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Obama and OrwellWhat the master Brit can teach Democrats about elitism.

By Jeff Greenfield
Posted Thursday, May 1, 2008, at 6:19 PM ET
George Orwell. Click image to expand.

Elitism has bedeviled American liberalism for the better part of four decades. It undermined the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, and now it's making mischief in the Obama campaign every bit as much as the omnipresence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The charge that liberal candidates don't connect with or understand the values and beliefs of regular Americans is embedded in old epithets like "limousine liberal," which I first heard aimed at New York Mayor John Lindsay in 1969. It was also at the core of "radical chic," the phrase made famous by Tom Wolfe in his savage 1970 account in New York magazine of a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers thrown by Leonard Bernstein and his wife in their Park Avenue duplex. (Wolfe didn't invent the term, but he gave it currency.)

There's also an even older and more illuminating antecedent from across the Atlantic: the writings of George Orwell in England in the late 1930s, which describe a version of elitism that echoes powerfully in our current political battle.

Orwell's 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier is an account of his travels to England's industrial North, to the towns of Barnsley, Sheffield, and Wigan. Orwell—once a scholarship student at Eton—wrote of everything from conditions in the coal mines to the homes, diets, and health of desperately poor miners. He himself was a socialist who could also turn a critical eye on the British left, and in the middle of the book, he devoted a chapter to the failure of socialism to gain a foothold among the very citizens who would have seemed to benefit most from its rise. Substitute liberal or progressive for socialist, and the text often reads as though Orwell were covering American politics today.

"Everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, is a way out [of the worldwide depression,]" Orwell writes. "It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat, even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such an elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already." And yet, he adds, "the average thinking person nowadays is merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to Socialism. … Socialism … has about it something inherently distasteful—something that drives away the very people who ought to be flocking it its support."

One key to the movement's lack of popularity, Orwell argues, is its supporters. "As with the Christian religion," he writes, "the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." Then he wheels out the heavy rhetorical artillery. The typical socialist, according to Orwell, "is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England." (Think "organic food lover," "militant nonsmoker," and "environmentalist with a private jet" for a more contemporary list.)

Orwell also rails against the condescension many on the left display toward those they profess to care most about. Describing a gathering of leftists in London, he says, "every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses."

Real working-class folks, he says, might be drawn toward a socialist future centered around family life, the pub, football, and local politics. But those who speak in its name, he says, have a snobbish condescension toward such quotidian pleasures—even condemning coffee and tea. "Reformers" urged the poor to eat healthier food—less sugar, more brown bread. And their audience balked. "Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like organs and wholemeal bread, or [raw carrots]?" Orwell asks. "Yes it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would rather starve than live on brown bread and more carrots … a millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits. An unemployed man doesn't."

And so, Orwell ruefully concluded, the snobbish socialists succeeded in depleting their own ranks. "The ordinary decent person, who is in sympathy with the essential aims of Socialism, is given the impression that there is no room for his kind in any Socialist party that means business."

The perennial struggle of Democratic contenders to appeal to ordinary Americans seems very much of a piece with Orwell's sharp descriptions. Election after election, Democrats argue that once Joe and Jane Sixpack fully grasp the wisdom of the latest six-point college-loan program, or of an 800-page health-care scheme, they will come to wave the Democratic banner. And, sometimes, these voters do just that—provided that the candidate in question has demonstrated a sense that he or she is not treating them as the subject of an anthropological study. Bill Clinton had a full steamer trunk of domestic programs; he also was a product of Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale Law School. But his 18 years in the vineyards of Arkansas politics gave him the tools to compete for support on a more visceral level. Then there were Clinton's obvious tastes for earthly pleasures—from Big Macs to more intimate diversions—which made it very hard to label him as an aloof elitist.

For Democrats at the moment, it is no doubt exasperating to watch working-class voters choose candidates whose economic tastes run to comforting the comfortable. And it may be cold comfort to learn that such impulses are not confined to time and place. But if you want to court these voters in a way that will resonate with them, you could do a lot worse than heeding the cautionary words of George Orwell.

And Barack? Ix-nay on the egg-white omelets.

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Jeff Greenfield is the senior political correspondent for CBS News.
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Notes from the Fray Editor

It was one of those Frays where you almost felt you only had to read the post titles: Hmm, I'm interested in what dumber people think from jwschmidt; Frasier for President from Alpha Tau, "lex talionis in the land of NASCAR" –thank you Waliyuddin. Or maybe a line from a post: "you never explained what arugula was"-- Real Slim K, complaining to jwschmidt, above. Why do working-class Americans hate socialism, Ralph7 wants to know. Moodyguppy asks if it is "a sales problem or a product problem" in a post with a splendid use of strike-through—go and look. It's Barton Fink Syndrome, says Doodahman, giving us the welcome chance to shout "I'll show you the life of the mind" (a possible Fray motto?), while GreenwichJ gets a check for his short but telling look at UK socialism in the 80s, bringing a wave of nostalgia to the Fray Editor. But post titles cannot give the full flavor of the tough talking, so here are some samples:

Comments from the Fray

Where do you draw the line with the Orwellian logic? How do you work for justice if you don't already look like, act like, and think like the people you are trying to help? If you don't already fit in, should you be ridiculed? The line in my view (while identified at a different point by different interpreters) is that place where the artifice you present is more than trivial and begins to threaten the very principles you stand for.

For example, Obama could unobjectionably, in my view, dress differently, practice his bowling game, study up on local habits, learn to come off more like a regular guy, or even modify his words so as not to offend. But this election has given us a peek into the next step that he has not taken and cannot without losing his soul.

The folks who Obama is most unlike this year (the same folks he is losing) are described by you and other media pundits variously as "working class," "white," and "older."

There may be lots of ways to appeal to these demographic subsets which are honorable -- and he should do it. But the line he won't cross, which Hillary Clinton has no scruples about at all -- is to speak the language of social suspicion, exclusion (now of gays as much as blacks or women), or tolerate the ugliness of personal attacks.

Older voters in particular, especially in certain regions, socio-economic groups, and racial backgrounds, are not just bowlers and beer drinkers and hunters. They also include among their ranks folks with leftover prejudices and other generational tendencies that someone like Barack Obama will never and should never pander to.

--John Adkisson

(To reply, click here)

Orwell ,and Greenfield's 21st century take on his expose of leftist elitism are spot on except for one inconvenient truth; that being the fact that the downtrodden and the unwashed masses are, for the most part, ignorant, uninformed, and incapable of critical thinking. Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh have been very successful utilizing this unspeakable truth.

--jbunker

(To reply, click here)

Varying degrees of socialism have always appealed to smug elitists who see themselves as the apparatchiks of a strong central authority imposing its will on what they as an unsophisticated population. What elite socialists really fear is the success of capitalism destroying their own exclusivity. Why do social critics decry McMansions and mock Applebees? They symbolize the more successful among the working class not knowing their place.

What's the matter with Kansas? How about what's the matter with China? It took the transformation to capitalism from the world's biggest, baddest socialist experiment to lift hundreds of millions of working class out of poverty.

--HBFreddie

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(5/4)