There’s been a bit of a dust-up over Charles Murray’s recent anti-elitist manifesto. Apparently Murray, who is a scholar at a major think tank and a well-known writer and political thinker, is not an elitist. But mountain bikers are. Anyways, Claire Berlinksi has a quiz everyone should take to determine whether you might be an elitist yourself and not even know it! You might even be an out-of-touch elitist.
David Frum has done an especially good job dissecting Murray’s ridiculous piece. I don’t have a whole hell of a lot more to add, myself, except that I think to some degree everyone engages in this elite-mongering.
A lot of conservatives think there is some coastal elite-class of snobby liberals and technocrats out trying to rule over the plebes in Real America; and I’ve read enough liberals to know that plenty of lefties think all Republicans are rich corporate elitists who have the rich liberal technocratic elitists by the proverbial you-know-whats.
This bipartisan antipathy toward the rich and powerful is likely because there are rich and powerful people on both sides of the political aisle. It’s stupid and delusional to think otherwise. And of course, the perception of elitism is often sullied by our own prejudices – so Murray doesn’t understand how he could possibly be perceived as an elitist, but thinks that someone who went to a better school than he did, regardless of whether that propelled them into the halls of power, is an elitist. It doesn’t make sense. It’s jealousy and resentment and victimization all wrapped up into one.
Elitism is all relative – just like wealth. You can make two hundred thousand dollars a year and still feel poor if you only hang out with billionaires. That doesn’t mean you’re actually poor, of course, but everything is relative. Same with this sense of the elite – this mirage of some other more powerful group pulling the strings, as though the world could be broken up so easily into Us and Them.
