The new upper class and the real reason we dislike them
What makes the new upper class new is that its members not only have power and influence, but they also increasingly share a common culture that separates them from the rest of the country. Fifty years ago, the people who rose to the most influential positions overwhelmingly had Hank’s kind of background, thoroughly grounded in the American mainstream. Today, people of influence are characterized by a college education, often from elite colleges. The men are not married to the girl next door, but to highly educated women socialized at the same elite schools who are often as professionally successful as their husbands. They were admitted to this path by a combination of high IQ and personality strengths. They are often the children — and increasingly grandchildren — of the upper-middle class and have never known any other kind of life.
As adults, they have distinctive tastes and preferences, and seek out enclaves of others who share them. Their culture incorporates little of the lifestyle or the popular culture of the rest of the nation, in fact, members of the new upper class increasingly look down on that mainstream lifestyle and culture. Meanwhile, their children are so sheltered from the rest of the nation that they barely know what life is like outside Georgetown, Scarsdale, Kenilworth or Atherton. If this divide continues to widen, it will completely destroy what has made America’s national civic culture exceptional: a fluid, mobile society where people from different backgrounds live side by side and come together for the common good.
Blowback
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Hey SFB, Obama’s interference into almost every aspect of our lives is responsible for destroying this country. Entrepenuership is dead. That’s all part of Obama’s ghastly destructive plan.
fogw on February 7, 2012 at 9:15 PM
I don’t know who Murray is referring to when he says WE, but the first example he mentioned of the guy with a 100 million dollar stake in the auto business – the one he says WE don’t hate – is definitely the guy who is painted as the bad guy, and the rich elite he says we do hate – the political and media elite who comprise the tapestry of our pop culture – those are the people that have sided with the OWS movement and, in return, the OWS movement has sided with them.
So who is this WE?
keep the change on February 7, 2012 at 9:19 PM
The reason I don’t like the new so-called upper class has nothing to do with their cloistered upbringing, smug arrogance, diffident elitism, or even their contemptible arrogance.
No, the reason I loathe them is that they believe that they are capable, qualified, and endowed with the knowledge to manage the lives of We the People better than we are ourselves and they will use their accumulated power to force their vision and will on us. They seek to rule over us, not to govern with our consent.
They are a self-appointed aristocracy slowly stoking the resentments of the peasantry who may one day repeat not the Amercan Revolution, but the French Revolution.
Charlemagne on February 7, 2012 at 9:31 PM
I read this and thought of Palin and all the reasons that she connected with real people but not the “new upper class” who hates her with a passion.
Grunt on February 7, 2012 at 9:35 PM
I suspect this is an excellent article, but unfortuantely it is subscription only, yes?
Dreadnought on February 7, 2012 at 9:46 PM
Yo Chuck, the upper class always lived on the other side of the tracks, along the common in the nice houses, belong to the country clubs, vacationed at the beach or in the mountains etc. More populist revisionist crap.
dmann on February 7, 2012 at 9:48 PM
Is he talking about the rich that support raising taxes that don’t affect them?
Slowburn on February 7, 2012 at 9:49 PM
How is that any different from how the rich have always been? When did their kids ever go to school or mingle with ours? And have they not always looked down on the culture of the commoners?
Besides, it’s “Hank” who’s the actual new upper class person. He didn’t inherit his wealth but instead had to earn it. His children will have more in common with the other rich kids than someone like me, and their kids will likely look just like the people he’s calling “new upper class”.
Esthier on February 7, 2012 at 9:56 PM
He means Obama and his elitist pals… like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
profitsbeard on February 7, 2012 at 10:01 PM
Here’s a similar article of his in the WSJ:
The New American Divide:
The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what’s cleaving America, and why.
Charles Murray rules.
petefrt on February 7, 2012 at 10:39 PM
The whole premise of this article is flawed. His statements were truer around the turn of the 19th century then they are now and most certainly truer up through the 1950s. During that time, people from influential families were groomed for influential positions. (Kennedies anyone?)
The difference is that, in some aspects, there was less regulation and a man could rise from rags to riches. Today, the “rich” have legislated themselves a monopoly on wealth and do everything possible to keep the little guy little or put him out of business altogether.
Speakeasy on February 7, 2012 at 10:42 PM
What’s this “we” sh1t?
RoadRunner on February 7, 2012 at 11:04 PM
Although Murray makes some good points, casting his thesis in terms of “us” disliking the “upper class” is objectionable. That headline probably wasn’t his call.
Having class-based dislikes is something the right makes it a priority to avoid. I’m sure some in the uneddicated-populist right hate “the rich,” and we know for a fact that a lot of leftists do.
But for many — I think most — on the right, the animus against people like Soros and Pelosi, Kerry and Corzine, is political, and based on their penchant for abusing the power of government to create sinecures for themselves and play with the financial fortunes of the people.
If they didn’t try to jack around with my economic freedom and financial future, I wouldn’t care who they were, what they did, or how much they had. I’m happy for anyone to be as rich as he can manage — as long as he’s not either doing it by imposing mandates on the taxpayer, or parlaying his fortune into a destructive political dilettantism.
J.E. Dyer on February 7, 2012 at 11:12 PM
I think he’s vastly exaggerating the degree to which the Proper Bostonian or Park Avenue swell of a century ago identified with hoi polloi, but it is true that recruitment into the upper strata has been streamlined in almost Napoleonic fashion, circumventing both traditional roadblocks and former assimilating influences. An immigrant child can find himself in a plush professional or government sinecure by virtue of the right test scores and hard, hard work, skipping ten generations of pedigreed Americanism. That is bound to loosen social bonds even as it increases opportunity for rapid advancement. And therefore to risk a loss of common cultural currency and social legitimacy as formal credentialism supplants informal prejudice but also erodes communal trust.
Seth Halpern on February 8, 2012 at 12:32 AM