I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s “Gay Culture” during breakfast this morning, and I decided that I should spit out my half-digested ideas on Elite Culture. It’s a topic that has been on the back of my mind for two weeks as I’ve read Brooks’ column on cultural capital, the Atlantic Monthly issue on inequity and college admissions, the New Republic’s issue on cronyism, and the fight within the right on the Miers appointment. It’s also been on the back of my mind as we try to assimilate into our blue collar town.
I’ll try to be brief as I pull together these disparate thoughts, but we’ll see how it goes.
I live in a town about twenty minutes from Manhattan, with a large percentage of a town of blue collar professionals. Aside from our educational background, there are all sorts of superficial cultural differences that separates us from our neighbors — where we travel, what we read, what we watch on TV, what we drive (we have the crappiest car), how we shape our hair, and what after school activities we chose for our children.
I’ve found friends here; we all like chatting about our kids and our failed efforts at home improvement. But our move to Blue Collar Town has thrown into sharp focus all privileges that I’ve had and how we navigate the world in such different ways.
Some cultural differences are more important than others. When I found out that my kid was having trouble talking at two, I immediately called the state so that he could receive services. I bullied the state and later the school district into getting him help. I was aggressive and arrogant when I needed to be.
Several kids on our block are having academic and behavioral problems in school. The parents are too afraid to have their kids helped, because of their own history with learning disabilities and being in old segregated special ed classes. I have told them that their kids will get one on one attention, if they get them tested, but they don’t believe me and instead they just wait until the school holds their kids back in later grades. One parent won’t answer the phone when the school calls, because she’s so afraid.
An aggressive attitude towards bureaucracy, especially the education bureaucracy, is one way that the educated elites maintain their place. This then enables them to manage the many hurdles that one faces to enter college. They get their kids SAT prep classes and then tutoring after that. (I just spoke to one guy in another town who just spent $3,000 on SAT tutoring for his kid in addition to a $800 class at Stanley Kaplan.)
If it weren’t for the soaring real estate market, we would have probably ended up in a community of people like ourselves with advanced degrees and subscriptions to the New Yorker readers and postcards from the museum. People travel in packs and ever since I moved to New York City after college, I have only been around this group.
What should I call this group? Is elite the right word? I’m not sure. But I know it when I see it. You are part of the elite if you’ve been to Europe, been to a selective college, read the New York Times or the WSJ, if you know what WaPo means. If you are one or two degrees away from people of real power and prestige in the country. If you have a blog or read them. If you buy books through Amazon and watch Lost. If you use correct grammar and a salad fork.
Who cares about those things, you say? WTF does it matter whether you drive a Camero or a Camry? And you’re right. But this group, in addition to using a salad fork, also controls most of the power and makes most of the money in this country. Last week, Ross Douthat and David Brooks cited the disturbing statistics about non-elites entering college. Partially, there are institutional barriers at work here. Partially, it’s the dumb cultural differences like grammar and after school activities, and partially it’s important cultural differences like attitudes towards school bureaucracy.
This distinct elite culture and its monopoly over power and prestige has also created resentments. That’s what I find so fascinating about the debate over the Miers appointment. Unlike the red/blue debate from last November, this debate is happening just within the Republican party, so we can control for politics. There is a real tension in our country between the elites and non-elites, and it can’t be just chalked up to different political values.
Right now the debate is over the value of a CV. A weighty CV is the currency of the elite, and now others are questioning its value. Being a good person and the respect of a leader should be good enough, the critics say. They point out the right jobs and the right recommendations are earned through SAT prep classes and a stylish hair cut. And look at all the assholes who have come out of Harvard. Good points.
But now we don’t know who deserves positions of power and who doesn’t. This is what happens when a meritocracy falls apart.
Apt. 11d 
I think the Miers debate may be “elite v. non-elite,” but only if you define elite very, very narrowly. Harriet Miers has, by most worthwhile definitions, been part of the elite for most of her life; except for her conversion to evangelicalism (not unheard of among elites, particularly in the South; both Bill Clinton and Al Gore were members of evangelical churches), she has vastly more in common with the Vanderbilts than the Clampetts.
Now, when people start complaining because Bush has nominated a public defender from Clarksdale, Mississippi (or, to stretch further, one of your blue-collar neighbors) to the Supreme Court, then we can have a real “elite vs. non-elite” debate. 😉
LikeLike
Methinks you’re way overplaying the bluecollarness of H_____. I was born there (OK – Westwood, moved to Saddlewood Drive in H_____- right behind St. Johns [which I attended] at age 4).
Just saying, watch the Brooksian tendency to drive eleven miles out of the Big City and discover yourself to be in moo-town. There’s more than enough Englewood Cliffs white colar workers there…
(we native jerseyans are sensitive about our towns….)
LikeLike
sorry, H—-. but I have to delete the name of our town.
Yes, I’m sure that I was being very Brooksian in this post and lumping a whole area into one category. I could have written that one section of our town has these characteristics, but that would have made for awkward prose.
Let’s meet at Starbucks for a coffee sometime.
LikeLike
I’m not sure that we’re witnessing a meritocracy falling apart as much as we’re watching plenty of well-intentioned people on either side of the political line taking stock of their assumptions about what constitutes “merit” in the first place.
Laura, I’m in something of the opposite position: I grew up in one of those New Jersey towns, where most of my friends didn’t attend college and my grammar was bad. Now I rent an apartment in an “elite” D.C. neighborhood, where every day I “pass” in a world of Ivy League degrees, The New Yorker, National Public Radio, wine discussions, and other cultural markers I didn’t grow up with (and still don’t particularly enjoy). As you divide the country into “elites” and “non-elites,” spare a thought for those of us stuck in the middle who have to “fake it” to some extent as we move through both worlds.
LikeLike
I’m somewhat between the two as well. Blue-collar roots, but went to Elite U. Frankly I was miserable there. I’ve often thought I should have gone to to a state school instead, but I won a full-tuition scholarship to Elite U. I don’t think this makes me a member of the elite class.
One of the reasons I was miserable was so few students and faculty had any idea what life was like for people who had to work for a living.
To this day, when I read the NYT, I’m often infuriated by their elitist assumptions. Which given thier readership is not suprising, but it is still very insular.
One elitist assumption that is very irritating is only elites like good food & wine or a good book.
Anyway, enough ranting from me.
LikeLike
The Atlantic Monthly issue is staggeringly good. I bought it because I had nothing to read while waiting for my root canal – may well subscribe again. AND it had Caitlin Flanigin snarking at a ‘dads-can-be-dispensed-with’ book, which attitude always rings my bells.
Elites – we are certainly trying to ensure that our kids can do anything they want. We have climbed a good way up the greasy pole, I guess, we live in a leafy burb with million-dollar houses (which was a leafy mixed-income burb with $200,000 houses when we moved here, how the Hell did this happen?!) went to Ivy grad schools and make enough to pay tuition for college, but there are certainly people above us, and we could slip down. Mostly at this point we form our friendships at work and with the parents of our kids’ friends, so to the extent that class is uniform there, so are our friendships.
And I guess more important: since the data generally suggests that our kids will form much more of their class orientation and attitudes by aping their friends than from anything we try and inculcate, I guess by where we live and who we live with we are reproducing what elite status we have.
LikeLike
Jeff and Ron, if you’re not already familiar with it, you might be interested in Alfred Lubano’s book Limbo. He was raised in a blue-collar household (father was a tradesman, if I’m remembering correctly), went to college, and became a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Limbo includes both his own experience and oral-history-type interviews with other straddlers, as he calls them. Very readable and thought-provoking, and definitely illustrates the phenomenon of “passing” in a white-collar workplace.
LikeLike
I came from a solidly blue-collar background (union workers on both sides, railroad and construction)–except that my mom had white collar ambitions and made good money in real estate, making it possible for me to move up, get a degree, and work white collar most of my life so far. But the divide is still there in my family itself; my 3 sibs didn’t go to college and kept blue collar careers, and more conservative values, than I did.
I think the blue-collar world view is essentially darker and more pessimistic than the white collar one, more focused on survival, less optimistic about change. Cynical about elected leaders, certainly, unsurprised when things go badly. I’m not sure if it’s lack of education that breeds this, but I would say maybe…unless you know the history of activism in this country, for example, you might not realize how possible it is to be part of a movement for change.
LikeLike
Unfortunately, Laura, no can do on the Starbucks. Grew up there (westwood, h—–, and later morristown) but no longer live there. Don’t even live in beloved NYC any longer, as a university job has sucked me away to the rust belt.
Though new city does remind me a lot of NJ – seems to be about 80 percent catholic, for one thing. But the sinking population and plummeting house prices remind you pretty quickly you ain’t in the Garden State anymore…
LikeLike
Amanda: Thanks for the book recommendation. I do think, though, that it’s an overgeneralization to assume that anyone who can’t get by in the “elite” necessarily must have come from a blue-collar background. In fact, my parents were the first generation in their families to work in corporate America, and most of my early jobs were in sad, small-time, white-collar offices like the kind parodied on the TV show “The Office.” Truth is, you can wear a dress shirt and work in an air-conditioned room without being even remotely acceptable to the NPR-listening, Thai-food-eating “elite.”
(I wish I didn’t have to keep using the term “elite” when what I probably mean is “top tier of the middle class,” but we really don’t have a strong, honest vocabulary for talking about this stuff.)
For what it’s worth, a fun novel that dramatizes this phenomenon is Joe College by Tom Perrotta. The book isn’t great–the plot is kind of weak–but Perrotta really nails what it’s like to have people look down on you if you don’t know what kimchee is or if you’ve never thought to entertain, as he puts it, “the assassin’s side of the story.”
LikeLike
When people say “elitist” what are they really saying? Perhaps they mean you’re not so smart. But I believe the message Im’ hearing is “there’s more than one valid way to live your life — why don’t you knock off the patronizing sarcasm?”
I believe most Americans are open to the idea of people “attaining” middle class lifestyles if it’s on merit. But there has been a decoupling of true merit and upward mobility in the past 20 years or so; it goes along with the new requirement of a college degree. It used to be that college was just one avenue for success in life, that you could work your way up in a business, for example, without ever having gotten your bachelor’s. These days, however, putting everyone through that early sieve of college means that kids from enriched backgrounds have more of a jump than they used to. There are fewer and fewer opportunities outside the college-grad path.
Interestingly, in my experience people have no problem with an Ivy League grad as long as that grad is *respectful of others*. It’s the subtext of entitlement and superiority that people are responding to.
LikeLike
I grew up in a upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood and live now in an upper-middle-class semi-urban neighborhood (our neighborhood would have been a suburb in 1920 but is pretty attached to the city now). Yet there’s absolutely no comparison.
Growing up, my neighborhood was filled with engineers, technicians, teachers; the few rich people tended to be business owners, not law partners. All the kids went to public school or catholic school. It was expected that we would all go to college, but state schools were considered good enough.
Now, my wife and I are one of the few couples among our peers likely to send our kids to public school (one other families faced with that choice just moved to the real suburbs). The preschools that dot our side of the city unashamedly promote their ivy-league seedbed cred (the preschools). Playground conversations among adults are likely to leap from complaints about landscapers to the bother of maintaining vacation homes.
It’s truly wierd to me. It’s as if someone took that neighborhood of engineers and teachers from my childhood and slid it into a bucket of money. The people are the same, they have the same type of jobs, but the assumptions are all different.
LikeLike
Yes, that Atlantic Monthly issue was quite excellent, not only for Flanagan, but for really questioning the worthiness of the top schools. They take apart the ranking system and point the advantages that they give to wealthy kids.
And I know all about the barely white collar job. I worked for four summers during college in a solenoid valve office. Dim florescent lights and machinery workers in the back.
I am curious why this elite/class/populism discussion has been a subtheme in American politics for the past few years. Henry thinks that the elite have gotten more elite over time, because of added wealth. Seems like landscapers, housecleaners, and private school are the norm.
Chris. yeah, Miers isn’t hanging out at World Wrestling Championships and eating pork rinds. But her conservative critics are taking a lot of heat for being elites/elitists. I’m not sure I get it, but that’s how it is playing out.
I just think that there is a lot of resentment out there right now, probably exasberated by the concentration of wealth in a few hands and the growing isolation of elites and non-elites in their separate communities, and that these resentments are spilling out at any opportunity.
Anyhow, I appreciate all the feedback. Tell me more.
LikeLike
I am amused at how careful some of you are to disguise your class: you’re struggling hard to deny that you’re rich by saying “upper-middle-class” and “engineers with buckets of money,” but you’re still rich from where I live, with no college degree and in a house that only cost in the 5 digits rather than the 6 digit range.
If your household income is over $70,000 per year, you are in the top fifth of households in the US (I am not in that category). You are in the top one percent of the world. Sure there are lots of people above you, but there are far more below you.
LikeLike
Kai, I actually thought writing “upper” middle class was being honest (as opposed to writing just “middle class”). Call me rich, if you want, though I find that idea amusing.
I do suspect that elites have gotten more elite over time, though my previous post is misleading on this point. I’m sure where I live now (near the coast) vs. where I grew up (inland) is as crucial to my personal experience as the passage of time.
There’s nothing new about prep schools; I’m just not used to thinking of them as a norm.
LikeLike
Laura, I think the reason there’s so much discussion about elitism and class is because IMHO the entire country is currently in the process of being re-sorted. If you have adjusted to the reality of work in the digital age, you get to remain middle class or may even become fabulously wealthy. If you haven’t, you don’t. Middle class parents recognize this and are doing everything in their power to advantage their children — but you’ll note that even with all the advantages people try to pass on to their kids, it still often doesn’t work. And as the measures get more extreme they also become more obvious to the outside world, and more controversial.
Things are happening with our society right now that are not completely unprecedented, but the average American doesn’t necessarily know how it’s played out in the past. During the industrial revolution/gilded age all the same stuff was happening: it was Teddy Roosevelt and a war in Cuba instead of George W. and the war in Iraq, it was Hearst instead of Fox News, it was Andrew Carnegie instead of Bill Gates. A new emphasis on media, but without the consumer skills or legislation in place to make sure that media was accurate and not harmful. A rurally-based/Southern populist movement that scorned formal education and rose to the very highest levels of government. It’s all happened before. And back then, as now, it scared people, made them more religious as they looked for meaning in this unexpected new world, and brought massive class tension.
LikeLike