The elite as I see it are the people that
run the country. The broad elite consists of the people who are prominent in Kansas
City or Indianapolis or individual cities. They're the CEOs of the most important
industries. They're the mayor, the people who own the TV stations, et cetera. The narrow
elite are those people who have effects on the nation's culture and economics and
politics. That's a very small group. You're probably talking about fewer than 100,000
people all together who have that kind of power. And that's what I see as the class
the broad elite and the narrow elite who have drawn away from the rest of the country
and formed enclaves and cultures of their own. They eat different foods. They drink
different alcoholic beverages. The upper class, for example, has a disdain of extraordinary
force about domestic mass market beer. You will never see Budweiser in the refrigerator
of a member of the new upper class. They raise their children differently. They go to different
churches. They have different religious attitudes in general, if they go to church at all. In
almost every way they have folk ways that separate them from mainstream America. Take
television for example. The average television set in the United States of America is on
35 hours a week. That\'92s probably too much, but the fact is, the people that are watching
that television get an exposure to a popular culture in very large doses. What does the
new upper class watch on television? Downton Abby
, Madmen
, the more adventurous probably watch Breaking Bad
\i0 \'96 but aside from that, they don't really watch TV. And, in fact, a lot of them
will say to you, Gee, we don't even really have a TV anymore. Okay, that's
fine. I'm not saying there's something virtuous about watching TV 35 hours a week.
I am saying that when you have that kind of divergence in that single behavior you have
part of the reason that you have an ignorance of, and oftentimes a disdain of, mainstream
America by the new upper class, which is very problematic in terms of the future of the
country. One of the things in the book that really worked was my Bubble Quiz. You know,
I faced the problem of because my audience really is upper middle class and upper class
people, especially young people, and I wanted to convince them of the degree to which
they are isolated in many cases. And since a lot of times you can't bring too much
quantitative data to bear on that, I said, Well, I'll let them prove it to themselves.
So I have a 25 item quiz in it, and a high score means you are not in an upper middle
class bubble. And a low score means you are. So some questions are the importance
is very obvious, have you ever lived in a neighborhood in which more than half of
your neighbors did not have college degrees? For example. Some of them are a little mischievous
have you ever stocked your refrigerator with mass market American beer? Since the
signature of - one of the signatures of the new upper class is that all their beers are
handcrafted small batch boutique beers. Other questions, to me, are really significant in
what they say about the larger aspect of a person's life. For example, have you ever
walked on a factory floor? Not necessarily, have you worked in a factory before? Have
you ever seen a factory floor close up. remembering for a moment that all of these wonderful objects
that fill your lives were made almost all of them \'96 on factory floors? If I had
to pick out the one question that I think is the most important of all it is this: Have
you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day? It's okay
if you just have feet that ache because you've been standing on your feet all day. That counts
too. But if you have never held such a job, you are intrinsically, inherently, ineluctably
unable to understand the lives of a great many of your fellow countrymen who do hold
such jobs. I hope that the quiz has had a salutary effect on bringing to people's
attention the degree to which they live in a bubble that seals them off from an awful
lot of their fellow American citizens.