www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.18218/article_detail.asp
Karl Zinsmeister Goodbye "Regular Joe" Democrat Democrats: the party of the little guy. Those images of America's two major political wings have been froz en for generations. The stereotypes were always a little off, incomplete , exaggerated. Starting in the 1960s and '70s, whole blocs of "little guys"--et hnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops, construction workers, homema kers, military veterans--began moving into the Republican column. And bi g chunks of America's rich elite--financiers, academics, heiresses, medi a barons, software millionaires, entertainers--drifted into the Democrat ic 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 f irm. Comparing counties that voted strongly for Bush to those that voted strongly for Gore in the 2000 election, the study shows that in pro-Bus h counties only 7 percent of voters earned at least $100,000, while 38 p ercent had household incomes below $30,000. In the pro-Gore counties, fu lly 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 f inanciers. Obviously both parties have their fat cats, but Federal Election Commissi on data show that many of the very wealthiest political players are now in the Democratic column. Today's most aggressive political donors by fa r are lawyers--who donated $98 million dollars to 2004 political candida tes as of June. Kerry's m onthly fundraising totals have routinely doubled or even tripled Bush's totals. And the money on the Kerry side has come much more from rich ind ividuals, while Bush has relied on flocks of small donors. John Kerry is in many ways a perfect embodiment of the Democratic Party's takeover by wealthy elites. Experts describe his genealogy as "more roy al than any previous American President." There is a long line of blue b lood and inherited funds in his family, and his life has been anything b ut typically American: Mom was an heiress summering at her family's reso rt estate in France when she met dad, a Phillips Andover/Yale/Harvard La w School alum who was passing his own summer of 1937 in France "as an ap prentice in a sculptor's studio." John's early boyhood was spent in a gr and 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 se nd him off to boarding school and he would adapt anew to a world of comp etitive boys from wealthy, privileged families," as Kerry's Boston Globe biographers summarize. He described himself at that point as being "from Oslo, Norway" (where his father was then posted as a diplomat). Paul's and then Yale, Kerry whirled through hoity-toity circles with Auc hinclosses and Bundys and trust-funders of all sorts, and when it came t ime for marrying, he showed the darnedest luck at finding true loves wit h true money. 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 p oint of functional bankruptcy. But most of his life has been grand: hund red-dollar haircuts by Christophe, Old Master paintings, and expensive t oys of all sorts. His five current houses, one more achingly exclusive t han 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. National Journal rates his record the most liberal in the US Senate (John Edwards is tied for second). The term "limousine liberal" doesn't adequately capture how disconnected Democrats like John Kerry (and Jay Rockefeller, and Barbara Streisand, a nd Jon Corzine--there are now many such) are from everyday American life . They are more like "Learjet liberals," who literally pronounce their p oxes on oil executives and cattlemen from leather sofas floating at 15,0 00 feet inside their personal jets (which consume 1,200 gallons of fuel every time they streak their enlightened owner to an Idaho skiing weeken d or Cape sailing jaunt). John Kerry is a man who will ignore his own car registration fees and par king tickets and dinner tabs, while cavalierly calling pharmaceutical sc ientists "selfish" and "irresponsible." He is a fellow who made no chari table donations for years on end, while excoriating other Americans for being "hard-hearted" and "greedy." In this issue of The American Enterprise, Chris Weinkopf, Joel Kotkin, an d other contributors limn John Kerry's separation from middle-class Amer ica. They connect Kerry's rarefied politics back to New England, the reg ion that produced him, as well as the other Democratic favorite this yea r, Howard Dean. New England is an area well out of the American mainstre am in many ways. Politically, it is more liberal than the rest of Americ a Economically it often resembles Europe more than the rest of the coun try. And culturally, New England is far more prone to elitism than any o ther part of the US New England's elitism--and the resulting tendency of its politicians to a ssign decision making to a managerial class at the top of society--is th e quality that propels it most emphatically out of mainstream American p ractice. 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 s pecial talents, every man is fundamentally as worthy as another. This sp rings from both our religious traditions and the egalitarian principles on which our government was founded. And historically it has been everyd ay yeomen, not lords, who did most of the building and defending of Amer ica. Most every rifleman who fought in our Revolution could read and write, ha d 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 s ame time, the officers were generally the only ones who were literate. A s 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 popul ation lived outside the major cities, and we continue to be a highly dis persed, localized, and independent-minded people, quite resistant to bos sing from the center. Average Americans believe elitism is not only wrong in principle, but als o ineffective. In his new book The Wisdom of Crowd s, James Surowiecki of The New Yorker demonstrates that a cross-section of everyday people will generally prove better at solving knotty societa l problems than any fraternity of experts. He presents many proofs for t he conclusion--long promoted in these pages--that ordinary citizens poss ess 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. America's distaste for elitism might once have trans-lated into a distrus t for conservatism. But today, with country-club Republicans having been swept aside by NASCAR Republicans, there is nothing undemocratic about American conservatism. It is now liberalism that is the dominant creed a mong elites. Over the last generation, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington r eports, professional elites have become both "less nationalistic" and "m ore liberal than the American public. This is reve...
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