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Elitism has bedevilled American liberalism for the better part of four decades. It undermined the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, and now it’s making mischief in the Obama campaign… The charge that liberal candidates don’t connect with regular Americans is embedded in old epithets like “limousine liberal”, which I first heard aimed at New York Mayor John Lindsay in 1969.

There’s also an even older and more illuminating antecedent from across the Atlantic: the writings of George Orwell… which describe a version of elitism that echoes powerfully in our current political battle… He himself was a socialist who could also turn a critical eye on the British Left… [and] he devoted a chapter to the failure of socialism to gain a foothold among the very citizens who would have seemed to benefit most from its rise. Substitute liberal or progressive for socialist, and the text often reads as though Orwell were covering American politics today.

Orwell also rails against the condescension many on the Left display toward those they profess to care most about… “every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted…” [Thus] the snobbish socialists succeeded in depleting their own ranks. For Democrats at the moment, it is no doubt exasperating to watch working-class voters choose candidates whose economic tastes run to comforting the comfortable. And it may be cold comfort to learn that such impulses are not confined to time and place. But if you want to court these voters in a way that will resonate with them, you could do a lot worse than heeding the cautionary words of George Orwell.

Excerpted from ‘Obama and Orwell’ by Jeff Greenfield in Slate, May 1