I’m pleased that Joe Carter has taken up the important argument that one shouldn’t assume redneck conservatives hate elites just because they hate Blue elites, but I’m concerned about the way Mr. Carter has gone about it. It isn’t wrong to point out, as Carter does, that they respect military elites, but I’m not sure that matters in quite the way he wants it to. It reminds me a little of conservatives who argue that there are plenty of women in positions of leadership and prove it by pointing to women who excel at traditional femininity . Contrary to unpopular opinion, "Hints from Heloise" and well-respected supermoms don’t obviate the need for feminism. In the same way, saying that rednecks look up to super-rednecks doesn’t really address how they feel about elites . (Judging by the way my West Point friends talk about the political connections of generals, the premise might not even hold in the first place, but I’ll leave that argument to people who know how to make it. Carter himself points out something along these lines when he mentions "desk jobs in DC.")
A better example than the Navy SEAL might be the man who always leaves the house ostentatiously well-dressed, trades in high-flying rhetoric verging on the rococo, and broadcasts his taste for life’s finer things. This description might fit a well-heeled man-about-New York, but it might just as easily describe a certain breed of Southern politician. Jack Beatty explains (quote from The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley , which, incidentally, describes a time and place—early twentieth century Boston—when politics as tribal loyalty actually worked):
[Curley] had an intuitive Disraeli-like appreciation for the symbolic uses of appearance. He never dressed—or talked—down to his constituents. Neither did Huey Long. Both politicians appreciated the vicarious element in their sartorial no less than in their rhetorical appeals. T. Harry Williams writes of Long, "He understood the social forces that made his success possible and . . . he respected those forces."Southerners’ respect for Army Rangers is entirely intuitive; their respect for gentleman intellectuals, aristocrats, and dandies (i.e. James Vardaman, William Alexander Percy) is not. The fact that Southerners do adore these men is stronger evidence of their comfort with elitehood than the fact that they recognize superlative strength, character, and self-discipline. Just keep in mind that successful candidates of the "dapper Southern politician" type have always been careful to express their solidarity with the common people, even if it sounded more like noblesse oblige than any kind of identification with them.
One of these, propelling the ascent of both Curley and Long, was an identification upward, an envy cut by awe. Long had seen the "Great White Chief" of Mississippi, James K. Vardaman, campaigning in the piney-woods towns dressed in white from his hat to his shoes and conveyed in a wagon pulled by two white oxen—he had seen poor dirt farmers mesmerized by Vardaman’s immaculacy, and their reaction, Williams writes, taught him a counterintuitive lesson: "The masses were more likely to follow one of their own if that man showed that in some ways he was better than they were."
