Mark Naison: The McCain Palin Ticket Appeals to a Powerful Strain of Anti-Intellectualism in American Society
However, the very things that make McCain and Palin feared in most of the world gives them an excellent chance of winning the presidency. Their proud anti-intellectualism, reflected in their personal histories as well as their rhetoric, touches a powerful chord with many working class and middle class Americans. There is a long tradition in this country of mistrusting people who have advanced academic training, which the McCain/Pallin ticket has used to great effect in holding Barack Obama up to ridicule. While some Americans might admire Barack Obama for working as a community organizer before attending Harvard Law School, and for teach law before running for public office, Republicans have used these features of Obama's biography to saw that he doesn't understand how"real folks" live.
Is this strategy going to work? Unfortunately, it could. Pitting the election as a contest between a"Good Old Boy" and his"Good Old Girl" sidekick against a"Professor" and"Community Organizer" is going to play well in large portions of working class and middle class America. McCain and Pallin are recognizable figures,, people you'd run into on the ball field and or the local bar, while Barack Obama seems like a talented and exotic outsider who somehow married into your family or moved onto your block. McCain and Pallin are candidates of a party whose policies have brought hardship and pain to untold numbers of Americans, whose jobs and homes are in jeopardy, and who are saddle with personal debt. But they speak a language ordinary people can understand and they don't make them feel guilty about their pickups and SUV’s, their snowmobiles or their guns, their service in the military and their religious faith or their occasional trips to the bar or the strip club. By contrast, they don't really know Barack Obama, and mistrust his sophistication, his calm demeanor and, and his easy facility with complex policy questions a president must face.
The discomfort, and the confusion, many working class and middle class Americans feel about intellectuals is something I experienced first hand during my fifteen years coaching sandlot baseball and Catholic Youth Organization basketball in Brooklyn in the 1980's and 1990's. The teams I coached,. though their home base was Park Slope, played many of their games in white working class neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Marine Park, Canarsie and Bergen Beach. The majority of the people I coached against were cops, firemen, construction workers, civil servants, and people who owned small businesses and I really enjoyed spending time with them. They were tough, generous, competitive and far less racist than most people would be led to expect. Though their neighborhoods were still overwhelmingly white, they were scrupulously fair to the Black and Latino kids who played on visiting teams, and tolerate d no racist language and behavior from their players or fans .I liked competing against their teams, working with them to set up games and tournaments, and occasionally going out with them for a meal or a drink. For many years, they had no idea what I did for a living. They saw a big, loud, intense, man prowling the sidelines, someone who pushed his teams hard and never backed down from a physical confrontation, and figured I was one of them, a cop, a sanitation worker, maybe a construction foreman.
When they found out I was a college teacher, they were utterly astonished and extremely confused. It was as though they just found out I had come from outer space"A professor, that's insane" someone told one of my fellow coaches" I thought he was just another Brooklyn redneck,". At the Bergen Beach baseball complex, located in a tough Italian enclave near the Belt Parkway, my name was no longer Mark, it was" Professor.", That is how people began referring to me at games and at meetings. That's how they refer to me today if they run into me in a store or on the golf course. .Their teasing wasn't mean spirited, but it definitely had an edge. These tough, hard working white guys saw professors as people who looked down on folks like them and were quick to write them off. They had felt comfortable with me because of how I acted on and off the field ,but now they wondered whether I secretly held them in contempt. No one said,” wow it's great that a guy who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn went out and got a PhD." Although they never said so in so many words, it seemed as though they feared that the very act of getting a PhD meant that I thought I was better than them.
After listening to the speeches at the Republican Convention, I am convinced that appealing to such fears and suspicions is at the core of the McCain Pallin strategy. None of this is new. From George Wallace, to Spiro Agnew to Rush Limbaugh, the right has used anti-intellectualism, especially directed at Professors, as one of its major rallying cries. But to do so at this historic moment, when the American economy is in deep disarray and so many of its foreign policy initiatives have come to grief, is particularly worrisome. Will working class and middle class Americans see through this desperate charade and vote for someone with the temperament, training and intellect to actually solve some of the nation's problems, or will they let their own fears and prejudices wed them to the status quo. Time will tell, but based on my own personal experience in white middle class and working class America, I am not hopeful.