The Myth of the Elite Liberal Conspiracy
from What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank

Here is G. Gordon Liddy, the celebrated Watergate felon, telling us how it all works in his best-selling 2002 backlash When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country.

There exists in this country an elite that believes itself entitled to tell the rest of us what we may and may not do—for our own good, of course. These left-of-center, Ivy-educated molders of public opinion are concentrated in the mass news media, the entertainment business, academia, the pundit corps, and the legislative, judicial, and administrative government bureaucracies. Call it the divine right of policy wonks. These people feed on the great American middle class, who do the actual work of this country and make it all happen. They bleed us with an income tax rate not seen since we were fighting for our lives in the middle of World War II; they charge us top dollar at the box office for movies that assail and undermine the values we are attempting to inculcate in our children.[1]

 The same bunch of sneaking intellectuals are responsible for the content of Hollywood movies and for the income tax, by which they steal from the rest of us. They do no useful work, producing nothing but movies and newspaper columns while they free­load on the labor of others. Liberals, in other words, are parasites.

From the mild-mannered David Brooks to the ever-wrathful Ann Coulter, attacks on the personal tastes and pretensions of this stratum of society are the stock-in-trade of conservative writers. They, the conservatives, are the real outsiders, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and the mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social “betters” to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.

The conservatives cast their acid gaze upon college towns in New England, where self-righteous young students flirt intensely with some species of lifestyle experimentation, party away the nights, and consume their special, special lattes. The conservatives laugh derisively at the earnest young vegans of Washington, D.C., two years out of Brown and already lording it over the hardworking people of the vast interior from a desk at the EPA. The conservatives sneer at the child-rearing habits of the hippie set; they quote incredulously from the frothy statements of fashion designers; they rage righteously against the carnival of Ivy League treason at this year’s conclave of the Modern Language Association, always taking the pseudo-radical claims of those Ivy Leaguers—along with the pseudo-radical pronouncements of most fashion designers and those hippies—at face value.

Whatever the target, the conservative social critique always boils down to the same, simple message: liberalism—meaning everything from racy TV to deconstructionists in the Yale French Department—is an affectation of the loathsome rich, as bizarre as their taste for Corgi dogs and extra-virgin olive oil. “That’s the whole point of being a liberal: to feel superior to people with less money,” seethes the inimitable Ann Coulter.

Only when you appreciate the powerful driving force of snobbery in the liberals’ worldview do all their preposterous counterintuitive arguments make sense. They pro­mote immoral destructive behavior because they are snobs, they embrace criminals because they are snobs, they oppose tax cuts because they are snobs, they adore the environment because they are snobs. Every pernicious idea to come down the pike is instantly embraced by liberals to show how powerful they are. Liberals hate society and want to bring it down to reinforce their sense of invincibility. Secure in the knowledge that their beachfront haciendas will still be standing when the smoke clears, they giddily fiddle with the little people’s rules and morals.[2]

Coulter instantiates this thesis about the rich not by opening a copy of Fortune or Cigar Aficionado but by turning to what’s on TV. See, there’s all sorts of filth, put there by liberals. We know the liberal elite hate the common people because of what we see on TV, what we read in highbrow modern fiction, all of which can be laid at the doorstep of liberalism. On the other hand, we know that the GOP is the true party of the workers, since the hard-guy Republican Tom DeLay is “more likely to have a beer with a trucker” than the wealthy senator Barbara Boxer of California. We know it because the two social possibilities of American life are mimicking the liberal “beautiful people” of Hollywood or embracing “the working-class hillbillies who go to NASCAR races,” that favorite litmus test of the populist right.

[1] G. Gordan Liddy, When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2002), pp. 26–27.

[2] Ann Coulter, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (New York: Crown, 2002), pp. 29, 27.