The Two Class Wars In America

By: Richard Reeves

There I was, minding my own business, railing against a U.S. invasion of Iraq and other points east on public radio, when another guest veered from his railing for war to pre-emptively strike at "elite academics" who live on the West Side of Manhattan and in Malibu.

Slow on the uptake, I realized later that Eric Dezenhall, identified as a "damage control consultant", was shooting at me.

Thank you.

I don't live on the West Side (I live on the East Side), I've never lived in Malibu (though I am open to invitations), and no one has ever before accused me before of being an elite academic. I do teach, at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, but my only academic credential is a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Consultant Dezenhall, who was in the Communications Office of the Reagan White House, is, I noticed, a graduate of Dartmouth. Back in Hoboken, NJ, where Stevens is, we tended to think of Dartmouth, to say nothing of the White House, as a pretty elite venue. But what did we know?

Anyway, I am proud now to be accepted in and by the elite. I was scarred as a young man when, trying to escape corporate America, I applied for the Foreign Service. I did well on the written exam, but was thrown out, almost literally, when I was interviewed by a very distinguished-looking fellow who I thought might be a Dartmouth man. He asked me if I really grew up in Jersey City and went to college in Hoboken. I said yes.

He said: "We don't take people like you."

Now, at last, I feel vindicated for that cavalier dismissal. A Dartmouth man has validated my eliteness.

But I did realize that I have become just another enemy or warrior in the class wars dividing America these days. The warrior in the White House now, a graduate of both Yale and Harvard Business School, says that people like me are attacking tax breaks for the rich because we are just economic class warriors who resent and envy anyone with more money than we have.

But the President and his soldiers are no different. They are busily waging cultural and intellectual class war, perhaps resenting and envying anyone with more ideas and fewer repressions than they have - or anyone who questions the dumbing-down of America.

But what does that matter? If you take a broader, dispassionate view of these things, you realize that the Bush side sees no need for class war because they have already won and are tired of rearguard skirmishes with losers on the West Side and the beach. Who needs the "cultural elite", as Vice President Dan Quayle called better spellers, or the "corrupt elite", as that incorruptible warrior Newt Gingrich called other historians, or the "chattering classes", as Robert Bartley, the former editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, calls anyone who asks questions he has long since answered?

"They think they know better than the people", was Jack Kemp's put-down of questioners and others suspected of being elites. Then there are "elite media" and "media elite", take your choice; they all chatter too much and make too little - money, that is. After all, if the chatterers made enough (and loved their children enough), they wouldn't be against eliminating estate taxes. Face it, too much of the angry elite just don't have estates.

One very smart and identifiable member of the elite, Nicholas Lemann of the very chatty New Yorker magazine, put all this in a partisan context a couple of years ago in a book review: "Populists used to hate the rich, but now they hate 'the elite'. This shift has been made possible by the migration of populism from the Democratic to the Republican Party."

So, it seems, we all have to choose which class to despise. Florence Reece, a coal miner's wife in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the great 1931 strike, asked the question in a song Woody Guthrie made famous. Her title was: Which Side Are You On?