How Did This Happen? Part II

It is interesting to note that so many public intellectuals are now examining white, working-class people as a sort of anthropological exercise. On the one hand, it's a good thing that highly educated, liberal people are trying to understand their less educated counterparts. On the other hand, it's a bit depressing that there is such a gulf between the two groups. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that many academics in the U.S. today find it easier to understand and certainly to have empathy for someone living in the developing world under very different circumstances from our own than we do with the average Trump enthusiast.

One of the discoveries of these cultural anthropologists of the white working class is that the subjects of the study view themselves as middle class. That distinction is a telling one, for I think it's an assertion of both being at the heart of America's identity (a status they fear is slipping away) and that they are not people who need things--though one of the great ironies of modern American politics, I can't help but point out, is that states and areas whose residents express the most antipathy to government tend to be subsidized, through federal and state taxation and expenditure, by places highly populated by pointy-headed intellectuals.

But I think we pointy-headed intellectuals play a leading role in the modern social, cultural, and political divide between highly and less educated white Americans.

I recall years, when I was a young radical, a friend remarking that she felt like she "could not keep up with" me. By the time she accepted one of my positions, I had staked out a new one, farther away from normal people like her. And of course that was the point, to be more radical than thou. It's a very human and understandable impulse, to wish to "distinguish" oneself, to use Pierre Bourdieu's term. Intellectuals like to turn their educational advantages not simply into cash, but into "cultural capital." We adopt ways of living and thinking that set us apart from--and above--our less educated peers in our taste in food, entertainment, and, of course, politics. Hence we are often perceived, by those we view as our inferiors, as walking around with "stick up our ***."

One of the problems with using one's education to assert superiority is that it so often generates humiliation and resentment in those who are made to feel excluded. Another problem is that if you are determined to be in the minority, you won't win many elections.