It’s payback o’clock
It seems what is good for the proletarian goose disagrees with the patrician gander
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are…
F. Scott Fitzgerald
In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university – more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60% – I found myself thinking a lot about class divides and social hierarchies.
Rob Henderson, author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class.
You may or may not have heard of
, but you’ve probably come across his theory of ‘luxury beliefs’. Thanks in part to his conversations with fellow students at Yale and Cambridge, former foster kid Henderson became conscious of the differences between, to reference Nancy Mitford’s famous taxonomy, U and Non-U. The ‘U’ stands for upper class and, as only an upper-crust Englishwoman can, Mitford detailed the intricate and unspoken rules for signalling membership of what was Britain’s (then still largely hereditary) elite. For instance, saying “had one’s bath” rather than “took a bath”).As this excellent article published in (where else?) Tatler points out, Mitford wasn’t being entirely serious. As only one born into privilege can, she was at least in part satirising the attempts of self-made new money types to sneakily move a few rungs up the ornate British class ladder by deploying appropriately well-bred terminology. (The post-war era was a time of significant social mobility throughout the Anglosphere, especially in what was still quasi-feudal Great Britain.)
Nonetheless, Mitford’s peers were horrified by her indiscreet revelations. After Mitford’s article went viral – as often happens in these cases, those being satirised missed the joke and treated Mitford’s (CIA-funded magazine) article as a Holy Text for the Aspirational – Evelyn Waugh wrote an open letter in which he declared, “There are subjects too intimate for print. Surely class is one.”
I’m still not sure if Waugh was being entirely tongue-in-cheek or if he was at least partly serious.
Will life soon mirror art?
While we’re on the uppermost reaches of the British class system, it’s probably not coincidental Saltburn has “tapped into the zeitgeist”, as I believe showbiz types say. While attempting not to spoil it, I'll share the basics. There’s an elite family that treats people – even members of their class who have fallen on hard times – cruelly. But when fresh prey (social climbing, lower-middle class prey, though it cunningly camouflages itself as a product of the drink-and-drug-addled underclass) heaves into view, things turn out somewhat differently than might be expected.
If I were a member of the incumbent elite – someone who lived, for instance, in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods of one of the world’s costliest global cities – I might be a little worried about the fact that (a) those with their finger on the cultural pulse believed there would be a market for a tale of four solipsistic – if undeniably charismatic, good-looking and entertaining – aristos getting their comeuppance and (b) the fact there’s turned out to be an even larger and more appreciative audience for Saltburn than its makers could ever have hoped for.
I might even worry that, after four decades of people like me having things arranged mainly to our satisfaction, our long run of good fortune might be starting to splutter out.
The elite bubble
Luxury beliefs – ideas that don’t (much) damage the lords and ladies while wreaking havoc when adopted by the peasants – arise out of the elite value system.
Unsurprisingly, non-elite and elite value systems differ markedly. If you’re making the effort to read this newsletter, there’s a good chance you’re a member of the corporate or cultural elite and have an instinctive understanding of what the correct views are to express around fellow members of the corporate and cultural elite. While in the company of less polished folk, you may occasionally express incorrect views, especially if you’ve had a few drinks. But that’s certainly not the kind of talk you will indulge in at a dinner party or office work function.
At this juncture, even if you are a member of the elite, you’re probably silently protesting you aren’t and have no idea what these so-called ‘elite values’ I’m referring to are.
(In this meritocratic era, nothing is more elite than angrily insisting you are not part of the elite. Or that while you may be fractionally more prosperous and/or culturally influential than the Average Joe, you are at heart a salt-of-the-earth, unassuming everyman or everywoman.)
So, let me again refer to the work of Mr Henderson, whose book you should purchase at the first opportunity. In a recent piece entitled, The Grand Canyon-Sized Chasm Between Elites and Ordinary Americans, Henderson drills down on the following troublesome statistics:
· Among the elite, the vast majority (74%) say their finances are improving, compared with just 20% of ordinary voters. The share is 88% among Ivy graduates.
· 91% of Ivy graduates, 78% of elites overall, and just 49% of ordinary voters have a favorable view of lawyers.
· 86% of Ivy graduates, 67% of elites, and only 28% of non-elites have a favorable view of members of congress.
· Among the elite, President Biden has an 84% approval rating, roughly twice as high as among the general public.
· 70% of Ivy grads, 55% of elites, and just 22% of non-elites are in favor of banning non-essential air travel “to fight climate change.”
· The majority of Ivy graduates and elites are also in favor of banning private air conditioning, gas powered cars, gas stoves, and SUVs “to fight climate change.”
There were other eye-catching but not unexpected divergences. Most elite respondents believed the US “provided too much individual freedom”. In contrast, most non-elite respondents felt there was “too much government control”. As Henderson noted, a substantial majority of everyday Americans “believed that the most educated and successful people in America* are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good. This view is held across the board—across age, gender, race, political party, and ideology”.
Here are a few other grabs:
* Elites are more in favour of allocating authority not to local or national governments, but to global organisational bodies (e.g., the U.N.).
* Elites are significantly more pro-immigration, as measured by the extent to which they agreed with statements like “When jobs are scarce, employers should give priority to people of [this country.]”
* Educated people are more likely to express prejudice toward immigrants who are described as highly educated, relative to less educated, and are therefore seen as job competitors.
As Henderson notes:
“It’s nice for the educated class when immigrants provide cheap hired help and open interesting restaurants. They’re less excited when immigrants are competing with them for the same jobs. If thousands of people with bachelor’s and postgraduate degrees from, say, China and India, were unlawfully entering the U.S. each day, my guess is current elite attitudes around border security would be very different.”)
Interestingly, you don’t even need to currently be part of the elite yourself to have an elite worldview.
To quote Henderson one last time:
“My views were shaped by my upbringing more so than my education. Most people are this way, which is why researchers typically use an individual’s parental education to measure the person’s social class. A high school dropout with two college-educated parents will tend to share their parents’ outlook and mirror the mannerisms reflective of their class. A PhD with two non-college educated parents will tend to share their parents’ outlook and mirror the mannerisms reflective of their class.”
This brings me to my own ‘class journey’, which, so far at least, appears to be going in the opposite direction to Henderson’s.
Working hard to make a living, bringing shelter from the rain
If you did a content analysis of the mainstream media – or the ‘independent’ media, for that matter – you might conclude society’s scribes hailed from a class that has the rare luxury of being able to obsess over ever more esoteric, post-material concerns.
This would be a terrible mistake. Every single reporter I’ve ever encountered was enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks and then attended – as so many Hard Knock School alums do – the University of Life. (Most recent qualification: PhD in Pulling Yourself Up By The Bootstraps.) All the journalists I’ve ever known were taken from their impoverished parents at age 11 and apprenticed to a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, hard-smoking, ancient subeditor who would smash a cricket bat on their youthful fingers every time they mixed up fewer and less.
All journalists came of age hating this stern taskmaster but, in time, valued his hard-earned wisdom and perhaps even felt an odd kind of affection and respect for the old bastard. I’m not sure if it was the same elderly, dyspeptic tyrant who raised all the journalists or if you reach an age in this game where you get tapped on the shoulder and told you’ve got to start taking on wildly-optimistic-but-soon-to-be-bitterly-disappointed media-industry trainees. Given my advanced age, I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
I’ve certainly never encountered a journalist raised in middle-class, let alone upper-middle-class, circumstances by university-educated parents in a ‘leafy’ locale. Or one who got a good degree from a top-tier university. (There’s no need for any brainbox book learnin’ when you’re a hard-charging newshound!)
It goes with saying that no member of the Fourth Estate – in Australia or elsewhere in the Anglosphere – went to a private school, or even a selective state school – or has ever lived in a desirable location. (For instance, a gentrified but still pleasingly gritty inner-city neighbourhood. Or a pleasant beachside community.) Indeed, our newspapermen and newspaperwomen are so passionately devoted to their noble vocation that such crudely materialistic thoughts never enter their heads. Even if they happen to live in Sydney, long one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets.
But as is so often the case, I am the inexplicable exception. Unless I’m offered the editorship of the AFR, it’s unlikely to be financially feasible for me ever to return there, but I grew up on Sydney’s North Shore. Some of my friends and family members still happily live in that neck of the woods. I’ve got some fond childhood memories of the place. People often loyally defend their hometown against criticism from outsiders – even when they have no particularly logical reason to do so – and I’m no exception.
That noted, even I couldn’t help but raise a bemused eyebrow at the recent Come-to-immigration-restriction-Jesus moment of those who now live on the other side of the Harbour Bridge to me.
A spreading mess
Around 99 per cent of the criticism levelled at North Shorians is unsophisticated reverse snobbery. (I have nothing against reverse snobbery, but at least put in some effort.)
This is not that.
I’m not arguing non-North Shorians are morally superior to North Shorians. (I find ‘Putatively oppressed Group X is morally superior to Oppressor Group Y’ arguments tendentious.)
I am arguing North Shorians – and, more broadly, those university-educated professionals, well-heeled business owners and captains of industry who’ve done rather well for themselves out of four decades of neoliberal economic and social policy – are now finding the bill is starting to come due.
As any student of history would expect, they are responding not with apologetic remorse but with apoplectic rage. The Fitzgerald quote I’ve always thought best encapsulates the different life experiences of the powerful and powerless is not the passage I began with, but this line from The Great Gatsby:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Anglosphere elites have grown careless. Or at least so self-interested and self-satisfied that they’ve failed to notice the growing mess they’ve been forcing others to live in.
There is perhaps no clearer example of such a mess than mass/uncontrolled migration.
Is this a dictatorship?!
Last year, the voters of NSW elected a centre-left government headed by a youngish leader. (Young enough to be part of the age cohort that understands it will be far more difficult for them to get their foot on the property ladder than it was for their parents or grandparents.)
Rather than just claiming it’s serious about doing something about ridiculously unaffordable housing (standard operating procedure for many centre-right and centre-left Anglosphere governments for decades), my new state government is, incredibly, seemingly serious about doing something about ridiculously unaffordable housing. To wit, embracing a YIMBY approach to zoning. One that will see some of Sydney’s more exclusive areas become, if not less exclusive, then at least more densely populated.
Much to the schadenfreude-soaked amusement of less fortunately – geographically and economically – located Sydneysiders, the lawyers, judges, doctor’s wives, C-suiters, property developers, landlords, university administrators, shareholders, senior public servants and top media executives (admittedly, there are not quite so many of them around nowadays) of Sydney’s North Shore have been spitting chips for weeks now about having to house a small proportion of the rapidly growing number of new Australians. In the Sydney Morning Herald (where else?) one enraged North Shorian observed:
I’ve watched Sydney grow, and I think it’s really got to the point where we’re at gridlock now… It doesn’t make sense, and they’ve done no traffic or proper impact studies. They’ve thrown it on to us. Are we a democratic country, or are we living in a dictatorship? I’ve never seen this before in my life.
Well, quite.
Shoe, meet other foot
Elites do live in a democratic country in the sense their views are sought, and their interests looked after, by elected politicians.
Non-elites, especially since the collapse of the Keynesian settlement, have increasingly been living in dictatorships. Undemocratic societies where the disenfranchised 80 per cent yearn to slow down immigration but invariably find themselves overruled by the top 20 per cent – those well-situated members of the bourgeoisie so monomaniacally committed to a Big Australia (and a Big Britain/Canada/New Zealand/US) – just so long as it doesn’t result in a bunch of property-value-diminishing, village-atmosphere-destroying, road-clogging, tacky high rises sprouting up around the five-bedroom grand Federation manors in their neighbourhood.
Elites throughout the Anglosphere only now seem to be becoming cognisant of the trouble they have been storing up for the future, a future now rapidly bearing down on them. As I wrote at the start of 2024, I’ve got a feeling in my bones this will be the year events cause the scales to drop from their eyes.
*All Henderson’s data relates to the US. But I suspect there would be remarkably similar findings if elites and non-elites were asked the same set of questions in any Anglosphere and many Western European nations.