Charles Murray has Discovered White People are Not a Monolith, Laments.

I am probably going to my library to read this one for teh lulz; the author, Charles Murray, who with Richard J. Herrnstein wrote the notorious The Bell Curve, has written a book on the startling notion that there is a difference between white people of different classes.

The rich, they're different.  Whodathunk?

Anywhoo, I found out about this thing of brilliance and scholastic achievement from both Roy Edroso and Erik Loomis today, and I am already astonished that this is where The Bell Curve's author wound up. Would working class whites like myself be better behaved if we spoke the same language as rich schmucks like Mitt Romney? Okay, player, you've got me. Or wait, is he saying they should learn how to talk down to us? Huh! Let me pause and reflect on that. If my betters, like George Herbert Walker Bush could only pretend to like pork rinds, or if his scion, could only be NASCAR-compatible, wouldn't we all get off the meth and lead more productive lives? 

Um, no?  But since I haven't read this, and all I really have is some of his recent dumbfuckery, let's look at some of that:

We are watching the maturation of the cognitive stratification that Richard J. Herrnstein and I described in "The Bell Curve" back in 1994. When educational and professional opportunities first opened up, we saw social churning galore, as youngsters benefited from opportunities that their parents had been denied. But that phase lasted only a generation or two, slowed by this inescapable paradox:

The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite -- the "cognitive elite" that Herrnstein and I described -- becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama's example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent ("Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.

Oh fuck. He discovered the 1%, and now thinks they're a bloody meritocracy just because they've figured out the secret handshake.

With geographical clustering goes cultural clustering. Get into a conversation about television with members of the New Elite, and they can probably talk about a few trendy shows -- "Mad Men" now, "The Sopranos" a few years ago. But they haven't any idea who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price Is Right." They know who Oprah is, but they've never watched one of her shows from beginning to end.

Talk to them about sports, and you may get an animated discussion of yoga, pilates, skiing or mountain biking, but they are unlikely to know who Jimmie Johnson is (the really famous Jimmie Johnson, not the former Dallas Cowboys coach), and the acronym MMA means nothing to them.

They can talk about books endlessly, but they've never read a "Left Behind" novel (65 million copies sold) or a Harlequin romance (part of a genre with a core readership of 29 million Americans).

These are generalizations that have nothing to do with anything. They might even be more about a Red state-Blue state divide. What is he even on about? And no, the Dallas Cowboys coach is the more famous Jimmie Johnson--what the fuck?  But if one is a Blue State person--not an elite, but middle class, one will have a slightly more "elitist" taste. Basically, he's patronizing the Tea Party folks. Or what he thinks they are.

It's a bit arbitrary, as generalizations tend to be.

The real story: socioeconomic issues affect the whole culture differently at different strata. If we experience a situation where the middle class is sinking, the nouveax pauvres are going to show some of the stereotypical lower-class features regarding attitudes towards marriage and reproduction due to issues of access to birth control, and relative financial readiness to marry (after all, when you marry someone, you're also kind of marrying their credit rating, crass as that may be). All of which has nothing to do with anyone's familiarity with popular cinema or what radio station they listen to. It has more to do with being the class one is.

Um, they call it socioeconomics because...? Also, he's assuming popular culture figures aren't elites. Left Behind author Tim LaHaye is a kind of elite. Pat Robertson has a media empire--he's an elite. Branson, Mo. is full of CMA winners who are elites. Elite is as elite does. If one makes a lot of money for stuff they're talented at?  I think success and fame are a form of elitism. They got juice. They influence others.

But this branding, whether we talk about it in red/blue state terms or class terms, doesn't have the force of practical realities. If Professor Murray is concerned about working class white declines in marriage and out-of wedlock reproduction, he could look at the practical realities of those people. If a young white girl in, say, South Dakota has an out of wedlock child, look at her education about and access to birth control, including her options regarding abortion. Look at her and her partner's education about and access to jobs in that area. And don't even start about whether they followed fucking NASCAR. Seriously. Look at them, then look at yourself, then die in a fire, then stop writing stupid books about culture when you don't get it.