On the eve of Election Day 2004, I read an interview with Tom Wolfe in the Guardian in which Wolfe seemed to endorse the incumbent president. "I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again."
I was shocked. I had always assumed all truly smart people were either leftists or economists (exceptions like Ezra Pound notwithstanding). Yet here was an entrenched member of the New York literati glibly mentioning that he might vote for someone I considered a moron, a warmonger and a fundamentalist.
Wolfe's explanation: "I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East Coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality."
I had heard this rhetoric before. "East-coast liberals" were alleged to be a smug, exclusive bunch who shunned the salt of the earth. But liberal elitism always seemed to me just another piece of propaganda - like "activist judges" or the "liberal media" - cooked up by strategists so that conservatives could feel victimized even as they took over the country. What is pretentious about wanting to raise the minimum wage and tax the rich?
I still think Wolfe was wrong; if anyone has a "twisted sense of morality," it is "pro-lifers" who would ban stem cell research while executing the mentally impaired. However, charges of liberal elitism have started to make more sense to me.
I spent this last summer in Albion, a rural town in western New York. Albion is a decidedly unpretentious place, the kind of place where everyone can point north and no one has heard of Fellini. My first few weeks there felt strange. I chalked up the feeling to loneliness, and then to culture shock; in retrospect, though, I think what I was experiencing was a gap between what I expected these rural people to be like and what I actually found.
The Albionites I met were conservative. Many of them were religious, or patriotic, to the point of dogmatism. This I expected. What I didn't expect was that they were neither stupid nor vindictive. They had political views that I considered misguided, or even destructive. However, in most cases, they did what they did in good faith, because they thought it was right.
In liberal bubbles like Brown, we tend to demonize the political "other." Such antagonism, of course, appears on all sides of the political debate. However, when people like me do it, we engage in elitism.
This is because, despite the temporary political dominance of Red America, cities on the coasts retain a disproportionate amount of economic and social capital. If a UMass student wears a T-shirt saying Huck Farvard, it's funny; if a Harvard student wears a T-shirt saying "I do my lerning at UMass," it's offensive. This same imbalance tinges liberal criticism of Middle America.
In the aforementioned Guardian interview, Wolfe recalled a dinner party in New York where he brought up the possibility of voting for Bush. "People looked at me as if I had just said: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.' ... You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election." We all know this was true in 2004, and is still true today. If you don't believe me, go to Coffee Exchange and try starting a conversation about family values.
So come on, fellow East Coast liberals - let's admit our prejudices. We do think we're better than they are. And what's more: in some cases, we're right. We are better than conservatives who disown their gay children. We are better than redlining real estate agents. We have a right to lord it over those people, for the simple reason that our moral values are right and theirs are wrong.
But this self-righteousness can easily get out of hand. Branding all conservatives as backward is an empirical mistake. The lefties who invented political correctness could take a cue from their own tolerance workshops. The same people who are careful to remind their friends that most Muslims are not terrorists are often the slowest to admit that most conservatives are not evil rednecks.
We should work to replace our elitism with honest, vigorous debate. We need not agree with conservatives, or even like them; but we must see them as real people. They may be wrong, but most of them aren't "twisted and retarded."
Andrew Marantz '06.5 is a tree-hugging liberal Jew, just like everyone else.
