Yep. All of us. You, me, the high school English teacher who had you read Whitman and Wilde without apologizing for their sexual preferences, the struggling graduate student eating Cup Ramen in a drafty studio apartment, the kid digging ditches for the Peace Corps in a guinea-worm-infested African swamp, are all arrogant, out-of-touch elitists, living in a isolated bubble far away from the concerns and loves and beliefs of the American People.
Multi-millionaires like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh? Real Americans, men of the people, the common clay of the New West.
Follow me below the fold to find out more.
"On one side, we have the elites," Fox News host Glenn Beck explained last month, "and the other side, we have the regular people." The elites are "no longer in touch with what the country is really thinking," Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle complained this summer. And when Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell recently began a campaign ad by saying, "I didn't go to Yale," she could be confident that her supporters would approve.
Yeah, Tea Partiers hate this guy. Or maybe they know he didn't actually learn anything while at Yale, which is as good as not going in the first place.
Anyway. With those quotes, noted pundit Charles Murray begins his recent Washington Post editorial: The tea party warns of a New Elite. They're right. 'Warns'. How ominous! But let me qualify. When I say 'noted pundit' Charles Murray, I mean 'well-known scientific racist' Charles Murray. His best known work is The Bell Curve. Published in 1994, this learned, extensively researched, and thoroughly execrable work 'statistically' 'demonstrated' that black people, as a race, were and are intellectually inferior to whites and Asians, and that black communities remain uneducated and impoverished in large part because of that inferiority. (A certain maxim by one Samuel Clemens comes to mind here.) As such, Murray argued, United States social policy needed to recognize that inferiority, including explicit advocacy of eugenics. The Wikipedia article quotes:
We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. "If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility." The technically precise description of America's fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone rich or poor. The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe.
Well. Perhaps I exaggerate slightly when I say Murray advocates for eugenics. Maybe he 'only' wants to starve the poor. Still, one wonders whether Murray would still support the last sentence of that paragraph, given that he now works for a wingnut welfare organization, the American Enterprise Institute, where he rubs shoulders with such leading lights of the conservative movement as John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, Fred Kagan, Irving Kristol, and Michael Novak. But this introduction has been ad hominem enough without further condemning the unfortunate gentleman for his choice of associates.
Murray starts out with (amazingly enough) something close to a good point: access to the top tier of higher education is still heavily correlated with prior socioeconomic status.
Compared with 50 years ago, the proportion of students coming from old-money families and exclusive prep schools has dropped. The representation of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans has increased. Yet the student bodies of the elite colleges are still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper middle class. According to sociologist Joseph Soares's book "The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges," about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupations put them in the top quarter of American families, according to Soares's measure of socioeconomic status. Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families.
And it's true: access to the best universities is still very much predicated on being able to afford the best universities. Somehow, though, I'm pretty sure the Tea Party isn't going to get behind a platform of equitable education access any time soon. But moving on:
Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them -- which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.
Which means most of them grew up in the suburbs or urbanized areas where almost two-thirds of all Americans now live. Wait, who's unrepresentative of 'real America' now, Chuck? But let's see where he's going with this.
When they leave college, the New Elite remain in the bubble. Harvard seniors surveyed in 2007 were headed toward a small number of elite graduate schools (Harvard and Cambridge in the lead) and a small number of elite professional fields (finance and consulting were tied for top choice) [...]
When the New Elite get around to marrying, they don't marry just anybody. [...] The New Elite marry each other, combining their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the benefit of both.
So what's your point, Chuck? I thought that that was a good thing? Certainly, your previous works would suggest that...
We are watching the maturation of the cognitive stratification that Richard J. Herrnstein and I described in "The Bell Curve" back in 1994.
... there we go.
The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite -- the "cognitive elite" that Herrnstein and I described -- becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama's example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent ("Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.
Well, point 1: your 'cognitive elite' theory is, to put it politely, bullshit, and I would have hoped that the massive (and massively negative) scholarly response to The Bell Curve would have pointed that out. The 'New Elite' are not smart because they have good genes - it may be a small factor, but not a major one. Again, I give you the example of Harvard and Yale graduate George W. Bush, Super Genius. No, it's wealth. Rich people go to the best schools, get the best jobs, marry other rich people, and so on and so forth. Murray's editorial so far is an excellent argument for the resumption of the estate tax and a massive expansion of government student loan/grant programs.
But. Conservative think tank, remember? Now Murray, blinders firmly in place, heads right off into the ditch. After pointing out that the 'New Elite' tend to live in certain areas (well, duh!) he continues:
With geographical clustering goes cultural clustering. Get into a conversation about television with members of the New Elite, and they can probably talk about a few trendy shows -- "Mad Men" now, "The Sopranos" a few years ago. But they haven't any idea who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price Is Right." They know who Oprah is, but they've never watched one of her shows from beginning to end.
... and this has to do with being wealthy and Harvard-educated how, again?
Talk to them about sports, and you may get an animated discussion of yoga, pilates, skiing or mountain biking, but they are unlikely to know who Jimmie Johnson is (the really famous Jimmie Johnson, not the former Dallas Cowboys coach), and the acronym MMA means nothing to them.
They can talk about books endlessly, but they've never read a "Left Behind" novel (65 million copies sold) or a Harlequin romance (part of a genre with a core readership of 29 million Americans).
If hating Left Behind is wrong, I don't want to be right. But heck, why not go all the way? If Left Behind and Harlequin romances represent American literature, isn't Twilight, as a Mormon death-and-resurrection story crossed with a Harlequin romance, the great American novel?
They take interesting vacations and can tell you all about a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada or an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor, but they wouldn't be caught dead in an RV or on a cruise ship (unless it was a small one going to the Galapagos). They have never heard of Branson, Mo.
Um, okay. Last I checked, you needed a lot more money to buy and maintain a RV (especially with gas as expensive as it is), or to go on a cruise, than you need to go backpacking. But (and here let me foreshadow my point) Murray is citing cultural markers that have nothing to do with wealth or a top tier education, and conflating them with membership in this 'New Elite'. But let's move on.
There so[sic] many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven't ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn't count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don't count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn't count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a factory floor, let alone worked on one.
If you don't mind me asking, since when was the Rotary Club 'quintessentially American'? Since when was poverty 'quintessentially American'? Since when do you have to be a member of the wealthy upper class to hate Oprah and mixed martial arts? Notice how much 'doesn't count'? If you took two part-time jobs to pay your way through college, congratulations, you're as elitist as the guy whose family bought him a Harvard MBA. And do notice the implications of the subtle 'close friend who', along with the Left Behind bit earlier. Murray doesn't want to come right out and say it, for some reason, but there is apparently a religious test for 'Real Americanism', and non-evangelical-Christians start coming pretty close to the wrong side of that line. Similarly, you may notice the subtle references to environmental causes - backpacking instead of RVing.
Taken individually, members of the New Elite are isolated from mainstream America as a result of lifestyle choices that are nobody's business but their own. But add them all up, and they mean that the New Elite lives in a world that doesn't intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. When the tea party says the New Elite doesn't get America, there is some truth in the accusation.
Yeah, um, no. It's the Tea Party who doesn't 'get' the America the 'New Elite' lives in. Rather, to put it more bluntly, they don't get that there can be more than one 'American culture', that people can be wholly American without conforming to the small-town white-bread trailer-park zeitgeist (I mean, 'The Price is Right' as a country-wide symbol of what it means to be an American? I don't think so).
But why is Murray pushing this view? Let's see:
Part of the isolation is political. In that Harvard survey I mentioned, 72 percent of Harvard seniors said their beliefs were to the left of the nation as a whole, compared with 10 percent who said theirs were to the right of it. The political preferences of academics and journalists among the New Elite also conform to the suspicions of the tea party.
But the politics of the New Elite are not the main point.
No, Charles, you're either ignorant or lying; in the words of one of your own philosophers, you're either 'liar, lunatic, or Lord', and I wouldn't put much credence in the latter option if I were you. To the Tea Party movement, liberalism IS the main point. Backpacking and highbrow literature and so forth aren't bad in and of themselves - as witness the prominent career of one Victor Davis Hanson, classicist, conservative pundit and douchebag - they're bad because, fairly or unfairly, they've been linked in the teabag meme generator with nasty un-American liberal beliefs like, say, environmentalism and atheism.
Murray starts with the germ of a point, but then he goes horribly, horribly wrong. And deliberately so. Yes, it sounds like somebody spent way too much time reading 'Stuff White People Like', but this is an especially nefarious restatement - nefarious because of its scientific veneer - of a powerful ongoing theme in modern conservative politics. Let me tell you what's going on here.
Yes, the 'New Elite' are wealthy - they go to exclusive schools, get the best jobs, marry into each others' families, and keep their children on their elite path. In other words, they're the Old Elite: wealthy, educated, powerful. They are George W. Bush. But talking about 'wealth' is class warfare, and class warfare is a threat to the genuine elite in this country, like, for example, the Koch brothers. The American Heritage Institute would never permit Murray to print an editorial explicitly arguing that wealth biases the playing field in so many different ways (even though it does).
So what does Murray do? He downplays wealth as a factor. The 'New Elite' are successful not because of wealth, but because of good genes. They're genetically other. A 'new race'. Literally not American. Maybe not even human. But how can you tell that someone belongs to this dangerous, alien 'other'? That's where Murray gets really nasty. He elides wealth and defines 'elite' culturally. Hating 'Left Behind' and Garth Brooks country-pop have nothing to do with going to Harvard or Yale or being a high-powered CEO or bank manager. But the takeaway from this article is that people who don't share small town, rural, lower-class, conservative American culture are not real Americans.
Not only that, but anyone who shares in this 'New Elite' culture is suspect. As Murray takes pains to suggest, holding certain cultural views links you to the 'New Elite', to this wealthy, highly educated political class, no matter how wealthy or powerful you actually are. In a very careful, very roundabout way, he's suggesting that holding certain cultural views, which stereotypically correlate with liberal political views in the Tea Party mind, make you a member of the wealthy American bourgeois and a class traitor to the proletariat. Conversely, those who do not hold such cultural views are not members of the wealthy American bourgeois, no matter how rich they happen to be. It's a very convenient bit of propaganda when one is one of a handful of conservative billionaires using a populist movement to get oneself tax breaks.
That's why I say we are the 'New Elite'. Because no matter how wealthy, how well-educated, and how well-connected, readers of this site actually are (and generally the answers are: not very, less than one might like, and not at all), if we don't read Left Behind and live in small towns with evangelical Christian friends, we're on the rich side of the class warfare coin. We're out of touch with 'real America'. We are the bourgeois of 18th century France, unconcerned and unfamiliar with real American life, as represented by the Tea Party proletariat, which, like the South, is going to rise again, shaking off the chains of their economic and cultural oppression. We:
are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.
In closing: fuck you, Charles Murray, you racist hack.
Love.