Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Station of the Crossed

While it's worth questioning whether the topic should occupy anyone's time, I have been thinking lately about the cohort of the Republican Party that remains #NeverTrump. At this point, what is the motivation? As usual, the invaluable Victor Davis Hanson has some thoughts:
We rightly associate the elite disdain for the clingers, irredeemables, and deplorables with progressives like Obama and Hillary Clinton. But politics is incidental to the matrix; more essential is class.

It was Mitt Romney who said he could not work with 47 percent of the population and wrote them off as hopelessly lost voters. It was David Brooks and Bill Kristol who caricatured the white working class as near Neanderthal and romanticized illegal aliens (often by deliberating conflating them with legal immigrants.)

If one were to read carefully through the disparagement of Americans in the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, with their slurs against hillbilly Virginians and Texans and smelly Trump supporters, one can see that Strzok appears likely to be a suburban Republican or independent of the sort who would vote for John Kasich.

The point is not that Strzok and Page are hyperpartisans, but that they are comfortable with candidates who foremost reflect their cultural tastes and proper cursus honorum. And as we have witnessed with some in the NeverTrump movement, for these sorts, being grateful that new economic policies might reinvigorate the old rust-belt and the hinterland is more than offset by the concomitant price of an ascendant working class that lacks the tastes of the elite and the romance of the deliberately distant poor and minorities.
If you show sympathy for the hillbillies, or worse advocate for them, you don't get to hang with the cool kids. Back to Hanson:
The Trump catharsis has shown that about 10 percent of the Republican Party, the NeverTrumpers, was largely apolitical. That is, former cornerstone positions of deregulation and tax reform, oil and gas production, charter schools, deterrent foreign policy, restoring friendship with Israel and moving the embassy to Jerusalem were apparently always secondary to the more important criterion of offering a mild, sober and judicious frown to progressivism, through discerning losers like George H.W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney.

Such a Republican elite was so embedded within American establishment institutions as to be both immune from the economic stagnation of an Obama neo-socialist revolution (remember income inequality soared under Obama) and in no real need of a Reagan revolution or Trump’s often messy radical push-back against progressivism.
Yep. And this one is for you, David Brooks:
Its creed was not really, as advertised, the ethics of “losing nobly is better than winning ugly,” but rather the snobbery of “losing a cultural image is worse than winning a political agenda.” Put more bluntly, it is better to put up with a socialist with a “perfectly creased pant” than a prairie-fire conservative in rumpled Walmart slacks.
I know plenty of people who have, at various times, claimed to be conservative. Some of these people spend time on social media talking about their raw denim jeans and their wing-tip work boots. Others slag their home towns and the people they have ostentatiously left behind. I have known dozens of Philip Pirrips in my life. Class doesn't matter in America nearly as much as it did in 19th Century England, but it does matter. And many ostensible conservatives realize their perch is tenuous at best. Why take up the cause of those you've left behind? Isn't it better to go to London, or New York, or even Minneapolis, and shake the dust from your sandals?

We carry the markers of class and station with us at all times. If they overtake us, we become David Brooks. Don't be David Brooks.

8 comments:

John said...

A nice commentary. I think you're spot on describing those who view themselves as the elite have with the President and those who support him.

3john2 said...

Don't be a Brooks Brother.

Bike Bubba said...

Well said. It struck me when reading Gino's appraisal that what's going on to a degree is that both sides of the aisle are more or less absorbing a portion of Marx's dialectic of history--that of class conflict. But does it have to be that way?

Gino said...

a little googling, and you will find that almost every single conservative 'thinker' or talking head, comes from a privileged background.
there is not one son of a mill worker, a migrant taxi driver, or a coal miner's daughter, among them.
They are a class unto themselves, the cool kids, and unless you act like them, you cannot possibly be on their level of intellect. (Sowell and Walter Williams were very rare birds in this flock, Hanson was born with some privilege, but lived a working man's life.)

Bill O'Reilly may be an exception, but his father was college educated, an accountant.

Go ahead, try it. just pick any writer from National Review, or the Weekly Standard... or any Fox News talking head...

Mr. D said...

Gino,

Yep. That’s a big part of it. My father was a professional, a business consultant, and college-educated. His father was a millwright, though, so we’re somewhat closer to the working class. (My grandfather on my mom’s side worked for the county highway department.)

Bike Bubba said...

Agreed that those who write for a living are most likely the children of white collar families, but it strikes me as odd to think that they'd have no clue about the lives of blue collar people. They never talked with a kid in school whose dad had been let go at the steel mill? They had no blue collar relatives or neighbors? Never talked to the guy fixing their furnace or plumbing?

I'm third generation white collar--nearest blue collar work in my ancestry is really my great grandparents on the farm--but if someone truly has no clue about this, I've got to recommend an EEG.

Gino said...

those that write at that level didnt go to school with steel mill kids. they went to private schools, with people just like them. they basically grew up in and stay within that bubble, with the people they are comfortable with.

your profession is a bit different, being an engineer, you have to work with people who do the work.
i worked with a lot of engineers when i was in aerospace, 30 yrs ago. usually the young ones with the sharp haircut, creased pants, and perfectly matching tie were the hardest to work with, because they would tell me what they wanted, and then tell me how they wanted it done...i'm like... hands on guy here... it doesnt work. you cannot heat aluminum to 975F without distorting the object. lots of heated arguments and my supervisor had to chase one out the department, and wasnt allowed back.

the older guys, with the worn out loafers/ ketchup stained tie and 5:00 shadow? those guys were the best. they actually asked lowly me about certain procedures, and wanted my input to get the final product.

Bike Bubba said...

You were doing their job for the loafer crowd. I remember letting guys do my job for me as well in one job--just go to the smoke shack, or ask them about a process, and all I had to do was write up the results. Half the time we'd have a conversation about family life or hobbies as well. :^)

The trouble was getting the managers to buy in. As a rule, they'd bought into a terribly truncated/mutant version of how a factory ought to run, and no amount of evidence would convince them that they'd set up a horrible system.