August 16, 2006
Liberal Elites Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:00 PM EST Concerning “liberal elites,” a phrase John Steele Gordon and Josh Zeitz have been discussing, versus “limousine liberals”: As I remarked in a previous post, I think “limousine liberal” was effective polemical language because it referred to something real, material, and painful about the political world of the late 1960s. The phrase meant richer people advocating policies whose cost would be borne by poorer people who were not advocating them. For voters who found “limousine liberal” an effective taunt, the cry for justice seemed to have emerged from the mouths of people who would not have to live with the consequences, and the policies thus advocated were rarely without cost to someone. On occasion, some of the policies had some perverse effects.
By contrast, “liberal elites” may be effective polemical language, but I do not think it refers to anything nearly as real and material. For one thing, in the late 1960s liberalism had produced laws and policies, because liberals had a significant presence in the legislatures and judiciary. Nowadays the Republicans control both houses of Congress, the executive, and a larger and larger swath of the Federal bench. So how do those “liberal elites” accomplish their coercive villainies?
Well, they are alleged to control the culture: Hollywood, the networks, the press, the publishing houses, the professoriat, etc. As it happens, the purchase of movie tickets, newspapers, and books and the selection of television channels and applications to college are all voluntary commercial transactions. Unlike the laws and regulations established by sixties liberalism, none of these institutions compel action with the aid of the criminal or civil law and the consequent threat of imprisonment or fines. “Stop me before I shop again!” is not an impressive cry for justice.
Do liberal elites control the networks? Not Fox, and Fox’s successes compel partial imitation. Publishing? Ann Coulter’s successive volumes of increasingly mad and vicious ranting (liberals are traitors, Darwin caused the Holocaust and the Gulag, etc.) sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year; specialist political-conservative publishers appeared some years ago, and imitative lines then began to appear within mainstream publishing houses. Movies are made because the people who green-light them think they will sell tickets, and they are distributed on the same principle. Fewer people are reading The New York Times, which means that it matters less. The universities seem (in some academic disciplines) more univocally “liberal,” but if you don’t like Oberlin, you really can go to George Mason. Still, parts of the universities are an exception to the general rule; a little more on this below.
Elites are normally understood to be groups with greatly disproportionate political power, or very high status, or very high income. That seems to make the phrase “liberal elite” close to an oxymoron in modern America. Are people working in publishing houses, magazines, and universities an economic elite? If you work in those trades, you will now be laughing rather hollowly. There are some jobs at the top of those hierarchies that pay very well, but those are sharply sloped pyramids, and in my experience people below the apexes earn less than almost anyone with whom they grew up or were educated. Are these people a status elite? Not in my experience, not for decades. Back in the early 1980s, the people graduating with PhDs in the humanities from my university—Columbia—were already saluted with cries of “Taxi!” by the folks earning MBAs. That joke, I think, reflected relative status as well as relative prospective income. Are these people well-connected to our political elites? You be the judge: When the Chair of the English Department says jump, does the Speaker of the House ask how high? If you think that is an absurd reductio, how about the publisher of The New York Times? Outside New York City, political elites are likelier to bait The New York Times than rush to do its bidding.
Politics, in the words of Tip O’Neill, is always local, and there are exceptions to the broad picture sketched above. If you have locally heterodox politics and want a job in some academic disciplines in many colleges and universities, you are probably looking at trouble. That is a real problem, and some people within universities acknowledge it; I am not sure how it will get a lot better any time soon, but I do see some small signs of change. In my experience the more conservative people in some parts of some media outlets feel themselves marginalized, etc. (That is changing a little bit faster.) Nonetheless, the ability of elements within the Republican Party to persuade anyone that liberal elites wield significant coercive power over vast numbers of their fellow citizens is almost astonishing.
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