JONATHAN CHAIT OCTOBER 26, 2010
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[Guest post by James Downie]
The Bell Curve author Charles Murray has a bone to pick with the meritocracy:
That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans.
Let me propose that those allegations have merit.
This could be a defensible thesis, but Murray decides instead to prove it in as many wrongheaded ways as possible. First:
One of the easiest ways to make the point is to start with the principal gateway to membership in the New Elite, the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities. In the idealized view of the meritocrats, those schools were once the bastion of the Northeastern Establishment, favoring bluebloods and the wealthy, but now they are peopled by youth from all backgrounds who have gained admittance through talent, pluck and hard work. [...]
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.
Though Murray tries to imply that the "new elitists" have deceived themselves, no group is more aware of the falsity of this "idealized view" than the "meritocrats" themselves. Walk onto any elite campus, and you'll soon hear a group protesting the lack of socioeconomic diversity, and it is quite often those same meritocrats pushing for student loan reforms and funding to broaden educational diversity. And Murray doesn't even seem to believe that income level has much to do with achievement:
Students who have a parent with a college degree accounted for only 55 percent of SAT-takers this year but got 87 percent of all the verbal and math scores above 700, according to unpublished data provided to me by the College Board. This is not a function of SAT prep courses available to the affluent -- such coaching buys only a few dozen points -- but of the ability of these students to do well in a challenging academic setting.
Not only does he deny the influence of income on SAT scores, but his main piece of evidence is a non-income based category, "students who have a parent with a college degree." Yes, that category overlaps strongly these days with "upper-middle class," but the GI Bill put many of those students' grandparents into college for the first time, regardless of class. From here, Murray moves into more straightforward, worrying evidence: the New Elite cluster around certain cities, and largely marry each other (though shouldn't the latter be an outcome of the former?). But his cultural examples make less sense:
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.
Now, I've lived in Washington and New York my whole life, and yet I've never been able to get into Mad Men or The Sopranos. As TV ratings show, my classmates and I were/are always far more likely to watch Family Guy or Glee or something else less "elitist" than those critically-feted dramas. As for daytime television, until the rise of cable and the internet, the main demographics for daytime TV like The Price Is Right (whose new host, Drew Carey, is well-known to many "New Elites" from shows like Whose Line is It Anyway?) and "Oprah" were housewives and, um, college students, and both groups have been deserting daytime television.
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.
Er, MMA means mixed-martial arts, and its audience is actually more well-off than the average American. If you don't know what MMA is, that doesn't mean you're elitist; it means you are probably not a young male. As for the Johnsons, Jimmie Johnson is going for his 5th straight NASCAR title, but, as Matt Yglesias has already noted, it's unlikely that more Americans, elitist or not, know who he is than know one of the studio analysts on FOX's NFL coverage, given that football clobbers NASCAR in the ratings. There are many other poor examples in the latter half of the article, but, to be fair, Murray was doomed from the start, when he fundamentally misunderstood the articles he was writing against:
All this [anti-elitism] has made the New Elite distinctly touchy (see Maureen Dowd's "Making Ignorance Chic"), dismissive (see Jacob Weisberg's "Elitist Nonsense") and defensive (see Anne Applebaum's "The Rise of the 'Ordinary' Elite").
"Elite?" they seem to be saying. "Who? Us?"
Of the three articles he cites, only Weisberg comes close to the argument Murray claims all three are making. Dowd, Weisberg, and Applebaum's columns overlap not in protest at being labeled elite, but in fear of "anti-educationalism," of politicians boasting of not knowing anything, of taking pride in ignorance. As David Frum pointed out yesterday, Murray, and others like him, are trying to avoid a definition of elite that includes wealth, because such a definition, and the analysis of why these elites have performed so poorly in the past decade, would inevitably lead to policies that the ideological right is not comfortable with. Instead, Murray's definition becomes dependent on geography, culture, and, most worryingly, education. It is one thing to worry about the geographic clustering of college graduates or the continuing struggle for socioeconomic diversity in elite universities; it is quite another to turn learning into an enemy of "real America." Unlike class or race or other parts of one's background, a person can always expand his or her own education, and politicians should always be encouraging education, both for economic and cultural benefit. Using education as a wedge only ensures that ignorance continues, no matter what side you're on.
9 comments
This is a splendid takedown of Charles Murray, James. I like your citation of David Frum making the point that Murray and many conservatives wish to leave wealth out of the definition of what constitutes the elites because to include the wealthy would undermine the faux populism of these people.
- liberal reformer
October 26, 2010 at 10:50am
All the anti-intellectualism on the right these days is starting to remind me of the Fire Captain's monologue in Truffaut's "Fahreinheit 451" -- basically, learning makes some people feel superior to others, and we just can't have that. Selections from iMDb: The Captain: The books have nothing to say. Look, all stories of the dead, biography that's called, and autobiography. My life, my diary, my memoirs, my - intimate memoirs. These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be. Robinson Crusoe, the Negroes didn't like that because of his man, Friday. And Nietzsche, Nietzsche, the Jews didn't like Nietzsche. Here's a book about lung cancer. You see, all the cigarette smokers got into a panic, so for everybody's peace of mind, we burn it. Go on, Montag, all this philosophy, let's get rid of it. It's even worse than the novels. Thinkers and philosophers, all of them saying exactly the same thing: "Only I am right! The others are all idiots!" You see, it's... it's no good, Montag. We've all got to be alike. The only way to be happy is for everyone to be made equal.
- zardoz67
October 26, 2010 at 11:13am
Good stuff, Zardoz. I only wish the Republitards were as high minded as the Captain; the captain wants for everyone to be happy, the Repugnicants just want to be in power.
- GSpinks
October 26, 2010 at 12:06pm
Murray's argument brought to mind our current president's emergence onto the scene in his 2004 speech before the Democratic National Convention, in which he decried the pundits who tried to slice and dice us, and put together a one America vision. Murray's thesis seems to be more of a polemical attempt to divide us as part of a electoral strategy
- gator27
October 26, 2010 at 12:12pm
I feel like we are going backwards into the future. Father Counglin, Joseph McCarthy, Robert Welsh, Spiro Agnew, George Wallace, the KKK, the Silver Shirts, etc. all denounced the university educated, mostly eastern, elite. The Radical right wing extremists have been at this for a very long time. Now, a new generaltion of right-wingers have taken up the call.
- LawrenceGulotta
October 26, 2010 at 12:26pm
There is always a "them" who can be demonized, and there are always those eager to do so for some form of profit. Murray is every bit as vile as those on LawrenceGulotta's list.
- cspencef
October 26, 2010 at 2:33pm
Murray is just making shit up. If he ever engaged any actual human being in a conversation about sports and that actual human being responded by talking about Pilates or yoga, I'll contribute $1000 to the charity of his choice, which I imagine is either the old folks home for retired NASCAR drivers (who knew a nerd-clown like Murray actually liked such he-man sports?) or perhaps some kind of workhouse for kids whose genetic make-up dooms them to a life of manual labor.
- Geoff G
October 26, 2010 at 4:09pm
Remember when conservatives publicly espoused meritocracy and denounced identity politics? Yeah, I know. It was a long time ago. Now, everyone wants to be Tom Wolfe, making fun of elites and their foibles in publications that only elites read. That's fine as far as it goes. (Although, it *can* get a little old, and come off as more shrill and clumsy than deft and witty, as David Brooks demonstrates.) The point is, it doesn't go very far, and it certainly doesn't stand as a basis for any legitimate anger. Murray says that Tea Partiers have a point when they say that elites are out of touch. Never mind that that's not really their point. It's extraordinarily thin. It doesn't actually matter at all what TV shows or sporting events different sorts of people watch. Murray says that elites are in a bubble, because they grow up and live in cities rather than small towns or rural America, where, he says, a third of Americans "still live." Right, so elites are out of touch because they reside among the other two thirds. The fact is, everyone tends to stick with people like themselves. If elites are in a bubble, so is everyone else. In fact, elites are probably less bubble-prone according to numerous measures. They live in more hetereogeneous places. They're more mobile. They probably have more heterodox tastes, encompassing popular entertainment as well as higher-brow material. They probably consciously value diversity to a much greater extent. Nobody can walk in everyone else's shoes. Everybody has cultural affinities that fall somewhere short of all-encompassing. This is all trivially obvious. It doesn't serve as the basis of any sort of sound argument, much less rage. The insidious aspect of Murray's asinine musings is the "real America" business, which is toxic swill. Murray approvingly quotes Beck, who contrasts elites with "regular Americans." I would like to see Murray argue for what makes someone a "real" or "regular" American. We've already discounted cities, where, Murray acknowledges, most Americans live. So, evidently, "real America" excludes a majority of Americans. Interesting. Other sociological signposts, which Murray strangely calls "data," that mark one as irregular include the following: (1) A liberal arts education is suspicious -- never mind its ubiquity and, indeed, "quintessential" Americanness. (2) Professionals are suspicious -- especially financial professionals. (3) The upper-middle-class is suspicious. (4) High- or middle-brow cultural taste is, of course, anathema, and marks one as not of the true Volk. Even mainstream tastes in sports won't get you a free pass. One must be thoroughly literate in niche phenomena like MMA in order to be a real American. Okay, so far we have the urban, educated, intellectual, well-off (though not very wealthy) professional, culturally middle-brow bourgeoisie. Throw "Jew" and "homosexual" in the mix, and it sounds like we've got the coming of the Third Reich.
- JakeH
October 26, 2010 at 4:18pm
well said, JakeH
- GSpinks
October 26, 2010 at 5:12pm