The New Elite, Charles Murray And David Frum
10/26/2010
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

Charles Murray has an Op-Ed conveying an obvious truth:

The tea party warns of a New Elite. They're right. By Charles Murray Sunday, October 24, 2010

I learned of this from David Frum's Twitter account saying that Murray had submitted his "resignation as a social scientist" and saying "How does someone so smart write something so silly?"

I saw all this before I had seen the Murray Op-Ed, and when I realized that David Frum was attacking Charles Murray for anti-elitism, I actually laughed. A classic quote on elitism and politics is this:

"In the 1950s and early 1960s, only about a quarter of Americans said "yes" to the question, "I don't think public officials care much what people like me think." That sad response rose to about one-third by the mid-1960s, to more than 40 percent in 1968, and to an outright majority of the population in 1976. By the mid-1970s, two-thirds of the public said "they felt what they think does not really count." Sociologists would spend years puzzling over those numbers, but one ought not too quickly to reject the hypothesis that people felt that their views did not much count because in fact their views did not much count."

That's from David Frum's book How We Got Here: The 70'S: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life—For Better or Worse . He was talking about forced busing, among other things. The Tea Partiers would have similar complaints. Some of them would be directed at FrumForum.

Print Friendly and PDF