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First Words

Thank You for ‘Condescending’

Credit...Photo illustration by Derek Brahney

It used to be a good thing. “Voluntary submission to equality with inferiors” was how Samuel Johnson defined “condescension” in his 1755 dictionary. When a person of higher status treated a person of lower status as though they were peers, it was an act of generosity — one that both pleased the beneficiary and gratified the self-regard of the benefactor.

Nowadays, we’re inclined to see it as odious, and we’re inclined to see it a lot. “Democrats are a party of condescension, not hope,” a MarketWatch headline warns. Josh Barro, in Business Insider, says, “They have become smug and condescending toward anyone who does not match the personal lifestyle choices of liberal elites.” A Reuters report tells us that in some parts of the country, “the word ‘Democrat’ is often a euphemism for out-of-touch, condescending coastal elites.” The results of the last presidential election might be read as confirmation of this caricature: Trump swept the least-educated counties, Clinton the most-educated. The debate continues over whether the condescension of liberal elites helped spark populist resentment. What’s clear is that “condescension,” which once named an endearing gesture of courtesy, has turned toxic. How did we get here from there?

Let’s retrace our steps. In Fanny Burney’s epistolary novel “Evelina,” from 1778, we’re told that a well-born character “thinks it incumbent upon her to support the dignity of her ancestry. Fortunately for the world in general, she has taken it into her head, that condescension is the most distinguishing virtue of high life; so that the same pride of family which renders others imperious, is with her the motive of affability.” Condescension made her kind. By the time Jane Austen was writing, though, the word was already starting to rouse suspicion: When Mr. Collins, in “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), extols the “affability and condescension” of Lady Catherine, readers were reminded that this clergyman was at once snobbish and obsequious.

Discomfort with the word outpaced discomfort with the practice. The intellectual historian Don Herzog tells of the time, in the early 1830s, when the Duke of Devonshire took his librarian, John Payne Collier, lunch at the duke’s palatial estate. “He always does his utmost to lessen the distance between us, and to put me at my ease, on a level with himself,” Mr. Collier wrote in his diary. “I do not call it condescension (he will not permit the word), but kindness.” Neither of them really believed they were equals, though; the duke’s denial that he was condescending was itself a form of higher-level condescension.

Nothing marks the rupture between that age and our own so clearly as the discarded notion that condescension is virtuous. In our more democratic age, we don’t dare admit that we think we are better than others, let alone that anyone is better than us. Yet hierarchy hasn’t gone anywhere, and something like 18th-century condescension remains a common practice. We’ve simply lost the name for it. When the president of a university stops to speak to a student after a lecture, she is talking down a hierarchy of academic status. The student is likely to be charmed — just as an Episcopal priest is gratified by the “considerate” attentions of a bishop and the security guard is pleased when the “down to earth” museum trustee remembers her name. We’re happy when the higher-status person acts as if she’s on our level — which is why, as that Duke of Devonshire understood, you condescend best by pretending not to.

What we often confuse with condescension these days is its curdled opposite: contempt. Condescension denies distance; contempt asserts it. Contempt can be hate-filled or dismissive, angry or amused — but like condescension, it requires the background system of status. “Nothing is so contagious as contempt!” declares the heroine of Burney’s 1782 novel “Cecilia,” rejecting her lover’s proposal that they marry against his family’s objections. If his set has contempt for her, “who shall dare assure me you would not catch the infection?”

The contagion of contempt reflects the judgments rendered by our betters. A scientist, with a large laboratory to run, learns that junior staff members think he’s an arrogant jerk; he rolls his eyes, wondering why they don’t appreciate his high standards. But when he learns a Nobel laureate in his field considers him a lightweight? He doesn’t sleep for a week. People distinguish sharply between the resentment of someone of lower status and the contempt of someone higher. One annoys; the other wounds.

Notice that conservatives seem to care more what liberals say about them than vice versa. It hurts more to be dismissed as a bigot than jeered as a social-justice warrior. The working-class resentment toward elites — resentment being the reciprocal of contempt — is asymmetrical in the very same way. Educated liberals are inclined to disavow hierarchy, and yet they appear to be the beneficiaries of one.

“The truth is that when we’re talking about college-educated urban lefties versus working-class rural conservatives, lefties are the ones with the power,” Kevin Drum, the Mother Jones blogger, maintains. “We’re a powerful group treating a marginalized group with contempt.” In The Atlantic, Peter Beinart writes that “although conservatives dominate America’s elected offices, liberals wield the greater power to stigmatize.”

Plenty of liberals recoil at that picture: They, too, are hard up and downtrodden. (Ask them about condescension, and they’ll have plenty to say about mansplainers and white saviors.) If they’re stigmatizing, they’re merely resisting dominant forces that stigmatize them. “Is it really so condescending that we should vote for the candidate who would keep in place the footholds and safety nets that helped us?” Kevin Baker asks in The New Republic. “Or does the real condescension come from the likes of those who would infantilize white, working-class voters, making out that they cannot help but vote against their own interests if they even suspect that someone, somewhere is looking down on them?” In the shadow theater of the political imagination, ramen-noodle liberals compare themselves with Omaha Steaks conservatives and conclude that if they’re looking down, it’s from the cheap seats, where the upholstery is shredded and the floor is sticky.

The debate over who’s on top of the hierarchy is only intensified by a long-established American disavowal of such hierarchy. The first article of the Constitution declares forthrightly: “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Paradoxically, though, the absence of the old, unabashed class markers can sometimes increase status anxiety, leaving all sorts of people anxious and suspicious about what unspoken hierarchies might be lurking in the background.

The way that modern social stratification affects the working class was studied intently in the wake of the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace’s first campaign for the presidency, when books like “Blue Collars and Hard Hats” (1971) appeared. But the most probing was Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s classic, “The Hidden Injuries of Class” (1972). The authors lamented the emergence of a single-scaled hierarchy that esteemed a mediocre doctor more highly than a world-class welder; they lamented a rhetoric of meritocracy that left people thinking they had only themselves to blame if they were left behind. The blue-collar workers Sennett and Cobbs interviewed could be derisive toward effete, white-collar pencil-pushers, but they would also say things like “I didn’t have what it takes” to join them.

Today those injuries aren’t quite so hidden. Meritocracy remains the civil creed, even as large economic forces have further deprived noncollege workers of opportunity. Amid widening inequality, the high-profile enclaves of wealth — Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street — tend to be unchurched, immigrant-friendly and culturally out of sync with nonurban, noncollege workers. (When progressive pundits discourage talk of the “white working class” — a third of the Democratic base, and 44 percent of the popular vote — they call to mind the position Bertolt Brecht satirized when he proposed that the government dissolve the people and elect another.)

It’s no surprise, then, that contempt and resentment have become the alternating currents of American political sentiment. As for actual condescension, nobody uses it more effectively than Donald Trump. He doesn’t appeal to his working-class followers despite being a plutocrat; he appeals to them because he’s a plutocrat — a baronial figure who tells them that they’re sharing a foxhole, beleaguered by the same disdainful elites, at war with the same villains.

I’ll leave it to political strategists to hash over the advantages of revving up the base versus persuading the persuadable. But a politics less riddled with contempt would be a good thing in itself. There is reason, after all, to mistrust the social hierarchies that sustain it. And if what we want is a political culture with a greater regard for the dignity of those disfavored by the meritocracy — men and women of all colors and creeds — the way to get it may involve more, and better, condescension. Pretend equality can be excellent practice for the real thing.

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at N.Y.U. and is the author of “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 9 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Class Act. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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