Class War. Divided we stand.

Class War. Divided we stand.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Those in the media seemed startled to see Richard Gere and Senator Clinton roundly booed at a recent benefit concert for the victims of September 11. Gere clearly earned his opprobrium, by smugly lecturing the audience — among them relatives and close friends of the dead — about the immorality of their desire to punish the murderers. Mrs. Clinton may have been hissed because the politics of her husband's administration projected national weakness and timidity, which prompted these attacks. Or perhaps concertgoers remembered some of her hare-brained pronouncements about her own purported victimhood during the health-care debate, when she was bothered by angry callers. Or maybe New Yorkers in general were just fed up with her past coziness with Palestinian leaders.

Or was it that the crowd believed that Gere and Clinton live in a different world from their own?

There is a growing class division in this country over the war. Of course, 90 percent of us, of all classes, at least for now profess support for strong military action. Yet at least a tenth of the country — a very influential tenth in the media, the university, politics, foundations, churches, and the arts — is adamantly and vocally at odds with most Americans. Why is this so?

It is often not a divide between Democrats and Republicans. Nor does the abyss always separate the wealthy from the poor. Most strikingly, the fault line pits a utopian cultural elite against the working middle class. On campuses, especially public universities such as the California State University system, one feels the tension constantly. The tenured, well educated, and relatively affluent among the faculty are adamantly against the military response in Afghanistan. Yet the students — mostly children of the working-class of every conceivable ethnic background — almost uniformly support our troops.

Similarly, I watch the well-heeled upper echelon on television chastising our government and then see my twin brother — with decrepit pickup truck, fighting the lowest agricultural prices since the Great Depression, losing an ancestral small farm to the bank — proudly driving in and out with a tattered flag flying from his truck antenna. Recent emigrants in Selma, my hometown — which is now nearly 85 percent Mexican-American — have plastered fresh American decals over faded Mexican flags. Yet when I come to work, professors, who have done far better in America, suggest that our classes should now read Edward Said to "understand" the crisis "in its proper prospective." Those who are not thriving in America seem incensed by attacks on their country, while the beneficiaries of this wonderful system of freedom and capitalism are cranky — like angry puppies who gnaw and chew at their mother's ample teats.

The usual explanations about the sociology of dissent do not quite make sense any more. So far, those who are fighting in Afghanistan — mostly highly trained pilots and special-forces operatives — are not from among the unwashed poor. The affluent Left, then, is not opposed to action because the less-privileged are dying in droves. Is it because the better educated are more sensitive to world opinion? To the nuances of Islam? To the "Other" in Afghanistan, who are not male WASPs? To the vagaries of the European press? Perhaps.

Perhaps not. Rather, I think fashionable anti-Americanism and pacifism have now become completely aristocratic pursuits, the dividends of limited experience with the muscular classes and the indulgence such studied distance breeds. Our pampered critics may be as clever as Odysseus, but they have lost his nerve, strength, and sense of morality. And so they have neither the ability nor desire to ram a hot stake into the eye of the savage Cyclops to save their comrades.

In contrast, those who toil with their hands for a living, who become unemployed frequently and work two jobs, who take out loans for their kids to go to college at public universities, and who do real things like grow food, put out fires, and arrest felons, have a very practical view of human kind — not all that different from the pessimistic assessment of the old hard-as-nails veteran Thucydides himself. Because they see brutality daily, understand how hard it is to survive and raise a family in the arena of national competition, and know too well what man is capable of at his rawest, they do not in their own lives enjoy the luxury of seeing awful people as "ignorant" in the abstract, rather than evil in the concrete.

If a neighbor steals communal irrigation water, the farmer knows his grapes will not come to harvest until he stops the miscreant himself. The tile-setter calibrates the purchase of his kid's books by how many tiles he sets on his arthritic knees, the roofer by how many shingles his ruined back can withstand, the carpenter by how many hours of nailing a week he can scrounge up, the realtor by how well he hustles to sell houses. Men and women such as these — the ancestors of the mesoi who founded the Greek city-state — tell the uncouth at movie theaters to "shut up," and square off against bullies at Little League parks, so the rest of us can enjoy the movie or game in peace.

Not so with the elite media, the professorate, and many in education and the arts. They rarely work with their hands or meet those who do. Arguments, if settled at all, are settled by committee and consultation — not fisticuffs and two-by-fours — or maybe by corporate pink slips, with orders to clear out the desk in two hours. Insults among our elite critics invite sarcasm and irony, never a knuckle sandwich. For many, there is the lifetime employment of tenure, and summers out of the classroom. Quite simply, in America, in this its greatest age of freedom and affluence, we have created an entire leisured class who were not always born into great wealth, but who nevertheless have obtained an easy sinecure without worry and danger. They have completely lost sight of the fireworks when good and evil enter the realm of muscle and sinew.

Our new smug aristocrats are convinced that the Taliban and bin Laden are akin to an angry news producer, a supercilious dean, or perhaps a high school vice-principal run amok — pushy types who can be reasoned with or flattered, or, barring that, paid off, out-argued, petitioned, or ignored. Theirs is the arrogance of the Enlightenment, fueled by the ease of American materialism, which alike suggest that their nation is too good, too sophisticated, too wealthy, and too modern ever to stoop to fight in the gutter with 13th-century terrorists over a mere 6,000 dead.

Cannot the hateful gaze of fascists in the Middle East — like those of the crazed road-warriors on the freeway, or wild-eyed thugs on the train home — be simply avoided? Or reported to the authorities? Or — in extremis — reasoned with in polite give-and-take? Would a man or woman with ample free time, a title, and a nice car and house — America's critics circa 2001 — risk all that to tangle with a psychopath who has nothing to lose? And over what? An insult? A little money? Or perhaps your life?

The firemen and policemen in the audience know how to deal with bin Laden because they have seen something like him everyday, and protect those who have not from his ilk. They suspect that Richard Gere and Senator Clinton not only know little about real evil — much less how to deal with it — but most certainly, in safety, will sometimes scoff at those who do