By Erik Dolson
Matt Taibbi is my favorite political writer: he is observant, knowledgeable, willing to take on the left as well as the right, and crafts metaphors into blades of keen edge.
But he’s not infallible. In his recent piece “Does America Hate the ‘Poorly Educated’?” Taibbi pushes the theme that educated Americans (Liberal, living on the coasts, well-off) hate the poorly educated, and believe “that people with the right degrees deserve to be rich, and have health insurance, and good schooling for their kids, and dignified work, while those who threw away their books after high school deserve failure, in the same way smokers deserve lung disease — especially if they make unsanctioned political choices.”
In many ways I agree with his indictment of Liberal “elites,” and wrote about that in my 2013 book Chalice: “…you don’t like their guns, their beer, their hunting, their cheeseburgers, their underwear, the religious values… the list is well documented… you called them ignorant…”
While “deserved failure” may have been unmasked in Liberal elites during the pandemic, it’s been a Republican staple forever. It’s “class warfare” with different uniforms: not capitalists versus workers, or rich versus poor (when rich Republicans say with a tremor, “You’re talking about class warfare!” the response should be “Yes, but the lower classes didn’t start it.”).
Instead, Taibbi boils it down to the “credentialed” versus those who “threw away their books after high school…” and credits this message to Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. I’ve not read that book and am not addressing Sandel’s thesis.
But Taibbi fails when he says the anger Liberals (like myself) feel toward the unvaccinated is based on belief that the less educated are morally inferior. I don’t know why Taibbi made this extrapolation. It may may frustration with Liberals that equals his outrage about unfairness that stains American society (both of which I share).
But it’s a fact that vaccine denial is most prevalent among Americans with the least respect for education (how much respect is deserved can wait for another day). To this, I’ll invoke an old Christian saying that’s lost currency: “Hate the sin, not the sinner.”
Are Liberals angry about how the less educated respond to COVID? Yes. It’s the anger seen in families that don’t agree on how to handle a crisis when acts of some affect all. All anger is based in fear, and the fear is justified.
Fear that innocent Americans will die because they are unable to get care in hospitals full of patients who refused to get vaccinated against Covid.
Fear that those refusing to wear masks are prolonging the epidemic.
Fear that the unvaccinated are making the epidemic worse, as delay allows the virus to evolve, because some crackpot radio host (one of whom recently died of COVID) profits off their ignorance.
Fear that anti-vaxers don’t have the education to keep from drinking horse dewormer.
It’s easy to understand why the less educated don’t trust Liberals, or government, or their teachers. Aside from feeling the scorn “elites” have for them, the undereducated working class knows they have been not just left behind, but that they havebeen betrayed.
They know it was Republican CEOs who shipped their jobs to Mexico and China. They know it was good old American capitalism that flooded their communities with oxycontin, and that the Sackler family who profited gets to keep most of their billions. They know their schools suck and their kids are not likely to get into college, or find good jobs even if they do put down the pipe.
They also know they were betrayed by those supposed to defend them: Democrats, the Clintons and Pelosi's, and all of Democrat California. Powerful persons were supposed to defend the “average man and woman” working hard at a job. Liberals were supposed to fight for fairness, and opportunity.
Instead, Liberals took corporate dollars and embraced identity politics as “their” base. Liberals favored the “disadvantaged” clustered in urban areas over those who worked at lesser jobs that were disappearing; Liberals fed chicken to the unemployed while working families were getting by on peanut butter; Liberals protected trees before jobs; Liberals advocated for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) populations and mocked families with (supposedly) Christian beliefs.
But Taibbi concludes that “In the pandemic age, Americans on either side of the educational divide have moved past rooting for each other to fail. They’re all but rooting for each other to die now, and that isn’t a sentiment either side is likely to forget.”
I think he’s wrong about that, at least in my communities of liberals and conservatives.
As a Liberal, it’s possible to be angry that so many are not vaccinated and not wearing masks in Bi-Mart. But I know their beliefs do not represent moral insufficiency as much as a justified and self-perpetuating culture of outrage stronger than any individual.
As a Liberal, it’s possible to believe that only the gullible could still defend Trump (who was secretly vaccinated) without wishing death upon the families who do.
It’s possible to be angry that people are dying as the unvaccinated flood our hospitals without wishing death to the suffering, and that health care workers are angry for reasons that have nothing to do with class bigotry while they work impossible hours to save lives that did not need to be in danger.
It’s possible to be angry that America is failing so many Americans, on the right and the left, and still recognize that the reasons why pave a long road of interwoven cause and effect, and that it’s unlikely we’ll untangle the knots until far too late.
Nobody in Washington seems focused. And on that, maybe I agree with Taibbi after all.