On Tuesday, David Brooks, the faux-conservative columnist for The New York Times, and a columnist so ensconced in wry analysis of the American upper middle class that he seems to have completely lost touch with reality, penned a rather condescending column (aren’t they all?) about how upper class Americans have created their own society. Brooks’ thesis: “Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.”
This is an astonishing claim, given that income mobility in the United States has not changed since the 1970s, and that income mobility in the United States is the same as Europe’s, despite Europe’s higher levels of redistribution; virtually all differences between income mobility levels in the United States vs. Europe are attributable to dropping out of high school or having babies out of wedlock.
But according to Brooks, the new elite have chopped off the ladder behind them. Brooks blames “the pediacracy, stupid.” He cites these facts:
Upper-middle-class moms have the means and the maternity leaves to breast-feed their babies at much higher rates than high school-educated moms, and for much longer periods. Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
Yes, it turns out that making more money does accord your children extra benefits. But that doesn’t mean that you’re responsible for shutting off someone else’s path to success. According to Brooks, however, the upper middle class has now become exclusionary. How so? First, Brooks cites zoning laws and college admissions — fair game for talk of rules-bending in favor of the upper middle class, although it’s important to note that a vast majority of high school graduates now go to college (66% as of 2013, including 46% of those graduates from low-income families).
But then he goes after “informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.” Here’s his best example:
Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican. American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”
This is idiotic.
Did Brooks seek to make his friend feel stupid? Did he mean to suggest that his friend was “not welcome”? Or did he just want a gourmet sandwich? Attributing malice to people’s preferences is as nasty as actually excluding people through selection of hoity-toity restaurants. But Brooks continues:
To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality. … Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.
We have not created informal social barriers to mobility. We associate with people who think like us. This is just as true for a chi chi yoga instructor moving to Lubbock as it is for a Lubbock kid moving to Hollywood. But to pretend that the habits of the upper middle class in Texas are the same as the habits of the upper middle class in Massachusetts is ignorant. Brooks’ column is just another way to suggest to low-income Americans that there are insuperable barriers to success in America, and that those barriers can be found in sandwich choices, not merely the institutional obstacles we can actually tackle. In his column, Brooks’ actually contributes to a far greater barrier to success in America than cultural striation: he contributes to an unearned sense of victimhood, when the best option would be to encourage people to make solid life choices rather than lamenting their ignorance about soppressata (and for the record, I have no clue what the hell soppressata is, perhaps because I keep kosher).