TRES SOPHISTIQUE:

A War Against Elites: America Will Vote For Bush (Tom Frank, author of One Market Under God, Le Monde Diplomatique, Feb 2004)

[Conservative] populism, ever present on the radio and on Fox News, ... vituperates against the snobbish and delicate things that the powerful [liberals] are believed to enjoy ...

The all-Americans despise the affected elites, with their highfalutin ways and that’s why they vote for plainspoken men like George Bush, or his dad, or Ronald Reagan ...

The massive distortions and contradictions between these two rightwing populisms should be plain to anyone with eyes....

Why aren’t these contradictions crippling for the right? Partly because liberals ... simply don’t bother to answer the stereotype of themselves as a tasteful elite, seeing it as a treacherous and obvious deceit mounted by the puppetmasters of the right.

Quite true; liberals are not "tasteful," and it's obviously deceitful for the puppetmasters to say so.

But let's see how M. Frank refutes the view that liberals such as himself are pompous elitists.

[M]any Europeans ..., assuming that politics in the US works the same way as it does elsewhere - that material issues are important, that reason matters - ... step blithely into the minefield of political symbolism and are promptly blown up. The most spectacular recent instance of this came during the UN debate prior to the war against Iraq. You will recall that the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, clearly believed he was making progress every time he slapped down some US misrepresentation or pointed out some US error.

Here he was, a well-dressed and accomplished man, soundly refuting the arguments of the Americans, speaking several different languages, even receiving open applause from the UN representatives of much of the world as he berated the US Secretary of State, who stoically endured the abuse of his social superior, for this obvious error or that.

What the brilliant De Villepin missed utterly was that American conservatives don’t care when their arguments are refuted.... [De Villepin] was the hated liberal elite in the flesh: all that was missing was the revelation that he wore perfume or carried a handbag.

I can smell M. Frank's perfume from here. No doubt it was carried by the breeze from that explosion in the minefields of political symbolism.

I think I speak for all right-wing extremists when I say: In every way in which one man can be superior to another, Colin Powell is superior to Dominique de Villepin.

Posted by Paul Jaminet at February 19, 2004 9:00 PM