Who is the elitist?

One person has a bachelor’s degree from Chadron State College in Nebraska. His master’s comes from Minnesota State University at Mankato, and he spent the next 17 years of his life as a teacher.

The other got his BA from Ohio State University and his JD from Yale Law School. After receiving his law degree, he clerked for a federal judge, practiced corporate law at the prestigious firm Sidley Austin and went to California to work in the tech industry as a venture capitalist.

Readers will already have figured out what I did here: The first bio is obviously that of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz; the second, that of his Republican counterpart, JD Vance. When you compare them, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Vance is the one with the “elitist” pedigree.

I freely concede that I did not mention Vance’s tough childhood described in his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy.” But this only underscores the point: Contemporary politics often looks like a fight over which side is more elitist and “out of touch” with “average” Americans, based on warring definitions of what makes one side more guilty of snobbery and condescension than the other.

The problem for Republicans this year is not just that Walz’s biography makes it nearly impossible for them to cast him as elitist. It’s also that the right has spent decades arguing that voters have less to fear from abuses of power by billionaires and corporations than they do from the pretensions and power grabs of a “new class” of highly educated professionals - who happen to match Vance’s profile.

“The simple truth,” neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol wrote in an influential 1972 essay, “is that the professional classes of our modern bureaucratized societies are engaged in a class struggle with the business community for status and power.”

Conservatives have since capitalized on this idea in election after election. They were countering the success liberals had enjoyed since the 1930s, when Democrats began casting American politics as a conflict between workers and those Franklin D. Roosevelt condemned as “economic royalists.” The country club was the symbol of the moneyed elite’s power. The university is the symbol of the new class’s sway.

This history makes next week’s debate between Walz and Vance a fight over which brand of class politics will prevail.

A son of the Nebraska and Minnesota heartland, Walz presents not as some coastal progressive but as a Hubert Humphrey or Harry S. Truman liberal: a friend of labor and public education and an old-fashioned, small-town egalitarian. The formal name of his party in Minnesota, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, captures whose interests Walz sees himself as championing. The debate will test how much Walz’s persona and background can help Democrats recoup ground they have lost among less well-to-do voters, particularly in small towns and the countryside.

Vance is, well, complicated, and that complexity will likely require interviewers to ask a series of “Vance then, Vance now” questions. He seems to have changed a lot over the years, not least in his attitude toward former president Donald Trump, whom he once called an “idiot” and “reprehensible,” among other disparaging things.

He has defended the hideous lies he and Trump have told about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that have roiled the once-peaceful town and threaten newcomers who arrived there legally. This embrace of anti-immigrant rhetoric contradicts his past, too. He once condemned such attitudes for being “openly hostile to non-whites.” Of the mass deportation he and Trump now support, he previously said it “fails to pass the laugh test.”

Immigration is an issue that has split working-class voters in the past, and Trump and Vance are counting on many native-born Americans to vote that part of their identity. Walz’s challenge is to condemn the mendacious Springfield vitriol, and then do more. While outlining his ticket’s approach to immigration, he must also call voters back to the question of which party is really on their side when it comes to economics.

As for Vance’s corporate lawyer/venture capitalist past, he has at times confounded business leaders with rhetoric straight out of the left’s critique of neoliberalism - for example, criticizing “the postwar American order of globalization” that relies “more and more on cheaper labor.” How much of that side of Vance will show up?

So far, the contest pitting Chadron against Ohio State and Yale is going pretty well for the Chadron graduate. Gallup found that while Walz is viewed favorably by 41 percent of adults and unfavorably by 40 percent, Vance’s ratings are 36 percent favorable, 47 percent unfavorable. In playing down his debate expectations, Walz said he expects “a Yale Law guy” to “come well prepared.” You know he enjoyed saying that.