This morning, Pete sent the following message: “Oh, sure. Now you’re one of those who hates elitism! We all love elitism, just like…um, no, wait.”
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Steve, hold your fire. I just mentioned that I might write about this, but I just now did. I’m afraid you are the one who has to wait. I’m stumped. It’s too soon to make fun of me; I haven’t said anything yet about elitism. Let’s let ideas breathe here; that’s my new policy.
After a week or so of reading and thinking, I’m not close to being clear about what it is or how it affects my thinking and beliefs. Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it, and I never considered it before.
It says a lot about elitism that there is at least a score of definitions.
I have to confess up front that I have been unable to define or quite understand elitism or how it might have entered or reflected my life. My grandmother thought I was the most wonderful child in the world, but the rest of society didn’t agree.
I need to give it more thought.
It’s a fascinating subject, yet I need to be honest about what I don’t know and what I do know. I love my new motto: When someone hates, I love. When someone lies, I tell the truth.
The truth is, I don’t know if I’m an elitist, and I’m not sure it matters. It feels like another thing to throw at people, even if we don’t know what it means.
We all want to be on top, after all. I’m not on top of this one.
Generally, elitism is the belief that some things should be controlled or owned only by the richest or best-educated people. These elitists are also often described as having contempt for popular politics.
But there are all kinds of elitists – CEO’s, movie stars, billionaires, classical music conductors, TikTok Influencers, and famous athletes.
In the recent election, the winner gained great support by labeling opponents as elitists, something working-class people have been feeling and complaining about for years. He meant liberals and Democrats. So did they.
Yet nobody complains more about billionaires and CEO’s. It isn’t very clear.
Commentator Naomi Wolf says there is a big problem: “Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism.”
Amen to that. It seems true to me.
Recently, I dined with a friend who was obsessed with what was happening in our political system.
“Don’t these stupid people understand who they are voting for?” she asked. Bing, I thought, here is elitism, right in front me. I see that. Everyone is corrupting our political system in different ways and for different reasons. Everyone in the country feels like everyone else is as dumb as a pitchfork.
I’m not getting on the hate-your-neighbor train. People labeled stupid are not about to listen to people urging them to think differently or change their minds. Perhaps the Democratic Party is finally getting this lesson. Don’t call people you want to vote for you stupid.
I’ve spent the past week studying elitism, its history, and its definition. I can’t tell you what it is, but I recognize myself in many of its criticisms. I’ve often, especially early on, dismissed people who disagreed with me as inferior to me and my intellect.
I often read hostile messages on social media and wonder aloud if these people have anything meaningful to do. Some seem stupid—I don’t have a better word for stupidity.
I see elitism as a somewhat natural evolution. The country is usually split between the well-educated and well-off and the working people. There is very little interaction between the two groups, and eventually, elitism was bound to explode in a national election. The as unspoken war between the wealthy and the poor has continued since people discovered fire.
Living in the country has taught me to stop thinking this awful way. Everyone has it worse than me and is just as smart or more intelligent than me. My life has given me no reason to decide I am smarter than anyone.
In political and sociological theory, the elite are a small group of powerful or wealthy people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group.
According to many political observers and historians, the governing elite in the United States primarily draws its members from political leaders, including the president and a handful of key cabinet members, as well as close advisers, major corporate owners and directors, and high-ranking military officers.
“In most legislatures, punctilious attention to correct usage is considered elitist. For example, ‘government’ is normally pronounced ‘gummint’; bureaucracy is ‘bureaucacy’; fiscal comes out ‘physical,’ and one moves not to suspend the rules, but to ‘suppend.’ – Molly Ivins, writing about the Texas Legislature.
Elitists are inevitable in our culture, as are complaints from less fortunate people. That has existed for thousands of years and is becoming more evident in a society increasingly dominated by billionaires who are not an integral part of government. It is no longer a People’s Republic.
Is the problem elitism?
Artists have argued with themselves about elitism for years. By denying people’s sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture, melody in music, meter and rhyme in poetry, plot and narrative, and character in fiction, the elite arts often excluded the vast majority of their audience.
Critic Steven Pinter says the art world purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite. I often find high art obnoxious, but I know very few artists these days who feel superior or powerful.
Pinter got my attention, though. I see the love of flowers as the very opposite of high art.
“By denying people’s sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture, melody in music, meter and rhyme in poetry, plot and narrative and character in fiction, the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience,” says Pinker. “They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite.”
The same argument has been made about the news media (including by me), who seem to have lost touch with ordinary people. They consider themselves the only people who understand what is happening.
That is obviously not true.
I balk at the idea that I am elitist. I was born into a poor middle-class family and have worked every day of my life since I was 16. I live in an “ordinary people” community and get along very well with the people. I’m not even close to being wealthy. I don’t consider any of the people around me stupid or inferior.
“The time has come,” says political commentator Van Jones, “to move beyond eco-elitism to eco-populism. To change our laws and culture, the green movement justice, political solutions and social change.”
I can’t accept the idea that everyone wealthy and well-placed person in government or commerce is, by definition, elitist. I can see elitism in the decline of the news media, where journalists consider sitting in front of a TV set with a laptop a way to understand what is happening to ordinary people. How has that that worked this year?
Our culture has abandoned ordinary people in the same way it has abandoned the elderly. Remember Archie Bunker? He was the true seer in understanding our politics, but there are no Archie Bunkers on TV these days.
I believe the media’s elitism – they no longer bother to pretend to talk to people outside their circle – was evidence that not one national political reporter had an inkling of how unhappy most “ordinary” Americans were. This may cost the rest of us dearly.
Elitism is not a black-and-white issue for me, as most problems are. I have to leave this one open. Elitism is woven into the country’s major institutions: government, all media, culture, big pharma, and politics in general.
I think I have elitist blood running through my brain and instincts, like so many people do; I also think life has beaten out of me the idea that people who disagree with me are somehow less intelligent or worthy than the people who agree with me.
That’s not going to work. Elitism pops up too often in our world. I am beginning to believe it is woven into our DNA. It’s so ubiquitous that it is undefinable.
I don’t know whether I’ve discovered a new truth or been smothered by it.
“It is, of course, the first recourse of every elitist to see social barbarism in others….” – Graham Joyce.
