Snobs we will always have with us. When Hillary Clinton called the white working class in the Rust Belt “the deplorables,” she was not engaging in acute political analysis. It was little more than snobbery, the same that led her to leave Arkansas behind and to parachute herself into a posh zip code in New York, getting herself elected as a senator in a state whose farmers and factory workers north and west of her she despised. When Barack Obama said of the same kinds of people that having been left in the dust by technological and social change, they were now “bitterly clinging” to their guns and their worn-out ways of life, that too was little more than snobbery, setting those millions of people in the worst light, not taking them seriously, indeed hardly making an effort to get to know them at all
Snobbery is not the same as mere opposition or moral condemnation. Two elements are necessary for it. One is a refusal even to countenance what the “wrong” people have to say or how they live. “Not — English!” says the bigot Mr. Podsnap, in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, extending a stiff arm and clearing out of his way anything that might penetrate the shell of his self-satisfaction, for by “English” he means “Podsnap.” The second is a visceral disgust or fussiness, as if you would get your hands dirty merely being around the wrong people, those so far beneath you that you cannot endure their smell, whether physical or cultural, as when the same Mrs. Clinton blew up at an aide for scheduling her to attend a county fair, whose people she did not sharply distinguish from the pigs they raised.
Snobbery is the besetting vice of people who want to believe they are more intelligent than they really are, and who therefore feel a tad nervous when they are around the “wrong” kinds of people who happen to be smart. Truly brilliant people are rarely this way. Shakespeare could not have written his incomparable plays had he not mingled freely with tinkers and fishwives as well as with wealthy burghers and the nobility. Antonin Dvorak came to America, took to heart and celebrated the melodies of Stephen Foster and the Negro spirituals, and said that America would someday be in the forefront of the world in musical composition. That was four or five years before George Gershwin was born. Or I think of the tremendously versatile actor, singer, musician, and composer Theodore Bikel, a Jewish man born in Vienna, speaker of many languages, founder of the Newport Folk Festival, singing “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” with Joan Baez on the television show Hootenanny.
If John Henry Newman had been a snob, which he was not, he could not have preached with any effectiveness to working-class men at his parish of St. Anne’s in Birmingham. But when this classically trained writer and speaker gave nine lectures on the state of the Catholic Church in England, he had to book the Birmingham Corn Exchange to do it, so popular he was. If he had been a snob, his talents and his accomplishments would at least have given him something to be snobbish about.
But something happened to snobbery since Newman’s time that has given it a new character and made it a considerable force for destruction. It is that technological progress, moving on with unprecedented and breathtaking speed, gave people the idea that human progress in all respects must follow — in arts and letters, morality, education, social life, and religious worship. The groundwork for the attitude had already been laid by the Enlightenment, and the United States, though conservative in many important ways, built upon it. Think of the saying on the nation’s Great Seal: NOVUS ORDO SAECLORUM, “A new order of the ages.” Of course, it is a vast non sequitur. “We have television and you didn’t,” says no one sensible, “and therefore we reject what you have to say about the indissolubility of marriage.” No one sensible says that, but the doggedly “progressive” dismissal of the wisdom of past ages amounts to little more.
Now, actual progress in nontechnological areas of human life is painfully slow, because the human person at the center of it does not progress at all. He is the same now, in biology, in mental acuity and action, in the skill of his hands, and in the longings of his heart and soul as he was 20,000 years ago. It is why, when we enter the caves at Lascaux and see those brilliant paintings executed during the Ice Age, we feel we have come upon a message from a long-lost brother. But the progressive is impatient. He does not want to do the hard work, often unrewarding, usually misunderstood, of sifting through the moral insights of previous generations, the dangers they faced, their triumphs and their failures, their webs of compromises, giving a little way for vice here the better to secure a virtue there; and then of doing the same with his own current generation. He wants to get things done. Sometimes he succeeds; I must give him credit for energy. But more often he gets things undone.
Then does the new snobbery come to the rescue. It is the snobbery of shameless incompetence, enabled by wealth, a system of credentials, the engines of mass communication, and, as I have said, the ambient assumptions of progress. The snob produces bad work and passes it off as brilliant, tagging as rubes and hicks, or middle-class lovers of kitsch, everyone who will not repeat the progressive script. Marcel Duchamps took a urinal and entered it into an art exhibition, and everyone who was anyone was supposed to faint dead away at his genius. If you didn’t like the exposed girders and undressed concrete in brutalist architecture, it was because your mind could not soar to such abstract heights. People once taught the multiplication tables to children at age 7 or 8, quickly and efficiently, by memorization, and that was that. But “discovery” was to be promoted before such dreary foolishness, and though mostly what we have discovered is that college students need a calculator to determine a 15 percent tip on a meal at the diner, all the smart people, the best people, the teachers with their posh theories, still reject the old ways for their being old.
The leaders in my church, the Roman Catholic, did the same kinds of things after the second Vatican Council. They stripped away many a prayer, and they flattened the language of many prayers they retained. They turned the sanctuary into the head of a meeting room. They sent statues to the landfill. When some parishioners got their backs up, or even if they just seemed perplexed, they were told that the leaders knew better, that they had to get with the program, and that it was a new age for the Church. All that was to evade the questions, to coat the leaders with a shell of self-satisfaction, and to keep the little people in their place.
Snobs of incompetence are now everywhere, especially where money can be gotten and spent with ease and beyond the oversight of people who do not share the posh opinions. Dare to say the obvious, and snobs of incompetence will attack you with all the more fury, as their own position is absurd and their sense of superiority is insecure. If I say, “It is absurd to suppose that girls should be forced to compete in sports against boys, no matter what the boys call themselves,” I will be accused not only of stupidity but of hatred. Suppose someone not entirely progressive agrees with me, and I draw an obvious conclusion, that if grown women cannot compete in sports against teenage boys (and they cannot), it is absurd and immoral to place them in combat, when some poor slob’s life may depend upon the brute strength of the soldier next to him. Then I will get a lecture on the modern army, and I will be told that I simply do not understand the wonders of special training.
The election of Donald Trump is, in part, the result of revulsion against the incompetent snobs, those who assume that the people they serve are too stupid to know what is good for them. In this sense, it is a democratic turn, because all that is good in democracy, as far as I can see, is a trust that in matters that most concern them, people in ordinary life can govern themselves. They can run their own schools, keep their streets clean, hire who is best for their business, and engage in public celebrations without offense. Whether this democratic turn plays out as such remains to be seen. It does not help that a good many of the players are not moral exemplars. But the vice president, JD Vance, is such an exemplar, and he is just as much a target as Trump is.
We shall see. Meanwhile, by all means, let us know more of the specifics of what the snobs of the management state have been up to behind our backs. Much of it should prove quite entertaining.
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