This Angelo Codevilla piece in the American Spectator is receiving a lot of reaction online and on the radio this week. I have a few thoughts I’d like to share on it.
Codevilla was careful to note that the class divide he’s talking about isn’t distinguished in the Robin Hood sense we’re used to, but rather is attitudinal. The ruling class isn’t particularly oligarchic, except for the subclass consisting of the chieftains of large corporations. Even a guy like David Brooks, who makes maybe half a million a year, is still working for a living and is out of luck if he loses his jobs.
Among independent business people, some of whom have real wealth and most of whom don’t, there’s a split. Some are distinctly ruling class in mentality, and some are country class. It doesn’t depend on how much money you have.
The ruling class revere Harvard and Stanford grads, whether or not they went to Harvard or Stanford. They recognize each other by the uniformity of their social liberalism (which is received rather than considered wisdom), and, critically, by their reflexive contempt for the country class (or at least for the caricature of the country class that is also part of their received wisdom).
The country class value hard work and self-reliance. They look down on Harvard grads, because street smarts matter more to them than book smarts. They believe that hard work, intelligence and good intentions should be rewarded, linearly and reliably. Critically, they REFUSE to play political games, even if they can, because they think that amounts to rigging the game and just isn’t fair. In their own minds, career and financial success that depends on being tight with powerful people isn’t as worth having as success that you’ve earned.
That’s the most important reason why the country class is so out of sorts. There’s an overwhelming sense that the rules of the game have changed, and it’s no longer possible to achieve a robust personal success (your own house in a nice neighborhood, a nice start in life for your kids, good health) without having good connections and sucking up to powerful people. It does come back to the old self-reliant streak in the American character. When you feel like the only path to success that you consider worthy is being closed off, it can make you mad as hell.
Meanwhile, the ruling class simply don’t believe in achieving success by hard work. Part of this comes from a sense of innate nobility and entitlement that they feel in themselves, often as a result of having gotten accepted to a top university. They think of themselves as the cool kids, and their angst comes from a nagging suspicion that this might not be enough in itself to give their lives meaning and value. (That explains Ross Douthat.) Their attitude toward the country class is contempt tempered with pity, because they see those people as blinded by superstition and unwilling to accept the world as it is. And certainly the belief that hard work and good intentions should be rewarded looks a lot like superstition to someone who believes that belonging to the in-crowd is what determines the value of one’s life.
So bottom line, this isn’t about class warfare. It’s about two different approaches to living life. The ruling class see the country class as ignorant, petulant slobs whose lives need to be fixed for them. The country class see the ruling class as the a**holes who won’t let them live their lives freely. Neither class has much interest in meeting with and understanding the other. For over a century, progressives have been motivated by what they believe is a humanitarian desire to improve life for the ignorant classes. Naturally, this enrages the objects of the progressives’ affection, because at root they see it as a desire to enslave them.
Funny thing, I had a conversation yesterday with an old friend who runs a high-ten-figure hedge fund. (They’re flat for the year, like the rest of the hedge-fund world.) What he wants is to join a political party that believes in not taking people’s money and in not telling them what to do: small govt without the bibles. This is something I hear from business guys all the time: the whole “social liberal/fiscal conservative” thing. So far, there’s no political movement they can believe in.
So while some might say that that class war ought to be feared because we don’t know where it’s going to go, I say: let it rip.
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