The Story of the Decade, part 3

 This post will consider the claim that "elites" have angered ordinary people by treating them with contempt.  I've looked for data on "elite" views of working class people, or less educated people, and haven't found anything directly relevant.*  I've also mentioned the weakness of the evidence for elite contempt.  Now I'll take a glance at history.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of middle-class people went out and observed the lives of the poor and working classes.  I recently ran across (I forget how) an example published in 1905, by Elsa Herzfeld, a student at Barnard College, who reported on twenty-four families in Manhattan.  The families were all white and that the husbands all had jobs, mostly in factories or construction.  Her research was supervised by Elsie Clews Parsons, who was then a lecturer in sociology and went on to a distinguished career as an anthropologist.    Before her detailed discussion of individual families, Herzfeld offered some general observations:  "even those members of the family who have had a fairly good amount of schooling possess small reasoning powers.  They show some small curiosity, but it is rather that of a child, than the intellectual desire to know.  They lose patience when they are unable to comprehend a thing in the beginning.  The questions they ask are frequently childish ones."  There were also critical comments on their work habits and standards of child care.  Parsons provided an introduction to the book, and asked "what are the schools . . . the churches, the settlements, etc., doing to improve home life?  Do they teach boys and girls anything about their obligations in marriage and child-rearing?"  That is, both Herzfeld and Parsons wanted to help the poor, but they seemed confident that the best way to help them was to teach them to emulate the middle class, at least to the extent that they could given their intellectual limitations.  There was no suggestion that their situation might be the result of bad luck or systemic injustice, and certainly not that the middle class had anything to learn from them.  This is just one example, but it was consistent with other things I've read from that period, and totally different from anything you'd see today.  Rather than increasing condescension and contempt, there has been increasing social egalitarianism.   

Finally, there's the idea that people are turning to politics as a substitute for religion or something else that is missing in their lives.  The problem with this is that there isn't much evidence of growing discontent with one's own life, except in the specific sense of economic dissatisfaction among people towards the lower end.  

 That's my summary of what's wrong with some popular accounts of the rise of political polarization.  I'll break for a few posts on other topics, but return to proposing my own explanation.  

*I put in in quotes because many accounts use "elites" very loosely, more or less as college-educated professionals, or even just people with a college degree.