The members of the New Elite may love America, Charles Murray says, but, increasingly, they are not of it:
When educational and professional opportunities first opened up, we saw social churning galore, as youngsters benefited from opportunities that their parents had been denied. But that phase lasted only a generation or two, slowed by this inescapable paradox:
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.
What Herrnstein and I did not fully appreciate 16 years ago was how relentless this segregation would be. It is hard to get numbers — no survey has samples large enough to calibrate precisely what’s going on with the top percentiles of the population that I’m talking about — but the numbers we do have, combined with qualitative data provided by observers such as Brooks, Florida and Bill Bishop, in his book “The Big Sort,” are persuasive.
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 are 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.
Foseti adds that the New Elite are the modern incarnation of a certain type of American that has been around since the founding:
Unfortunately, America has always had a contingent of people who deny differences between boys and girls, who will stop at nothing to end “injustices,” and who believe they have been divinely endowed to determine who is right and who is wrong.
Since before America was America, it was settled by people hoping to create the kingdom of heaven on earth. For these people, the creation of this kingdom has always been what America is about. Thus it’s possible for the New Elites to love America (as they understand it) and want to destroy America as we know it (i.e. as we distinctly understand it).
After all, in the defense of the New Elites, there aren’t many things more American than abolitionism (many of the abolitionists believed that marriage was an institution of slavery), utopian socialism, protestant idealism, and 60s radicalism.
Those of us that oppose this sort of thinking do ourselves no favors when we pretend that the belief system we oppose is foreign to America.