Elitism versus tribalism: why "latte-sipping" and "gun-toting" are fair game.

I spent last night drafting a sally into the conversation about elitism that popped up in the wake of McCain's price-of-milk moment (1, 2, 3), only to throw it in the cybershredder this morning for reasons that will become clear. It started with a response to Matt Zeitlin's volley:

It’s interesting how Republicans seem to criss-cross on what makes someone a legitimate repersentative of most Americans. In 2000 and 2004, when Bush was the most aristocratic of the two candidates (in the case of Gore, only by a hair), we were assured that he somehow “got” average Americans better. In 2008, the GOP has gotten even more brazen. The McCain-Obama wealth gap, both in current and liftetime terms, is huge, and so the McCain campaign went full-frontal in trying to ignore the real financial differences between the candidate and instead focus on ephemeral issues of elitism.

As John pointed out, there's a difference between being an elitist and being part of an elite, so McCain's actual income is only one of many factors determining his Elitist Quotient. Just as important is, say, whether he reacts to the sound of Harleys revving their engines with contempt or by saying "That's the sound of freedom."

I'm willing to cut the left some slack and say that they probably don't realize the extent to which their contempt for the gun-toting and country-music-listening is a manifestation of elitism. ("Your gun control position doesn't have anything to do with public safety, and it's certainly not about personal freedom. It's that you don't like people who like guns. You don't like the people.") It's a little like the conservative party line on the disintegration of the black family; we look at the statistics and assume our case is strong while ignoring the fact that telling the black community they'd be fine if they all stopped being so dissolute is deeply insulting.

So elitism has less to do with how many houses you have and more to do with whether or not you think everyone who listens to Toby Keith is a buffoon.* By that standard, Democrats are more elitist than Republicans. That was the bottom line I reached in the post I wrote last night.

So why toss it out? Not because it isn't true, but because this article rightly suggests that it's true but fine:

Antipartyism and its partner in negativity, antipartisanship, have a distinguished, even brilliant pedigree... Canonical political theory from antiquity is studded with precursors and echoes of the philosopher Hume, who famously wrote: “As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honored and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated.” And Jefferson, co-founder of the first popular political party, nonetheless contended, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”

. . . Between carping and disapproval of parties and partisanship, on the one hand, and taking their uses for granted or utter disregard, on the other, we lose sight of the achievement of parties and partisanship. We miss the historical innovation of regular party rivalry, and the conceptual breakthroughs required to imagine and accept the political work parties do. Above all, we miss the creativity of party politics and the moral distinctiveness of partisanship. Parties create, not just reflect, political interests and opinions. They formulate “issues” and give them political relevance. Party antagonism “stages the battle”; parties create a system of conflict and draw the lines of division.24 Moving back and forth between metaphors of natural and artistic creation, Maurice Duverger tried to capture this shaping power: parties crystallize, coagulate, synthesize, smooth down, and mold. Creativity in politics is almost always identified with founding moments, constitutional design, transformative social movements, or revolution, not with “normal politics.” Modern party politics is the ordinary, not (ordinarily) extraordinary locus of political creativity.

I remember hearing William, a man of few compliments, say of a mutual friend, "His approach to politics is very tribal. I like that about him." (It might help to disclose that our friend is from Boston.) I like it about him, too. The necessary conclusion to draw from politics-as-tribalism is that Democrats should be allowed to have contempt for rednecks because rednecks aren't on their team, and teams matter. Reframe a party's elitism as tribalism and it becomes much more palatable.

I'll stop here, but there's more to be said about a team-based approach to party politics. Expect in the next few days posts on Edmund Burke "who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind and to party gave up what was meant for mankind," and the way that the two parties' positions on the Drug War can be explained by which communities they take to be on their teams.

* The most unpleasant conversation I've ever had ended with an unhappy liberal shouting that I should "go back to Mississippi." I always thought I was pretty cosmopolitan.