Populism and Elitism (Jeffrey Bell)
Tucker, William
"Populism and Elitism (Jeffrey Bell)" discussed since, chastised writers for leaving reality to the journalists and rebutted recent laments, like Philip Roth's, that the real world had become hyperreal, daily discharging in the news...
...A recent Gallup poll, for example, reported that 57 percent of Americans claim they would sacrifice jobs and prosperity to "preserve the environment...
...Since 1968, however, the party has been successfully invaded by a university- and government-based professoriate...
...it simply exists in the benumbed realm of the audiovisual, and is at once hilarious and disturbing as hell...
...The presidency¡ªintended to be remote from the people¡ªhas become the real medium for change...
...In the end, says Bell, populism always wins, but only after detours and derailments...
...Thus, politics becomes the competition among elites to conform most closely to mainstream opinion...
...He goes on: Between Wolfe and Wallace, we find ourselves in a strange bind...
...discussed since, chastised writers for leaving reality to the journalists and rebutted recent laments, like Philip Roth's, that the real world had become hyperreal, daily discharging in the news figures that dwarf those born of the novelistic imagination...
...Nonsense, cried Wolfe, the world of the real was ready and waiting to be novelized, if only there could be mustered sufficient notebook-toting Zolas for the task...
...The strain of counterculture solidarity that had run through the liberal-democratic part of the culture gave way to narcissistic self-protection...
...tions to restore American fiction to vitality...
...In America, for example, the House of Representatives¡ªintended to be the branch of government closest to the people¡ªhas become the branch of permanent power...
...But today the teachers' unions and the Association of Trial Lawyers of America prevail...
...The result, as Bell notes, was the most purely populist presidency since Andrew Jackson...
...Jeffrey Bell gives us a completely different paradigm: of history as a chess game between "the people" and various elites...
...Instead of bad novelists we have bad conditions for the novel...
...Birkerts disagrees, in part because he believes Roth's claim extends beyond the extraordinary characters in the news to include a "shattering of the context that might explain them": The real has become surreal...
...Wallace, let me proclaim in the spirit of manifesto, is by quite a long chalk the finest writer under 30 in the nation...
...The setting of society's standards is, in the final analysis, what politics is about," says Bell...
...He adjudges only Pynchon, DeLillo, and Robert Stone as successes in this regard, because they are "paranoids" who have rendered the modern American soul in chiaroscuro...
...As Bell notes, it is the Democrats' stronghold in the professional classes that enables them to field a stronger line-up of candidates...
...Victory in the Cold War only means that people will want to move on to the next problem¡ªas well they should...
...Like Jackson, Reagan came to office with a program for limiting government and liberating the forces of enterprise...
...For at a time when it has become possible to talk about a universal sociology, social scientists are mired in the past, still thinking in terms of "class conflict" between rich and poor...
...If fiction is to win and hold a readership, it will probably have to move Wolfe's way...
...Those in power are always falling behind the times, while simultaneously trying to institutionalize their own position...
...Where shall we get the picture of who we are...
...One hopes Sven Birkerts will use his talents to address this question thoroughly, and this question only, next time around...
...As Birkerts writes, "Wallace's stories are as startling and barometrically accurate as anything in recent decades .. . [he] is, for better or worse, the savvy and watchful voice of the now...
...Thirty years ago, this same party was an alliance between the working class, the poor, and the "Solid South...
...Birkerts's sense of the state of modern fiction is nowhere more evident than in his decision to end the book with a piece on David Foster Wallace...
...Second, isn't it possible that, as America becomes more affluent, elite opinion could expand to become the mainstream itself...
...On an optimistic note, Jackson's economic plan was eventually accepted by both parties with the election of James Polk in 1844...
...Until the American revolution, elites ruled everywhere through force or fear, perpetuating themselves through various rules of succession...
...the man¡ªor woman¡ªhunched over coffee in the mall...
...Although the Republicans were slow to seize the opportunity, they finally came crashing through in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan...
...0 opinion has quirky desires and values that rarely coincide with those of the majority...
...His genealogy of the larger trends may be a little screwy, but his readings of particular books and authors rarely err, and the essays in the book's final section, "American Writers," display the crisp style that made the first collection such a pleasure...
...Wallace's selection as final author in the book hints that Birkerts may recognize that he is wrong about his own prescrip T his is a book that I have been looking forward to reading for years...
...Democratic lawyers, professors, and teachers' union representatives are always far more appealing and articulate than the entrepreneurial clodhoppers and Christian fundamentalists who represent the Republicans...
...Although such casual expressions of support are always suspect (they probably aren't talking about their own jobs), it is not at all incon ceivable that elite attitudes¡ªa rejection of economic progress, the casual acceptance of sexual experimentation, a covert admiration for criminals¡ªcould become widespread...
...At the 1992 convention, there were more delegates with graduate degrees than with undergraduate degrees only...
...how deeply has democracy really penetrated the rest of the world, even in countries where regular elections have been established...
...p opulism and Elitism has its flaws, particularly the two-chapter rehearsal of every twist and turn on the American political scene since 1968...
...Only Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wanted the whole world to be split into self-sufficient cantons, was willing to confront the consequences of direct democracy...
...Although the media produce a steady drumbeat of criticism that Republican positions on issues such as crime and taxes are "unpopular," popular opinion remains unconvinced...
...It is without paranoia...
...Having taken on the trappings of an isolated elite themselves, the Republicans simply forgot to present an agenda, relying instead on past success...
...Watergate long ago proved that the social contract was a tissue of lies and evasions, and that government ran on fear and self-interest...
...Like Jackson, Reagan was rejected by Congress and condemned by the Eastern elite...
...Intellectuals, always a formidable elite, vie for power as fiercely as generals, businessmen, and politicians, and in contemporary American politics, the Democratic party has become the party of the upper-middle-class intelligentsia...
...assassinations pointed to the retributive violence alive in the American heart...
...The future of the novel rests in uncovering "the black hole at the heart of the contemporary...
...His work is Woolf's map of the subjective submerged in Wolfe's external reality...
...When he trades the spray-paint can of manifesto for the ball-point of reflection, however, Birkerts is one of the better critics...
...The Democratic party has become the repository of elite opinion, for the most part at variance with the mainstream...
...All heroism leaked out of political life, and with it all confidence in solid goals and purposes...
...Some bonding element in the social order has crumbled away, shivering our picture of public life into fragments...
...And there are a couple of problems that go unaddressed: First...
...And just as Jackson passed the torch to Martin Van Buren, Reagan left his legacy in the hands of another Eastern prot¨¦g¨¦, who quickly dissipated it...
...Academia trudges on, assembling the evidence of how business elites "exploit the masses"¡ªwithout ever addressing the fact that they themselves are a rival elite, trying to work out their own system of exploitation...
...The vast majority of people embody a common sense that makes self-government possible, while elite William Tucker is TAS's New York correspondent...
...Literary criticism has become surreal, perhaps, when the Trickster is held culpable for the crappy novels coming over the transom...
...As is often the case in the compassionate soul, individual failures of achievement are blamed on everyone and everything but the individual...
...he professional classes were T indeed once conservative and Republican: in 1948, Thomas Dewey was the candidate of the Eastern Establishment, and in 1960 Richard Nixon outpolled John Kennedy on Ivy League campuses...
...Yet because democracy operates almost everywhere through representative government, the people must choose members of one or another elite to lead them...
...But the new social novel does not hold much of the truth about the changed conditions of our subjective lives...
...Even so, armed with Bell's analysis, it is easy to see why the Republican ascendancy finally collapsed in 1992...
...Still, the basic point remains clear...
...CI...
...It is not a document of reality we need, Birkerts avers, but rather novels that have in their vision a loss of confidence in reality, the vague dread he believes endemic to our age...
...Today, no group can rule a nation without presenting at least the pretext that their actions reflect the "will of the people...
Vol. 26 • January 1993 • No. 1
