Elites

Talking heads and republicans always talk about the elites who support democratic party candidates and policies.  It’s so commonplace that you sort of have to stop and think about the term, “elites,” to see just how strange the word is when applied to democrats.

 

Is the elitism a matter of money?  There’s no doubt that there are rich people on the democrats’ side of the ledger.  But to suggest that wealth is peculiar to democrats to the exclusion of republicans is . . . so obviously nonsense that it’s not even worth arguing against the idea.  Still, consider which pair of candidates boasts millionaire and billionaire status.  According to a Time Magazine article this past July, just two or three weeks ago, Kamala Harris is worth about eight million bucks.  Her republican counterpart claims that he’s worth some ten billion dollars.  In the VP horse race, the headline to an article in 8 August of this year, in Fortune magazine, says it all:  “Tim Walz’s net worth is less than the average American’s.”  By contrast, according to Forbes as reported in a July article in Time Magazine, J. D. Vance is worth around ten million dollars.  So the top of the democratic ticket is poorer—an odd word in this context!—than the bottom of the republican ticket.

 

The same economic differences and equivalencies are no doubt spread throughout the wider membership of the two parties.  Nonetheless, there is no doubt at all that the great business magnates are predominantly in favor of republican candidates because they see republican policies as benefitting them and the wealth that they do not want to share with the rest of us via a more equitable tax structure.

 

So much for economic elitism.

 

Is the elitism a matter of familial descent, a sort of American version of European aristocracy?  I honestly do not know about the familial history of any republican or democrat.  Sure, we know that the Kennedys are supposed to be American royalty—but the familial influence of the Kennedys begins with the wealth of Joseph Kennedy, who is JFK’s father and RFK Jr.’s grandfather.  That’s not exactly a long-standing aristocratic heritage.  And, in point of fact, it is as “established” as is the pedigree of the Trumps.  Donald’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, founded the dynasty; Fred Trump, Donald’s father, increased the wealth of the family; Donald himself benefitted from that wealth in the same way that Joseph Kennedy’s kids benefitted from his wealth.  Are there other dynastic families in the two parties’ followers?  Sure.  The Roosevelts—oops, apparently all gone, and in any case evenly divided between republican and democrat; the Bushes; the Rockefellers; anyone else?

 

So much for “aristocratic” elitism.

 

Is the elitism a matter of education?  Here there does seem to be a difference that “privileges” followers of the democratic party.  According to the Pew Research folks, in the 2022 election, 49% of democratic voters did not have a college degree, whereas 63% of republican voters did not.  I assume that that difference leads to the differences in the votes among suburbanites, insofar as, again I assume, a college degree makes possible the middleclass status that leads to the ability to move to the ‘burbs.  Again according to Pew, in 2022 the democratic suburban vote was 57%, whereas the republican suburban vote was 53%.  Not a huge difference, to be sure, but large enough to make a difference in electoral outcomes when the margins between winners and losers are as slim as they have been for many years. Whether being able to afford to live in a suburb means that the person is “elite” is a different question, of course.  Is it the case that the American self-identification as a middleclass society is no longer valid?

 

I’m tempted to say so much for “educational” elitism here, although there is a fillip of support for the notion that democrats have a higher degree of college education than do republicans.

 

One final question:  is the “elitism” a matter of race?  I want to preface this by saying that to my mind there is nothing “elite” about any racial category, except insofar as some of those categories have institutional and historic privileges that matter a great deal.  In that contex, and with that limitation, then, Pew indicates in 2022 non-Hispanic whites represented 85% of the republican electorate and 64% of the democratic electorate.  That means that “minorities” voted for republicans at the rate of 15%, whereas for democrats at the rate of 36%.

 

So finally we have a clear “elite” advantage for democrats, in the rate of minority participation.

When I Became Black

I have to preface this by saying that my skin color is not brown, let alone black.  Even when I’m tanned, which hasn’t happened for so long that I forget what that feels like, I’m definitely a “white” person.  That’s so much the case that in my younger day kids in school used to say to me that I didn’t look Cuban.  That came from other white kids, naturally, and my response was always that they didn’t look American.  They had to think that one through.

Anyway, the Cuban thing is what makes me write that, white though I am, I know when I became black—not physically, needless to say, but emotionally and with complete and total fellow feeling.

 

It happened when I first got off the bus that took me from my home to the bus terminal from which I then walked the couple of blocks to my elementary school.  The first thing I noticed, because I was so nervous in going to a new school that I had to pee very badly, was that there were four toilets, each clearly marked not just by sex, the regular “Women” and “Men,” but also by color.  “White Women,” “Negro Women”; “White Men,” “Negro Men.”  I went into the “White Men” toilet because what did I know.  When I came out I wanted a drink and so noticed the two water fountains, one refrigerated for “Whites” and one not refrigerated for “Negroes.”  I wanted refrigerated water.  It was Florida in late summer, after all.

 

But what cemented the discrimination of apartheid in my little brain was the restaurant, a greasy spoon that was the only place to eat at that bus depot.  It had a sign above the door, neatly printed with the caption “NO NEGROES,” and under that also neatly printed “NO DOGS.”  Since Cubans were beginning to be a population to worry about—I’m talking 1961—the restaurant owners decided to scrawl in Magic Marker a new caption:  “NO CUBANS.”

 

My little brain, unsophisticated as it was at age 9, saw the point.  I was a stranger in a strange land, and my fellow strangers in a strange land were the African Americans who were as excluded from the restaurant as I was.

 

Oh, I could pass, to be sure.  Pale of skin and pretty adept at English, no one could tell by looking at me or listening to me that I was one of those.  But I knew that I was one of those.  And from that point on, I never but never tried to pass myself off as one of “us.”  I was happy being one of those.

 

As I got older I came to recognize that Blacks in America had a much much harder world to transit than I did, one of those though I was.  No one followed me when I went into a store.  No one suspected me automatically of being a thug or a vagrant or a threat.  Some of that has to do with the fact that I’m so short and puny that I can barely kill a mosquito without a swatter.  But some of it also has to do with the fact that, as the kids in my school said, I don’t look Cuban.

 

In any case, I also had a social and cultural support system that, I discovered, most Blacks in the 1960s, and maybe even the 2020s, just didn’t have.  Almost everyone in my family was highly educated.  Almost everyone in my family had access to books, the memory at least of wealth and status, a history of accomplishment, a “superior” place in the social hierarchy—not in Miami, to be sure, but exile did not define who we were.  There was just no question ever raised that I would work hard at school, do well, go on to college then some post-graduate program, and be a “success.”

 

I know perfectly well that many Blacks had the same sources of pride and place in their own backgrounds—some were then and still are my good friends and they introduced me to the riches of their history and achievements.  And I've come to know some of those riches first hand, teaching African American literature for many years.  But many Blacks do not have such a support system, and the result is that the apartheid I encountered back in 1961, although no longer legal, has a social afterlife that continues to make it very difficult to be Black in America.

 

As I said to begin with, I am not quite like the white cliffs of Dover, but white I am.  But I became black when I got off that bus at the depot.