OMG. The Election Results Forced Me to Realize I'm ... a Cultural Elitist

Nov. 18, 2016

I first had an inkling that we were heading for a stunning ballot day upset—what the political scientists call a "wave ballot"—on the evening of October 20. I was attending the Champions for Children dinner benefiting the Moyer Foundation, the clemency run by former Phillies' pitcher Jamie Moyer and his wife, Karen, that provides grief counseling to children who have lost loved ones.

Former Governor Ed Rendell was the recipient of the evening's Community All-Star Award; when Rendell shuffled to the stage to make remarks, he was a unlike homo than the force of nature who, as Mayor in the 1990s, turned around a downwardly Philadelphia narrative. In recent months, the former Governor had made the wrong kind of headlines on behalf of Hillary Clinton, musing, for example, that Donald Trump'southward misogynistic comments would come up back to haunt him because "at that place are more ugly women in America than attractive women. People take that stuff personally." Rendell, who could hold his ain with policy wonks as an elected official, had seemingly become little more than than just another cable TV talking caput, a provocative bloviator, leaving many of united states who accept long known him shaking our heads and affectionately muttering, "Oh, Ed."

I learned in the backwash of November 8 that I very well may be the cultural elitist I've been reading about. And, for someone who prides himself on an oceanic sense of marvel, I was blind to the hurting of my countrymen, as expressed at the polls. That'due south my failure every bit a citizen.

But during his remarks on October xx, I recognized the old Ed, and thereby got a glimpse of precisely what had been missing in this election season, specially from Hillary Clinton. Rendell talked virtually his career in public service—district chaser, mayor, governor—and fabricated a brief but compelling case for public service and the mutual adept. "It's an incredible opportunity to exist in a position to sign your name on something and help someone, one person at a time, one and a half million at a fourth dimension, 12 million at a time," he said. "I remember ane day at Sharon Baptist Church here in Due west Philadelphia, I signed a bill raising the minimum wage in Pennsylvania from $v.15 to $seven.15. If y'all were a working single mom with 2 kids and you lot were working at minimum wage, you made $10,400 at $5.15; by raising it to $seven.15, we gave yous a $iv,000 heighten. Past signing a piece of paper, I gave 420,000 people a $4,000 enhance. So this has truly been a labor of honey."

That nighttime, I couldn't stop thinking of Rendell'southward remarks. He'd e'er known that voting is essentially an emotional human activity, masquerading as a rational i. I remembered past speeches I'd seen; for all his faults, Rendell's success had long been a testament to the politics of empathy. Watch this and tell me you can imagine Hillary Clinton striking the aforementioned emotional chords:

Or watch the candidate I was drawn to during the primaries, Ohio Governor John Kasich, who, subsequently his surprise second place finish in the New Hampshire principal, spoke movingly and from the heart about coming together in common purpose:

Leadership is virtually calling others to represent something bigger than themselves. People desire to be inspired. And what had we gotten from Hillary Clinton? The ads blanketing our air waves boiled down to: I'yard not the other guy. In a change election, where was the affirmative reason to pull the lever for her? Instead, we were getting checklist politics, messages designed to appeal to specific groups of voters. It was identity politics writ big, which flew in the face of, say, 2008's Obama campaign, which struck at unifying themes aimed at our better angels: "At that place isn't a red America, at that place isn't a bluish America, there is a Usa of America."

The examples of Rendell and Kasich made me ask, looking at both presidential candidates: Where'southward the empathy? And: Tin can in that location exist empathy if there's no core conviction? Fifty-fifty Hillary's campaign director, John Podesta, wondered in his private emails what his candidate stood for.

So come ballot nighttime, more than surprising than the consequence was who tipped the results. Working class whites who had voted for Obama twice were at present taking a flyer on…Donald Trump? Clearly, the Donald'due south racist language, and racist advisers, were the appeal for many white voters. Just it is also clear that the election wasn't just about race—information technology was most those who, eight years afterwards the Bully Recession, notwithstanding felt left backside, and they were having a collective Howard Beale ("I'm mad as hell and I'm non going to take it anymore!") moment. The left thought nosotros were having an election, and then they brought a fact-checker to a culture war.

The morning after the election, I had a surgical procedure performed at Penn. In that location, nosotros all—nurses, doctors, clerks—bonded over our dismay at the previous night'south result, shaking our heads, commiserating. The ease with which all this was said, the unspoken assumption that of course nosotros all voted for Hillary, forced me to expect inward. Over the next few days, recovering, I had the time to check myself. I'd been wondering why Hillary didn't run on the Obama economic record: 70 plus months of job growth, record stock marketplace surges, depression gas prices. But, turns out, I was in my chimera. No one that I know voted for Trump (or has admitted it to me). Nor exercise I know anyone who fought in Republic of iraq or Afghanistan. I shop at Whole Foods, which has become a cultural signpost. According to David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, Trump won 76 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrell and 22 percent of counties with a Whole Foods, a 54 percentage gap; in 1992, the gap between the same counties was 19 percent.

In his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance gives us the white working class, consummate with polling that shows these non-college educated whites to be the most pessimistic group in America when it comes to assessing the land'south future. No wonder, given what Robert Putnam first chronicled sixteen years ago in Bowling Alone: The institutions that once held communities together have frayed. From churches to political parties to bowling leagues, the bonds of common experience take evaporated. The factory worker in Macomb Canton, Michigan? He'south all alone. He twice voted for Obama to shake things up, but instead got more of the aforementioned, and that included the message that everyone else matters but him: Stagnant wages, Goldman Sachs executives running the Treasury Section, the Justice Department issuing edicts to public schools to brand sure transgender kids take admission to the bathrooms of their choice, rising health intendance costs and unending educatee loan debt.

Which brings us back to the much-needed sense of empathy that Rendell reminded me of. The wife of the 1992 presidential candidate who famously said to manufactory workers "I feel your hurting" came face to face on election twenty-four hours with the one constituency that, in the age of identity politics, was left to shriek: "What most me?" Possibly the white working grade voter who was with Obama in '08 and '12 recoiled at a candidate who seemed to think rules don't apply to her. Maybe the email scandal—which I had dismissed as another in a long line of Clinton coverups in search of a crime—resonated because Hillary came to stand for all those who had cutting in front end of them in line these many years.

The wife of the 1992 presidential candidate who famously said to factory workers "I experience your pain" came face up to face on ballot day with the one constituency that, in the age of identity politics, shrieked: "What most me?" Possibly the white working class voter who was with Obama in '08 and '12 recoiled at a candidate who seemed to retrieve rules don't apply to her.

"And then information technology shouldn't take come up every bit a consummate surprise when millions of Americans were of a sudden drawn to a crass strongman who tossed out fraudulent promises and gave institutions and elites the eye finger," presciently wrote George Packer in the New Yorker simply weeks before the election. (I know, I know. In an essay in which I confront my own cultural elitism, I'm quoting from the New Yorker. What tin can I say? I'grand a work in progress.) "The fact that then many informed, sophisticated Americans failed to run into Donald Trump coming, and then kept writing him off, is itself a sign of a republic in which no eye holds."

Packer brilliantly foreshadowed the meaning behind what would be our election results:

In July, I went to run across [former Treasury Secretary, Harvard President, and Harriton Loftier School alum Larry] Summers at his vacation home in Massachusetts. When I arrived, he had just pulled up—in a Lexus—after a morning of tennis. We sat on a terrace overlooking Cape Cod Bay. Summers described numerous trips that he had made during his years at Treasury to review antipoverty programs in Africa and Latin America, and in American inner cities. "I don't think I ever went to Akron, or Flint, or Toledo, or Youngstown," he admitted. To Democratic policymakers, poverty was foreign or it was black. Equally for displaced white workers in the Rust Belt, Summers said, "their problems weren't heavily on our radar screen, and they were mad that their problems weren't."

On HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher, the iconoclastic Maher made some of these very points, pointing to political definiteness—how must collegiate calls for "safe spaces" play in rural America?—and the elite's pooh-poohing of the terroristic threat (ISIS is Al-Qaeda'due south "JV squad" the president once said) as proof of how out of touch we've get. Panelist Ana Marie Cox took upshot: "So what we need is more coddling of white people?"

Not exactly. What we need is more real connexion, a rekindling of American customs. There's actually a philosophy most this—Communitarianism. Ironically, it influenced a young, ambitious governor in Arkansas in the belatedly '80s and early '90s who would become on to get president. Championed by George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni, Communitarianism grew in the wake of Ronald Reagan's looking out for 1 particular special interest group—the rich—and the left's reactionary emphasis on identity politics. It was a call to serve the mutual good.

Etzioni's emphasis on the importance of common things wasn't new. It's what Lincoln was getting at when he appealed to the "ameliorate angels of our nature." It's what a skinny state legislator with a funny proper noun touched on one night in Boston back in 2004: "If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who tin't read, that matters to me, even if it'south not my kid," some guy named Obama said and then. "If there'south a senior denizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it'due south not my grandparent…It is that fundamental conventionalities—'I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister'south keeper'—that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our private dreams, all the same still come together every bit a single American family unit: 'E pluribus unum,' out of many, ane."

That was classic Communitarianism—the sense that to pursue the common expert is really to benefit us all. Simply Obama didn't align his governing with his rhetoric. White workers who voted for promise in '08 and '12 were now fifty-fifty more desperate for change.

What we need is a politics where self-interest and empathy converge. The more I ruminated over the meaning of this ballot, the more I idea that the answer to the divide is as old equally our history. It is, in point of fact, why we started this website in the starting time identify. Because what we need, in this country and in this city, is more citizenship.

One thing is sure: Left to their own devices, both parties volition now begin the process of overreaching. The Democrats are already turning leftward, well on the way to elevating Bernie Sanders supporter Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, to head the DNC. And Rolling Stone is out with a contrarian piece that doubles downwardly on balkanized identity politics, arguing that, in the future, winning political coalitions won't necessarily need to courtroom the white working class vote. For their part, the Trump takeover of the Republican party seems to promise a toxic mix of resentment-fueled populism with some hateful-streak authoritarianism.

We need neither arroyo. What we demand, instead, is a politics where self-interest and empathy converge. The more I ruminated over the meaning of this ballot, the more than I idea that the answer to the split up is as old as our history. It is, in bespeak of fact, why we started this website in the showtime place. Because what we need, in this country and, especially, in this metropolis, is more citizenship .

To that stop, The Citizen team has put together a comprehensive Ballot Apocalypse Guide—with applied ways non only for you to make your metropolis, land and country amend, simply also to empower yourself. Whether you're depressed or ecstatic about the election results, both are passive reactions. Nosotros're trying to give you information to be proactive.

That'due south why, at Thanksgiving dinner, I won't be fugitive a discussion of politics. I volition, instead, ask all those present—including my wacko far right aunt—to look in and share with the group what, if anything, this election taught us about ourselves. (Take our Thanksgiving Challenge past doing the same and nosotros'll publish the best stories from your holiday dinner table!)

For me, I learned in the aftermath of November eight that I very well may exist the cultural elitist I've been reading about. And, for someone who prides himself on an oceanic sense of curiosity, I was blind to the hurting of my countrymen, as expressed at the polls. That'due south my failure as a citizen. I become the post-election marches and the frustration and maybe fifty-fifty the name-calling. But that stuff is actually easy. Empathy for those I might not understand, and constructive acts to assist span our gap? That'due south harder. And, normally, when you do the harder thing? That's when y'all grow.

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/omg-im-cultural-elitist-larry-platt/

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