CLASS WARFARE? TELL ME ABOUT IT

By Michael Kinsley

"We've got to get away from this idea of economic class warfare that gets thrown into this discussion over and over again by the Democrats," said Republican Representative Bill Archer, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, on pbs's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour the other day. "I'm really sad that they continue to go back trying to divide America."

Whenever a Democrat points out that some Republican policy would help the rich or hurt the poor, a Republican invariably replies that the Democrat is practicing "class warfare." The label has been applied lately to Democratic critiques of some of the policies in the Contract with America, like the capital-gains tax cut, the business-depreciation tax cut and the "middle class" tax cut that would apply to incomes up to $200,000 a year. This is supposed to be a damning critique. The implication is that class warfare is a terribly old-fashioned or impolite or downright un-American thing to engage in. Class warfare: it sounds Marxist at worst, European at best.

Well, it would be lovely if the political dialogue could be conducted totally in terms of the general welfare, with no invidious arguments that seek to divide Americans from one another. And it would be swell if no politician ever suggested that an opponent was serving class interests that differed from those of the voters being addressed. But that is not the world we live in. In the real world, Republicans have been skilled and ruthless practitioners of class warfare themselves. "Us vs. them" has been the Republican theme in every recent election, and it has usually worked. Indeed, the current Republican ascendancy is a triumph of two kinds of class warfare.

First, there is cultural class warfare. Whether accurately or otherwise, the Republicans have portrayed the Democrats as the party of a cultural elite-ivory-tower intellectuals and inside-the-Beltway bureaucrats totally alienated from the concerns of ordinary Americans. The redirection of populist resentment from top-hatted Wall Street businessmen to Chardonnay-sipping Washington pointy-heads has been nothing short of brilliant.

By now it is a reflex. House Speaker Newt Gingrich uses the term elite as an all-purpose epithet, meaning little more than someone or something he doesn't like. Just since the election he has applied the term to directors of art museums ("self-selected elites using your tax money and my tax money to pay off their friends"), to the Bipartisan Entitlement Reform Commission ("driven by elite values"), to people who send E-mail messages supportive of President Clinton ("urbanites make up the Internet elite," according to a Gingrich spokesman) and, of course, time and again, to the "elite media" or "media elite." If this kind of talk is not class warfare, what is?

The second type of Republican class warfare is more subtle. It is classic economic warfare, only from the top down instead of from the bottom up. American politics can be seen-crudely, perhaps deplorably, but not inaccurately-as a battle between the poor and the rich for the allegiance of the middle class. Call it empathy vs. aspiration. In the 1960s the middle class joined hands with the poor. Since 1980 it has seen its class interest as lying more with the rich.

Political strategists talk about "wedge issues," meaning issues that pry voters away from their traditional allegiances. Welfare is the classic wedge issue. Conservative welfare reformers may say their primary concern is to liberate the poor from the shackles of their underclass culture, and some of them may even believe it. But only the most naive or cynical among them would deny that the political potency of the welfare issue derives mostly from resentment of the poor as leeches on society, not from sympathy for their plight. This resentment may be justified or it may not, but encouraging and exploiting it have been wildly successful Republican strategies.

Why is it illegitimate class warfare for the Democrats to try to portray the Republican Party as the handmaiden of the financial elite, but not class warfare for the Republicans to tar the Democrats as creatures of a cultural elite? If the Republicans feel free to exploit resentment of the poor, why shouldn't the Democrats feel free to exploit resentment of the rich?

Class warfare does seem like a fusty foreign concept. But in a slightly different guise it dominates not only American politics but much of American society as well. That guise is the cult of victimization, about which much has been written (such as Time critic Robert Hughes' wonderful book Culture of Complaint). By now the game is to accuse others of playing the victim card, and then to trump them. Blacks and women having had their turn, it is apparently the moment for white males to enjoy semiofficial permission to feel sorry for themselves-and to demand redress. This is a class war everyone is fighting, and no one is suing for peace. Maybe it's a job for Jimmy Carter.