If you can’t answer this question you are probably one of the “New Elite.”
Who are the so-called “Elite” that the members of the Tea Party despise so much? Do such “Elite” really exist? Charles Murray, writing in yesterday’s Washington Post, argues that these Elites do exist and they are largely out of touch with most of America. Murray writes:
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.
I'm guessing an intern did a great deal of research for an elistist like Murray to be able to write that article.
Wow, that comment on not having a close friend who was an evangelical Christian seems really off the mark. I probably fall into the category he is discussing. My life would highlight the difficulty of making such sweeping generalizations–half of my family went to community college, I married another PhD, but much of his family is blue-collar, etc. But when it comes to not knowing evangelicals–that's a stereotype of who evangelicals are that's never been backed up by any empirical data, and it highlights the ways in which Americans have always defined class more culturally than economically. (e.g., twenty years ago, a white collar teacher likely made half of what a blue-collar steel worker did.) I get that that plays into the argument here–we're discussing cultural segregation as much as economic. The problem is that he's trying to conflate the two. And thinking that evangelicals don't have their own new elite–identical in every respect to the secular new elite, except the two frequently don't mix–is woefully mistaken.