Just because most people like it doesn’t mean you have to

I asked last night what it is that makes Barack Obama and not John McCain an “elitist,” and what I’ve figured out is that it’s a stupid question that, like the ad hominem fallacy, tries to avoid the issues we really need to think about.  From Butterflies and Wheels:

But ‘elitists’ don’t have a monopoly on hidden agendas and invidious motives. One-upmanship, jockeying for position, ressentiment, self-righteousness, the thrills of disapproval and condescension and getting it right while others get it wrong – those are all equal-opportunity pleasures. Anti-elitists get their own little frissons from saying You’re a snob and I’m not. In fact, of course, it’s impossible to think anything is right as opposed to wrong, that any attitude, stance, commitment, political view, idea is better than any other, without opening the door to approval of self and disapproval of others. Quite, quite impossible. If we’re too afraid of being smug and superior and self-righteous to have any opinions at all, we just become vacuous spineless shapeless nothings, and we can never improve or correct or change anything. What could be a more conservative position than that? No, abdication of judgment is neither possible nor desirable, we have to be clear about that, and just settle down to doing it well instead of badly. Terry Eagleton puts it this way:

“We should, I think, give no comfort to those who in the name of a fashionable anti-élitism would ignore real evidence of cultural deprivation, though we should remember of course that there is no single index of cultural flourishing or decline.”

The elitism epithet works to inhibit judgment because it is so a priori. It assumes, without argument, that to say that any popular book or movie or piece of music or tv show is bad is a thought-crime, because doing so second-guesses majority opinion; it says majority opinion is wrong. Democracy is expanded from the political realm to that of ideas and art, and taken to mean that the popular is automatically good and the good is automatically popular. Put like that it looks insane, but what else does the elitist epithet mean?

Sad to say, if we’re going to think at all, we have to be able to think for ourselves. De Tocqueville pointed out how difficult this can be in a democracy, and he scared the hell out of John Stuart Mill, who pointed out the difficulty and the necessity even more sharply. Both the difficulty and the necessity are still with us.

With whom would you prefer a lager?

An often effective method of persuasion is to change the topic from what the argument is about to who the arguer is. It’s known as a fallacy because, according to the Nizkor Project, “the character, circumstances, or actions of a person do not (in most cases) have a bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made (or the quality of the argument being made)”: the topic in the presidential race isn’t what the President will do, it’s what kind of person he is. As Crooks & Liars pointed out last Spring

The data is clear. If the election is about the economy, health care and Iraq, John McCain cannot become the 44th president. Only if the GOP succeeds once again in transforming the race into a media medley about lapel pins, angry ministers and Muslim-sounding middle names can the Republicans hope to maintain their hold on the White House.

And so, [w]hile their man [or woman], be it George W. Bush or John McCain [or Sarah Palin], is the ‘authentic’ guy [or girl] you’d “’ike to have a beer with,’ the GOP drives the media conventional wisdom that paints the likes of Al Gore, John Kerry and now Barack Obama as effete, out-of-touch elitists whose positions change with the wind.”

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that today the Washington Post quoted Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain’s presidential bid, claiming that “[t]his election is not about issues,” said Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

[This leaves aside to me a truly astonishing question: what is it that makes Barack Obama an elitist but not John McCain?]

The creative mind is the one that can master these methods, take them apart when they’re being used against him, and come back with an even more effective strategy.

But what would I know? I blog about law and creativity, and I’m an academic who used to work with a major law firm and at that time lived in Manhattan. I must be an out-of-touch elitist.