The Gated Country

“liberals often argue that the real enemies of average Americans aren’t bureaucrats and Harvard-trained technocrats; they are the financial wizards, evil corporations and plutocratic tycoons. Maybe so, but at this point the argument doesn’t convince many people. Besides, why can’t both be enemies? After all, many elite liberal Democrats, in office and out, have been exceedingly Wall Street-friendly.”

--Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest

We have a sharply divided nation. Because conservatives are represented at the top of our liberal-dominated power and wealth social structure where most national dialog takes place, we mistakenly believe conservative/business v. liberal/knowledge represents the true national division.

In fact, the American upper class not only has its schools, its residences, even its entire lifestyle in common, but also shares its separation from, and its fear of, America’s less-favored super-majority. Credit for this understanding Charles Murray, whose Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 documents our profound class divisions.

Our upper class is nationwide gated America physically separated from the rest of us. Murray, in his own words:

the top of American society. . . run the country, meaning that they are responsible for the films and television shows you watch, the news you see and read, the fortunes of the nation's corporations and financial institutions, and the jurisprudence, legislation and regulations produced by government. They are the new upper class, [highly] detached from the lives of the great majority of Americans . . .—not just socially but spatially as well. The members of this elite have increasingly sorted themselves into hyper-wealthy and hyper-elite ZIP Codes. . . SuperZIPs.

If you are invited to a dinner party by one of Washington's power elite, the odds are high that you will be going to a home in Georgetown, the rest of Northwest D.C., Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Potomac or McLean, comprising 13 adjacent ZIP Codes in all. If you rank all the ZIP Codes in the country on an index of education and income and group them by percentiles, you will find that 11 of these 13 D.C.-area ZIP Codes are in the 99th percentile and the other two in the 98th. Ten of them are in the top half of the 99th percentile. Similarly large clusters of SuperZIPs can be found around New York City, Los Angeles, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor, Boston and a few of the nation's other largest cities. Because running major institutions in this country usually means living near one of these cities, it works out that the nation's power elite [lives in a] culturally rarefied and isolated [world].

Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into [this] world. [T]hey have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.

Insulated. Isolated. And afraid.