Sep 15 Many Wrong Roads To The Right Conclusion

Arnold Kling, writing at EconLog, tries to unpack the significance of the Tea Parties from a class perspective.

And he does it from the perspective of someone who’s definitely a member of one of the classes; the Tea Parties, to Kling, come from the world of NASCAR, WalMart and truck pulls:

Do [Tea-Partiers] fit the stereotype of being white, small-town, uneducated racists? Not much racism, but otherwise I would say they fit the stereotype enough to make me skeptical that this is an important political movement. This country is becoming more urban, less white, and more educated. At most, this movement could turn out to be the right-wing equivalent of MoveOn–a mailing list to be tapped when somebody wants to try to mobilize activists. But it may not even achieve that before it splinters and shrivels into insignificance.

Which, to be fair, is the norm for social movements, whether the Grangers or the Bund or the sixties’ Peace movement or the Contract For America or, for that matter, MoveOn.  They all coalesce around some crystal-clear imperative that everyone, or at least everyone that’s fundamentally sympathetic, can sink their teeth into.  Then, as things proceed, they get complicated; crystal-clear imperatives collide with reality and become bogged down with the ambiguities that plague every human endeavor where two more more gather.

That aside, though, I think Kling has it wrong; “education” isn’t a binary, “have or have not” idea.  While the “elite” of which Kling speaks trends generally left, a graph expressing formal “education” on the left would be an inverted bell; plenty of the putative educated “elite” (like, it seems, Kling) on one end, lots of poorly-educated or miseducated on the other, and a big gap in the middle.  On the right, I suspect, it’s reversed; the bell curve covers that middle - people of widely-varying but generally solid accomplishment with perhaps less regard for the trappings of “elite” formal “education”; indeed, people who know the difference between education and school.  While the Blue states may be where the “elite” get educated, general levels of education - expressed in terms of literacy and graduation rates (76% of Red State students graduate high school, if you leave out the old Confederacy, where social traditions de-emphasize education) are higher in red states.  “Education” in whatever form is seen as a means to an end, rather than as an entree to an “elite” that’s rather meaningless to life in the region.

But Kline makes a useful point:

I think the long-term significance of what is going on, both at the progressive end and at the Tea Party end of the political spectrum, is an open rupture. In the 1960’s, a Hubert Humphrey or Robert Kennedy could connect with uneducated white voters. The idea of blowing them off was unthinkable, if only because they were such a large majority of the voting population at the time.

Now, the elitism of President Obama and his supporters has reached in-your-face levels. They have utter contempt for the Tea Party-ers, and the Tea-Party-ers know it.

I wouldn’t want the Tea Party-ers at the faculty picnic, either. But my sense of class solidarity with Obama and other educated progressives does not make me want to see them exercise power. If anything, being a member of the educated elite and knowing knowing them as well as I do makes me share the Tea Party-ers’ fears.

The idea that we are a free association of equals - that our individual traits, our strenths and weaknesses and skills and, yes, education, are individual traits that don’t affect the fact that we are all equal before the law - is a conservative one; the conflict between that and the idea that society needs an “elite” to do the hard work of planning out life for all the proles (with commensurate rewards and privileges) isn’t “left-wing”, per se, so much as it is an artifiact of Fabian socialism that the American left adopted during the New Deal, and stayed with ever since.

One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa. I see the chances of both sides losing as much greater than the chance of either force winning.

And there, he’s got a point.

Read the whole thing; read it critically, but do read it.

Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.