Like many of you, I've attended many a meeting with fellow activists. Anti-war, pro-single payer health care, economic justice, all good causes, all good people. And with few exceptions, it tends to be the same 200 or so of us attending most of the meetings in my corner of the nation. While we all enjoy seeing one another, this is not mass movement building, and mass movement building is what it is going to take to make the kind of changes we all desire.
So what's preventing us from reaching people who - given the dire state of the economy - should be a receptive audience?
I was sitting in a lovely home in all well regarded suburb near Chicago, a liberal enclave, and feeling pretty inadequate amongst all the Ph.D.s. But academic types are hardly rare in progressive activist circles, and I had largely grown used to the abbreviated jargon flying around. These were nice people. They were professors and writers, largely, but a handful of us were workers of a less ivy tower variety. None of us were rich people, certainly. But I knew that an awful lot of people would see us as caricatures, illustrations from a Sarah Palin speech as to why the "left" is out of touch with "real Americans".
Let's get a definition out of the way first:
The term liberal elite is a political phrase to describe affluent, politically liberal-leaning people. It is commonly used with the pejorative implication that the people who claim to support the rights of the working class are themselves members of the upper class, or upper middle class, and are therefore out of touch with the real needs of the people they claim to support and protect. The phrase "liberal elite" should not be confused with the term "elite" as used by writers such as Vilfredo Pareto and C. Wright Mills. They use the term to mean those who exercise the most political power.
Wikipedia definition of Liberal Elite
And here is something else interesting The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media tries to bring down a rising star
Fox News. Talk radio. Nascar. Toby Keith. What do they all have in common? They are, apparently, enjoyed by "Regular" Americans, not us liberal elitists. We're busy wearing our birkenstocks, driving our hybrid cars, speaking French and, of course, drinking our lattes. And I'd laugh, except....except....this kind of rhetoric resonates with enough people that it's got to be dealt with. And in my every day life, working at a public library, I run into significant numbers of people who buy it.
"They think they know better than everyone else, they think they know what everyone else should do!" one woman told me, as she was pontificating about why couldn't stand "liberals".
"YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME!"
George W Bush, who was an actual elitist, wasn't an elitist by Teabagger definition. Al Gore is, John Kerry is, Barack and Michelle Obama are. It's an ephemeral and an elastic thing, apparently, defining what makes an "elitist" elite. And maybe it's an exercise in futility to try and challenge it and figure out how to reach the people who should be, by logic, supporting what we support - economic justice for working people. It seems to be linked to cultural issues - church, music, taste in entertainment - and rooted, to some extent, in an anti-intellectualism that leads far too many Americans to base their votes on whom they'd like to see at their neighborhood barbecue. It's frustrating. But it's an issue we need to grapple with if we're going to become more effective communicators and it's something I've been discussing with fellow activists as we strive to build grassroots movements.
I'm not a great fan of George Lakoff. But we need to build a mass movement and we need to be more effective in our outreach to people who, perhaps, have never thought of their economic problems as having specific political causes. Or who have adopted the anti-government rhetoric of the populist right to explain their personal struggles. And as long as they are using the "elitist!" epithet as an excuse to disregard our arguments, we're not going to reach them. So - how do we effectively communicate with people who have negative reactions to progressives based on their perception that "you think you're better than us!?