'Elite' Is Not A Dirty Word

 Jon Margolis [1], former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 [2]," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

The elites are fighting about elitism again, and who will be so bold as to point out that neither the politicians nor the political journalists know what the word means?

Well, OK. If nobody else will, we’ll do it here, understanding the risk of being labeled an elitist for having the temerity to correct the way other folks talk. But both the pols and the writers are using the wrong word, which might explain some of their confusion.

“Elitism” and its adjectival version “elitist” are being employed as euphemisms, Latinate multi-syllabics instead of the blunt, one-syllable, four-letter, Anglo-Saxon word really intended – snob.

The mistake began – or revived – after Sen. Barack Obama’s remarks about how some rural folks tended to “cling” to religion and guns because they were “bitter” about their economic troubles.

“Elitist,” said both his opponents, Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Many a columnist agreed, but some questioned whether Clinton, what with all her money, could really make that assessment. In a typical commentary, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson noted that Clinton’s  “family has made $109 million since her husband left the White House,” and the Clintons live in “two lavish mansions.”

As they do. But so did Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Kennedys lived in at least three. How come no one called FDR or JFK an elitist?

Maybe because the term was then almost unknown except to political theorists, to whom it was not necessarily pejorative. Oversimplifying a bit, it described a system of government in which, for instance, only people who had a chunk of money could vote – for example, the United States of America, in which the franchise was restricted to white males with a certain amount of property until the 1820s. Back then, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures, who also selected the electors who chose the president. The idea – openly proclaimed – was that most senators and electors would belong to the wealthy and educated classes.

Voters – all races and both genders these days – now choose senators and electors directly. But representative democracy retains strong elements of elitism. It’s planned that way. The assumption of the founders was that voters would usually choose to be governed by men of accomplishment and distinction, which in most cases meant men who were well-educated, which generally meant men of some means.

That assumption has proved prescient. Rarely do voters choose uneducated clods for public office. It is not insignificant that six of the past 11 presidents had either undergraduate or graduate Ivy League degrees and that two of the five others graduated from one of the equally (if differently) elite service academies. Now take a look: The next president will fit into one of those categories, too.

Voters, perhaps more than some candidates and commentators, seem to understand that elites are both inevitable and desirable. Some people will be especially good at what they do. They then join an elite. A board-certified surgeon, for instance, is part of an elite. The belief that this surgeon, rather than a general practitioner should be the one to operate on you, is elitism. Anti-elitism would support letting the GP wield the scalpel. Extreme anti-elitism would extend the privilege to the guy who drove the medical supply truck to the hospital. Let’s hear it for elitism.

But in some circles it remains an all-purpose insult. According to the San Diego Union, Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn., said “it seems ‘rather elitist’ that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate.” Well, in the final analysis, parents do and should make that decision. But one would think that a responsible parent would consult an expert, someone, for instance, who had … well, an academic degree in health. To Rep. Duncan – but not, alas, only to Rep. Duncan – an  “elitist” is another way of saying “someone who knows what she’s talking about.”

No doubt there are versions and extremes of elitism that most Americans would oppose. These days almost nobody believes – or at least admits to believing – that only the offspring of wealthy parents or the descendants of prominent ancestors should have the chance to become men and women of accomplishment and distinction, and maybe even president. We especially admire the person who works his or her way up from humbler beginnings. Like Lincoln. Or, for that matter, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But what Obama said about clinging and bitterness had nothing to do with elitism of either the moderate or the extreme variety.  He said nothing about who should govern or how. He just described certain people in a condescending manner, and condescension is the hallmark not of  a member of the elite, or even of an elitist, but of a snob.

The difference is neither cloudy nor complicated. I recognize, for instance, that far more of my fellow citizens read the novels of Danielle Steel than those of Philip Roth or John Updike. Not me. I have elite taste. I find them superb and her unreadable. Does that make me a snob?
Only if I think that my elite taste should give me special privileges, or if I forget that some Danielle Steel readers have skills that I lack, or are simply nicer people than I am. I am superior only in my taste in literature, in my case more of an inheritance than an accomplishment, so not even much source of pride.

But just as objectionable as haughtiness would be pseudo-slumming, discarding my elite tastes and values out of some populist delusion that whatever “ordinary people” prefer is automatically superior. Every member of an elite has two obligations: not to have a swelled head and not to surrender his or her devotion to excellence and accomplishment. It’s a civic duty; upholding elite tastes and values might just spread them around.

This is a point that seems lost on too many in the relevant elite here: political journalists. Everyone covering this campaign is part of an elite. Otherwise, they’d be writing about the Kiwanis club or making that late-night phone call to the precinct house to see if anyone’s been murdered lately.

Membership in this elite grants both privileges and responsibilities. The privileges are minimal, and not only because most of those parties one gets to attend are rather dreary. The responsibilities are substantial, and many journalists are not meeting them, perhaps because they don’t understand the difference between elitism and snobbery, or they somehow assume that anyone who is part of an elite must be a snob.

Otherwise there would have been no criticism of Clinton, and to a lesser extent of McCain, for calling Obama “elitist” when they are both richer than he. But being rich means one is part of an elite. It does not mean one is a snob. If it did, working-class heroes Kennedy and Roosevelt would have been snobs.

Maybe they were, but they were clever enough not to let it show. Thirty years ago, when he was 90, Dan O’Connell, the boss of Albany County, N.Y., who had worked with FDR as both president and governor, told me Roosevelt “didn’t like poor people. He was a patronizing son of a bitch, he was.”

But poor people didn’t think so, not because they were duped, but because FDR did more for poor people than any president before or since. Perhaps it makes no difference whether O’Connell was right, whether the private Roosevelt was a patronizing snob. A president’s policies are far more important than his personal inclinations, a reality that seems foreign in today’s journalistic climate.

Kennedy made sure he had an ample supply of Cuban cigars before he banned their importation. JFK had elite taste in cigars. But that did not make him a snob. Disparaging the guys who smoke White Owls would be snobbish, but he was careful not to do that. And because he didn’t, the White Owl smokers didn’t begrudge him his fancier smokes. They didn’t care what he smoked as long as the unemployment rate kept coming down.

Some of the coverage since Obama’s gaffe has displayed a certain amount of journalistic pseudo-slumming. After Clinton praised church-going and gun-owning, a reporter asked her the last time she’d gone to church or fired a gun.

“That is not a relevant question for this debate,” she said, understating the case. It’s not a relevant question at all. You need not go to church (which she does) or own a gun (she doesn’t) not to be a snob. You just have to refrain from belittling  those who do. Snobbery is not a function of what you own or what you do, but of how you think. It’s an attitude, not a condition.

One would think that members of the political reporting elite would know that. Why would they be covering the campaign, as opposed to the Kiwanis Club, were they not able to make precisely that distinction? They got into their elite thanks to their judgment, their perspicacity, their ability to communicate. Abandoning those skills in pursuit of blue-collar cred is both bad journalism and reverse snobbery, which is the worst kind.