The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (30 page)

And third: It rhymes, which is nice.

Let’s circle back to number two. Bill Clinton won the Oval Office in large part because he refused to fall into the trap that so many Democrats before him had. Namely, the Democratic Party had become (and largely remains)
the tail on the dog of special interests, particularly labor unions, racial grievance peddlers, feminists, limousine liberals, and the rest of the usual suspects. He cast himself as a different kind of Democrat, who wanted to “end welfare as we know it” and offer a “hand up not a hand out.” He attacked the brilliantly self-parodying rapper Sister Souljah, distanced himself from Jesse Jackson took time off from the campaign to oversee the execution of a mentally retarded man and, most importantly, talked relentlessly about the “middle class.”

Hence, the cognitive dissonance. You see, Bill Clinton and his advisers mastered the art of using the term middle class to win elections for a party that is obsessed with categorizing people in terms that negate the very idea of a middle class. Moreover, once elected, and all in the name of “protecting” the middle class, they put in place programs and championed ideas that undermined the stability of the middle class.

“Middle class” is a confounding term. Everyone uses it. Everyone claims to know what it means and who it describes, and yet it is almost entirely useless as a term of economic precision and deeply misleading as a term of political identity. In 2008, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ran for president with policies predicated on the assumption that 98 percent of Americans were, in effect, middle class.
¹
It tells you something that a party widely associated with its concern for the poor talks about the middle class far, far more. When President Obama was speaking at the 2008 Democratic convention—to his most passionate ideological comrades-in-arms, no less—he talked at length about giving tax breaks to the middle class. He didn’t even mention the word “poor.”
²
John Kerry’s 2004 convention speech mentions the middle class six times, and discusses it at length. Kerry mentions the word “poor” twice, once to mention that Bill Clinton helped reduce poverty, once to mention that Bush increased it. Scorecard for Al Gore’s convention speech in 2000: Tax cuts for the middle class, yes. Direct mention of the poor, no.

This is not to say Democratic politicians don’t care about the poor. I’m sure they do. But they also understand that even the poor—at least the
voting poor—
tend to think of themselves as the middle class, or aspire to be members of it. So when they talk about the middle class versus the rich, what they in fact mean is
everybody
versus the rich. In other words, being
for
the middle class, at least in many contexts, is just code for being
against
the rich. This has profound and pernicious public policy implications (to which we’ll return).

But there’s another meaning to the middle class: “middle America,” traditional America, flyover America, Main Street, Norman Rockwell America. It means the America of old-fashioned values and norms, the part of the map that got edited down to next to nothing in that famous
New Yorker
magazine cover depicting the Manhattanite’s view of America from Ninth Avenue. Democrats can never—ever—be caught appealing to what the hard campus Left calls “white America,” because white America is the very thing that the campus Left sees as the author of all of our problems and the primary target of all progressive reforms. That’s why the term “middle class” comes in so handy. It is a way of appealing to the heartland in terms that cannot be effectively faulted by the gargoyles on the parapets of the ivory tower.

This is not to say that the gargoyles don’t look down upon the middle class. Despising the traditional-minded, religious, hardworking middle class—once known to elite, effete, intellectual types as the “bourgeoisie”—has been the great and abiding pastime of the very same elite and effete intellectual types for centuries. Stendhal said that small businessmen made him want to “weep and vomit at the same time.” Hatred of the bourgeoisie is “the beginning of all virtue” proclaimed Gustave Flaubert.
³
I learned from David Brooks that Flaubert even signed his letters “Bourgeoisophobus” to signal just how much he despised “stupid grocers and their ilk.”

At first, America was not a hospitable climate for bourgeoisophobia. The founders were split not on the question of whether the bourgeoisie was good or bad, but which bourgeoisie to love the most. The Hamiltonians had a vision for America as a “commercial republic.” The Jeffersonians had a vision of America as a democracy of self-sustaining yeoman farmers. It took generations of wealth accumulation for America to produce an entire class of intellectuals who could hate the middle-class country that produced them.

In the early 1920s, American liberals turned their backs on the country that sought a “return to normalcy.” Disgusted with the triumph of the “Babbitts”—the pejorative label for middle-class philistines, taken from the main
character of Sinclair Lewis’s novel of the same name—a slew of articles and books appeared denigrating “middle America” as dimwitted, backward, and irredeemably provincial. The progressives of the Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson years had an abiding faith in the power and wisdom of public opinion, particularly when molded by “experts.” But once public opinion turned against them, they turned on the public. Harold Stearns, a once promising
New Republic
writer and Wilson administration functionary, edited a collection of essays in
American Civilization
that amounted to a seething indictment of American backwardness.
⁴

The Nation
ran a whole series of articles under the heading “In These United States” purporting to reveal that Manhattan was an island of sophistication in a vast wasteland of American backwardness.
^*
This was the era when it became an article of faith that the artist must hate the society in which he lives, that he must be “a public enemy” in the words of H. L. Mencken, and that the “
vox populi
is, to him, the bray of an ass.” The writers for
The
Nation
ridiculed what is today called “fly-over country”—which back then was really “train-through country” or perhaps “cruise around country”—with relentless condescension. Chronicling his impressions of Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis lamented that the “Scandinavians Americanize only too quickly!”
⁵
Perhaps not surprisingly, the South was an object of particular scorn. One writer believed that Mississippi could only be saved by an invasion of civilizing, cultured, missionaries from the North. Another scratched his head to ask what, if anything, Alabama had ever contributed to humanity.

The Midwest and West were hardly spared either. The story of Colorado was a tale of “continuous colossal waste.” The famed Kansan-progressive William Allen White lashed out that his state’s own culture of self-improvement was now backward, too. The “dour deadly desire to fight what was deemed wrong” had arrested Kansas’s artistic development. “No great poet, no great painter, no great musician, no great writer or philosopher” could be found in the Sunflower State. All that existed was the “dead level of economic and political democracy.” The Ohio-born novelist Sherwood
Anderson asked: “Have you a city that smells worse than Akron, that is a worse junk-heap of ugliness than Youngstown, that is more smugly self-satisfied than Cleveland?”

All in all, the cultural elite of the 1920s had firmly convinced themselves that they were, in Christopher Lasch’s words, “a civilized minority in a nation of Babbitts, Rotarians, and rednecks.” Undoubtedly, self-loathing played an important role in this bigotry toward middle America. Sinclair Lewis was lashing out at the small town world that bred him. He spent much of his life searching for the refined life he was sure was out there. In the process he wrecked marriages, friendships, and his own career. In self-imposed exile in Italy, Lewis drank himself to an early grave in 1951. His self-loathing was only outmatched by that of his obituary writers.

Harold Stearns went off to Paris to escape American provincialism, only to become a legendary drunk and moocher, who barely repented his disdain for his home country before he died. Sherwood Anderson died in Panama, having perforated his gut with the toothpick from a martini.

There is certainly some significance to the fact that so many of these writers were condemning their own communities and home states. In a sense, progressivism nurtures and is nurtured by a tendency to loathe what is near and love what is far. Those who escape the provincial must justify their own betrayal of their roots. The same story, but on a generational scale, played itself out to some extent in the 1960s when the New Left’s chief complaint (before they latched on to the civil rights movement) was how good they had it. Comfort, it seemed, was a sin. The opening line from the Students for a Democratic Society’s 1962 Port Huron Statement says it all: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
⁶
Betty Friedan, one of the founding mothers of modern feminism, was a devoted Communist journalist who deduced that her critique of bourgeois America would have more bite if she passed herself off as a humble housewife speaking truth to power instead of the Berkeley-educated activist she was. In
The
Feminine Mystique
, she indicted the traditional middle-class home as “a comfortable concentration camp” where women were held captive.
⁷
That the biggest difference she recognizes between being a Jew at Buchenwald and being June Cleaver is the degree
of “comfort” says more about Friedan than it does about anything going on in 1960s suburbia.

This line of thinking also helps demonstrate that the second wave of feminism was in no small part launched as a Trojan Horse for an older and more familiar Marxist assault. It may have evolved into something different and more mainstream, but the DNA is there.

And since we’re on the subject of Marxism, we might as well deal with it here since anyone venturing into the realm of class must at some point pull over at Karl’s Funland and throw some darts at the balloons, squirt water in the clown’s mouth, and tease the dancing monkeys.

According to most conventional discussions of Marxist theory, there are only two classes: the workers and the owners, or the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. “By bourgeoisie,” explains Marx in
The Communist Manifesto
, “is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labor.” The proletariat, meanwhile, are “the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live.”
⁸

The problem even for Marx, never mind his intellectual heirs, is that whenever one actually looks at people as they actually live, it turns out that there are a lot more classes than just two.
⁹
That’s why Marx is, to borrow a term from social science, such a hot steaming mess. In
Das Kapital
he writes that there are in fact
three
classes: The capitalists, proletarians, and the landowners. But then pretty soon Marx had to add the petty bourgeois and the peasants to his list of classes. That makes five.

No wait, it’s six, actually, because he divided the peasants into two types: The lowly serfs and the landowning peasants. The landowning peasants were proletarians but didn’t know it. Since their mortgages were taken out from the capitalists, they were really wage earners with undeservedly high self-esteem. The nonlandowning peasants, meanwhile, were members of the “barbarian class.” The petty bourgeois—small shopkeepers and the like—didn’t own the means of production, but they did employ wage earners. Where do they belong? Well, Marx is pretty sure they belong among the capitalists, but since they seemed to be disappearing he calls them a “transition class.”

Then there are the “ideological classes”—who are sometimes the handmaidens of the capitalists and sometimes their own class, it depends apparently on which side of the bed Marx got up from that day. Sometimes he talks about the “ruling classes.” In Britain they are the “aristocracy,” “the moneyocracy,” or “finance aristocracy” and the “millocracy.” There’s also the “lower-middle-class,” which draws its members from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, depending on what they do, what they make, or how much they earn.

Then, of course, there’s the “lumpenproletariat,” my favorite of the umpteen classes found in Marx’s allegedly two-class system. The
Communist Manifesto
defines them as “the dangerous class,
the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society
.”
¹⁰
But I prefer the fuller definition in
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
, which includes a list of all the members of the lumpenproletarian coalition that, according to Marx, formed the brute squad (to borrow a phrase from
The Princess Bride
) of the Bonapartist regime:

[D]ecayed
roués
[cads, lechers, and rakes] with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks,
lazzaroni
[an Italian term for goons-for-hire], pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers,
maquereaux
[pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call
la bohème
.
¹¹

If that’s too archaic, think of the henchmen Hedley Lamarr wanted to enlist to his cause in
Blazing Saddles
(minus, of course, the Methodists): rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers, and Methodists.