This comes as no surprise; it corroborates what we’ve long known. It’s a survey Scott Rasmussen conducted for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity investigating the attitudes and opinions of urban Americans who earn over $150,000 per year, i.e., about the top 10% of earners in the country. Those are what the excellent Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs,” i.e., those that only the wealthy, privileged and cosseted can afford to hold. I think of them as fashion statements, opinions held to make the holder look good to his/her peers, but that can be discarded at any time in favor of those more au courant.
When you read the survey, don’t take the write-up by the CtUP too seriously. It urges readers to think the study represents the top 1% of earners. It doesn’t. It confines itself to population densities of 10,000 people per square mile – i.e., the District of Columbia and the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami and Boston – and, by imposing the $150k earnings filter, Rasmussen’s cohort consists of well-to-do and overwhelmingly liberal Democrats. That’s a 1%, but not “the 1%.”
The data are telling, not just for what they reveal about the top 10% of mostly Democratic earners, but about the continuing importance of Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart. As he wrote, the elites, who are overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, think very differently from the rest of us.
Here are a few of the takeaways from the Rasmussen survey:
· In a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of elites say they are financially better off today than in the past versus 20% of all Americans.
· Nearly six in ten say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans.
· More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of vital energy and food sources to combat the threat of climate change.
· In stark contrast to the rest of America, 70% of the Elites trust the government to “do the right thing most of the time.”
· Two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.
· Somewhere between half and two-thirds favor banning things like SUVs, gas stoves, air conditioning, and non-essential air travel to protect the environment.
· About six of ten elites have a favorable opinion of the so-called talking professions—lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists.
· President Joe Biden enjoys an 84% job approval rating from this group – roughly twice as high as the general public.
Certain things stand out. First, is the amazing uniformity of opinion on the part of these mostly-Democratic, well-to-do and urban respondents. Almost all of the results are not just slightly or somewhat weighted toward one side of a question or another, but greatly so. Numbers like 67%, 70%, 74% and 84% indicate the type of close-to lockstep conformity that can only occur where dissenting voices are rare or non-existent.
More amazing is the fact that, when the survey group is limited to graduates of Ivy League colleges, the uniformity is even more pronounced. So, for example, an astonishing 80% of those respondents said gas stoves and 81% said gasoline-powered automobiles should be banned outright. In the same vein, 84% hold a favorable opinion of journalists and 86% members of Congress.
(Given that striking conformity, it’s quite the delicious irony that, in a time when elites shout ever louder about the value – even the necessity – of “diversity,” they burrow ever deeper into their echo chambers, living only with each other, listening only to each other, parroting the same opinions, disdaining other voices.)
Second, they’re utterly out of sync with Americans generally. Compare the results of this Gallup poll of Americans with those of elites in the Rasmussen survey. Gallup found Americans to have strikingly low trust in elite institutions giving approval ratings to public schools (28%), the presidency (23%), newspapers (16%), TV news (11%) and Congress (7%). Tellingly, one of the only institutions Americans do trust is, almost by definition, not an elite one; small businesses garnered a 68% approval score.
Now, Rasmussen’s is just one survey and, to have any real validity, it needs substantial corroboration. Murray’s scrupulously-done book provides it.
Most importantly, Murray finds elites to be far more isolated from the rest of the country than ever before. Indeed, they tend to be concentrated in just a few of what he calls “super zip codes,” i.e., those in which large majorities of residents are highly educated and highly paid. Interestingly enough, the two places with the highest concentrations of super zip codes are Washington, DC and Manhattan, overlapping nicely with the Rasmussen cohort.
Wealth is the major driver of elite isolation. They can afford to live in high-priced areas and they do. That isolation begins early in life when parents doggedly seek to enroll their children in elite pre-schools, elementary schools, prep schools and of course colleges. In short, these elites not only don’t know anyone unlike themselves as adults, they probably never have. And, because they tend to live lives of enormous privilege, attend elite schools and associate only with the like-minded, the tendency to believe themselves to be special, superior to the rest of us, is strong – too strong, apparently, to be overcome.
That isolation is the echo chamber in which divergent views are seldom, if ever, voiced or heard.
Hence, the results of surveys like Rasmussen’s in which elites hold homogenous views that they consider superior to those of others. And, as night follows day, they tend to appoint themselves our keepers, fit to lord over us, instruct us, silence our unapproved opinions, punish political candidates they find inappropriate for us to support and ignore our views and needs.
‘Twas ever thus. I know of no time in history when elites didn’t disdain non-elites and appoint themselves our governors. According to them, we can’t be trusted to hold the right opinions or support the right policies because we simply haven’t their superior understanding. That their take on issues might be more informed by their privileged position in society and the political hierarchy than by dispassionate understanding never seems to occur to them. No, it’s only we, the presumptively blinkered, who have such biases.
More importantly, they never seem to ask themselves basic questions like “How are we doing?” or “Are our policies helpful, constructive, sensible?” To ask such questions of course risks answering them and even a casual glance at history disabuses one of the notion that political/social elites have even minimal competency at anything much beyond advancing their own interests and, often enough, not even that. Those Gallup Poll results didn’t come out of thin air.
The Rasmussen survey is just one more indication that Murray is right – we’re coming apart – and elites have no intention of slowing or stopping the process. After all, to do that would require their moving in with us, listening to us, respecting us, honoring our needs, none of which they even consider doing.
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
