America’s elites live in a world of their own
Consider a few questions: In America today, is there too much individual freedom or too much government control? To curb climate change, should gas, meat, and electricity be strictly rationed? Are your personal finances getting better or worse?
Can government be trusted to do the right thing most of the time?
Those were among the queries asked in a series of opinion surveys last year by Scott Rasmussen, a longtime independent pollster not affiliated with any candidate. Rasmussen was testing a phenomenon he had detected over months of conducting nationwide polls. “I consistently noticed that three groups held views that were different from most voters,” he told me this week. “People with a postgraduate degree, people who lived in densely populated urban areas, and people who made more than $150,000 a year.”
In a standard poll of 1,000 adults, only about 10 respondents, or 1 percent, met those criteria. That’s too few from which to draw a statistically significant conclusion. So last fall Rasmussen conducted fullscale surveys of respondents meeting those conditions — a group he calls “elites” — and sure enough, the pattern he had sensed emerged full-blown. The views of elites weren’t just slightly out of sync with those of the population at large. They were dramatically different.
Take the questions listed above.
In Rasmussen’s general surveys, about 16 percent of respondents said there is too much individual
The views of elites weren’t just slightly out of sync with those of the population at large. They were dramatically different.
freedom, while 57 percent said there is too much government control. But among the polled elites, three times as many (47 percent) believed there is too much freedom. Just 1 in 5 responded that there is too much control.
Strict rationing of gas, meat, and electricity? In broad-based surveys, 63 percent opposed rationing and 28 percent approved. When elites were surveyed, on the other hand, the results flipped: Fully 77 percent favored rationing, while only 22 percent said they were opposed.
Personal financial circumstances? Of the elite respondents, an overwhelming 74 percent reported that their finances are getting better. When the question was put to a cross section of the public, by contrast, just 20 percent believed they were better off.
As for trust in government, 70 percent of elites surveyed expressed confidence that government officials will do the right thing most of the time. Yet among the general public, surveys have shown for years that less than 25 percent has that kind of trust.
“We haven’t had a majority of voters trust the government most of the time since Richard Nixon was in office,” Rasmussen told me. The reason elites are so much more confident, he speculates, is that government ranks are staffed disproportionately by men and women like themselves. “A lot of people on the outside like to think there’s a conspiracy,” he said. “It’s actually more like a fraternity.” Indeed, roughly half of the elites in his surveys graduated from one of just 12 prominent universities — the eight Ivy League colleges, Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.
Unlike more conventional descriptions of the “1 percent,” Rasmussen doesn’t focus on the superrich. The key to elite status isn’t great wealth; it is influence and access to the powerful. “This group may not be the wealthiest,” he observed. “But they lead government agencies, they are active in the media, they get involved in the political process, and most of them happen to share a certain worldview.”
That worldview skews left: More than 70 percent of elites surveyed identified themselves as Democrats. But even the small minority of self-identified Republicans tended to embrace attitudes and opinions quite different from those of the general public.
Rasmussen is quantifying a phenomenon that is as old as American politics itself — a sense that there are two Americas: one well-off, well-educated, and well-connected, the other less privileged and less protected. William F. Buckley Jr. famously captured that sentiment when he wrote in 1963: “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.”
Decades later, Rasmussen’s data suggest that the arrogance of such elites remains entrenched. In America they see a nation where people have too much freedom and should be told what to do by a government that knows best. Recounting a presentation he gave at Harvard a dozen years ago, Rasmussen tells me he has never forgotten one faculty member who demanded in exasperation: “Why won’t Americans let us lead? It’s what we were trained to do.” You don’t have to scrutinize poll numbers to recognize the impact of that attitude on America’s civic life. Too many elites look down on their fellow citizens, and an awful lot of their fellow citizens return the favor.