Maybe A Better Question Is What's The Matter With Berkeley, Harvard, etc.

Thinking more about that annoyingly clueless piece by Theo Anderson I wrote about yesterday, it's remarkable how much scribbling has been done about "what's wrong with poor white people" by those who wonder why "they don't vote the way we want them to". Perhaps it's that my life has been passed largely among poor white people of the kind a Berkeley Sociologist has to travel to Louisiana to find to study but I've known lots and lots of poor white people, many who have a high school education, if that, who consistently vote for Democrats. As I mentioned the other day, a lot of them are Catholics and just about all of them are religious believers, most of them Christians.

My question is why these writers, Tomas Frank, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Theo Anderson, ... generally the products of elite educational institutions, Ivy and might-as-well be Ivies, never seem to study why poor white people who do "vote the right way," choose to vote the right way.  Would a book that studied why such "working class white people" vote for liberal democrats, what liberal democrats do right to convince them to vote for them,  sell?  My suspicion is that it wouldn't because I have come to suspect that the motive behind such pseudo-scientific study is, itself, an occasion of mostly wealthier white people feeling smugly superior to those of the great unwashed, satisfyingly ignorant masses.   And, let me clue them in, such underclass people know it just as other people who have been the frequent subjects of sociologists and anthropologists know some of that is what's behind such study.* 

I have come to suspect that the motive of most of that activity is not to find out how to appeal to such people, it is another occasion for such academic and journalistic elites to lord it over them. I think that that long established pattern has become expected by the members of the underclass and that is why Republicans can make such hay of things like Barack Obama's ill advised guns and religion comment and, now Hillary Clinton's admittedly dumb "basket of deplorables" gaff. In looking around the lefty comment threads, some of them are now pissed off at her for apologizing for it when that was not only called for but the most politically astute way of dealing with it. The reason they're upset with the apology is that they love to think of the underclass in that way.

Can you imagine Elizabeth Warren saying something like that? I have a hard time imagining it and the reason for that is because she came from a background in which she actually knows and deals with poor white people and she has advocated for them her entire public career. I think Hillary Clinton knows better than to have said it and I imagine it was a result of sheer exhaustion and perhaps exasperation that something like that came out. But the problem that Hillary Clinton faces, politically, isn't from poor white people, it's from rich white people who own the media, who lie to and deceive and propagandize poor white people. Most of them are the products of Ivys and might as well be institutions or they work for people who went to them and are either members of that elite group or that is their aspiration.

*  The often told joke runs something like "The average [name whatever target ethnic group] family consists of a father, a mother, two children and an anthropologist [more rarely "sociologist].   Other than the weirdest of rich folk like the exhibitionists of the Loud family going on a half-century ago, I can't recall any wealthy people who allowed that kind of violation of their privacy.   The closest thing I can think of, off hand, as an academic study is Thorstein Veblen's observations in his Theory of the Leisure Class well over a century ago.  And that was hardly something the rich volunteered to be subjects of.