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July 1, 2004 Dude, Where's That Elite? By BARBARA EHRENREICH You can call Michael Moore all kinds of things - loudmouthed, obnoxious
and self-promoting, for example. The anorexic Ralph Nader, in what must
be an all-time low for left-wing invective, has even called him fat. The
one thing you cannot call him, though, is a member of the "liberal
elite." Sure, he's made a ton of money from his best sellers and award-winning
documentaries. But no one can miss the fact that he's a genuine son of
the U.S. working class - of a Flint autoworker, in fact - because it's
built right into his "branding," along with flannel shirts and
baseball caps. My point is not to defend Moore, who - with a platoon of bodyguards and
a legal team starring Mario Cuomo - hardly needs any muscle from me. I
just think it's time to retire the "liberal elite" label, which,
for the past 25 years, has been deployed to denounce anyone to the left
of Colin Powell. Thus, last winter, the ultra-elite right-wing Club for
Growth dismissed followers of Howard Dean as a "tax-hiking, government-expanding,
latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing,
Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show." I've experienced it myself:
speak up for the downtrodden, and someone is sure to accuse you of being
a member of the class that's doing the trodding. The notion of a sinister, pseudocompassionate liberal elite has been
rebutted, most recently in Thomas Frank's brilliant new book, "What's
the Matter With Kansas?," which says the aim is "to cast the
Democrats as the party of a wealthy, pampered, arrogant elite that lives
as far as it can from real Americans, and to represent Republicanism as
the faith of the hard-working common people of the heartland, an expression
of their unpretentious, all-American ways, just like country music and
Nascar." Beyond that, the idea of a liberal elite nourishes the right's perpetual
delusion that it is a tiny band of patriots bravely battling an evil power
structure. Note how richly the E-word embellishes the screeds of Ann Coulter,
Bill O'Reilly and their co-ideologues, as in books subtitled "Rescuing
American from the Media Elite," "How Elites from Hollywood,
Politics and the U.N. Are Subverting America," and so on. Republican
right-wingers may control the White House, both houses of Congress and
a good chunk of the Supreme Court, but they still enjoy portraying themselves
as Davids up against a cosmopolitan-swilling, corgi-owning Goliath. Yes, there are some genuinely rich folks on the left - Barbra Streisand,
Arianna Huffington, George Soros - and for all I know, some of them are
secret consumers of French chardonnays and loathers of televised wrestling.
But the left I encounter on my treks across the nation is heavy on hotel
housekeepers, community college students, laid-off steelworkers and underpaid
schoolteachers. Even many liberal celebrities - like Jesse Jackson and
Gloria Steinem - hail from decidedly modest circumstances. David Cobb,
the Green Party's presidential candidate, is another proud product of
poverty. It's true that there are plenty of working-class people - though far
from a majority - who will vote for Bush and the white-tie crowd that
he has affectionately referred to as his "base." But it would
be redundant to speak of a "conservative elite" when the ranks
of our corporate rulers are packed tight with the kind of Republicans
who routinely avoid the humiliating discomforts of first class for travel
by private jet. So liberals can take comfort from the fact that our most visible spokesman
is, despite his considerable girth, an invulnerable target for the customary
assault weapon of the right. I meant to comment on his movie, too, but
the lines at my local theater are still prohibitively long. Back to Groups and Official Viewpoints Page
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