The Ideology of the Professionals

[MikeyChua]

http://inverted-world.com/index.php/column/column/the_ideology_of_the_professionals/

By The Realist

In “Why the ‘Whites As Cancer’ Myth?,” I used the early political career of John Kerry to demonstrate why anti-white slanders have proven so popular to a large segment of the American public. Kerry used unsubstantiated tales of atrocities committed by American soldiers in Vietnam to slander not only his fellow soldiers, but also his country and his race. Nevertheless, his activism made him a hero to many Americans and was the beginning of a successful political career.

I argued that anti-white slanders were attractive because they were a demonstration that the slanderer had overcome ethnocentric bias. What better way for whites to demonstrate they were free of the pre-fascist inclinations of the masses than to constantly harp on the evils America had committed, real or imaginary? Besides, the critical spirit that enabled them to realize the evils of their own people made them smarter and more sophisticated than others. Consequently, Kerry’s campaign of fraud made him courageous, heroic, intellectual, sensitive, and “hip” in the eyes of many.

The principle applies much more widely than just to Kerry’s career. Rather, the anti-ethnocentric snobbery he displayed was typical of his time. It was particularly common among American professionals and young people who aspired to become professionals, as Kerry, a future lawyer, did.

Professionals work in labor categories that require specialist educational credentials; some examples are lawyers, doctors, professors, journalists, teachers, and engineers. Due to the need for specialized skills in the emerging “knowledge economy,” the professional class was expanding rapidly both in numbers and influence in the 1960s and 70s. In 1960, only five percent of political interest organizations represented professionals; in 1980, 15 percent did.1

Classes naturally seek power, and one of their primary means of doing so is the production of myths. The sociological term for a myth that advances class interests is “ideology,” so that is the term that I will use here. The ideology of the professionals was that they were a uniquely tolerant and broad-minded group battling to save America from the uneducated, pre-fascist white majority.

*All in the Family* dramatized this myth perfectly. On the one hand, you had Archie Bunker, the racist, fearful, blue-collar bigot; on the other, in Meathead, you had an idealized image of the liberal young pre-professional, earnestly studying for his college degree—towards the end of the show’s run, Meathead becomes a professor. In episode after episode, Meathead manfully does battle, and prevails, against Archie’s ethnocentric extremism.

The work of sociologists had laid the ground for the sit-com confrontation. The period between the 1950s and 70s produced a voluminous literature on the dangerous authoritarianism of the white working class. According to the intellectual historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, in this period “one study after another depicted a working class … socially at sea, resentful of blacks and other minorities pressing up from below, beset by status anxiety, and ripe for radical demagogues.”2 In the 1960 book *Political Man*, the most famous of these studies, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset described his “gradual realization that extremist and intolerant movements in modern societies are more likely to be based on the lower classes than on the middle and upper class.”3 There was much hand-wringing about emotional remoteness of working class parents and their tendency to use corporal punishment in child-rearing. These dangerous tendencies were, in the view of the scholars, due to lack of education.4

It was the professional class that displayed most markedly the anti-authoritarian and anti-ethnocentric spirit that characterized the 1970s. In fact, according to historian Steven Brint, antipathy to authoritarianism was the foundation of professionals’ political outlook.5 These inclinations contrasted with those of blue-collar whites, who possessed a strong sense of racial solidarity and were more likely to support traditional values.

In the period between 1974 and 1988, professionals’ stance on social issues was easily the most liberal of any American group. They were about twice as likely as blue-collar workers to support government programs to help blacks, racial integration, environmental spending, civil liberties, women’s equality, reducing the role of the military in American life, and the rights of the accused in criminal prosecutions. It is worth noting that high-income business people, while not as liberal as professionals on social issues, were much more so than blue-collar workers. When it came to economic issues, such as welfare and reducing income inequalities between the rich and poor, however, blue-collar workers were furthest to the left and business people furthest to the right.6

Brint finds large discrepancies in political attitudes among various spheres of professionals. Relatively conservative groups of professionals were those who worked in the applied sciences, such as chemists, physicists, and computer scientists, and in business services, such as accountants, auditors, corporate attorneys, and management consultants.7

The most liberal groups of professionals worked in the culture and communications sphere (university professors, journalists, and artists are examples), the civic regulation sphere (such as prosecutors and judges, staff responsible for running public works and mass transit systems, and the employees of liberal foundations), and the human services sphere (such as teachers, counselors, therapists, and social workers).8 Another good predictor of liberal views among professionals was employment in the public and non-profit sectors.9

When Brint analyzes the views social and cultural professionals in the 1974-76 period, he predictably finds that they were even more liberal than professionals as a whole on social issues. This group was also most likely to support welfare programs, although the gap with blue-collar whites was small.

What is striking, however, is that, despite all of their liberal sympathies, social and cultural professionals did not express strong support of the labor movement, the institution that had traditionally defended the interests of the poor and powerless. Indeed, social and cultural professionals were less likely to support the labor movement than professionals as a whole, and were much closer to high-income business people in this respect than to blue-collar workers.10 The reason for the anomaly was probably that the labor movement spoke in the name of blue-collar whites, and the anti-ethnocentric elite sympathized with minorities.

The issue on which there was the widest discrepancy between professionals and the rest of the public was busing. In 1974, over 40 percent of professionals supported busing to promote racial integration, as opposed to ten percent or fewer of blue-collar whites, high-income businessmen, and blacks.11 Brint does not break out social and cultural professionals separately, but given their other beliefs, it can scarcely be doubted that they were particularly likely to support busing.

Professionals’ view of busing perfectly illustrates their hostility to blue-collar whites. Since the latter were more likely to live in the urban neighborhoods that desegregation orders applied to,12 it was they who were most damaged by the social disruption that busing caused. The public-sector professionals in the legal and educational spheres who implemented busing were plainly motivated by resentment towards blue-collar culture. Ronald P. Formissano makes this point in Boston Against Busing, a history of school desegregation in Boston, where the dispute over busing was particularly bitter.

The desegregation planners … looked upon the Southie Highs [a white urban Boston high school] of the world as at best anachronisms, and at worst as narrow, parochial places perpetuating distrust of outsiders, prejudice, ethnic and racial stereotypes, and outmoded and ineffective modes of education, trapping their students in a cycle of immobility. The planners (e.g., Board of Education employees, Judge Garrity’s advisers) believed that it was right on both moral and utilitarian grounds to “take away” the Southie Highs from their communities. The planners assumed the superiority of their middle-class and cosmopolitan values to those of persons and groups they judged to be localist, uneducated, and, unlike themselves, bigoted.13

Formissano also points out the sense of superiority the busing dispute caused in affluent liberals:

One consequence of the… desegregation that tends to be imposed on the lower classes is that the white working class screams and acts out its frustration in public. Neighborhood militants and racists [who publicly protest busing] are catapulted into influence and to the forefront of media attention, while an aura of shame begins to infect the atmosphere. This allows the rest of society, particularly middle-class liberals, to feel morally superior to the “racists” in South Boston.14

Anti-busing protesters recognized the class hostility directed against them:

When antibusers compared themselves to black activists, they usually ended up seething with bitterness. “They were heroes and martyrs,” they lamented, “but we are racists.” Who regarded the antibusers as racists? The liberals, suburbanites, elite politicians, outsiders, and especially the media. For antibusers these groups not only overlapped, but “the liberal establishment” and the media were virtually the same thing: a hated enemy who presumed to judge them from the safety of their “lily-white” suburbs. The media doubly frustrated the antibusers by portraying them as racists and by refusing to anoint them with victim status, much less to bestow on them a mantle of morality. But the liberal media earlier had readily legitimized black demonstrators and hairy, unruly youth [that is, leftist student protesters]. For the antibusers, the contrast was infuriating.15

Professionals in the 1970s, particularly in the social and cultural sphere, viewed themselves as an educated, enlightened minority defending America from the pre-fascist masses. This ideology of anti-ethnocetric snobbery is epitomized by a remark made in 1972 by J. Stanley Pottinger, a white lawyer employed at high levels of the US government, including assistant Attorney General, during the Nixon and Ford administrations. On hearing it argued that affirmative action was wrong because it discriminated against whites, Pottinger exclaimed, “That is the biggest crock I have ever heard. It is the kind of argument one expects to hear from a backwoods cracker farmer.”16 Pottinger’s remark demonstrates that professionals were contemptuous of rural, as well as urban, white non-professionals. It is, moreover, the perfect emblem of a class that crusaded against bigotry while remaining blind to its own.

References

   1. Steven Brint, *In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4. ↑
   2. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), 460. ↑
   3. Ibid., 460-61. ↑
   4. Ibid., 460-68. ↑
   5. Brint, 103. ↑
   6. Ibid., 89. ↑
   7. Ibid., 55-56. ↑
   8. Ibid., 56-60. ↑
   9. Ibid., 92. ↑
  10. Ibid., 120 ↑
  11. Ibid., 108. ↑
  12. Ronald P. Formisano, *Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s* [book on-line] (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991, accessed 4 June 2007), 13; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=24275601; Internet. ↑
  13. Ibid., 17. ↑
  14. Ibid., 233. ↑
  15. Ibid., 5. ↑
  16. Paul Seabury, “HEW and the Universities,” *Commentary* (February 1972), p. 44. Quoted in Michael Lind, *The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution* (New York: Free Press, 1995), 150.