Privilege for What Purpose? : Everyone Uses Connections, Some Turn Their Backs on Consequences

So Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana used a bit of privilege to get out of going to Vietnam. Those who support him will find nothing wrong in this. “The man didn’t ‘get out’ of anything,” they say. “He did his patriotic duty in the National Guard.” Those who oppose him will find nothing right in this. “It was hypocritical of the rich in those days to support the war but avoid fighting it themselves,” they say. “Just as it is hypocritical of them now to be gung-ho militaristic while less privileged Americans do their dirty work.”

Whichever side one takes, there’s another issue tucked away in here--the ambivalence with which Americans regard the general matter of privilege. We mistrust it, but we also envy it. Quayle seems to have used his wealth and connections to further his own self-interest. For many people that is the ultimate goal: to have the money and power to buy one’s way out of annoying duties--whether military service, time in prison or housework. By and large this nation is enormously tolerant of the privileges claimed by the rich. If you have the dough, people say, you get to do anything you want with it. Perhaps people are so tolerant because the American dream promises that they, too, will be rich one day and therefore as free to claim the exemptions of wealth.

The ambivalence about the uses of privilege once caused an angry debate in my family over nepotism: Should relatives help each other in professional advancement? Is it OK for television producer Steve Bochco to hire his family members when more talented actors are out of work? The pro-nepotism contingent argued that if family members didn’t look out for each other there would be no way of breaking into the Establishment. To combat the old-boy nepotism network, they said, women and blacks and Jews and Asians must form their own alliances; if they don’t help each other, no one else will. The anti-nepotism contingent argued that family connections are no substitute for talent and hard work, that alliances of any sort are unfair and exclusionary and that you don’t correct the problem by imitating it.

It’s an insoluble debate, because everyone uses connections--whether based on wealth, family, friendship, work or shared experiences. People try to get jobs by using connections--they call on influential people for whom they worked, distant cousins, college alumni. People try to get articles published in newspapers and magazines by claiming connections (“so and so suggested I send this to you”). People try to get better seats at the ball game, and any seats at all to sold-out shows, by finding connections. Entering some jobs, organizations or unions depends entirely on having connections with an insider.

Connections are the basis of individual and group survival; they derive from the oldest tribal rule of reciprocity--you do for me, I do for you, we’ll do for our own. The problem is not with the need for connections but with the fact that connections cut two ways: They enable those who have them and exclude those who don’t. Our reactions to people who “have connections” depends on which side of the cut we fall. A New York friend of mine waited 11 years to advance to perfect opera seats by subscription only to discover, to his fury, that his new seatmate had inherited hers. But my friend did not object when, through connections, he got house seats to “Phantom of the Opera.”

The point, therefore, is not to attack the use of privilege but to ask: How is privilegeused? Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy came from rich and powerful families, but they also had a tradition of service to the public, of duty to those less privileged and of using their power to improve the lot of the powerless. The rich without a sense of social conscience often use their wealth for gaudy, self-promoting display or to buy self-serving trinkets like entry into law school and government.

Thus the point is not to attack the use of connections but to ask: How does the insider use his or her connections--and with what consequence to the outsider? Almost everyone belongs to one kind of club or another, formal or informal, and enjoys club “privileges.” But when the club gives insiders a leg up to power and wealth, outsiders are entitled to question why they get the lesser opportunities. When the club exempts insiders from paying their debts to society, outsiders are entitled to ask why the debt always falls to them.

Now consider the fact that Dan Quayle used his privileges to avoid combat in Vietnam. Many thousands of young men did the same thing, and many thousands, following conscience or an antipathy to a miserable war, fled the country. What bothers me is that Quayle didn’t--and doesn’t--seem to care much about the people who, lacking his connections and lacking his wealth, could not travel his route to safety. What bothers me is that Quayle, having had his free lunch, would deny help to others in need. What bothers me is that Quayle, having sat out the war in safety, continued to support it and celebrates it to this day. It looks like a case of hypocrisy to me.