In The Washington Post last Sunday, the social scientist Charles Murray wrote one of those uncommon articles that manages to intrigue and infuriate all at once. Murray’s thesis is that the America’s elite is out of touch with “the real America.” Writes Murray, “We know, for one thing, that the New Elite clusters in a comparatively small number of cities and in selected neighborhoods in those cities. This concentration isn’t limited to the elite neighborhoods of Washington, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and San Francisco. It extends to university cities with ancillary high-tech jobs, such as Austin and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle. 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. 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). 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. There so 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. 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. Part of the isolation is political. . . [b]ut the politics of the New Elite are not the main point. When it comes to the schools where they were educated, the degrees they hold, the Zip codes where they reside and the television shows they watch, I doubt if there is much to differentiate the staff of the conservative Weekly Standard from that of the liberal New Republic, or the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute from those of the Brookings Institution, or Republican senators from Democratic ones. The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.”
Charles Murray is only about 20 years late in the discovery that pop culture is full of niches, but there are still things that broadly connect. It’s ridiculous to contrast yoga and MMA (that’s Mixed Martial Arts, for you out-of-touch elitists out there) without talking about football, baseball and basketball, the mass appeal sports that cut across all kinds of lines. It’s dumb to contrast Mad Men and The Price Is Right and not talk about mass appeal shows like American Idol or The Simpsons. Has Murray never heard of Star Wars or Halo or Twilight or Avatar? And at a time when most people from every station in life are not reading enough, it’s ludicrous to suggest that Jonathan Franzen‘s fans should read Harlequin romances, just to meet some fusty professor’s expectations of what mainstream Americans read. (I actually think educated people should be snobbier, should take more pride in what they read and watch, and should ask more of themselves than what is offered by mass culture.) And beyond that, it’s just nutty to talk about defining mainstream Americans by such consumer choices.
But there is an educated, wealthy elite, and to my mind, they do have some traits which separate them from most Americans. For one thing, they are less religious. For another, they tend to overvalue educational credentials and intellect in evaluating other people, and to undervalue other attributes. (It’s why we keep backing candidates like John Kerry in races against candidates like George W. Bush, and then being shocked by the outcome; it’s why we do not understand the appeal of Sarah Palin.) And third, they are very sophisticated in developing rationalizations for acting in their own self-interest. And in this way, they–we–are no different than every elite that has ever existed.
There’s a difference between being elite and being enlightened, between being educated and being intelligent, between being cultured and being just.