Sherry Chandler

And again, it’s class

In our blog discussion of The Other, Rosalie pointed out that it often isn’t race or culture but class that identifies The Other. One of the ironies of our supposedly classless country. And one, I’ll admit, that I’m guilty of.

Later, in her comment on my Kohut post, Rebecca said

Just goes to show you that the intelligentsia identify the “Other” in Yankeeland too.”

I find these comments by David Sirota relevant to that theme in our conversation:

“The uncool subject is class,” author Bell Hooks once wrote. “It’s the subject that makes us all tense.” What an understatement, considering the two leading “change” candidates in the latest presidential polls.

Barack Obama is contending for the Democratic nomination as a candidate who avoids focusing on economic class. He asks us to believe — nay, to “hope” — that the interests of Wall Streeters underwriting his campaign can somehow be “brought together” with the interests of workers harmed by corporate America’s wage, job and pension cutbacks.

By contrast, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is competing for the Republican nomination on a call for proletarian solidarity. Next to John Edwards (D), he is the “classiest” presidential candidate, explicitly deriding “plutocracy” and “the Club for Greed” that he correctly says runs Washington.

…

Not surprisingly, officialdom has reacted quite differently to the Obama and Huckabee phenomena.

The ruling class roundly praises Obama’s class-averse campaign. Even George Will, the columnist-spokesman for country club Republicanism, effused that Obama is “refreshingly cerebral.”

…

To those with money and power, Huckabee is committing the worst sin. His class rhetoric puts his Christian religion’s altruistic, meek-shall-inherit-the-Earth tenets above Washington’s free market fundamentalism. And the cultural roots accompanying Huckabee’s cause are even more appalling to the limousine crowd. This Republican apostate is not an Ivy Leaguer putting on a wink-and-nod show. He’s a former Baptist minister from a low-income family who was never scrubbed by an elite brush — meaning he might actually believe in his class crusade.

I’ve got to stop my quoting here or I’ll give you the whole essay, which I’d have you read in its entirety because Sirota goes on to contrast the establishment’s reaction to GWB’s fake populism with their reaction to Huckabee’s real thing. It’s all right to play at class as long as everybody important knows you’re just a slumming prince.

Bush, you see, was always an aristocrat underneath the “windshield cowboy” veneer. He is the son of a president, a Skull-and-Bones man — ruling class all the way

Just as an aside, I’d like to point out that bell hooks is a Kentucky-born writer, though she left early on. Can’t imagine why.

Now, mind you, I have no desire in the world to see Mike Huckabee as President of the United States of America. Though he couldn’t be any more ignorant than George W. Bush and might be considerably more compassionate. I understand from my reading, however, that his governing style is just as autocratic. And right now I think he’s push-polling, which is dirty.

Nor do I have any problem with having an educated, informed, articulate man like Barack Obama as President. That would be my preference.

If I were to write a “Where I’m From” poem after George Ella Lyon, I’d have to say I’m from Mike Huckabee. But where I’m from is not where I am.

And it would behoove us to remember that some of the world’s worst populist demagogues have risen from the masses.

But it also behooves us to remember that it is class as much as race that makes Obama’s candidacy possible.

We’ve gotten used to seeing black faces in power: Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice. But they’ve had class.

Says Sirota:

Personally, I want to believe Obama’s vision of America as a class-free utopia where change comes without rancor or division. But history shows that most positive change in America has been about class and conflict — whether it was the battle for basic labor laws or the fight for Social Security.

That’s why, whoever wins the primaries, the more class forces its way onto the presidential stage, the better.

Link from Firedoglake

P.S. Consider this. The more the media congratulates us for not taking to the streets when elections are stolen, when illegal wars are undertaken, the more they’re engaging in class warfare. The culture wars are not about morality. They’re about power and money.

Right now, I think they’re trying to convince those of us on the left that if we oppose Obama we must be, at least subliminally, racist.

Possibly related posts:

Always a class act

Not North/South, Suburbs/Country but Class?

One more quote

Coupla points from Elayne Boosler

Duelling Evangelists

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