Head of the New Class: Al Gore, candidate of the intellectualized, meritocratic elites

National Review, Nov 6, 2000 by John Derbyshire

A Gore victory in November would, of course, have many consequences for the nation and the world. It would also, however, have a larger historical meaning-in the sense that people looking back on it 100 years hence might say: "Ah, that represented ..."

What? What larger trend would be embodied in a Gore victory? We have all internalized the consequences of past elections. Andy Jackson-the dethroning of the old coastal gentry; Teddy Roosevelt-victory of Progressivism; FDR-dawn of the welfare state; and so on. We know roughly what a Gore victory would mean in particulars; what would it be part of?

I suggest that its larger significance would lie in its being a decisive triumph for the New Class-the intellectualized, tertiary-educated, meritocratic elites of the law, academia, the media, the great foundations, and government bureaucracies.

The term "new class" was first used in this precise context by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1972, and got capital letters from Michael Novak later that same year. Some key essays on the phenomenon were gathered together in a 1979 book, The New Class?, edited by the historian B. Bruce-Briggs. Anyone who seeks clarification of who the New Class is and where it comes from could not do better than to track down a copy of that book (sadly, long out of print).

The New Class has been engaged in its "long march through the institutions" for 30 years, but Bill Clinton was the first of them to attain the presidency. Al Gore himself is only a sort of honorary New Class-nik, having been born to privilege rather than having acquired it through the educational system. The programs and values of the party Gore leads, however, are solidly New Class, and he has made the necessary adjustments to his personal profile.

A Gore victory would consolidate the New Class domination of the Clinton years, and make it unassailable. By his powers of appointment, Gore would make New Class values paramount in the judiciary and executive, as they already are in academia and the media.

But what are those values? What are New Class people like, in general? What do they stand for? And why should we oppose their hegemony? Permit me to enumerate.

They are liars. Bill Clinton and his wife are famously mendacious. At this point, after eight years' exposure to them, no sensible person believes anything they say. Most people suppose that this mendacity is personal and particular-that it is a failing of the Clintons, and does not represent anything larger. Even Al Gore's carelessness with the truth has been attributed to his association with the Clintons, as if it were a sort of infection.

In fact, a disdain for the truth is fundamental to New Class values, and key to their obtaining high political office in a democracy. To the extent that ordinary Americans are aware of the existence of the New Class, they dislike it. As David Gelernter has pointed out, the old elite (of privilege via family property) had one advantage over the new one (of privilege via formal education): "The old elite used to get on fairly well with the country it was set over . . . [They] approached life on basically the same terms. The public went to church and so did they. The public went into the army and so did they . . . Today's elite loathes the nation it rules."

The New Class has deep differences of opinion with the common people and therefore cannot get elected without a certain amount of deceit. The American public is, for example, religious; the New Class is atheist. (Peter Berger expressed it very elegantly: The people of the U.S. are as religious as those of India, but they are ruled over by an elite as irreligious as Swedes.) Thus New Class candidates for power must make a show of piety. At critical points in his various personal dramas, President Clinton has taken care to be seen coming out of church clutching a Bible.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore actually represent two different strategies of deception. The Clinton technique is simply to lie and intimidate one's way across the gap-as Clinton did in the matter of his draft-dodging and philandering. The Gore candidacy represents another approach: the conscripting of a member of the old elite, with sufficient old-elite attributes (fidelity, military service) to bridge the gap, and to use him as a front man for further New Class advance. This strategy is having its first trial with the Gore campaign, and may not work. The strains it imposes on the candidate's personality are extreme, and cause peculiar deformations, which voters may find unappealing. The lesson of the Clinton-Gore candidacies may ultimately be the one taught by another national leader in another time: If you're going to lie, lie big.

They are self-righteous. One of the first sightings of the New Class in politics was Michael Harrington's mention of the "conscience constituency" that rallied to the presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy in 1968. A firm certainty of its own superior virtue, and a corresponding contempt for other, especially older, moralities, has been a New Class trait from the beginning. As P. J. O'Rourke noted more pithily, watching the Clinton crowd sweep into Washington in 1993, they were "stuffed up to the nose-holes with a conviction of their own righteousness." Norman Podhoretz pinned this quality down in his discussion of a quintessentially New Class novelist: "The authorial point of view in the work of Philip Roth claims for itself a singular sensitivity to things of the spirit . . . whereas others are represented as altogether blind to things of the spirit and as caring only for lesser things of the flesh like food and money and material possessions."