Who Is "Out of Touch?"
Elites who can't quite have it all.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz has become the single largest political donor in this midterm election cycle, dropping more than $115 million to support their own business interests. This is horrifying for our democracy, sure, but the story did have one paragraph that made me chuckle:
[Pointy-head billionaire technofascist Marc] Andreessen has told friends a story about a confrontation he had about a decade ago with David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, at the headquarters of Condé Nast, which owns the magazine. Mr. Remnick’s team argued that the tech elite were out of touch, a person who heard Mr. Andreessen’s version of the story said, but when the investor saw how well appointed the Condé Nast offices and bathrooms were, he concluded that it was the media elite who were out of touch.
Astute readers will detect in this paragraph strong echoes of the interminable accusations of being “elite” that have helped to make America’s political rhetoric of the past decade so nightmarish. Republican elites calling Democratic elites “elites,” and vice versa. The observation “Hey, all the people calling the other side ‘elites’ are actually elites themselves!” is true and also has been made often enough at this point that we do not need to keep on making it aloud.
Now, the spectacle of a Silicon Valley billionaire accusing the nation’s most prestigious magazine editor of being out of touch is like watching a quadruple amputee and a triple amputee argue over who is more likely to win the Olympic pole vault. But the fact that such an accusation could even creep into Andreesen’s misshapen brain is an illustration of why such arguments are so alluring. The rubric of being “in touch” allows those who are undeniably elite to indulge in the fantasy that they can claim solidarity with the Regular People just by cobbling together a list of characteristics and activities that they have in common. It is a cheat code for soothing the egos of those who would never want to actually be a regular person, but who yearn for the populist shield of being sufficiently in touch with the experiences of regular people to lend their opinions credibility and insulate themselves from accusations of elitism.
Thus, proclamations of being In Touch tend to quickly devolve into laundry lists of the sort of shallow factoids found in dating questionnaires: I like sports! I listen to popular music! I recently pumped my own gas at a gas station, with no assistance from a service worker! The nature of these justifications is that they must be things that someone whose life experience is substantially out of the mainstream can do without altering anything about their own material circumstances. They often include things that happened before someone became an elite (I went to a public elementary school!) or things that amount to inconsequential safaris into the Land of Normal Folks (I went on a hunting trip, just as country people do!). The fantasy here is that the more behaviors one can claim that are shared by the median American, the more one can claim spiritual kinship with the median American, while studiously ignoring the market value of the home you live in.
In order to keep our national dialogue free of obscurity, it is imperative that we have crack down on these discussions of who is and is not out of touch. Most of the people who engage in them fail to live up to even the paltry standards of their own discourse. Just ask the questions with a tiny bit more clarity:
Have you taken a flight recently? The majority of Americans did not take one flight in the past year.
Did you read more than two books last year? You’re in the minority.
Have a college degree? Also a minority.
Do you eat out? The most common place that Americans eat out is McDonald’s, and the most popular sit-down restaurant brand is Olive Garden. Is that where you go? Or do you go somewhere fancy, like, you know, TGI Friday’s? What—fancier than that? Wow.
Are you a white male? Seven in ten Americans are not.
Etcetera. I can barely imagine what qualities Marc Andreesen believes that he has that qualify him for being In Touch, but I guarantee that they are all very stupid.
The thing to recognize here is that this entire framework is wrong. It is a childish exercise in self-justification that does not even take itself seriously on its own terms. Elites—economic, cultural, and otherwise—feel deep shame and guilt at their own unjustified position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, or anomie at their own isolation from the rest of mankind. They search desperately for trivial points of commonality to make themselves feel a part of the society that they have worked so hard to ascend away from. Yet, if they were being honest with themselves, they would have to confront the hard reality that the one life experience that would prevent them from being out of touch will remain forever out of their grasp, by its very nature.
Because being in touch with normal people is not about having similar hobbies or watching the same TV shows. (The very idea that there is a median “normal person” that you can measure yourself against to ensure your own normality is a meaningless statistical fiction in a country as large and diverse as ours.) I submit to you that the one characteristic that unites the lives of all Normal People is this: They are at the mercy of forces greater than themselves. They have to work for money in order to pay bills in order to survive. They are at all times subject to the cruel depredations of fate. Even if they have savings, the stability of their lives could be snatched away by a single disaster. If they rest for too long, they will lose their ability to support themselves and their families. They are all, to varying degrees, in the position of having to do things that they would not choose to do, because those things are necessary in order to earn money and live and navigate their position in society.
And guess what? Once you have a few million dollars in the bank, you are no longer in the position that I describe. Once you have a few million dollars in the bank, you may still choose to work, and you may still want to get richer, and you may decide to live a more lavish lifestyle that requires more income, but you are fundamentally removed from the necessity of shaping your life around the need to work to live a decent life. A few million bucks in the bank means that you have passed from the world of need to the world of choice. You have gained the ability to dictate the substance of your life. You have finished weaving the safety net that will prevent you from falling into the pit of penury. You may still like the same things that other people like, but you do not share the most powerful defining feature of their lives. You are free in a way that they are not and never will be.
This does not make you a bad person. This does not mean you don’t deserve to be happy. That doesn’t mean that you have no problems. I am not sitting here telling you to feel guilty. I am simply stating the material fact that at a certain level of wealth, it becomes impossible to be truly in touch with the life experience of most people, because the most significant aspect of that life experience is one that disappears when you surpass a certain level of wealth. If you do not have to work to live then, yes, you are out of touch with the organizing principle of the average person’s life. You may feel sympathy for them, or spiritual and political affinity, but your life is of a fundamentally different type than theirs.
Congratulations! You’re out of touch. Enjoy it. If you don’t like it, give all of your money away. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.
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Also
Related reading on the psychology of the rich: Grievance Poisoning In the First Degree; Prisoners of Fortune; Abominations of Capital.
One good labor story to read today: Emily Markwiese on how a coalition of union activists in Washington state saved one of their comrades from being deported by ICE.
Did you know that you can buy fly ass How Things Work t-shirt just in time for the spring? It’s true.
The accusation of being “elite” is just another front in the culture war. I did fly last year (for a parent’s funeral), I read more than two books per year, and I have a college degree. But I will never be a homeowner nor am I likely ever to retire. I rarely eat out and I never travel for pleasure. People who did not go to college, who do not read books, but worked hard and were in the right place at the right time may own franchises of major chains, have large homes and boats or RVs, eat regularly in nice restaurants, and retire by their sixties. I don’t begrudge them the lifestyle they’ve earned (if they’ve earned it), but if one of us is elite, they are. As long as I have to work for a living and pay rent every month, I refuse to call myself anything but working class.
In my definition elites are those who lives are not financially precarious. I think the shame we feel about our material circumstance is assuaged by attaching ourselves to moral movements that don't move the needle much for the general good but assure us of our moral superiority.