You Say Elitist, I Say Potato

I haven’t had a chance to parse through and offer some thoughts on the debate we hosted between Conor Friedersdorf and Dan Riehl, nor the unfortunate fall out that transpired after the exchange. There was a lot going on in that debate and the resulting blow back and so it might be a bit ambitious, even for blogger of my verbose persuasion, to attempt to capture everything in one post.

However, experiences of the morning have brought a particular element of the whole foofaraw back into focus, namely the ways in which cultural cues are both deeply embedded and a priori inform our political discourse in what I take to be unhelpful ways.

The lead in: despite only working at the company wherein my employment currently resides for four and a half months, I have come to be considered management. I wasn’t hired into any kind of management specific role and to this day my job title and description remain ephemeral at best. None the less, walking around this office I am treated with a certain deference (unwarranted in my opinion) because of the perceived position of power I happen to occupy.

From my experience, when you’re management, it is important to demonstrate that no task with which any of your employees might become saddled is too small or too lowly for you to perform, as well. My conception of management, cast as it was in the fires of not-for-profit work, is that you recognize and acknowledge the power differential that tips in your favour, but that you conversely pitch in and participate in getting whatever work needs to get done.

Full stop, period, bottom line.

To that end, today I am wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and boots, both because I have to move the president of the company from an office in one building to and office back in the primary building, and because it happens to be casual Friday and the first day of Stampede here in Calgary. To move all of the items from one office to the next, I am also pushing a cart between the two buildings out in the public, in addition to wearing “moving office” appropriate clothing.

Now, because I look the way that I do and because I’m pushing a cart around, people with whom I’ve been interacting with outside have been treating me qualitatively differently than when I am, say, walking around in a suit and tie, which is my normal garb. Even with an event where jeans and a t-shirt are as ubiquitous as they are during Stampede currently running, there is a noticeable difference to how people approach me.

To the average passerby I am no longer “management”, I have become a physical labourer and they have altered their behaviour patterns towards me in what they take to be the appropriate fashion. It never enters their mind that the criteria by which they determine what behaviour patterns are appropriate are entirely arbitrary, all they know is that we have certain cultural cues about you treat certain classes of people and they are abiding by those cues — rightly or wrongly.

Nothing particularly controversial there.

The point: so it generally seems to go in our political discourse as well, but in the case of cultural cues that enter into our politics we have a few monkey wrenches that create difficulties for our smooth analysis. As pertains to politics and the culture wars, the use of cultural cues because key elements in normative statements of derision about “the other side” and their unfitness for ascendancy to the levers of governance within society.

So it also seems to go with Dan Riehl and Robert Stacy McCain (two examples, go through their respective websites for many other posts on this topic) as pertains to their reactions towards Conor Friedersdorf and the results here I take to be muddy at best.

Now, let’s get all the cards on the table before we move forward.

There have been a series of relatively ugly exchanges since what I took to be a pretty healthy and interesting debate here at this site. Sides have been chosen, lines have been drawn and all that. When push comes to shove, I tend to find myself lining up with Conor. I like Conor’s approach, I respect his intellectual acumen, and I appreciate the vision he brings to the table when it comes to squinting his eyes to the horizon of conservatism’s future. Not everyone has the same reaction to Conor, needless to say, and in the timeless words of now Senator Stuart Smalley, “that’s, okay.”

But look, that I generally come down on the side of “Team Friedersdorf” in this debate, does not mean I can’t appreciate where Riehl and McCain are coming from and see some truth in the analysis they present. I have managed to maintain a cordial and respectful tenor with both Conor and Dan throughout this scuffle, about which I’m pretty happy and I happen to think that Dan, while I might not agree with him most of the time, is a really smart guy. I think you only have to listen to the audio of the discussion between he and Conor to appreciate how much Dan Riehl brings to the table. Dan calls it like he sees it in a pretty gruff fashion that doesn’t tend to be my particular cup of tea, but they guy simply isn’t any slouch. And despite my general lack of interaction with Robert Stacy McCain, I would offer a similar analysis of his approach to politics in general from what little interaction I have had.

Now in reading over Dan and McCain’s responses to Conor, it seems that they are utilizing certain cultural cues to form a particular analysis about who Conor is and what he’s all about: Conor went to Columbia (Conor corrects my inaccurate lifting of his academic history from McCain’s blog in the comments) , he’s blogging for The Atlantic, he’s educated and makes no bones about using that education in debate. Ergo Conor Friedersdorf is an elitist and is not to be trusted.

Dan has indicated that he has talked to a handful (large or small, I don’t know) of people about Conor and that they have  backed up the analysis he and McCain have presented there within. Okay, fine. But as far as I can tell, the tarring and feathering of Conor as an elitist didn’t start there, it started with those cues (though if I’m mistaken I have no doubt that Dan will promptly correct me, and I’ll be happy to redact if that is the case).

However, what strikes me most about this is that it seems to be the same line of attack that Dan and McCain tend to use in deriding liberals. So my armchair analysis of all of this is that at core Dan and McCain take Conor to be a liberal in conservative’s clothing who isn’t to be trusted because he fits certain cultural cues and cannot, therefore, fulfill certain conservative requirements.

There are two challenges I have with this kind of analysis, both very different and mutually defeating.

Firstly, the analysis that liberals tend to be snotty elitists who look down on the common people of America is an argument that is not entirely without merit. I don’t have statistics or broad behavioural analysis to back the claim up, I have only my own anecdotal experience to offer in this regard. But traveling as I have over the past ten years in largely liberally minded circles, I can say from my own experience both in my own thinking and in interactions with others that there is a grain of truth to this charge.

But a single grain don’t make a whole field.

When Dan and McCain (among many, many others) make claims like this, they know that there is some truth to what they’re saying and, more likely than not, those to whom they are saying it know there is some truth to it. But it just isn’t the whole truth insofar as one simply cannot say that every single liberal is an elitist snob, because, in fact, every single liberal is not an elitist snob. Nor does going to a particular school or working at a particular company, speaking a particular way or, as the case may be, wearing a suit and tie or pushing a cart with jeans and boots on make you a particular way.

The sin of this analysis is not that of omission, but of overreach. And in that regard, the use of certain cultural cue as a mean of performing political analysis is deeply flawed because, as conservatives such as Dan and McCain constantly remind us of the average American: people are far more complex and nuanced than said cues on their own allow us to see.

Which leads into my second challenge with this line of argument: namely that by tarring and feathering liberals writ large and Conor Friedersdorf in general as elitist via certain contingent cultural cues, Dan and McCain commit the exact same sin that they use to condemn Conor and liberals.

The idea here is that liberals and elitist pseudo-conservative (including Conor) are most grievously charged with looking down their noses and failing to see the fundamental worth of average individuals because they are stuck on themselves. Rather than seeing people as people these apostates instead see average people as the plebes based on erroneous conceptions. But Dan, McCain, and other conservatives of their ilk perform the exact same kind of blinder gymnastics in painting a broad swath of people with a single brush based on what for at least some of those people are equally erroneous conceptions.

You’ve basically traded stereotype for stereotype and are, at the end of the day, no further ahead in your analysis, except perhaps within the confines of your own mind. As much as salt-of-the-earth conservatives are warranted in challenging liberals and elitist pseudo-conservatives  upon their biases about a certain segment of the population, so too ought those same conservatives have the courage to challenge themselves — or at least be open to challenges from others — on the exact same kind of biases at play in their analysis. I say that because I think that in no small part, those biases are deeply in play within their analysis.

This play of shadows represents my biggest problem ideologically determined politics: the use of inaccurate or, at best, partial cultural cues is so fundamentally inherent to our discourse that we only ever really avail ourselves of a much smaller proportion of the picture than to which we have access. In so doing, we make decisions — albeit often times unconsciously — not to see each other and remain firmly ensconced in our own chosen biases and limitations.

That we might consciously choose to make ourselves aware of those limitations and transcend the confines of our biases informs the glimmer of hope to which I doggedly hold on and around which I fashion my own meager political project.

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