The essential point about Gates-gate, or the tempest over last
week’s arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is this: Most
liberal commentary on the subject has taken race as its theme.
Conservative commentators, by contrast, have furiously hit the class
button.
Liberals, by and large, immediately plugged the event into their
unfair-racial-profiling template, and proceeded to call for blacks and
whites to “listen to each other’s narratives” and other such anodyne
niceties even after it started to seem that police racism was probably
not what caused the incident.
Conservatives, meanwhile, were following their own “narrative,” the
one in which racism is often exaggerated and the real victim is the
unassuming common man scorned by the deference-demanding “liberal
elite.” Commentators on the right zeroed in on the fact that Mr. Gates
is an “Ivy League big shot,” a “limousine liberal,” and a star
professor at Harvard, an institution they regard with special loathing.
They pointed out that Mr. Gates allegedly addressed the cop with that
deathless snob phrase, “you don’t know who you’re messing with”; they
reminded us that Cambridge, Mass., is home to a particularly obnoxious
combination of left-wing orthodoxy and upper-class entitlement; and
they boiled over Mr. Gates’s demand that the officer “beg my
forgiveness.”
“Don’t you just love a rich guy who summers on the Vineyard asking a
working-class cop to ‘beg’? How perfectly Cambridge,” wrote the
right-wing radio talker Michael Graham in the Boston Herald.
Conservatives won this round in the culture wars, not merely because
most of the facts broke their way, but because their grievance is one
that a certain species of liberal never seems to grasp. Whether the
issue is abortion, evolution or recycling, these liberal patricians are
forever astonished to discover that the professions and institutions
and attitudes that they revere are seen by others as arrogance and
affectation.
The “elitism” narrative routinely blind-sides them, takes them by
surprise again and again. There they are, feeling good about their
solidarity with the coffee-growers of Guatemala, and then they find
themselves on the receiving end of criticism from, say, the plumbers of
Ohio.
The Gates incident was a trap that could not have been better
crafted to ensnare President Barack Obama, who is himself a loyal son
of academia’s most prestigious reaches, and to whom it was immediately
obvious, even without benefit of the facts, that the Cambridge police
“acted stupidly” in the situation.
Mr. Obama’s way of backing out of his gaffe was just as telling: He
invited Mr. Gates and the policeman who arrested him to the White House
for a beer, the beverage so often a gauge of a politician’s blue-collar
bona fides. One symbolic gesture, hopefully, can exorcise another.
Class is always an ironic issue in American politics, and the irony
this time is particularly poignant. We are in the midst of a great
national debate about how to make health care affordable; almost
nothing is more important to working-class Americans. “For the health
of the nation, both physically and economically, we need a system with
a public option,” Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers,
wrote recently in the Huffington Post. “And we need it now.”
But whether working families get it now depends to a large degree on
Mr. Obama’s personal popularity. And now comes Gates-gate, this latest
burst of fake populism from the right. Waving the banner of the
long-suffering working class, the tax-cutting friends of the top 2%
have managed to dent the president’s credibility, to momentarily halt
his forward movement on the health-care issue.
Umbrage at a Harvard professor’s class snobbery, in other words,
might derail this generation’s greatest hope for actually mitigating
the class divide.
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