Ross Douthat has a wonderful way of casually saying things that you don’t hear many conservatives say. For instance, his statement on Monday that “the note of white grievance” that Pat Buchanan struck in a 2000 speech at Harvard is now “part of the conservative melody.” Wow, a prominent conservative who acknowledges that politics in the Obama era involves an aspect of “white grievance.” For that kind of thing alone, Douthat earns his space in the New York Times.
Unfortunately, the rest of his column tries to make out “what Pat Buchanan got right” with his accusation that liberal America discriminates against white Christians. Douthat cites a Princeton study of eight elite colleges, showing that low-income whites are disadvantaged in the admissions process.
For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.
This leads Douthat to conclude:
The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions.
That sounds about right to me. I would guess that working-class white Christians from conservative states and regions are under-represented at Harvard, i.e. they make up a smaller proportion of the Harvard student body than of the United States population.
But in the second half of his column, Douthat tries to make a lot of hay out of this. He says, “Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.”
But remember that the Princeton study was of eight elite schools. If we assume that only alumni of very selective schools go into law, philanthropy, finance, academia, media, and the arts, then Douthat’s “inevitable” conclusion might hold. But might not graduates of disproportionately white and working-class schools also go into these fields? Or is it that Douthat has in mind a certain type of law firm, financial firm, media organization, etc.? Is the New York Times probably a little deficient in the white, working-class, red-state demographic? Yes, probably. Same goes for Teach for America, Morgan Stanley, and Cravath, Swaine & Moore. But what about “law,” “finance,” and “media” generally? We don’t really know.
My point is that Douthat is trying to make a general argument about American society based on the proclivities of a very narrow sliver of the educational elite. Or maybe all I’m really getting at is, like Tim Fernholz, I wonder how many white, working-class, red-state Christians Douthat knows. This part of the column seems to be based on Douthat’s impressions of Harvard, which, while interesting to me, probably don’t have much salience for most Americans.
Then, on the basis of the fact that Harvard doesn’t have many Southern Baptists, Douthat proclaims that there is a “cultural divide” between, well, the stereotypical red American and the stereotypical blue American. Again, this kind of Brooksian commentary is fair as far as it goes. Yes, there’s a cultural divide. No, it probably doesn’t help that elite colleges don’t admit many “aspiring farmers.” (Though I have to say, there might be reasons other than culture for an aspiring farmer to go to Texas A&M rather than Harvard.)
But what really gets me is how Douthat creates a false equivalence between the two sides of this cultural divide. The Right fears that “Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth,” while the Left fears “crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs.” The problem, of course, is that the former set of fears has absolutely no basis in reality, whereas the latter, even if sometimes exaggerated, does.
As Steve Benen notes:
Just this year, John Patrick Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon; Joe Stack flew an airplane into a building; Jerry Kane Jr. and his son killed two police officers in Arkansas; and the Hutaree Militia terrorist plot was uncovered. Last year, James von Brunn opened fire at the Holocaust memorial museum; Richard Poplawski gunned down three police officers in Pittsburgh, in part because he feared the non-existent “Obama gun ban”; and Dr. George Tiller was assassinated. In 2008, Jim David Adkisson opened fire in a Unitarian church in Tennessee, in part because of his “hatred of the liberal movement.”
And today we read:
Convicted felon Byron Williams loaded up his mother’s Toyota Tundra with guns, strapped on his body armor and headed to San Francisco late Saturday night with one thing in mind: to kill workers at the American Civil Liberties Union and an environmental foundation, prosecutors say.
I really hate how we keep coming back to this subject. But the reason we do, it seems to me, is because conservatives like Douthat, ashamed of the radicals that the label “conservative” has come to be identified with, keep trying to argue, in essence, that liberals have the same problem. But they don’t. And if there was anything like the Tea Party Movement on the left, talking about violent revolution etc., I guarantee you Democratic politicians would stay very far away. (Or, imagine that the Tea Party was black.)
If you want to bridge the cultural divide, I think it’s more important to address the festering swamp of paranoia and hatred being fed by Fox News and the likes of Andrew Breitbart, than it is to get Harvard’s admissions officers to admit a few more farmers.
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