IN DEFENSE OF THE "CHATTERING CLASSES"
By Max Boot
June 11 at 5:45 PM
It was the kind of Facebook post that, in years past, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to. Heck, I might have posted it myself. It was a picture of a Memorial Day parade in a small town in the Northeast. A Facebook “friend” (meaning, a real-life acquaintance) wrote above it: “This is the real America: uncomplicatedly patriotic, proud, hard-working, decent folks. So different from the chattering classes.”
The author of this dismissive missive was, it goes without saying, a member of the “chattering classes” himself. As was the man who coined the phrase: Alan Watkins, a conservative British columnist, who first used it during the 1980s to refer to liberal intellectuals who loathed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
The subtext is this: I may make my living as a wordsmith or a talking head, but I’m not part of some know-it-all, out-of-touch elite. I’m good people, the salt of the earth, because I speak for the conservative masses and join in their contempt of my liberal peers.
My Facebook friend took this invective a step further by implying that all chatterers are unpatriotic, lazy and indecent. Not himself, of course: He meant everyone to his left, which, given that he appears to be a Trump supporter, includes a lot of people.
This is a populist trope with a long history. President Richard M. Nixon invoked the “hard hats” and the “silent majority,” while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, attacked “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
Naturally, Agnew’s words were penned by speechwriters — William Safire and Patrick Buchanan — who were, by definition, members of the “chattering classes” themselves.
I used to think right-wing anti-elitism against the intellectuals — in contrast to the left-wing anti-elitism against the rich — was innocuous and even well-warranted. While warning of the dangers of populism, I sometimes indulged in this kind of posturing myself.
Like a lot of conservative eggheads, I imagined that, even though I lived among the coastal elite, I was expressing the wisdom of the heartland.
I now realize that these stereotypes are lazy, stupid and dangerous.
They are, in fact, a right-wing version of the Marxist conceit that the “proletariat” is good and the “bourgeoisie” bad. It was only a short step from this assumption to Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot consigning intellectuals — the “enemies of the working class” — to hard labor or an unmarked grave.
In reality, virtue is not the monopoly of any social class. There are plenty of admirable working-class individuals — and also plenty of lazy, good-for-nothings. The same is true of the educated elite: Some are laudable, others aren’t.
Try telling my friend Elliot Ackerman, an acclaimed novelist, that he is lazy and unpatriotic. His Marine Corps service in Iraq, which earned him a Silver Star and a Bronze Star for Valor, attests otherwise. (The New York Times recently published a powerful excerpt from his new memoir.)
It is not only factually wrong but morally obtuse and politically dangerous to stigmatize the “chattering class” — i.e., those of us who earn a living by writing and speaking about the world.
In the United States, to be sure, it will not lead to Stalinist show trials, a Cultural Revolution or the “killing fields,” but it could conceivably lead to the kind of soft authoritarianism that Viktor Orban has imposed in Hungary.
President Trump shows his eagerness to imitate the dictators by calling the news media “the enemy of the people” and denouncing his critics as traitors. The president’s hateful rhetoric encouraged one supporter to mail pipe bombs to prominent liberals and journalists, and could yet spark greater violence.
Trump hates the chattering classes because they don’t support him; for him, all politics is personal. But there’s more to it than that. He fears the chattering classes because they can mobilize opposition to him and expose his sordid secrets.
More than a political threat, the chattering classes are a psychological threat: They feed Trump’s insecurities because he knows they view him as a buffoonish ignoramus, not as the “extremely stable genius” that he so desperately wants to be.
Because the chattering classes stand in opposition to Trump’s designs to impose authoritarianism in the United States, I am proud to count myself among their ranks.
Trump prefers — make that “loves" — “the poorly educated,” because they are more likely to support him. In 2016, Trump won 66 percent of white voters with a high school diploma or less, and only 48 percent of whites with a college degree.
This is a reversal of a long-standing pattern of white college graduates voting Republican.
With his anti-intellectual, racist and nativist words and acts, Trump has turned the GOP into the party of the white working-class and the enemy of the educated.
To paraphrase FDR, I welcome their enmity. 
And the road to this hellish populism was paved by people such as my Facebook friend, with their casual contempt for the “chattering classes.”
-washingtonpost.com
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/...5bfa32cba8 
