Bookworm:
Noemie Emery has an excellent article about the way in which every phase of Obama’s presidency, including election, has been the culmination of 100 years of American elitism looking for the platform to prove that Big Government powered by Ivy League minds is the perfect expression of government. To date, as with the whole anthropogenic climate change shtick, the elitists’ theory has failed miserably when it comes to facts.
What struck me immediately about Emery’s article was that she was describing people I know very well, and I don’t mean my Marin neighbors, or my Berkeley classmates, or the snotty pseudo intellectuals who peopled Naomi Wolf’s social group at high school. Instead, the article struck closer to home. The secret is in this paragraph (emphasis mine):
Attitudinal rather than doctrinaire in their judgments, they leaned Democratic because of their loathing of business, but they judged people largely by mores and manners, and men in both parties would earn their contempt. Harry Truman, as Siegel notes, “had triumphed not only over Republicans and business, but also overHenry Wallace and the supporters of the Soviet Union on the left, and Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat segregationists of the right.” Truman was also a businessman whose small men’s-wear store had gone bankrupt, and for this Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a solon whose influence would span half a century, called him “a man of mediocre and limited capacity.” Schlesinger, who also complained about the “Eisenhower trance” and described the race between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter as “Babbitt vs. Elmer Gantry,” would find his true soulmate in Adlai E. Stevenson, a fellow snob and two-time loser in the race for the White House, whom Michael Barone has described as “the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle class American culture.”Schlesinger famously fell for John Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, less for their politics, which were in the end not too different from Truman’s, than for their personal glamour and aura of privilege, which set them apart from the multitude. But even those two, and their successors, fell short. Kennedy shunned Schlesinger’s counsel. Bill Clinton was a wonk but also a Bubba, who never completely outgrew the Hot Springs experience. All three had middlebrow tastes when it came to the culture, sympathized with the middle class, and tried to promote and not stifle prosperity and upward mobility. And thus the elites had to wait for the man of their dreams.
That describes to a tee my parents, both of whom were European to the bone. In fact, although he voted for the philosemitic Reagan against the antisemitic Carter, to the end of his day, my dad’s favorite presidential candidate was Adlai Stevenson . . . because he was so witty.
Although both lived in America for a longer period than they had ever lived in any other country, and despite the fact that my father grew up in Berlin slums and an orphanage, they were all about manners and attitude. They were less impressed by decent people than they were by people who knew how to use their salad forks correctly. I once abandoned someone who was, in retrospect, a very nice boyfriend for me, and one with whom I could have been happy, because my parents sniffed “Oh, he’s in sales” — never mind that he wasn’t selling encyclopedias door-to-door but was, in fact, a very successful bond salesman. It was enough that he wasn’t “one of us,” meaning that he wasn’t hyper-educated, excessively well-read, and conversant with fancy cutlery.
Wanna-be Europeans only if they can be in the Elite Ruling Class of Europe.
They have no interest in being AVERAGE Europeans.
But the times are changing in Europe.
The populace UKIP made huge inroads in the UK elections the other day.
And populace-based parties are gaining strength all over Western Europe.
Now, if only Europe could defend itself from Russia.