monopolies for their livelihoods. They hold many prestigious public or private offices like the character the Grand Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera The Mikado who bears the title “Lord-High-Of-Everything-Else.” They are the Pooh-Bah class, not the doing class.
A prosecutor-attorney friend of mine has perhaps come up with an apt tag game analogy for Sarah Palin’s appeal to the business and working middle class – her directness and keen perception of the mostly un-verbalized resentment of the working class to the intrusions of the professional class acting in tandem with big government.
In the children’s game of tag, a person is selected as “it.” The other players stand in a circle a short distance away. The tagger yells “go” and the players try to avoid being tagged “it.” Even young children quickly learn strategies to dodge, hide behind others, run on angles, feign moves and re-direct the focus of the tagger on others to avoid from being “it.” But when a new kid shows up who doesn’t fall for all the fakes and feigns he or she can often walk right up to someone and surprisingly tag them “it.”
Sarah Palin is like that new kid in school in a child’s game of tag. She’s the outsider whose working class directness and common sense is a signal to the working class that she “gets it” (i.e., understands their situation). And obviously the “it” that Palin “gets” isn’t the same “it” of the dodging President Bill Clinton – (“it depends on what the meaning of ‘it’ is”).
Is Palin’s so-called “anti-intellectualism” or lack of aristocratic status a Republican problem which alienates the professional classes? Maybe it is. But given that the professional class is so dependent on the government regulatory system is it any wonder that Republicans may consider them a lost constituency, investment bankers included. To the contrary, isn’t the real problem the resentment of the “doing class” to the attack on them by the professions and government?
All the current political campaign rhetoric about the “racism without racists” and the “Bradley effect”on Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and the “class warfare card” of Sarah Palin only confuses and twists the issue of the attack on the working class with the false issues of racism, discrimination and mob populism.
The public issues of immediate concern to the “doing class” currently being re-framed as hidden racism, discrimination and intellectual regression are: sub-prime mortgages to lower income minorities and immigrants which now threaten retirement investments, the vote on same-sex marriage laws in California which threaten working class family values, and the qualifications of a Black president who is perceived to have a track record of doing little to nothing but has been advanced to where he is largely due to affirmative action, transgressing the old work ethic of the working class.
To mischaracterize these issues in terms of race as another New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, does; or as anti-intellectualism as David Brooks does, or as lack of aristocratic class or status is to misunderstand what is going on. To use an intellectual’s term it is “false consciousness.”
Underlying all of the above issues is the premise that parents are entitled to hand on to their children the benefits of their class position and social mobility, including their property wealth, investments, and religious values. It is a concern about achieved social status versus ascribed social status by “accident of birth.” Modern American society has traditionally been modeled around achievement and merit; individualism over collectivism.
But counter-modernizing social and legal movements have created a “soft” society of automatic promoting schools, union jobs and affirmative action as quasi property rights, and affordable housing via sub-prime loans to combat the “hardness” of competitive capitalism. The state, not the market, is the redemptive dispenser of this welfare “American dream” of feeling “at home” in all areas of social involvement (“it takes a village”). Conversely, President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” is an attempt to inject competition back into public schools where the professional culture is antagonistic to its harshness. Obviously, a pre-emptive war of choice does not fit in to this utopian welfare vision of the American Dream; thus, the “unpopulism” of the Iraq War.
This shift from achievement to ascription and social privilege challenges the social class opportunity system that has made the U.S. unique and enviable to all, despite its flaws. The reforms of the New Deal, however imperfect, were never intended to undermine the class system but to provide a “floor” to it. The put down of Sarah Palin as a racist or anti-intellectual signals the call for a minimizing, if not ending, the “open society” of prosperity and entrepreneurial opportunity that have been a part of the class system of American society.
Under the newer welfare system based on ascribed rather than achieved status the life chances of the individual are tied to whatever collectivity to which they are defined as primarily belonging. Under such a system it will matter less what individuals do than what they are; or what somebody officially attributes them to be (e.g., underprivileged, gay, homeless, union member, victim, etc). This begs the question: who will do the allocating of such status? It will be professionals together with government. It is thus little wonder then that professionals see Sarah Palin as a backward threat to the reforms of racial equality brought about by the Progressive intellectual establishment and liberal religion. It is also why Indian-British novelist and intellectual Salman Rushdie has called the pick of Sarah Palin for Vice-President “a joke.” Such utterances are a reflection of class contempt and solidarity at the doing class.
What was at stake with the recent past election was not that Sarah Palin is racist or anti-intellectual or low class or never will be allowed status by the media elites, but whether we want to end or marginalize our highly successful, albeit imperfect, open social class system. To do this would ultimately entail total control over each person’s life chances (e.g., their place of living, housing affordability, their investments, their value system, their health habits, etc.). The prospect of benign totalitarianism that such a shift would entail is not very appealing, especially to the doing class. That is why class warfare rhetoric has found fertile ground in the past national Presidential race; not because of racism, backward thinking, social status, or mob populism.
See Peter L. Berger and Brigitte Berger, The Assault on Class, Worldview (July, 1972).
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