Snobs Like Us

You can always count on Hollywood panjandrum Harvey Weinstein to be bombastic about his own restraint. “In 20 years of coming to the Toronto Film Festival, I’ve never released a statement for a film,” read the statement e-mailed to journalists in mid-September. “But I would like to take this moment to formally invite Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota and Republican presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann, to co-host with me the big premiere of Butter in Iowa in a few months from now. I know Michele will already be in Iowa for the caucus, so we can save some money on airfare and travel. I would of course be more than happy to fly in the other leading members of the Tea Party movement to make an entire day of it.”

The Weinstein wit has clearly stayed hidden under a bushel too long. Note the effortless contradiction between the joke about saving money on airfare and the munificent offer to fly in—well, how many dozens of Tea Partiers might qualify for Harvey’s largesse? There speaks a people’s tribune for sure. Little did he know that, within weeks, sassing Bachmann’s vogue would amount to spearing a dinosaur.

For the record, I can’t legitimately review Butter. After around ten minutes of glib fashion jokes disguised as political criticism, largely at the expense of Jennifer Garner’s heartland gorgon—her hubby’s the champion of the Iowa butter--carving contest, she’s the Lady Macbeth behind his Land O’Lakes throne—a colleague and I looked at each other, mimed a shared lobotomy, and voted with our feet, done in by Our Side’s peculiar assumption that snobbery is incisive propaganda.

 Apparently, the audience that movies like this one are designed to flatter can’t get enough of hearing that those mysterious vanilla folks out in flyover country are yokels and frauds. That must be a special comfort on election nights. But in the 1930s and the war years, a liberal-minded film mocking ordinary people would have been a contradiction in terms. Even the movies that warned against mob hysteria didn’t sneer at mobs for being tacky, today the upscale left’s debased idea of the ultimate indictment.


Disdain for one's compatriots is as old as the country, of course. Yet from the ever reliable Alexander Hamilton (“Your people is a great beast”) to democracy non-fan H.L. Mencken’s “booboi-sie,” the sensibility was traditionally conservative, adding social contempt to a principled mistrust of popular wisdom. Leftists, on the other hand, used to overdo their love of the common man—which, since some things never change, often wasn’t any too informed, making for a lot of soppiness.

The great reversal dates back to the GOP’s post–World War II witch hunt, when the House Un-American Activities Committee’s right-wing Jacobins and then Joe McCarthy targeted elites and styled themselves vox populi with a vengeance. Ever since, however preposterously, Republicans have done better than Democrats at playing the party of “the little man”—the angry, Caucasian little man, but the vestigially true-American little man even so. Like it or not, the arts wing of the liberal establishment hasn’t exactly bestirred itself to contradict the distortion, taking refuge instead in self-pity (“If they only understood”) combined with superciliousness (“They’re too dumb to understand”).




No wonder movies of the ’50s were such a stew of mixed signals. With its cowed cow-town populace refusing to support lonely Gary Cooper, 1952’s High Noon—from a script by soon-to-be-blacklisted Carl Foreman—notoriously disgusted Howard Hawks and John Wayne into inverting its premise in the peerless Rio Bravo. Yet film students today might have a rough time guessing which one was the left-wing parable about buckling under to McCarthyism and which was the right-wing response, since Cooper still can’t help incarnating the familiar solitary figure of “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” mythology, while Rio Bravo—featuring a motley gang of misfits banding together to fight the good fight—looks like a tribute to, um, collective action. A budding teenage narcissist named Bill Clinton loved the former, but any number of Democrats might wish he’d been fonder of the latter.

 Even so, once he went into politics, Clinton did have what used to be called the common touch, not exactly a widespread virtue among college-educated liberals of his generation. Scorning conventional values is the proper job of bohemias and avant-gardes, but it’s lousy training for winning elections, and the boomers were products of an era that conflated cultural arrogance with moral superiority. Starting with The Graduate, which ridiculed the suburban middle class on purely aesthetic grounds—whether these people were bigots or had voted for Goldwater, both unlikely in that milieu, mattered less than their consumer-society Philistinism—the movies that catered to hipster entitlement seem incredibly smug today. Even at the time, Studs Terkel was rightly outraged by the scene in 1970’s Five Easy Pieces in which Jack Nicholson, playing an alienated child of privilege, humiliated a diner waitress as if he were sticking it to his oppressors.


Symbolically heralded by the huge success of Star Wars, the Reagan era recast popular culture as well as governance in its image. Effectively beaten at their own game, since the man in the White House hadn’t stopped being a movie star—as his biographer Lou Cannon put it, he’d landed the role of a lifetime—Hollywood liberals felt newly otiose, and so did the liberal audience. No wonder the hippest new filmmakers to emerge in the ’80s were Joel and Ethan Coen, whose frisky satires ended up endorsing some of the boutique left’s worst prejudices about the heartland.

Whether that was the Coens’ intention is debatable. Their callower movies’ snark at the expense of uneducated, feckless people was always offset by Preston Sturges–style glee at the crackpot inventiveness of lower-depths Americans. In their maturity, they’ve largely sworn off making fools of their characters, and the major exception—2008’s Burn After Reading—is arguably more sympathetic than scoffing about the naïve goofballs caught up in CIA intrigue. Yet it’s hardly unreasonable to guess that many of the Coens’ fans in the ’80s and ’90s—educated, hip, and cued to be derisive—got off on seeing their unchic fellow citizens turned into corn-fed Martians.

One reason the Coens’ work stood out was that so few other movies, satiric or otherwise, still featured that class of Americans at all. The same was and is even truer of TV, where the yuppification of sitcomland that began in the ’80s has become so much the norm that the regional and economic (though not racial) diversity of earlier sitcoms looks like Woody Guthrie for the eyes by contrast. Of the two great exceptions, one—The Simpsons—is a sui generis monument to the stratum-trashing inclusivity of pop culture at its best. The other, which spent six of its nine seasons among the top-rated shows on the air between 1988 and 1997, has been all but elided from our collective memory.

That would be Roseanne—the gutsiest, least compromised sitcom ever to hit No. 1, and a show to make Emma Goldman’s ghost stand up and cheer. Not that you’d have known it from the ruckus when Tina Brown, always on the outlook for provocation, brought Roseanne Barr in as guest editor of The New Yorker’s women’s issue in 1995. It didn’t matter that Barr, who’d fought ABC—and won—to defend her show’s integrity, qualified as a feminist heroine if anyone did. Nor did it matter that Roseanne’s intransigent blue-collar championing of everything from women’s lib to gay rights had been a slap in the face to Bush 41’s class-based politics of caricature. To The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, as well as New Yorker writers Jamaica Kincaid and George W.S. Trow—both of whom quit in protest at Barr sullying their sanctum—all that mattered was that Brown had invited a vulgarian through the front door.

Barr herself is famously obstreperous. Psychodrama, not perspective, is her calling card. Her afterthoughts on the whole flap are telling anyway: “In the end, it’s because I was working class and those guys are snobs. And they don’t like working-class people. … They don’t want to elevate any working-class point of view. The closest they get is Barbara Ehrenreich, one of the elite talking about what it’s like to be working poor.” Characteristically, the jab at Ehrenreich is both unfair to her and spot-on about the larger sensibility at work.

 Not much has changed in the 16 years since—except, of course, that popular culture now seems incapable of producing a Roseanne at all. The sophisticated audience gets its upscale treats, while prole America sees itself represented only on reality shows and seems perfectly content with that. Not for entirely bad reasons, either, since reality TV has long articulated all sorts of sociological grit scripted shows leave out. True, in terms of prole America’s self-image, it’s a considerable slide from Bruce Springsteen to Jersey Shore, but what the hell: At least someone still cares. More than Harvey Weinstein does, anyway.


This important article ignores the second major moment of developing left snobbery towards ordinary Americans. Yes, the first was McCarthyism and the Cold War, with the feeling that populism (and the working population that was its base) had become a right wing force. But the second was the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War when it seemed that blue collar families were opposed to the issues championed by the emerging student movement and the left-leaning sectors of the professional/managerial class. I remember speaking at a rally right after the Cambodian invasion saying, as if it were a deep insight, that we weren't going to create a progressive American movement on the basis of anti-Americanism, that an internationalist perspective that cut us off from our own culture was simply a prescription for exile, and that we needed to do what those who had come before us had also done -- find a way to accept and even celebrate our own history. The result of our failure to do that is shown as much by the Weathermen as by TV.

Steve Miller, Boston, MA

Dear Mr. Miller, thanks for your comment. I agree with you totally and just didn't find room to get into how 1960s leftists estranged the working class -- their great sin, if you ask me, no matter how much I admire some of them otherwise.

Back in '85 or so I read a short item in The New Republic where the writer, a baby boomer, reflected on his views then and during the '60s. It struck him that he and his friends used to say America's workers were brainwashed into thinking that their work mattered and their lives weren't a trap, and now they were saying the big problem with America was that the workers didn't work hard enough. (This was during the Japan-is-beating-us competitiveness scare.) Either way, he said, his kind assumed a vast gulf between themselves and working Americans. You could also say that either way his kind complains about working Americans.

Pot meet kettle. This strikes me as too smug by at least half in its comfortable and over-easy conflation of pop culture producers, the Democratic Party, and the left -- whatever that means here.
Perhaps, instead of cultural smugness, where the Democratic Party really disdains working class America is precisely where the party's purse strings attach it most clearly and decisively to Wall Street -- that is to say, about as far from anything that resembles "the left" no matter how ill defined the term.
I have little understanding of the culture machine, but it seems likely that at the level you're mostly aiming at -- Hollywood elites, the core economic values are also far closer to Wall Street than to either "the left" or to Main Street.
What does strike me -- particularly as a native southerner -- is vastly different cultural values (in general) with respect to education and intellectualism when comparing working class southerners (at least) with white collar liberals. The disdain runs in both directions and is reflected amusingly in Talledaga Nights, which certainly sends up NASCAR culture but reserves its only real scorn for teachers and those uppity enough to occupy the corporate suites.

Let's put this in perspective. Just as so-called college-educated liberals sometimes display disdain for the blue-collar, fly-over segment of the population, the disdain and hostility coming from those folks and aimed at the so-called "elites" is just as bad, if not worse. This is by no means a liberal phenomenon. Have we forgotten Sarah Palin and her constant attacks on elites and the mainstream media? Let's remember that you don't generally find college-educated liberals talking about themselves as though they are the "real America".

Kudos Mr. Carson. This is one of the best pieces of cultural criticism I've read in years. Growing up lower middle class/rural in the 1960s, I've watched the drift you describe and it has angered me. I can remember many of my friends with whom I watched "Five Easy Pieces" cheer on the Jack Nicholson character while all I wanted to do was reach through the screen and pummel him.

In the 1960s, the upper crust was often the target of skewering in mainstream entertainment. "Green Acres" was a farce, but a pointed one. I've always thought that Jack Benny's seemingly clueless self-deprecation was a subtle jab at privilege and we clearly lack that in the culture at the moment.

DRF, I agree with you that the Republican's adoption of its facile "little man" stance borders on the ludicrous and is fraught with inconsistency as it moves from image to concrete policy proposals. I still chuckle at "Poppy" Bush tossing horseshoes and waxing on his love of pork rinds during the 1992 election season as he tried to pass himself off as just an ordinary guy.

That said, political movement is informed by cultural expression and as it is right now, our side (I believe both you and I qualify as liberals) is losing the war for the hearts and minds of a large segment of the population that it shouldn't be losing.

I think the author might want to look into American history.
Take a look at Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life."

Stevenson and his supporters did not start but simply reacted (albeit foolishly) to those who know nothing and proud of it.

Sorry about the bad link to the Hofstadter book.

The origins of the left-wing cultural/intellectual elitism vs. right-wing cultural populism divide is much older than the 1950s. In the 1930s, for example, Father Coughlin played up the sneering left-wing elites in FDR's cabinet. In the early 1920s, the Second Ku Klux Klan organized against what it saw as a secularist, urban intellectual elite hellbent on destroying American values; it wasn't anti-black racism alone that convinced tens of thousands to march through Kokomo, Indiana. If there is a common thread in all this anti-liberal elite cultural populism, it's quite obvious: anti-Semitism. And, yes, the Nazi Party in Germany (and its like-minded Fascist parities elsewhere in Europe) traded on the exact same anti-liberal cultural elite tropes (though few embraced the racial totalitarianism of the actual Nazis).

Of course, this goes much further back than the early 20th century. The scorn leveled at the abolitionists, for example, betrayed some of the same sorts of right-wing cultural populism that you see today. Go back and read an editorial from the Charleston Mercury before the Civil War and you'll see the insults against Northeastern "free love societies," "intellectual idealists," and the like - arrayed against what Georgia Governor Joe Brown called "the aristocracy of the white race." Herrenvolk Democracy was very powerful then and it still is now.

None of this is to say that cultural liberals have been entirely innocent here. The disdain for "flyover country" is real and I sense it all the time I leave East Tennessee and go to major university cities (which I otherwise love). But, in the grand calculus of things, reverse elitism of the Sarah Palin-Joe McCarthy-Father Coughlin variety is much, much more dangerous to America itself than the haughtiest self-righteousness you could conjure up at Zabar's.

You need to be logged in to comment.