October 28, 2010
HAVING NEVER COME IN CONTACT WITH AMERICANS...:
The tea party warns of a New Elite. They're right. (Charles Murray, October 24, 2010, Washington Post)
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.
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.
That idealized view is only half-right. Over the past several decades, elite schools have indeed sought out academically talented students from all backgrounds. But the skyrocketing test scores of the freshman classes at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other elite schools in the 1950s and 1960s were not accompanied by socioeconomic democratization.
On the surface, it looks as if things have changed. 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. According to sociologist Joseph Soares's book "The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges," about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupations put them in the top quarter of American families, according to Soares's measure of socioeconomic status. Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families.
The discomfiting explanation is that despite need-blind admissions policies, the stellar applicants still hail overwhelmingly from the upper middle class and above. 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only 55 percent of SAT-takers this year but got 87 percent of all the verbal and math scores above 700, according to unpublished data provided to me by the College Board.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.
Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them -- which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.
When they leave college, the New Elite remain in the bubble. Harvard seniors surveyed in 2007 were headed toward a small number of elite graduate schools (Harvard and Cambridge in the lead) and a small number of elite professional fields (finance and consulting were tied for top choice). Jobs in businesses that provide bread-and-butter goods and services to individual Americans, which make up the overwhelming majority of entry-level openings for aspiring managers, attracted just 1.7 percent of the Harvard students who went to work right after graduation.
...it's hardly surprising that they know so little about their own country, Is America Really A 50-50 Nation? Not Even Close, New Polling Finds (JASON JONES, 10/27/10, IBD)
We are told that in America today, partisanship has never been so bad, that it threatens our nation's unity. At the same time, we've been told we should keep our faith, our values and our morality to ourselves, and that our public spaces, traditions and celebrations must remain devoid of God and Christianity.Now there's proof that the truth is actually quite different. That proof is in the form of a new book being released on Nov. 2 by Doubleday. In "Beyond a House Divided: The Moral Consensus Ignored by Washington, Wall Street and the Media," the leader of the Knights of Columbus, Carl Anderson, shows how recent polling conclusively reveals that the culture wars are being won by those with traditional values.
Those of us who believe in God, have successful marriages, oppose abortions in most instances, want less government than more, think the government and media are part of the problem, and are supportive of religion in the public square are not a minority.
We're not just a majority either. We are part of the quiet consensus at work in this country — if only those in the media and Washington, D.C., were paying attention.
The truth is that Americans are a people guided and sustained by morality and faith, and want those values reflected both in their institutions and political leadership.
