Stones Cry Out

Oh, I completely agree. I think that people who falsley label people "elitist" have issues of their own. Seriously, I think they've had some bad experience in their past that has skewed their view of people in general.

I don't remember all that you've said in your two weeks of defense and don't have time to read back through. So I repeat what you've already said, haze away.

Perhaps you've labored the distinction between elite(s) and elitism. Elites are those who have large amounts of economic, social or cultural capital. It's relative, but in general an elite is going to be in the higher percentiles of one or more of those kinds of capital.

Conservatives have elites just as much as liberals do. If a conservative possesses great amounts of income, wealth, prestige, a network of powerful people one can call upon, then one is a conservative elite. I roll my eyes when I hear conservatives who are elites say that they are not, simply because they have redefined the word "elite" to mean "liberal." Elite and liberal are two different words. Adjectives like conservative and liberal can equally be used to modify the noun elite.

Elitism is a trickier thing. I speculate that many of us are meritocrats to a large degree. We want the folks building bridges and skyscrapers to be the ones who got As in engineering, and the doctor operating on us better have done well in medical school. We don't usually prefer to have an average or mediocre medical professional working on our bodies.

But where does meritocracy become elitism? Is elitism in certain ways or in certain contexts a good thing? Or is it always and everywhere an evil?

Running through all this discussion about elites and elitism is a melodic line: Americans love the myth that "we're all middle class." I have very, very affluent friends with 7 figure incomes, belong to extremely exclusive clubs, and yet who think they are "middle class". Maybe because they're friends with me they are. :)

Thanks for saying what needed to be said, Matt. National Review often takes its default position (first on the modern conservative block) as a license to bestow cultural impramaturs where it sees fit. Some of us sypathetic to the politics of NR laugh at those pretensions.

Kathryn Jean Lopez has perhaps forgotten that William Buckley, the cosmopolitan Yalie with more time on yachts and airplanes than most of us will ever see, was never himself a populist in any meaningful sense. While they play games with Dean's comments about who sips what wine, the rest of us take sweet tea from recycled Mason jars (sometimes, anyway).

Patrick: Thanks for the comment. I sort of play it to both ends. I'm a red state Southerner with an affinity for football and Jimmy Buffett, but I'm also a vegetarian who won't touch most store-brand coffee. I think you hit the nail on the head, though. Lopez comes across as the biggest poser on the planet when making these arguments. I haven't seen Sideways, though I intend to. Liking the movie doesn't make an elitist by any means, but using her standards, Bill Buckley is the world's biggest elitist. Has she not read Miles Gone By?