In today’s column for the New York Times, conservative pundit David Brooks muses about the education divide in the Democratic party’s nomination battle. His argument, in a nutshell, is that America is itself dividing along a new fracture, and the old class wars are just a distraction. The new REAL problem Americans face these days, is the increasing cultural and economic chasm between those who have, and those who have not attended college.
With regard to the Democratic nomination, then, it becomes clear to Brooks that if the polls show that Barack Obama is speaking to the college educated, and Hillary Clinton is speaking to the intellectually unwashed, the Democratic constituency must be broken.
See “Demography Is King” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/opinion/29brooks.html?th&emc=th
Since January, I have been carrying on running email discussions with my brothers, and with any other friends willing to put up with me, about the rather epic and sometimes tawdry struggle between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
It would seem this year’s American primaries are like a flash-point for political junkies and reality show enthusiasts alike. Even Japanese school girls are into it.
For those of us in the left-leaning political junkie camp, it is almost as if the very future of liberalism is on the line. If the Democrats can’t win this November’s election, after what Bush and his crew have done to screw things up, perhaps they should just give up.
So, in the interest of giving my normal correspondents a break from my one-sided political rants, I figure it is high time for a letter directed at one of the media pundits who get me all riled up. 
David,
Interesting theory and analysis. I think you have missed the mark in your attempt to solidify the “two Democratic parties” around the issue of education, though. The problem with this theory is that you assume liberalism used to be a unifying, homogenous ideology, and, like many conservatives, you probably think that American political elections have been playing out a grand debate between liberal and conservative principles over the past century.
Alas, the political and cultural agendas of liberalism have never been monolithic, and they are certainly not unifying. Liberalism is a loose collection of tenets and interests, many of them in competition, when they are not in outright conflict with one another.
Bringing these differences into one house helped to distinguish liberal philosophical positions from the traditions and assumptions of conservative philosophy early on, but they have always been a liability in the real-world of political policy-making and electoral success, particularly in a two party system.
Liberal policy positions are often about changing society to make it more fair, but since definitions of ‘fairness’ and questions about cost/benefit ratios are themselves fraught with political conflict, whole-scale liberal changes tend to gain traction only when a county is in crisis… At the time of The New Deal, for example, parts of the liberal playbook resonated with a huge majority of Americans.
Since the New Deal, on the other hand, keeping the various liberal factions together under one roof has been practically impossible. Identity politics, single issue activism and countless Ralph Nader-type crusaders have managed to divide the liberal house into walled enclaves.
Such are the pitfalls of embracing diversity and radical egalitarianism.
Education doesn’t explain the current political divide, any more than the conservative trope of the class-wars did in the 90s. The problem with the party’s voters is that they have too many things they want fixed, now, and each interest group (there are hundreds) is suspicious that their pet projects are going to be forgotten, as a leader (whoever that leader is) is forced to focus on just a few.
This, more than any new cultural or ideological phenomena in America, also explains the huge early success of Barrack Obama’s campaign.
His speeches and his platform, even the candidate himself, were a vague vessel that could be filled with everyone’s hopes and dreams. (Hell, even my very conservative brother found Obama inspiring.)
Precisely because he was unknown, Barack Obama became transcendent; he provided Democrats with the tantalizing prospect of healing the divisions that had frustrated any effort to define the party and its mission over the last half century.
Your idea about the education divide is just one of the many interesting demographic statistics in this race: there are the old versus the young, and the differences between the men and the women; there are minority groups in disagreement with each other; there are votes broken down according to class divisions, and geographical identities and regional economies; there are immigrants versus native borns, and the conflicting interests with regard to religion and the environment to be taken into account… all these categories act as indicators of the conflicting ideals and interests that have always been intrinsic to liberal voting behaviours, and they have all played their part in defining the Democrats’ demographic.
Nothing new there.
Yet, following the “Super Tuesday” polls, you’ll recall, Obama rode a phenomenal wave, and had nearly everybody on his side. He was winning unlike states and unlike demographics by 65%-70%.
I would argue that he did this precisely because people didn’t really know much about him in those early days. He was a blank slate and they wrote their own issues into his open-ended messages of hope.
Now, however, people see that he, like the rest of us, has an identity and his own concept of what changemeans. His “I am the American experience. I am a hybrid of all of you, and so I can be trusted to unite the country and pay attention to everyone’s interests” ideal was dealt a deathblow by each new thing we learned about him. Starting with his personal attacks on Hillary Clinton’s ‘character’ and the comment that she was “likeable enough”, moving to the exclusive, seemingly black-only church he attended, and his inability to relate to people in a chocolate factory (or to even pretend that wanted to taste their candy), and on through his awkward attempt to bowl with the locals, Barack Obama began to become “that guy, the smooth-talking, black Democratic Senator running for president”, not (as Gail Collins put it) the phenomenon BARACK!!
As people watch him, and as more is revealed about his personality and his personal biography, the empty vessel gains provenance. And, yes, even his apparent intelligence and his fantastic way with words–two things which were supposed to have been his strongest assets–might have, over the course of three months, undermined his “I am You”/”We are Us” persona.
The problem is not that Barack Obama suddenly seems elitist to all the people who didn’t manage to get a Harvard law degree, nor that his African heritage has suddenly become scary. It is simply that he no longer seems to be one of “us” in that transcendental, all-inclusive sense.
The only people left thinking he is part of ‘their group’ are the college kids, upper middle class urban/suburbanites (particularly the men in this group who are under 60), a few culture-vulture artist types, and the African Americans. None of which means they are the only ones voting for him, by the way, or that the rest of America would reject him in November; but it does mean that they are the only ones left identifying with him, when he uses the word “We”.
The one remarkable element in this race was how a candidate many people had never heard of before became, for a short while, a symbolic vessel for change. He was, for a time, someone that many people believed could represent all of the competing agendas and interests that constitute America’s highest (yes, they’re liberal!) ideals.
Turns out they were wrong. He is a person after all, with his own tribal/identity markers (one of the many ‘we’s that always leave a ‘they’ lurking in the margins). Just like the rest of us.
Facing this, Democrats will learn that they have to find some way to agree upon a leader, a set of policies, and a political agenda that won’t be or do everything we want (again), and some of our dearest dreams about change will have to be put on hold (again).
At the same time, outside the party, American fence-sitters will wonder what exactly these liberal types really stand for (again).
From hope to disillusion to reality. Clinton or Obama?
We are back to facing ourselves, and acknowledging that liberalism’s very egalitarianism makes it a disparate, not a unifying ideology. There will never be a magic bullet, nor a hero who will get us everything we want.
We are back to working with a political reality that pulls lofty ideals back down to the muddy, sometimes ugly, never-perfect world of democracy, as it is. …where the task at hand is always going to be getting what we can through the system, one painful step at a time… cries of “Foul!” and “Not fair!” and “Sell-out!” and ”You can’t touch that!” and “What about us?” from inside and out…
We are back to compromise, and partial—never quite satisfying—solutions.
…isn’t that a Clinton expertise?
