For extra credit, identify the well-known journalist from whose work the following quotes are taken. A certain America politician "looked like a handsome garage attendant.... He comes out rubbing his hands on an invisible garage rag (most of the pit grease out of his nails).... His hair is still wet from careful work with comb and water in the gas station's cracked mirror (main panel in the men's room triptych, rubber machine on one side, comb-and-Kleenex dispenser on the other)."

If you guessed that the author was a high-toned Tory conservative-say, William F. Buckley Jr. or Peregrine Worsthorne-you were mistaken. The excerpt comes from an article Garry Wills wrote in 1968 for New York magazine, "Can Wallace Be Made Respectable?" (It appears that, inasmuch as George C. Wallace resembled a gas station attendant, the answer was no.)

My grandfather was a gas station attendant (he also worked as a janitor, a construction worker and a salesman). So I find it interesting that at the end of the 20th century, liberal journalists such as Wills feel free to write with contempt about gas station attendants. After all, a few elderly people still speak of a time when liberals and Democrats actually struggled on behalf of Americans like those who pump gas and wipe windshields for a living.

The evident distaste of Wills for people who work in my grandfather's occupation is shared by the Hollywood entertainment upper crust. In the recently premiered second episode of cartoonist Matt Groening's highly praised animated series Futurama, set in the 30th century, the villain is a poor, snaggle-toothed gas station attendant-on the moon. And he has my grandfather's Southern accent. The other lunar villain in the episode is a beer-bellied white prole in a T-shirt who speaks Brooklynese. Imagine the picket lines that would form if Groening portrayed the moon being overrun in the 30th century by black welfare mothers or Mexican wetbacks. (According to a mutual acquaintance, Groening, a millionaire many times over, has a large staff of servants.)

Several years ago, when The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was released again, I was astonished to discover that a cinematic opera had been made about the tragic life of a gas station attendant. More amazing than the subject was the treatment. The story was told without irony, without snickering, without a wink to knowing sophisticates. I saw it first at a matinee and my fellow moviegoers, mostly retired New Yorkers of my grandparents' generation, sat through it in rapt silence. When I returned to watch it a second time at night, the audience was full of white yuppies from Greenwich Village and Soho. The crowd burst into laughter on seeing the hero singing in the gas station where he worked. I suspect that the same audience would have been fighting back tears if, in a Merchant-Ivory film, an English heiress on vacation in Tuscany had just been jilted by a young lord.

The French are reputed to be snobs, but they produced an opera about the passion of a gas station attendant for a shop-girl. The British are said to be obsessed with class distinctions, yet Britons of all classes tuned in to follow the life stories of low-income people in the soap opera Eastenders. In the United States, once reputed to be the paradise of the common man, working-class characters appear in films, television shows and fiction chiefly in the roles they were assigned in Elizabethan drama?clowns and villains.

A case can be made that those primarily responsible for this are the well-bred Southern writers, who have disseminated the contempt of the Southern gentry for low-class whites to a national audience. Aristocratic Southerners, of course, invented the term "white trash" and made a great show of preferring "colored folk"-at least "good" ones-to lowly rednecks. The pairing of the gentle, wise black and the evil redneck is found in the work of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, and James Dickey.

In Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the nobility of Nigger Jim is contrasted with the villainy of Injun Joe (a half-breed who is at once redneck and redskin) and the dissoluteness of Huck's father (whose name, Finn, makes him a synthesis of the two white groups most detested by affluent Anglo-Americans-the rural Southern poor and the Irish). Later, Faulkner taught a generation of educated Americans to shudder at the upwardly-mobile vulgarians of the Snopes family, while admiring the genteel if decadent Sartoris clan and their Mammy. Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire turns on the conflict between proletarian brutishness and decayed gentility. In Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, an idealistic upper-class Southern lawyer defends an innocent black man accused of a rape that was committed (naturally) by the retarded son of a white hillbilly family. (The South, we are supposed to believe, has an unusually high proportion of retarded white people, like Faulkner's Benji and Billy Bob Thornton's character in the movie Slingblade.)

The most grotesque example of this kind of bias is found in the novel Deliverance by the poet James Dickey, a writer firmly in the Southern ruling-class tradition. The Virginia Cavaliers of the 17th century would have been delighted by Dickey's portrayal of heroic suburban professionals who best primitive, violent hillbilly half-wits. In the imaginations of my generation, the movie Deliverance fixed the image of the white rural poor as cavemen waiting to sodomize unwary city folk; it is to class mythology what Birth of a Nation was to racist ideology.

The Southern elite's contempt for low-income whites is shared by members of the national elite-liberals, no less than conservatives. One wellborn New York editor of my acquaintance refers to all Southerners ( a category that includes George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay) as "crackers." Another journalist, a member of an ancient WASP family, likes to imitate blue-collar proles in a Long Island "Guido" accent, rather in the way genteel Southern Bourbons used to imitate "Sambo." In his book Liberal Racism, Jim Sleeper has described what I like to think of as "The law of the conservation of contempt." Many liberals who would be horrified to be caught referring to "ghetto trash" or "barrio trash" chatter on about "trailer trash." They cannot make darkie jokes or Polish jokes, but Bubba jokes are socially acceptable.

The double standard of the liberal Left when it comes to white and black folk culture is just as apparent. It is understood that minority folk traditions are Culture, while white folk traditions, Anglo-American and European alike, are Kitsch. Among the white liberal elite, to cultivate an interest in jazz is a mark of sophistication; to cultivate an interest in blue-grass, another art that originated in the South from the confluence of African and Anglo-American folk music, is a sign of eccentricity, if not vulgarity.

The double standard can also be found in the contrast between the attention paid to the history of the black migration from the rural South and the utter lack of interest in the equally dramatic migration of the white Southern rural poor in the same era to industrial cities in the North and on the West Coast. Jacob Lawrence's Migration series is rightly considered to be one of the masterpieces of 20th-century American art. Suppose, however, that Lawrence had been white, and that he had modified Cubist techniques to tell the story of the migration of white Kentuckians who went to work in the factories of Chicago and Pittsburgh and Detroit. Would Lawrence be celebrated today? My guess is that he would be as forgotten as John Steinbeck and the Joad family.

There is one exception to the ban on approving white workers and farmers as sources or subjects of fine art and literature. For many years now, Irish and Irish-American writers have been capitalizing on the fact that educated Americans who make no secret of their loathing for, say, working-class Irish-Americans on Long Island, find their cousins in Ireland quaint and charming.

Today it is easy to forget that snobbery used to be associated with the American Right, not the American Left. As late as the 1940s and '50s, the so-called Old Right, influenced by the libertarian Albert Jay Nock, saw itself as a "saving remnant" of natural aristocrats marooned in a vulgar mass society. I once asked George Will when liberals had become snobs and conservatives populist. He answered without hesitation, "The Adlai Stevenson campaign." Stevenson, it may be recalled, claimed on the hustings that he was the candidate of thinking Americans. He was supported by liberals like Murray Kempton, who famously remarked during another race that Richard M. Nixon was the candidate of those parts of the country that lacked bookstores. By 1972, support for Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern was concentrated among the affluent and the very poorest in the white electorate.

Ironically, one of the great achievements of the New Deal Democrats-the provision of a college education to a large part of the population by way of the G.I. Bill and, more recently, Federal student loans-may have backfired, harming egalitarian liberalism. The British speak of the invidious distinction between those who are "U" (university) and "non-U." In the U.S., current liberal snobbery is that of the college-educated looking down their noses at those whose educations ended with high school. The New Deal did not expect that the children of farmers and garage mechanics, on receiving their degrees, would try to forget their origins and busily erect new distinctions between their class and that of their parents and grandparents. But that is what has happened. Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson made it possible for non- elite Americans to attend colleges where they learn to despise people from backgrounds like those of Truman (a clothing salesman) and Johnson (a teacher in a small-town elementary school).

In this connection it is important to recall that many of today's leading progressives are veterans of '60s-era campus activism, which pitted college-educated whites against working-class police officers and "hardhats." James Fallows has described how the antiwar movement "exhibited contempt for the white proles" who fought in Vietnam. He describes the use by affluent Leftists and liberals "of the phrase 'pig' for the blue-collar, lower-class people who were doing the job they thought they were supposed to do."

By the 1990s, the pigs were being dehumanized by means of a new label-"angry white males." "Males" once was a noun used to refer to animals; in recent years, however, liberals began referring to lower-class black men as "black males" and lower-class white men as "white males." Women, though, are not referred to as "females." In the lexicon of modern American progressivism, men are males but women are women.

To be sure, a Democratic politician who does not have a safe black, Latino, college-town, or affluent liberal district must still appeal to working-class white voters-deftly, like Bill Clinton, or clumsily, like Al Gore (whose reminiscences about slopping the hogs on a Tennessee farm have been rewarded with ridicule). Nevertheless, the contrast between the energy liberals have devoted to race and gender politics and the attention they have paid to class politics is astonishing. One can only imagine what might have resulted if the ardor the liberal Left has put into defending quotas that disproportionately benefit affluent members of racial minority groups had gone into organizing unions in new economic sectors or raising the minimum wage.

To the extent that New Deal liberalism survives at all, it is identified with the diehard defense of Social Security, paid for by one of the most regressive taxes ever levied on working people. In addition, in the South and elsewhere Democrats have lately campaigned to fund public education by means of state lotteries. Thus the people who can least afford to gamble their meager earnings will be swindled by government in order to subsidize teachers, many of whom cannot pass minimal competency tests. (Except
for the Religious Right, nobody appears to be objecting to regressive taxation in
the form of lotteries.)

The identification of liberalism with the affluent has further been reinforced by the defection of working-class Democrats who have joined the Republicans or the ever-growing number of alienated independent voters. Ruy Texeira of the Economic Policy Institute has documented a steady decline in support for the Democrats between 1992 and '98 among all groups in the population making less than $75,000 a year. According to Texeira, "Overall support for the Democrats among whites has eroded severely, but that drop-off has been concentrated among those with less than a four-year college degree and those with low to moderate incomes."

One might think that Democratic strategists would be striving to win those voters back. But neither of the two dominant factions in the Democratic Party has shown much interest in working-class whites. The centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) seeks to win the support of business and professional types. Texeira, after pointing out that the people he calls "technician dads" and "waitress moms" are the real swing voters, observes: "Yet it is the affluent suburban voters-those with $75,000 or more in household income and usually holding college degrees who are more typically mentioned as the target of choice by self-styled New Democrats, even though such voters are outnumbered 3-to-1 by their midscale to downscale counterparts."

While the DLC courts investors, corporate executives and professionals, the Democratic Party's "progressive" wing remains more interested in championing racial minorities of all classes rather than working-class Americans of all races. Several high-ranking Democratic aides in Congress and the Executive branch have privately told me that party strategists have written off the white working-class vote, and hope to make Latinos a solid Democratic constituency. In this scenario, the Democratic Party will regain its majority status as a coalition of well-to-do whites, blacks and ever-swelling numbers of Latino immigrants, who will be attracted by affirmative action, racial redistricting and other measures that discriminate against working-class and poor whites on the basis of their race.

With the exception of the greatly weakened labor movement, no major political body speaks for the economic interests and cultural values of the country's alienated white workers. The urban and rural political machines that used to represent these citizens have been replaced by two new phenomena: One is the candidate-centered organizations that link politicians, wealthy individual and corporate donors, and media consultants; the other is the single-issue lobbies, often funded by large private liberal and conservative foundations but never focused on the concerns of white workers. Abandoned by liberals, manipulated by conservatives, working-class whites have been drawn to a series of demagogues-from George Wallace to Patrick J. Buchanan-who have claimed to advance their interests.

The alternative to a demagogic politics of grievance is a politics of egalitarian reform. A new, race-neutral egalitarian movement would reject both the phony, manipulative populism of the Right and the Left's combination of egalitarian rhetoric with contempt for blue-collar Americans who happen to be white. The goal of those concerned about reversing the decades-long growth of inequality in the United States should be the improvement not only of the income but of the status and dignity of all working-class Americans. Even gas station attendants.