Democrats: the of the little , Republicans: the of the wealthy. Those images of America's two major political wings have been frozen for generations.
The stereotypes were always a little off, incomplete, exaggerated. (Can you say Adlai Stevenson?) But like most stereotypes, they reflected rough truths.
No more. Starting in the 1960s and '70s, whole blocs of "little guys"--ethnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans--began moving into the Republican column. And big chunks of America's rich elite--financiers, academics, heiresses, media barons, software millionaires, entertainers--drifted into the Democratic Party.
The extent to which the parties have flipped positions on the little-guy/rich-guy divide is illustrated by research from the Ipsos-Reid polling firm. Comparing counties that voted strongly for Bush to those that voted strongly for Gore in the 2000 election, the study shows that in pro-Bush counties only 7 percent of voters earned at least $100,000, while 38 percent had household incomes below $30,000. In the pro-Gore counties, fully 14 percent pulled in $100,000 or more, while 29 percent earned less than $30,000.
It is "becoming harder by the day to take the Democrats seriously as the party of the common man," writes columnist Daniel Henninger. "The party's primary sources of support have become trial lawyers and Wall Street financiers. It is becoming a party run by a new class of elites who make fast money--$25 million for 30 days work on a movie, millions (even billions) winning lawsuits against doctors ... millions to do arithmetic for a business merger."
Obviously both parties have their fat cats, but Federal Election Commission data show that many of the very wealthiest political players are now in the Democratic column. Today's most aggressive political donors by far are lawyers--who donated $98 million dollars to 2004 political candidates as of June. (By comparison, the entire oil and gas industry donated $13 million.) And rich lawyers do indeed tilt strongly Democratic: 71 percent of their contributions went to Democrats, 29 percent to Republicans.
Migration of the rich and powerful to the Democrats has been so pronounced that Democratic nominee John Kerry has actually pulled in much more money than sitting President George Bush this spring and summer. Kerry's monthly fundraising totals have routinely doubled or even tripled Bush's totals. And the money on the Kerry side has come much more from rich individuals, while Bush has relied on flocks of small donors. So which is the party of the people now?
John Kerry is in many ways a perfect embodiment of the, Democratic Party's takeover by wealthy elites. Experts describe his genealogy as more royal than any previous American President. There is a long line of blue blood and inherited funds in his family, and his life has been anything but typically American: Mom was an heiress summering at her family's resort estate in France when she met dad, a Phillips Andover/Yale/Harvard Law School alum who was passing his own summer of 1937 in France "as an apprentice in a sculptor's studio." John's early boyhood was spent in a grand house outside Boston bought with inherited money. At age ten he was packed off to a fancy boarding school in Switzerland, and "for the next seven years of his life, this would become routine: His parents would send him off to boarding school and he would adapt anew to a world of competitive boys from wealthy, privileged families," as Kerry's Boston Globe biographers summarize.
Kerry spent his high school years at St. Paul's prep school, with a rich aunt paying the bills. He described himself at that point as being "from Oslo, Norway" (where his father was then posted as a diplomat). At St. Paul's and then Yale, Kerry whirled through hoity-toity circles with Auchinclosses and Bundys and trustfunders of all sorts, and when it came time for marrying, he showed the darnedest luck at finding true loves with true money. His first wife was worth $300 million; his second is a billionaire.
Between heiresses, Kerry had to live on his own earnings, and the results were not pretty. His spending on high life exceeded his income to the point of functional bankruptcy. But most of his life has been grand: hundred-dollar haircuts by Christophe, Old Master paintings, and expensive toys of all sorts. His five current houses, one more achingly exclusive than the next--Beacon Hill, Georgetown, Nantucket, Fox Chapel, Sun Valley--could keep a producer for "MTV Cribs" filming and looking up synonyms for "fabulous" for most of a year. Yet of course politically, Kerry is a man of the left. National Journal rates his record the most liberal in the U.S. Senate (John Edwards is tied for second).
The term "limousine liberal" doesn't adequately capture how disconnected Democrats like John Kerry (and lay Rockefeller, and Barbara Streisand, and Jon Corzine--there are now many such) are from everyday American life. They are more like "Learjet liberals," who literally pronounce their poxes on oil executives and cattlemen from leather sofas floating at 15,000 feet inside their personal jets (which consume 1,200 gallons of fuel every time they streak their enlightened owner to an Idaho skiing weekend or Cape sailing jaunt). John Kerry is a man who will ignore his own car registration fees and parking tickets and dinner tabs, while cavalierly calling pharmaceutical scientists "selfish" and "irresponsible." He is a fellow who made no charitable donations for years on end, while excoriating other Americans for being "hard-hearted" and "greedy." Some tribune of the ordinary guy.
In this issue of The American Enterprise, Chris Weinkopf, Joel Kotkin, and other contributors limn John Kerry's separation from middle-class America. They connect Kerry's rarefied politics back to New England, the region that produced him, as well as the other Democratic favorite this year, Howard Dean. New England is an area well out of the American mainstream in many ways. Politically, it is more liberal than the rest of America. Economically it often resembles Europe more than the rest of the country. And culturally, New England is far more prone to elitism than any other part of the U.S.
New England's elitism--and the resulting tendency of its politicians to assign decision making to a managerial class at the top of society--is the quality that propels it most emphatically out of mainstream American practice. Being ruled by the Harvard faculty might appeal to the electors who sent John Kerry and Ted Kennedy to the Senate, but it sounds like a nightmare to most of the rest of America.
Americans grow up imbued with a deep sense that, while we each have our special talents, every man is fundamentally as worthy as another. This springs from both our religious traditions and the egalitarian principles on which our government was founded. And historically it has been everyday yeomen, not lords, who did most of the building and defending of America.
Most every rifleman who fought in our Revolution could read and write, had a good understanding of the issues for which he was fighting, and had firm opinions on the principles at stake in the war. In Europe at that same time, the officers were generally the only ones who were literate. As he shaped these proud, obstreperous, self-governing men into an army, George Washington found he had to adapt to the "levelling spirit," where "the principles of democracy so universally prevail."
Reinforcing our philosophical egalitarianism is the fact that America (as Daniel Boorstin pointed out) has traditionally been a culture without a capital. At the time of our founding, more than 95 percent of the population lived outside the major cities, and we continue to be a highly dispersed, localized, and independent-minded people, quite resistant to bossing from the center.
Average Americans believe elitism is not only wrong in principle, but also ineffective. And they are correct. In his new book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki of The New Yorker demonstrates that a cross-section of everyday people will generally prove better at solving knotty societal problems than any fraternity of experts. He presents many proofs for the conclusion--long promoted in these pages--that ordinary citizens possess forms of knowledge, intuition, and moral sense that make them better arbiters of critical national debates than any educated elite. This is not just rabblerousing, but a time-tested reality that explains much of the brilliant success of America and the common people who have come to her shores.
