Jim Sleeper: Washington Post Reverts to Truth-Dodging: 'Blame the Ivies!'

[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.]

They're ba-a-ack! Now that America's wealth"is more concentrated in fewer hands than it's been in 80 years" and"the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans... earn as much as the bottom 120 million" (as Bob Reich put it here below) conservative opinionators are doing just what they did about it twenty years ago.

They're giving Americans a"new elite" of Ivy League liberals to resent and to blame.

The tactic is evergreen, and not just because Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray enjoys recycling Bobos in Paradise author David Brooks' two-decade-long obsession with the Ivy League. (Murray did it again yesterday in the Washington Post, citing Brooks right alongside Glenn Beck.)

"What sets the Tea Party apart from other observers of the New Elite," Murray announces,"is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America.... Let me propose that those allegations have merit."

Let me propose that what sets the Tea Party's hostility apart is its funding by an elite Murray doesn't mention, the one that's cannibalizing"mainstream America." And let me point out that with even as conservative a writer as David Frum making a similar observation, the Post's judgment in publishing Murray on this is more than a little suspect here -- indeed,"embarrassing," as Frum puts it.

Conservatives have been stoking Ivy-envy since before Joe McCarthy attacked Dean Acheson. It's so easy - and, sadly, so often justified -- that you forget how irrelevant it is to the real new elite that's channeling Tea Partiers' and other populists' resentments against anyone and anything that might actually relieve their distress.

The only thing"Ivy" about this resentment-stoking elite -- much of it drawn from that wealthiest one-tenth of one percent -- is that an all-Ivy Supreme Court majority last spring enabled its unrestricted and, increasingly, undisclosed mis-direction of resentment. I skewered the Court here and in the Boston Globe last spring, but this is one Ivy elite Murray and Glenn Beck didn't mention.