Norman Rockwell, "Election Day"
Recently I have been reading a good
deal about elites and elitism in the papers, and it seems pretty clear that a
lot of folks don’t like them or it. Many
of these elites live in coastal states, where they drink Sancerre and macchiatos—ingestive
behaviors that have so provoked the non-elites, who live in landlocked states
and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and Doctor Pepper, as to lead to the election of
President Donald Trump. The denizens of
Flyover Country are “populists” or at least suckers for “populism”—making it
all the more confusing that Mr. Trump did not in fact win the “popular” vote.
For a long time I though elite meant “little writing”. This is on account of an old Smith-Corona
portable typewriter that was lying around my grandmother’s house. It was an elite
typewriter—meaning that it produced a line of type with twelve characters
to the inch. This seemed more elegant
than the standard burly pica, with
only ten characters per inch. Many years
later, when I began to learn something about printing, all this became
clearer. But since nobody can tell me
what a “populist” is, I have came to think of Trump voters as the Picas.
American politicians were already
wooing the Picas before Andrew Jackson. If
you are old enough you may remember Spiro Agnew, a disgraceful and indeed
disgraced Vice-President in the Age of Nixon, notable back in the day for his
pithy invective. It was he, for example,
who memorably characterized his critics as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Of course he only said that. The actual author
of the words was William Safire, a Republican speech-writer and long-time “word
maven” for the New York Times. But Agnew did actually say a few things on
his own. When criticized for being a
mediocrity he uttered a plea of no contest but pondered aloud whether his
critics didn’t think that the large number of mediocre Americans were deserving
of representation.
This was
met with howls of derision, though it was in fact a classic American gesture of
anti-elitism of the sort that has given so many of our politicians their
annoying folksiness. Once the Founding
Fathers were gotten out of the way, claiming to have been born in a log cabin became
one of the first requirements for major political office. The log cabin was the
only maternity ward suitable for a serious presidential aspirant. Having forebears who arrived on Plymouth Rock
on the Mayflower was far less prestigious than having arrived in Dry Gulch in a
covered wagon. Oklahoma became a state
in 1907. It immediately became de rigueur for gubernatorial candidates there
to boast of a strain of “Indian blood” not always clearly demonstrated by the handwritten
genealogies in their family Bibles. The current
senior senator from Massachusetts, born an Okie, has carried the tradition into
the twenty-first century. No elitist can
beat us.
But the
cold comfort of philology is that the American political system is and must
remain inescapably elitist—at least so long as we remain committed to an
electoral process. As is true of many
modern English word families, the vocabulary of election includes some words
directly derived from Latin and some others indirectly derived by way of
medieval French. The Latin verb eligere means to choose, select, or
elect. The idea is that of identifying a
preference among options. The past
participle of eligere is electus, and from that we get elect in its nominative and adjectival
forms in both its theological (“Elect
from every nation, yet one o’er all the earth…”) and social (the Mikado’s
daughter-in-law-elect) senses. The process of choosing is called election. The word elite
is an old French equivalent of the Latin electus,
and it too has entered the English vocabulary.
What goes
without saying often goes unsaid. The
idea of election or choice implies a perceived superiority. If you have a choice among several options,
you want to choose the best, the biggest, the tastiest, the freshest, the
cleanest, the most valuable, etc. When
we speak of “elite schools” it implies that we think that Harvard University is
in some sense superior to Podunk County Community College. And not to choose something is to neg+elect it. We now hear that Donald Trump is the revenge
of a neglected electorate. This is all
rather curious. The associations of
certain usages of the word elite—especially
that of snobbish superiority—point to a paradox in the electoral process. All politicians crave to be elected. None dares claim to be elite.
You or I may find that elitism
renders puzzling results. In an age more
innocent of political correctness a witty British journalist came up with a
witty apothegm: How odd of God to choose
the Jews. To which the brilliant riposte
soon came: Far from bizarre. The goyim annoy Him. We still await the bard of the election of
2016.
