Applebaum: Murray is also an "Elitist"
Anne Applebaum writes:
Charles Murray has written an entertaining and partly accurate portrait of America’s New Elite. He makes only one serious error, albeit one that is very interesting: He leaves himself out. Throughout his article, he refers constantly to "they" and "them," when he should be writing "we."
Murray, by his own account, grew up in a "non-collegiate" family, but made it to Harvard thanks to hard work and the SAT. He has spent most of his working life as an academic political scientist and is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. More to the point, he has made a career out of glorifying meritocracy and even defending intellectual snobbery. Most recently, he attacked college education as "a waste of time," in part because most people aren't smart enough to benefit from it.
It's a provocative argument, like all of Murray's arguments, which I have always enjoyed reading. But this time his intellectual honesty doesn’t go far enough. He is right that there is rebellion afoot against the meritocracy -- a group that, in a different political climate, he used to admire -- but he is wrong to think that people like himself aren’t meant to be the targets.
You can choose to live in Virginia instead of Maryland. You can choose to watch NASCAR instead of the World Cup. You can even vote Republican. But when politicians use the words "Ivy League" as an insult, and when Glenn Beck mocks higher education in general, their targets are people exactly like Charles Murray. The language being used right now in American politics is not merely "anti-liberal-elite," as Murray and others keep claiming. It's "anti-elite," and specifically "anti-educated-elite." Period.
