Patronizing "Ethnics"

When, as appears likely, Samuel Alito replaces Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, the Bush administration will have achieved one of its most significant accomplishments. As a citizen who's delighted by this apparentand highly partisanGOP victory in a period where Democrats have gained traction against their adversaries in so many other areas, it's cause for optimism. (The slight prospect of a Chuck Schumer/Dick Durbin-led filibuster, raised over the weekend, is surely enticing, since it would keep Jack Abramoff off the front pages for weeks; but even given the Democratic Party's penchant for self-destruction, in an election year they're probably not that myopic.)

Nevertheless, in the course of the Judiciary Committee hearingsCowardly Liberal Lion Ted Kennedy notwithstandingthe elevation of Alito to a working-class folk hero was, in many instances, over the top. U.S. News columnist and talk-show analyst Michael Barone has no peer, at least in the conservative establishment, for crunching numbers, precinct by precinct, during elections, but he was the worst offender in promoting Alito's up-from-the-bootstraps persona. 

Barone's piece, The Education of a Judge, wasn't as offensive as Kennedy's smears on the nominee, but it was pretty bad. He wrote, describing Alito's New Jersey youth: The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of cultural conflict [as opposed to today?], a battle between what I have called the beautiful people and the dutiful people. While Manhattan glitterati thronged Leonard Bernstein's apartment to celebrate the murderous Black Panthers, ordinary people in the outer boroughs and the far-flung suburbs of New Jersey like Hamilton Township were going to work, raising their families, and teaching their children to obey lawful authority and work their way up in the world.

Obviously, liberals have no monopoly on sweeping generalizations, but an innocent reader taking in Barone might conclude that the entire Upper West Side was toasting the Panthers while neglecting parental responsibilities. Meanwhile, the salt-of-the-earth residents of Hamilton were conducting the important business of the countryhard at work, on the factory lines and coaching Little Leaguewhile dilettantes in the city and Los Angeles flitted from one chic fad to another. There's some truth to both portraits Barone draws, but as someone who lived a few miles from Hamilton in 1972, I have different memories.

My father ran a car wash in that town in 1971 and for six months the next year, until his sudden death left me and my four brothers to operate the business until it could be sold. It wasn't an ideal situation. Just as parts of Manhattan were open, sometimes ostentatiously so, to the women's movement, gay liberation, etc., while denigrating men and women who worked for the NYPD, on construction projects or as maids or doormen in their apartments, there were elements of racism and bigotry, hardly hidden, in central Jersey. In Bordentown, for example, there were under- and above-ground meetings of KKK groups, ugly slurs directed at those young people with long hair or mini-skirts, and hippiesthe few that lived thereweren't terribly surprised to awake in the morning and find the tires of their cars slashed.

Our house was in Lawrence, about equidistant to Hamilton and Princeton. I spent senior year at a public school that was stifling from the pinheaded principal's neo-militaristic fetish for toeing the line. My history class took a straw vote before the '72 election and the tally was 32-2 in favor of Nixon. I was one of the McGovern supporters, and also gave a presentation that fall advocating the decriminalization of marijuana and was nearly hooted out of the classroom. Never mind that one of the loudest and most crude opponents was himself a drug dealer trading in substances far more dangerous than pot. That was just the culture of the school.

I've no doubt that Alito was a diligent, honest and respectful young man, as his prestigious and admirable career attests to, and wasn't party to the undercurrent of filthy and mean-spirited behavior in his hometown, but it's not the clear-cut Us-vs.-Them conceit that affluent pundits like Barone and the Times' David Brooks glory in.

Brooks, in his Jan. 12 column, came up with the unremarkable conclusion that Democrats have lost the white ethnics. (Actually, as Barone notes, Brooks isn't entirely correct, since John Kerry won Hamilton Township by a bare margin of 49.8-49.3 percent.) Brooks reduces the cultural conflict to simple terms: The liberals were doves; the ethnics were hawks. The liberals had 'Question Authority' bumper stickers; the ethnics had been taught in school to respect authority. The liberals thought an unjust society caused poverty; the ethnics believed in working their way out of poverty.

I think Brooksunlike his colleagues, who've been racing through the DVD set of last year's 24 to bash Bush for electronic surveillancehas been spending too much time watching the All in the Family episodes he probably missed as a youth. I knew, both in Jersey and Huntington, plenty of ethnics who were against the Vietnam War, participated in demonstrations and didn't respect mindless authority. Also, not all liberals were wealthy and had the luxury of skipping homework and examslegacy acceptances at prestigious colleges were not an option.

The last paragraph of Brooks' column is so elementary that you wonder why he's so well regarded. The big story of American politics, he informs us, which was underlined by every hour of the Alito hearings, is that sometime between 1932 and 1968, the DNA of the Democratic Party fundamentally changed. In 1932, the Democrats had working-class DNA. Today, the Democrats have different DNA, the DNA of a minority party.

We'll see in the next few years whether or not the Dems remain a minority partyprobably, but who knowsbut it wasn't just the working-class who voted for FDR over Hoover in '32. A widespread economic depression will change party affiliations with the arrival of a pink slip.

Nevertheless, Brooks isn't a patch on his colleagues at the Times' editorial page offices. On Jan. 23, in Judge Alito's Radical Views, the writer said, Alito is exactly the kind of legal thinker President Bush wants on the Supreme Court. Well, that's using your noggin. Who did the Times expect Bush would tap, Bobby Kennedy Jr.?

January 23