What’s a little class warfare between friends?

I used to engage in Marxist class analysis simply for the sake of shoring up my lefty street cred, an indispensable commodity for Yale undergraduates. This time around, though, it’s because I don’t know any other way to explain a particular kind of argument wandering the hallways of the blogosphere. (Given the timing, my interest is, of course, entirely anthropological.)



Exhibit A, a reader quoted favorably by Andrew Sullivan and picked up by Conor :

I think, and I could be projecting here a bit, that the reason for the size of the Obamacon phenomenon is that some conservatives in the libertarian, realist, and religious categories are acting on the sense that Obama is one of them. It’s not about any one policy. It’s that when they hear him talk, they recognize their own kind of thinking. He is reasoned, thoughtful, temperate, ethical. While they may worry about this policy or that, they have a gut feeling that they trust him to be making the decisions.

Exhibit B, this story on America’s "linguistic divide":

"You betcha." "Doggone it." "Say it ain’t so, Joe."



Quick: How did you respond to reading those earthy, down-home phrases uttered by John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, on the U.S. campaign trail? Do you find them disarmingly cute and endearing? Or does the very sight of them make you utter aloud a few unprintable words of your own?



. . . So, a voter might be a Midwesterner, like the peeved University of Illinois student who slammed Palin’s "gosh dern golly-gee" debating style, writing in his student paper that her informal diction "may be okay to say in casual talk among friends, but not when you’re talking to the nation . . . Just because people aren’t from Wall Street doesn’t mean they stopped at sixth grade."

I’ve been saying for years that Ivy League cadences don’t indicate genuine intelligence any more than similarities between the rhetorical styles of Southern politicians and Baptist preachers prove that the former are genuinely pious, and I’ll keep saying it until I die or get lost in my own sentence structure. Graduates of elite schools aren’t that much smarter than other people, but they sound smarter, given their familiarity with cultural cues that indicate membership in a certain class (i.e. cues like what they make small talk about, which words they use, how quickly and confidently they talk, etc). In picking apart the Sarah Palin phenomenon, Sullivan’s reader and the author of the Star piece have confused insensitivity to these cues with indifference to intelligence. It’s possible to insist that our leaders be intelligent (by which I mean something more than street-smart, of course) without insisting that they sound like intellectuals or experts.



In other words: Obama’s speaking style, syllable for syllable, sends the message that an elite education is an impressive thing to have, and I agree with him. Sarah Palin’s doesn’t, and I don’t care. Sullivan’s reader is right that Palin doesn’t sound like "one of us," but does the "us" refer to temperate, thoughtful, ethical people, or does it refer to some more tribal?



^{Lest anyone imagine that I have no pride in my alma mater, I’ll throw out two recent examples of Ivy League-bred genius: this video of "I Got 95 Theses But the Pope Ain’t One" ( Sixty days to recant what I said? Father, please! You had, what, going on fifteen centuries? ), and this parody of the Ashley Todd hoax, "He Saw the Chuck Baldwin Sticker on My Corvair And . . . " On the other hand, I once heard a story about a fellow Eli who answered the question "How has your class background shaped your political beliefs?" by talking about being a science major.}