When I was first in Iraq, in 2003-04, the hardest part of talking to Iraqi professors was how they would badger me about their pay. No matter how much they were paid (and a full professor in Iraq, after liberation, was paid more than a surgeon, more than a judge on any national court) it was never enough. When, once, I told one of the biggest complainers that if he wanted more money he should work for it–perhaps write a book, or do some extra teaching, anything to make the excess dollars he so badly wanted, he replied: “Teach more? Write more? No. In this country we get paid on the basis of who we are, not what we do.”
I was reminded of this the other day when I met, here in the U.S., the privileged son of a highly placed professional I know. No, the son doesn’t work, even though he’s in his 40s. He comes from a good family that can afford to keep him in beer and transportation. Though, actually, he has been working a bit of late — he was an Obama volunteer.
In trying to resurrect conservatism and the Republican party, I fear there’s a whole segment of our country we can never reach. These people, whether rich or poor, are not our natural constituents. These are the people to whom things are owed.
We saw it after the Katrina debacle, at the other end of the socioeconomic scale: “Why are you so slow to help us? Where is our money and food? Why haven’t you been here, government, rebuilding my house? I know my rights, and my rights include welfare, subsidies, support, and attention. We’re not to be treated like those victims of tornadoes in the Midwest who pull themselves together, help their friends, patrol their communities, and rebuild their neighborhoods. No, life is supposed to be easy, big and easy; why aren’t you here right now with the support I deserve?” And we hear it from the fat financial community who want the bailout check left at their door while they go on rich retreats to celebrate their good fortune.
This, by the way, is why Sarah Palin was so refreshing and, to be clear, so exotic to all the elites: a woman who could raise herself up by dint of hard work and self-sacrifice to be a wife, mother, mayor, and governor. She didn’t do it by set-asides, by birth, by quotas, or by handouts. She did it as a woman and she did it by her efforts. She exemplified what we all once saw as America–a land of opportunity, where you could be anything you set your mind to be so long as you worked for it. She showed us something about both her character and ours, our old-fashioned American character. For all this, she had to be ridiculed–she represented a kind of American virtue that shames the privileged, whether they be rich or poor.
But maybe we as a party have boxed ourselves in. We believe that prosperity will trickle down from the success of the prosperous and we believe (or have been shamed into believing) in the superior moral status of those whose only job is always to ask for more. But the shiftless have no greater moral claim than others, and prosperity doesn’t always trickle down from the top. It wells up from the efforts of the working classes, the middle classes, the builders, doers, and makers of America. And it’s not just small-business owners who are the backbone of America but the clerks and sales people and night watchmen in those businesses.
The poor knew Obama was on their side, and the liberal rich were always in his camp. (If it’s simply “the economy, stupid,” and not culture and values, then why does Connecticut always vote Democratic and West Virginia not?) No, the strange thing was that the party of self-reliance, of initiative, of productivity and hard work, the party of cops and soldiers, firemen and farmers, hunters and ranchers–the party of ordinary American virtue, not privilege–allowed itself to look like the party of big oil and bailouts. How bizarre it was to see a plumber trying to come to our rescue and tell us what to say; but it was already too late.
So we saw that the great mass of Americans wanted us to talk to them about job growth, job creation, and job security. And we responded with platitudes about the fundamentals of the economy, platitudes about saving Wall Street to help Main Street, platitudes about “earmarks,” and rhetoric about the bugaboo of socialism (except, of course, corporate socialism). Americans knew there was a recession afoot, and we just looked stupid pretending it was otherwise. Perhaps above all, we knew that middle America was worried about what the future held for this country, domestically, economically, and internationally; but instead of reliability and steadiness we proclaimed that we were “mavericks,” which is closer to “unpredictable” and “unprincipled” than it is to strength and dependability. Not exactly what Americans would look for in tough times.
Obama praised the middle class and, thus, the heart of America. It may have just been words, just pandering; if so, they will soon find out. Yet we, who know that this country is carried on the backs of hardworking Americans, didn’t even have the rhetoric. We will never carry the privileged, those either at the top or the bottom of the socio-economic scale. That’s okay. But if we are ever to lead this country we had better learn again the virtues, the real excellences, of ordinary, hardworking, middle- and working-class Americans, listen to their concerns, and learn again how to speak their language.
— John Agresto is a visiting fellow at the Madison Program at Princeton University.