What’s wrong with the cultural elite?（659 words）

By Simon Kuper

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Picture a coffee shop in a big city almost anywhere on earth. It is filled with stylish, firm-bodied people aged under 50 drinking $5 coffees. Fresh from yoga class, they are reading New Yorker magazine articles about inequality before returning to their tiny $1.5m apartments. This is the cultural elite — or what Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, calls the “aspirational class”. Her book The Sum of Small Things anatomises it using fascinating American consumption data. Currid-Halkett herself is a class member (as are some of my best friends), and yet she helps explain why the cultural elite is so despised as to have generated a global political movement against it. Though Trump is the unmentioned elephant in the room in her book, you think of him on almost every page as the antithesis of this class — indeed, in the minds of his supporters, as the antidote to it.

Trump likes to tag the cultural elite as “the elite” but not all class members are rich. Adjunct professors, NGO workers and unemployed screenwriters belong alongside Mark Zuckerberg. Rather, what defines the cultural elite is education. Most of its members went to brand-name universities, and consider themselves deserving rather than entitled. They believe in facts and experts. Most grew up comfortably off in the post-1970s boom. Their education is their insurance policy and, so almost whatever their income, they suffer less economic anxiety than older or lesser educated people. Their political utopia is high-tax, egalitarian, feminist and green. They aim to be “better humans” rather than simply rich, writes Currid-Halkett. Though often too busy to be happy, they feel good about themselves. The inequality they see everywhere is never their fault.

When it comes to consumption, the cultural elite’s core belief is a scorn for stuff. Branded goods no longer convey status now that any old oaf can buy them. The top 10 per cent of American earners (which includes most of the cultural elite) spends a shrinking slice of its income on cars, TVs and household items, things that the middle class still values. With the sharing economy taking off, hipsters barely own anything at all. Forget shared bikes — Americans can now rent designer dresses.

What stuff the cultural elite does buy is used to adorn their bodies. Living in dense cities where everyone is on display, they need expensive clothes. New Yorkers in particular also have watch fetishes. In 2010 they “spent about 27 times more on watches as a share of total expenditures than everyone else — no city even compares”, writes Currid-Halkett in a typically delicious titbit.

The cultural elite spends relatively little on beauty products, but splurges on exercise, because it thinks that bodies (like food) should look natural. The thin, toned body expresses this class’s worldview: even leisure must be productive. Instead of trawling shopping malls, class members narrate their family hikes on Facebook.

These people maximise what Currid-Halkett calls “inconspicuous consumption”: things you cannot see. They buy nannies to save time, elite magazines to feed their brains and status, and education to propel their children upwards. “The top 1-5 per cent [of American earners] spend on average 5 percent of their total expenditures on education, while the middle class barely spends 1 per cent,” writes Currid-Halkett. Her intellectual ancestor Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 study The Theory of the Leisure Class, portrayed Wasps frittering away money, but today’s cultural elite is engaged in a ruthless project to reproduce its social position. Barring some huge economic shift, today’s breastfed elite toddlers will be the elite of 2050. The meritocracy is becoming hereditary.

This is where the cultural elite’s self-image diverges from the view held by its critics. Trump voters see a class that talks equality while living privilege and exuding contempt. Here are Greenpeace members who are always on planes, proclaiming their goodness instead of improving the world. Maybe if everyone shopped at Whole Foods (the upscale grocery chain nicknamed “Whole Paycheck”) the world would improve, suggests Currid-Halkett. But there’s a counterargument: if everyone shopped at Whole Foods, it would lose its status, and the cultural elite would have to shop elsewhere.

These people live in places and ways that hardly anyone else can afford. The only poor people they know are their nannies. Their New Yorker subscriptions might cost just $90, but are usually premised on expensive educations.

Though Currid-Halkett is too polite to do more than hint at this, class members regard outsiders with either scorn or pity. Overproductive themselves, they look down on iPad parents, the obese and the uninformed. Many even mock their own parents as kitsch provincials. There’s an element of this in the relationship between Ivanka Trump (raised in Manhattan) and her father (from Queens). In fact, long before Trump became president, he was the exemplar of everything the cultural elite abhors. His hair and orange skin scream artificiality. He loves buying stuff. He is fat and ignorant. He thinks exercise depletes the body. He gets his information from cable TV.

No wonder the key rite of cultural-elite conversation has become Trump-dissing (see previous paragraph). And so the cultural wars that got him elected rage on.