Conservatives Aren’t The Only Ones Who Are Classist
Image; Coastal Elite from Halifax, Canada; modified using Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
I remember heading to an orchestra musical performance for the Star Wars film A New Hope (1977). I am not the most cultured regarding “fine art,” but this event hit that perfect intersection of being both nerdy and music that I know. I was genuinely excited to watch a movie I love while listening to its score, enhanced by a real-life orchestra.
My family and I were riding on a free bus, which the theater center provides for those coming from downtown who do not want to worry about the venue’s limited parking. It was an unusual bus experience for someone who rides the bus frequently because everyone was decked out in their finest suits and dresses. There was this one woman, probably in her mid-50s, who was dressed in a sparkly white dress. She had an anti-Trump pin on and smiled at me. We struck up a very amiable conversation.
I must have been reading Rich because she cracked a joke that she felt was appropriate among people in her class. We were talking about how nice the bus was, and she said something like, “I never take the bus. You never know what kinds of people will be on it.” I frowned in that natural way one does when a joke doesn’t land, and our conversation died down from there.
Yet the comment stuck with me because here was a woman who considered herself a liberal, a progressive even, and she held an utter contempt for people who regularly take the bus — people she considers poor— and it’s a reaction I sadly see all too often among the Left.
Disdain for the rural poor
You could write a book on the classist character of the Republican Party. From the limiting of collective bargaining rights to a fierce attempt to block a raise in the federal minimum wage, it’s clear that many Republican powerbrokers hold utter contempt for the working class. We should call this nonsense out.
And yet, you can write an equally long book about upper-crust liberals being condescending to the “conservative” poor they think are beneath them. One common classist element I see on the Left is the utter contempt many liberals have for conservative-led states.
We see this a lot on social media whenever a disaster strikes a “red state,” and some liberal account will blame everyone who lives there. “I’m not a religious person,” goes one X user, “but from now on, any red state that gets hit by a natural disaster, I’m saying it’s God’s way of punishing them for their wicked ways.”
It’s clear that some of this resentment is coming from a classist association some liberals have with the “hicks” in red states, weaponizing the same rhetoric typically used by conservatives to deny poor people state benefits. “From farm subsidies to social security to Medicare to literally dozens of other examples, the typical red state citizen wouldn’t make it without handouts,” mocks one commenter. “Biden’s policies work for the poorest, least educated, unhealthiest states too. You’re welcome, Red States,” condescends another.
It’s a common sentiment spoken in liberal circles all over the country that liberals are better informed about the “facts.” Liberals think rural Americans, who they automatically associate with conservatism, don’t understand the suffering caused by the Republican Party. Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas?— whose argument is that conservatives use cultural issues to redirect working-class resentments toward “liberal elites”— has been the defacto question on the liberal establishment’s mind for the last couple of decades.
Why aren’t conservatives adopting policies that, from the liberal perspective, are ultimately for their benefit?
This perspective verges on being infantilizing as it treats such voters as merely ignorant rather than worthy political opponents (or, in the case of liberals in such states, those suffering under regressive voting laws). Many “blue state” liberals develop a disdain for their supposedly ignorant peers. When people in these rural areas don’t do “what’s right for them,” then it creates the reaction we saw above, where such places (and people) are seen as deserving of that misfortune.
And a lot of people in rural areas certainly feel that condescension. In the words of one Redditor on this sense of resentment:
“I feel a lot of city liberals fetishize minorities and keep us around as friends almost like accessories to show how woke they are. I’m about as left as they get, but damn I’d much rather hang out with a group of Hicks. At least they’re genuine.”
Again, classism does not begin and end with the Republican Party. There are a lot of liberals who hold contempt for the “flyover states” they monolithically paint with a broad brush.
Knowing better
This classism can also manifest in one particular cultural indicator that liberals cling to without realizing that they are doing so. I am, of course, talking about education. I cannot tell you how many times liberals have told my debt-free self that I should go to graduate school or get a PhD because “I like learning.”
In truth, I want to do nothing less than go into debt my entire life for the prospect of a career I might not even land. Education is expensive in America—in part due to neoliberal actors stripping away funding—and it’s often quite classist in its own right. Higher education is jokingly (and sometimes seriously) referred to in feudal terms. As Tilman Reitz writes in the peer-reviewed High Education journal:
“…the US academic system is now a vital part of a capitalism with strong neo-feudal traits: a rent-seeking economy, a caste-like reproduction of social status, a para-statist power elite with alliances between the relative political, academic and corporate centres, and a post-democratic public sphere based on the representation of institutional prestige.”
In other words, education is integrated within our capitalist system and replicates many of its same problems.
Yet, in conversations I have in real life and online, education is repeatedly depicted as the solution for our political dysfunction, ignoring how capitalist actors have often co-opted it. According to some, we advance our goals not by securing a political majority and building alternative power structures but by ensuring everyone gets properly educated. In the words of Brian Karem in Salon:
“The United States is a nation of militantly ignorant people, arrogant in their beliefs, unable to change their minds and unwilling to try. We lack education.”
Karem is making the case that the American public’s support of Donald Trump and modern conservatism is rooted in our terrible education system.
This perspective is partly based on data showing that more education correlates with increasing liberalization, a correlation we still do not fully understand. It may be partly affected by polarization, increasing gender equity, and liberal family structures’ being more likely to send their children to university than the act of education itself.
Yet even if we fully understood this correlation (or lack thereof), it’s condescending to assume that your “side” is natural and right and that the moment someone receives “the facts,” they will agree with you.
That’s not how learning works.
There is no guarantee that someone will adopt “the correct information”—however nebulously that is defined—as a result of mere exposure to it. Congress is quite well-educated, and many of its educated elite are Republicans. Senator Ted Cruz went to Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Republican Senators Daniel S. Sullivan, Michael D. Crapo, and Tom Cotton also went to Harvard. This education did nothing to liberalize their perspectives. Far more complex factors affect someone’s political alignment than just education.
Furthermore, liberalism, while an umbrella term emphasizing individual rights and equality of opportunity within a capitalist system, has a variety of competing perspectives (see classical liberalism, neoliberalism, Social Liberalism, etc.). And that’s before even getting into the democratic socialist, communist, and anarchist philosophies that are on the Left but reject liberalism entirely. These philosophies are competing with one another, and education will not automatically lead a person to one over the other.
Yet, if you falsely believe that learning will lead someone to your side, that can create a toxic type of condescension. As Emmett Rensin critiques in Vox, this smugness has become a defining aspect of American liberalism:
“The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing. Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you’re actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn’t know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge.”
It’s this smugness that critics like myself claim is partially rooted in classism.
A conservative conclusion
The point of this piece is not to “dunk on liberals” for being better or worse than any other perspective. I want to reiterate that I don’t think the powerbrokers of the Republican party are any better (they are usually much worse). Many elite conservatives are classist in very tangible ways that deserve the utmost scrutiny.
Instead, it’s about how much of the Democratic Party’s current political strategy is rooted in paternalism. Voters are depicted as people who simply do not understand all the good politicians are doing—a demographic that needs to be marketed to rather than people with unique experiences and needs that our leaders can learn from.
And this problem doesn’t just apply to conservatives. If you think you are “right” and the other side lacks proper “education,” then you will most likely be just as paternalistic to factions inside your coalition as outside of it. We can see this in the current faultline between social democrat and progressive factions of the Democratic Party’s coalition with more neoliberal actors.
What’s the matter with Kansas can very quickly become what’s the matter with progressives and leftists? A question that winnows your coalition down until nothing is left.