Words, wormholes and obstacles to productive discussion

Something one of our columnists wrote this week set me on the path for this week’s column, one of those cases where you have vague ideas floating like blurry birds in the distance of your mind until something suddenly brings them closely into focus. The subject: elites. And concurrently, populism.

I’ve long wondered about how these terms worked their way into our consciousness, how they separate us in our public discussions and what they actually mean. Michael Barone, of all people, helped provide some clarity.

Barone is one of those conservatives who likes to beat on that class of people he calls “elites.” His column this week bemoaned what he sees as the “intellectual rot” of this class, stemming from the embarrassing performance of the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT during their stumbling congressional testimony in defense of their policies toward anti-Semitism on campus. I wasn’t offended by his condemnation of their mealy-mouthed attempts to justify inaction in the face of rankly offensive behavior. What thinking person couldn’t be at least embarrassed by the inability of the heads of some of America’s premier university to unequivocally condemn repugnant ideas?

But I was curious that he was so willing to slide down this wormhole to discredit the whole body of America’s vast higher education culture and, beyond that, a vast body of Americans who happen to see the world differently from the way he sees it. He calls these people “elites.”

And, it strikes me that this is a term we generally reserve for a particular degree of accomplishment. We have elite athletes, elite actors, elite songwriters, elite physicists, elite mathematicians, elite entrepreneurs, elite ministers and on and on. How did elite thinkers come to such a hard fall from grace?

And why - and here’s what really captured my imagination - does a Michael Barone, for example, not qualify for that class? Barone has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. In terms of educational accomplishment, does one get more elite than that? He appears regularly as a commentator on national television programs, has published essays and books on contemporary topics and writes a weekly column appearing in newspapers across the country for one of the top syndicates in the nation. In my book, he’s about as elite as they come.

And let’s not simply pile on thinkers like Barone. Our generally liberal columnists Susan Estrich and Jeff Robbins also have been railing in recent weeks about the “elites” whom they believe are diverting the national conversation on Mideast affairs. Both these writers have extensive credentials in media and direct links to the country’s pre-eminent universities. They are suddenly not “elite”?

In my own experience, this line of thinking traces to Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s eventually disgraced vice president, who gained popularity decrying the “effete corps of impudent snobs” and “nattering nabobs of negativism,” mostly in the media, whose approaches to politics he opposed. It wasn’t a new strategy in American discourse - or any nation’s discourse, I suppose - of personalizing ideological conflict, but it at least burnished the trend.

Which, speaking of wormholes, leads me to “populism,” a term I suspect many would see as the polar opposite of “elitism.” It, too, is often co-opted for a writer’s selfish purposes. Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, is often described as both a “populist” president, praised by certain individuals and opposed by certain others for his fundamental advocacy of bootstrap self-improvement and uncompromising nationalism, and as a “progressive,” praised by supporters and dismissed by opponents for his ideas on social welfare and monopoly busting. Our most famous contemporary populist, of course, is Donald Trump, and one could name any number of similarly directed public personalities from George Wallace to Andrew Jackson who have captured a certain segment of the public imagination with ideas that at their core evoke simply a rugged opposition to, well, elitists.

How, I have often wondered, has populism come to define a certain type of thinking that is somehow lesser than, or at least adversarial to, elitism? Shouldn’t populism, a specific appeal to the masses, be something to be appreciated in a democratic society?

I don’t have answers to such questions, I’m sorry to say after you’ve traveled with me so far down this particular gaping pipeline of reasoning, but I do think there’s something here that newspaper readers and people who take part in broad public discussions should keep in mind. The application of certain words has a great power to channel one’s thinking toward personalities and distract it from ideas, and it seems to me that this makes a great and injurious impact on productive conversation.

And, just for one last glimpse of those fleetingly clear birds that brought us to the point, add to this line of thinking the term “woke,” introduce the central theme of the hymn Amazing Grace - “I once was blind, but now I see” - and see where it takes you.

jslusher@dailyherald.com