We’re not sure to what extent we agree with the analysis by Sam Schulman in the Weekly Standard. He asks: “Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?” His answer: social class. Maybe he is on to something. Those rather condescending interviews by Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson (as contrasted with certain earlier Couric and Gibson interviews) suggest that there is a ring of truth in Schulman’s argument. Here is an excerpt:

Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember. The presidential campaign was going to be about sex — the sex of the inevitable winning candidate. Then it was going to be about race. We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world. But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex. They are looking at social class. Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middle-class — and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles?

The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won’t do. In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely. Obama’s longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism. But no longer. The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers’s malignity and Obama’s connivance. But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do — turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence — they injure not help their cause.

Class will always trump politics. Being the first in one’s family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status. More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became Sixties royalty not because of the status of the Ayers family in Chicago, but because of their relish for violence. They attempted to kill, and celebrated the killings of others (like Charles Manson’s victims and the murder of any number of cops), to set an example for the less privileged. “We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution…Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way,” said the future Mrs. Ayers in 1970…

Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated — but why? He hasn’t, like Chuck Colson, repented, or paid his debt to society by serving a prison term. He doesn’t even enjoy the prestige of a Clinton presidential pardon. Susan Rosenberg, a fellow Weatherman for whom Mrs. Ayers did go to jail rather than implicate in the execution murders of several cops, enjoys that distinction. What makes the Ayerses respectable is purely a matter of upper-middle-class solidarity…

behind Obama’s fiery mentors, there is an upper-middle-class background, attainable, imitable, and soothing. If one were to pick out one real achievement in Senator Obama’s life, it is to show us that attaining his status has been pretty easy for him. And it can thus be pretty easy for us, if we just pull the right lever…

McCain and Palin have each refused, by sheer cussedness, to fulfill the social expectations of others. This may make them poison to undecideds who suffer, more than most, from class anxiety. But do not despise the undecideds. Even conservatives can contract Scheiber Syndrome. Think of David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and George Will. The symptoms? Curiously amplified, obsessively repeated, sometimes elaborately stage-whispered doubts about the Republican ticket.

There is no cure, but there is an etiology. All share a dreadful secret — their writing is driven by an anxiety to be tastemakers to the gentry, not merely thinkers and entertainers. There is nothing more anxious-making than striving to create taste for the classes, not masses, or even to keep up with it. (The struggle to do so is etched in the lines of Tina Brown’s face.) But what the classes think is a matter to which the GOP standard-bearers are sadly but nobly indifferent.

Maybe it’s not just a matter of class, but perhaps also of religion, though the two may correlate pretty well. You will recall that in 2004, those who attended church once a week or more broke 64/35 for Bush and those who never went to church went for Kerry 62/36. HT: Roger Simon

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 5:42 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Religion, Republicans, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.