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May 05, 2008
I LIKE WINE . . . AND CHEESE. SOMETIMES TOGETHER.
Slate has a really interesting article about wine-and-cheese liberals. That the author accuses Obama, and not Hilary, of elitism, seems kind of ridiculous. Obama may be a really rich dude, but Hilary and her husband are loaded.
This type of populist spirit is what got huckleberries like Jimmy Carter elected. The grassroots theory of upbringing is a wonderful fallacy - it assumes that poor people grow up out of the dirt and thus are noble savages in their thinking. Just as Matlock used his home-town ways rather than his big-city lawyerin', these rubes and donikers who grewed up on the farm just have a better idea of life than you big city folks. Populism always finds itself as the rich man championing the working man for some political purpose, and therefore I never trust it. Pandering to the poor is a time-honored tradition because there are always more poor than rich, and the nice thing about an egalitarian system is that, as Atticus said, the vote of the lowest farmer counts just as much as Rockefeller.
I don't think its fair to accuse Hillary of being a rich girl, but it is ironic that a earthiness, the lack of which is a severe strike against her, is the same thing that good her husband elected. I think Obama's polish works against him: he's smoother than the spot on my car where I spilled a whole bottle of turtle wax. Do either of them really care about the poor? Beyond a political platform and a vote-grabbing strategy? Who knows. That platform/strategy will get legislation passed, and often the wrong kind.
But the article is interesting because of Orwell's characteristic leftist attack of the left. In ANIMAL FARM and 1984, he lays into Bourgeois culture with, respectively, broad and sophisticated allegory. But this passage from THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER is pretty effective:
"As with the Christian religion," he writes, "the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." Then he wheels out the heavy rhetorical artillery. The typical socialist, according to Orwell, "is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England."
Its a pretty prescient attack on the LA fundraiser crowd. And it made me think of this recently endorsement of Obama by Tom Hanks:
Hanks, who has always seemed like a pretty great guy, disparages his status as a member of the "radical chic." He makes fun of the celebrity endorsement at the same time as he gives it. This self-effacing move will be effective, no doubt, but it only hints at the problem at the core: the people who support socialistic welfare programs are the ones whose income can suffer its blows. At the end of the day, liberalism is hip, and conservatism isn't, and attacking the hipness is a way of devaluing the altruism.
This may not make any sense but I'm going to publish it anyway.
| By Andytown | 06:17 PM
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