Some words have interesting careers.
Think of all the different—sometimes contradictory—meanings that have accreted around some very common words.
“Democracy” is one, as is “liberal.”
Once you start thinking about it, you realize that many of the words we commonly use to name important things are very slippery indeed.
This would be more of a book than a column were I to delve deeply or broadly into this linguistic-semiotic phenomenon.
Relax.
I don’t propose to delve at all deeply or broadly into this subject.
Rather, I want to say just a few words about the career of another common word, “elitism,” and its cognates.
Like many of my conservative confrères, I often use the word “elitist” in a negative sense.
I mean the self-appointed elite of our nomenklatura: the bureaucrats who manage the administrative state in Washington, various state capitals, and corresponding insular, self-infatuated oases in the European Union and such comically malevolent redoubts as the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Such emissaries of the kinder, gentler (gentler for now) totalitarian impulse deserve the epithet “elite” in part because of their economic status, but mostly because of a congeries of sociological factors that we might describe metonymically as “Harvard.”
It’s curious, however, that “elitist” in this sense must be distinguished from another, also negative, deployment of the word.
For the left, too, “elitist” is, or at least was, an all-purposive negative epithet—a little semantic stink-bomb that, emptied of any definite meaning, is almost as potent as “racist” in bringing discussion to a grinding halt and clearing a room.
When did that happen?
William Henry, in his unfairly neglected book “In Defense of Elitism” (1994), speculates that the great change came “somewhere along Bill Clinton’s path to the White House.”
By the mid-1990s, Henry observed, “The very word, used as a label, seems to be considered enough for today’s rhetoricians to dismiss their opponents as defeated beyond redemption.”
I should point out that, unlike me, Henry wasn’t a knuckle-dragging, right-wing fascist hyena.
Indeed, he wasn’t a hyena of any kind, but, on the contrary, was a life-long Democrat whose heroes included Hubert Humphrey, Martin Luther King Jr., etc., etc.
Nevertheless, Henry understood that by enrolling “elitism” in the politically correct index verborum prohibitorum, one effectively condemns oneself to the cognitive dissonance of perpetual mendacity. The political philosopher Harvey Mansfield once spoke of “the self-evident half-truth that all men are created equal.”
It’s a politically expedient fiction as well as a judicial ideal.
In the realm of talent and achievement, however, the ideology of equality is a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that.
Henry dilated tartly on “the simple fact that some people are better than others—smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace.”
Indeed, he went further. “Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal.”
Henry died before his book was published, which might have been a mercy.
He wouldn’t have been forgiven for sentences such as this: “Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study.”
Sure, “Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute,” but “that does not mean that all contributions are equal. ... It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.”
I hope you were sitting down for that last observation.
It was true, too true, but hardly the sort your common or garden-variety dean of diversity would look kindly upon.
Henry’s point was that reality is elitist.
Failure to acknowledge that might make you feel kinder, gentler, etc., but at the significant cost of living a lie.
Remember Barack Obama’s description of some small-town Pennsylvanians as bitter, gun-clinging, narrowly religious yahoos who reflexively dislike anyone not like themselves?
That statement was self-righteous; it was blinkered; it was bigoted, emotionally impoverished, and otherwise odious.
But it wasn’t in any normal sense of the word “elitist.”
I don’t live in Pennsylvania.
But I do live in a small(ish) town; I think the Second Amendment is a vital prophylactic against the untoward prerogatives of state power, and I'd sooner “cling” to religion than the hectoring, welfare-state, just-let-us-tell-you-how-to-live-your-life directives dispensed by the Obamas and their heirs.
In the end, however, what bothers me about such directives isn’t their elitism but their arrogance.
Indeed, for connoisseurs of political savvy, perhaps the most disturbing thing about Obama’s infamous diatribe (it ranks right up there with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment) was the contrast it revealed between the oleaginous, feel-your-pain evangelism of hope he had on an infinite playback loop and the disabused arrogance that crackles just beneath the burnished, campaign-trail mask of the people who would rule us.
The moral?
Faced with widespread criticism of their remarks, Obama and Clinton both prevaricated, objecting that they were misunderstood, that they didn’t put things “as well as they should have.”
But that was completely disingenuous.
Obama and Clinton both were plenty clear about their contempt for ordinary Americans.
It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that that contempt isn’t so much elitist as simply repulsive.
