Thomas Frank: Ann Coulter and David Brooks play a sneaky, unserious class card
A few days ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks took the occasion of the outrage in Ferguson, Missouri, to call for a national effort to combat classism, an unfortunate form of prejudice that, he says, results from widening inequality. Nowadays, Brooks asserted, classism intertwines with racism to produce a truly monstrous complex of attitudes toward the people at societys bottom.
If you are a newcomer to the culture-war labyrinth, you might be surprised to hear a leading conservative deplore classism, because its the rights beloved free-market system that has opened the yawning crevasse between the classesbetween the people who work and the people who own. But in truth class grievance is central to the cosmology of modern conservatism. They love nothing more than to denounce snobberyjust as long as they are able to attribute that vice to scholarly liberal weaklings who disdain the plainspoken ways of middle America. David Brooks himself wrote one of the best-known iterations of this stereotype, back in the days when people were just beginning to associate red states with proletarian authenticity and blue states with upper-class pretension. (And back in October, he argued against the scourge of partyism.)
When Brooks skewers the tastes of the liberal professional class, he often does it in a self-effacing way. He presents himself as one of them, a liberal manqu, and his message to red-state America is: Youre right to distrust them/us. But consider the right-wing classism critique as it has been enunciated by a very different writer, in a 2003 book that is probably best forgotten:
Liberals thrive on the attractions of snobbery. Only when you appreciate the powerful driving force of snobbery in the liberals worldview do all their preposterous counterintuitive arguments make sense. They promote immoral destructive behavior because they are snobs, they embrace criminals because they are snobs, they oppose tax cuts because they are snobs, they adore the environment because they are snobs.
The writer here is Ann Coulter, and though it may seem unfair to associate her poisonous prose with the thoughtful stylings of David Brooks, I do so for a reason. She and he are on the same political team, roughly speaking, and if you can make your way through the smoke and the shrill, you can see the conservative mind beginning to change.
The critical line in the Coulter passage above is about the way liberals embrace criminals. After each incident of outrageous police brutality of the last few decades, liberals have generally sympathized with the victim, while conservatives have reached for the law-and-order megaphone, closing ranks with the police and even presenting them as blue-collar heroes. This goes back at least to the Kerner Commission, which was appointed to investigate the urban riots of the 1960s (it famously found that police forces were often seen by black residents as an occupying force) but which wound up being used to stoke the white backlash. Since then, race vs. class has become the insane script for everything from the Henry Louis Gates controversy back in 2009 through the shooting of Trayvon Martin and even the recent events in Ferguson.
The twist Brooks is putting on this narrative is something new. He doesnt even mention liberals in the article. Today we once again have a sharp social divide between people who live in the respectable meritocracy and those who live beyond it, he writes.
People in the respectable class have meritocratic virtues: executive function, grit, a capacity for delayed gratification. The view about those in the untouchable world is that they are short on these things. They are disorganized. They are violent and scary. This belief has some grains of truth because of childhood trauma, the stress of poverty and other things. But this view metastasizes into a vicious, intellectually lazy stereotype. Before long, animalistic imagery is used to describe these human beings.
Brooks gives us no examples of some respectable someone indulging in such a stereotype, so its difficult to understand who he has in mind or what political effects he wants his accusation to have. But he is certainly expanding the familiar right-wing class grievance in a remarkable way. Now its not merely the police whom professional-class snobs dont understand, but their victims as well. We privileged folks can blog as earnestly as we want, but thanks to the class divide, we still dont really know what life is like in Ferguson, Missouri, or Cleveland, Ohio, or even in certain reaches of New York City.
Perhaps Brooks was moved to write this as an act of conscience. Maybe hes noticed that toxicity has taken over in the GOP. Perhaps hes realized that the decades-long conservative project of highlighting the pathologies of the underclass has been little more than an excuse for doing nothing at all to address racial grievances.
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Thomas Frank: Ann Coulter and David Brooks play a sneaky, unserious class card