Mike Elk is a union organizer and fantastic progressive. He’s also a great educator. At last year’s Netroots Nation, he was critical to the success of the full-bore union outreach that brought many of us up to speed on labor’s critical role in keeping the USA healthy.
Elk recently wrote a provocative piece for TruthOut.

His article provoked a lot of discussion amongst thoughtful allies. Some thought he was being too hard on the Democratic establishment, others thought he was right on and still more thought his analysis was good in some areas, but missed the mark in others.
I contributed to the (private) discussion and was asked to weigh in more publicly.

Here’s an abridged version of Mike’s argument:

Conservatives win many votes saying that liberals are elitist. I am here to tell you that the liberal movement is indeed very elitist. Its organization’s staffs are composed mainly of Ivy leaguers whose life experiences are dramatically different than the 70 percent of Americans that never graduate from college. Very few of them have any actual experience living with or knowing working-class people. As a graduate of Bucknell, I still feel out of a place and most glaringly underdressed when I get in a room with the Ivy Leaguers running our movement.

As garbageman turned United Electrical Workers (UE) in Political Action Director Chris Townsend put it to me:

“When I am in meetings in Washington, DC, with organizations that presume to speak for workers or on behalf of workers – I ironically find myself the only worker in the room. As a worker with a GED – and 30-plus years of labor union experience – opinions like mine are rarely sought and universally dismissed as being too extremist when most workers feel the way I do about things. This is why it is so common for liberal and left-wing staff and activists to completely misunderstand workers.”

The experiences of liberal elites are so outside of the mainstream that, very often, they just don’t understand the working class. They fail to communicate to workers because most of them have never talked to a worker in real life, except for to ask for fries at McDonald’s. Instead, when they fail to understand the misdirected anger of the working class at its economic anxiety, they tend to engage in intellectual snobbery and narrow-mindedness that only serve to alienate the white working class further.

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Such snobbery was expressed to me in an email recently sent to me from a Democratic media strategist who said the message of the day was, “Conservatives face a choice about the future of their movement: Will they come to the table to get things done or ‘stick with the angry people’?”

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Americans are screaming now about the economic hell we are in. Republicans are screaming about how awful the economy is and winning many of them over. Albeit, they’re winning them with the wrong solutions, but they are trying to win Joe the Plumber, not Joe Stiglitz, so the details don’t really matter.

On the economy, the Democratic message is, “Sit tight, don’t get out in the street and protest, everything will be alright.”

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The progressives who are telling me to be cool and not get upset with things are just merely talking down to me. They have the privilege of telling me not to get upset, when I have every right to be upset.

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anybody who actually worked on the Obama campaign like I did knew that McCain’s defeat was caused by the financial crisis and McCain’s baffling response and coddling of Wall Street.

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I remember how white, working-class, swing voters couldn’t stop talking about Sarah Palin for weeks on end.

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Many white, working-class people loved her because here was a politician who finally was working class and ready for a fight. They loved her even more as Ivy League liberals denounced her as basically “white trash.” It felt to white, working-class people like liberal elites were calling them “white trash” too.

Liberals still treat Palin and the right-wing populist Tea Party Movement that she leads as “white trash.” They spend more time attacking them as “stupid racists” than actually trying to win them over and address their concerns. It’s as if liberals are saying we know better than you stupid working-class people.
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Republicans are rallying the troops against the educated elites of society. As a result of their political jujitsu, Republicans are making it look like they are engaged in a class war on behalf of the working class against the liberal elite.

Liberals instead are playing into the class war trap by talking down to the uneducated masses of America via TV talk shows and blogs. They can’t understand why they aren’t winning over the working class because they are too busy attacking them.

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I wonder why they feel under attack? Maybe it’s all the liberal elites calling white, working class people “stupid racists.”

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focus groups found that race was not an important factor affecting the political opposition of white, working class conservatives. Indeed, the study found that mocking these people as racists, as I argued in my article, “Martin Luther King Would Have Loved the Teabaggers, Not Called Them Racists,” only serves to stigmatize them more against liberal elites.

Talking down to working class people engaged in a class war against the elites isn’t going to win them over.

What liberals have to do is unite with the teabaggers and engage in a class war against Wall Street. Organized labor has succeeded in doing this by using constant, year-round, on-the-job political engagement to compel people to come over. As a result, Obama won by 23 points among white, non-college graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among all white, non-college voters.

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If we don’t stop laughing at white, working class people, we are going to lose too.

From there, Elk continues on to discuss the fairly unique role unions play in the national discussion. As an institution, they communicate with their members and consistently demonstrate the fallacies inherent to right-wing arguments. His point is that the unions engage with the working class while the Democratic establishment talks down to, or worse, talks over, them.

Much of the push-back against Mike’s piece consisted of Ivy-Leaguers saying that one didn’t have to grow up in a trailer park to understand working-class issues… That many of the the tea-baggers are racist and/or stupid and deserve the derision they earn. Others were concerned that Elk’s use of “elitists” was an unnecessary validation of a long-time Republican attack.

What was odd to me is that both Mike Elk and the people defending themselves against his attack have mainly missed the point, so far as I’m concerned.

It’s not bloggers and activist driving the narrative here. We, Ivy League or GED, aren’t the “elitists” Elk should be concerned about. If Elk had cabined his discussion of “elitists” to those in senior decision-making positions and those researching policy for the Democratic Party and its allied institutions, I’d find little to disagree with.

Here is my contribution to the discussion:

GED, raised in foster homes, on my own at 15, dishwasher, USMC, waiter, bartender, factory worker, landscaper, computer programmer, community college, B.S., J.D…

My thoughts are that liberal elites think themselves above politics. Appealing to the masses is somehow “dirty”; in their minds, if they get the policy right, that should be enough. Holed up in academia, foundations or think-tanks, these folks just don’t get out enough to realize that the rest of America isn’t paying attention to them. Professional wrestling, Fox News, talk radio, church, sports and country music are much more a part of Joe and Jane Sixpack’s life than cap and trade will ever be. To the extent politics fits in, the message has to be simple, and if possible, caricatured. I’m not sure how much of America this describes, but it’s not insignificant. These folks vote, and their vote counts just as much as ours.

Reaching them? You’ve got to chip away at the trust they have in their institutions. You can wait for Republicans to do it themselves and that will work at the margins when things get bad enough…

What’s key is that you cannot expect to win by attacking these folks personally. You’ll only succeed in alienating them further and driving them deeper into their cocoons.

Part of the reason we did well in 2006 was that there really had festered a culture of corruption that constituted a betrayal of trust. Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley, Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, and incessant “last throes” statements killed folks’ faith in what Rush and O’Reilly and church leaders were telling them about Republicans. Moreover, people never saw how Republicans made their lives better.

And that’s the crux.

We’re on the verge of traipsing down that very path. Sure, the rank corruption won’t be as bad (Charlie Rangel is pretty much our worst now that the dude from LA is about to be sentenced), but the institutional corruption of buying off pharma and AHIP to get a health deal, coddling Wall Street as they bestow billions in bonuses upon themselves, continuing heavy defense spending while cutting almost everything else, buying off big coal and big ag to get cap and trade… well, all of that constitutes a more pernicious form of elitism that gets in the way of liberals actually dealing with main street problems.

Moreover, to rank and file liberals, this kind of thing is perceived as institutional corruption and chips away at the trust we have in our own institutions, and, following, our incentive to turn out at the polls.

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I think we lost in 2004 because too many Democrats are elites… Who told Kerry to ignore the purple heart band-aids? The swift-boat attacks? I’ll put up $20 to a box of donuts that is was some elite snob turned off at the idea of having to respond to the rabble. And Kerry, blue-blood that he is, took that advice.

Elites hate populist politics. Our party hierarchy is replete with these folks.

We didn’t win any recent elections because of an absence of elitism on our side. We won because Obama has charisma and Republicans lost the trust of the folks they spent so long lying to.

But now… here we are again. Obama’s charisma continues to stem a precipitous decline, but we also don’t see him listening to Main Street America. If he was, how do you possibly explain Geithner keeping his job? One third of the stimulus being tax cuts?

And please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Main Street America is the font of all that is good and wise. I’m just saying that the evidence demonstrates that Obama is listening to David Broder and David Brooks much more than he’s noticing the problems of Americans working two jobs to pay the rent, daycare and health insurance.

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[in response to a conversant that claimed our loss in 2004 could be blamed on bad policy and bad tactics]

And I’m saying that Kerry’s mistakes were borne of elitism… that someone with dirt under his fingernails would never have made those mistakes.

And I’m saying that the difference between Kerry and Obama is charisma.

Policy only matters in electoral politics when it arrives on voter’s doorsteps. We didn’t lose in 2004 because Bush had better policies; we lost because of a refusal to connect with voters where they were.

And that’s why I thought Howard Dean was the much better candidate.

Moreover, (I think) that’s why the Village destroyed Howard Dean: it’s ok to use populism to affect policies that advantage the elite, but… don’t even think about it if you are going to help the “little people” at the expense of the villagers and their brokers.

That’s why Clinton was never welcome in Washington and why, over time, he became more corporate friendly and less populist.

So yeah, I do think there is a strain of elitism running through the progressive establishment (of which the blogosphere is not a part, yet…) that has very little to do with vanity. The marketing side of politics is forsaken by many of the heavy-weights that occupy the higher echelons of the progressive establishment.

Discuss.