The news came in last Friday’s Washington Post, in which it was announced that “Republicans plan to describe Obama as an elitist” – mmm, novel word, that – “from the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where liberal professors mingle in an academic world that is alien to most working-class voters.” Then, like clockwork, out slid the new issue of The Weekly Standard, which lambastes Mr. Obama’s neighborhood as an island of upper-class daffiness – a neat trick, considering that Hyde Park’s median household income is substantially lower than both the national and the Chicago median.
At first I thought this had to be a mistake. True, there is a clique of professors in Hyde Park who are “alien” to working-class interests, as I know from having lived there for 15 years. Those professors are conservatives, however: members of the University of Chicago’s law and economics departments who have given that institution much of its world-wide fame.
Their hostility to the working class is not to be doubted. They have dreamed up ways to get the New Deal ruled unconstitutional. They have railed against labor unions and higher minimum wages while cheering lustily for Nafta and grotesque pay inequality. At this very moment, in that diabolical neighborhood of Hyde Park, the university is setting up a lavishly funded Milton Friedman Institute in order to better worship the greatest free-market evangelist of them all. (Fittingly, it will occupy what used to be the Chicago Theological Seminary.)
But these professors get a pass when Hyde Park’s “academic world” comes under fire. These are intellectuals conservatives love; indeed, if the GOP ever was the “party of ideas,” as many insist, those ideas pretty much came from Hyde Park.
