[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
Ok, it’s not really a “quiz”–you kind of have to figure out the scoring on your own–and the questions in this “quiz” aren’t even clear, anyway. Still, if Charles Murray has been so good as to help define specifically who the elitists whose damaging policies and lifestyles are hurting America truly are, then the least that we can do is take his word for it, and see if we aren’t actually one of them. So take the “How Plebe are You?” quiz. And, of course, let everyone know your results.
6/25. Wow. I must be “isolated and ignorant.”
Interesting… the blogosphere dismissal of Murray’s comments rather supports his thesis, even if it was neither methodically outlined nor properly documented.
I think it ties rather nicely with Adam’s previous post about the absence of a “clerisy” class… the Elites that Murray describes are exactly the opposite of a useful Aristocracy.
Murray’s failure is that he has not the wit to skewer them as Wodehouse did the Drones.
That has to be one of the most confusing quizes that I’ve seen. Some of the stuff would seem outright contradictory in determining whether you were elite or plebe. What’s the chi-square on Mad men and the Price is Right, or Oprah and MMA, or Kiwanis and living with lower-income folks? I think the maker of the test suffers from “has no idea what America is like”-ism themselves. They are just taking potshots.
The questions have not been re-formatted for a “quiz”… in some cases answering yes makes you elite, in other cases answering no… you have to refer back to the answer key of the original essay to calculate your score. 🙂
8 Elitist parallels out of 25. Phew.
Like most discussions of so-called “populist” movements and their “elitist” bugaboos, that quiz is about as asinine as it gets. This current “populist” movement is driven by consumerist spectatorism, like everything else in our petulant Age of Unceasing Want. These populist movements come and go every time we see some form of economic farrago interrupt the conceits of the the so called “American Dream”. Nine times out of ten, they are simply personality cults, used by malignant forces for their own malign ends. The Kingfish had his thugs, so too did the imperialist, anti-republican Roman emperors polish their populist charade with spectacle while kicking the Gracchi around. Nobody ever made much hay with a campaign slogan of “Every Man a Serf”.
But these insidious “anti-elitist” campaigns work like a charm, hence their unceasing appearance. The human seems to possess a bottomless well of sympathy for kicking his own ass. Nothing will change in Washington until they have utterly bankrupted the nation, unleashing ferocious forces whose outcome is always less than beneficial.
The Media and our Federal Government are simply a City State writ large, independent of the fate of the lapsed Republic and bought into a globalist farrago that has successfully gutted the prospects for those whose populist angst is soothed and petted by the mountebanks on the make that have infested the political process for millennia.
Some may actually mean well but it is always hard to maintain decorum and a properly chaste governmental mood when wallowing in a brothel.
I got one out of the first 7. That’s about my limit for a quiz without more Ritalin. Or a Mountain Dew. And I get his point, sort of. But then again, he’s writing an editorial in the Post. Anyway, he wrote: “Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.”. So he’s already whittled down to about a third of the population; how many of that group both keep up with NASCAR and watch Oprah, I don’t know. Point is, his Real America is pretty small. Maybe Real Americans ride bicycles to work at least 2 days a week. I mean, at that size, you could pick just about any demographic you want and say the political discourse is ignoring their concerns. And maybe that’s the important point – Real America is a diverse collection of strangers. And then I’m not particularly fond of the common association of phd’s and elitism. It is quite true that those over-educated sops – and I should know, I’m surrounded by them – constitute an elite, but that elite is not necessarily congruent with the political and economic elite. Heck, you should see how they dress. Anyway, like I said, I think he has a point, but I think the piece needs a rewrite.
I’m apparently 48% elitist, and almost entirely in my ignorance. Interesting.
Comments are closed.