CLASS WARFARE? TELL ME ABOUT IT

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"We've got to get away from this idea of economic class warfare that gets thrown into this discussion over and over again by the Democrats," said Republican Representative Bill Archer, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, on pbs's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour the other day. "I'm really sad that they continue to go back trying to divide America."

Whenever a Democrat points out that some Republican policy would help the rich or hurt the poor, a Republican invariably replies that the Democrat is practicing "class warfare." The label has been applied lately to Democratic critiques of some of the policies in the Contract with America, like the capital-gains tax cut, the business-depreciation tax cut and the "middle class" tax cut that would apply to incomes up to $200,000 a year. This is supposed to be a damning critique. The implication is that class warfare is a terribly old-fashioned or impolite or downright un-American thing to engage in. Class warfare: it sounds Marxist at worst, European at best.

Well, it would be lovely if the political dialogue could be conducted totally in terms of the general welfare, with no invidious arguments that seek to divide Americans from one another. And it would be swell if no politician ever suggested that an opponent was serving class interests that differed from those of the voters being addressed. But that is not the world we live in. In the real world, Republicans have been skilled and ruthless practitioners of class warfare themselves. "Us vs. them" has been the Republican theme in every recent election, and it has usually worked. Indeed, the current Republican ascendancy is a triumph of two kinds of class warfare.

First, there is cultural class warfare. Whether accurately or otherwise, the Republicans have portrayed the Democrats as the party of a cultural elite-ivory-tower intellectuals and inside-the-Beltway bureaucrats totally alienated from the concerns of ordinary Americans. The redirection of populist resentment from top-hatted Wall Street businessmen to Chardonnay-sipping Washington pointy-heads has been nothing short of brilliant.

By now it is a reflex. House Speaker Newt Gingrich uses the term elite as an all-purpose epithet, meaning little more than someone or something he doesn't like. Just since the election he has applied the term to directors of art museums ("self-selected elites using your tax money and my tax money to pay off their friends"), to the Bipartisan Entitlement Reform Commission ("driven by elite values"), to people who send E-mail messages supportive of President Clinton ("urbanites make up the Internet elite," according to a Gingrich spokesman) and, of course, time and again, to the "elite media" or "media elite." If this kind of talk is not class warfare, what is?

The second type of Republican class warfare is more subtle. It is classic economic warfare, only from the top down instead of from the bottom up. American politics can be seen-crudely, perhaps deplorably, but not inaccurately-as a battle between the poor and the rich for the allegiance of the middle class. Call it empathy vs. aspiration. In the 1960s the middle class joined hands with the poor. Since 1980 it has seen its class interest as lying more with the rich.