CHARLES MURRAY had an amazingly elitist, condescending column yesterday in the Washington Post in which he argued that America is ruled by a "New Elite", that this elite is composed of those Americans smart enough to get into top-flight universities, that they owe their smarts chiefly to the fact that their parents were also smart, and that the rise of the tea-party movement is due largely to resentment on the part of those Americans who aren't smart enough to get into those top-flight universities and are thus naturally excluded from the New Elite. Mr Murray himself may not recognise that this is, in fact, the thrust of his argument, but that's because, judging by the op-ed, he doesn't seem to be thinking very clearly.

Mr Murray couches his piece as a broad concurrence with the tea-party mantra that America's elite is out of touch with regular people. He begins by addressing "the principal gateway to membership in the New Elite, the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities."

In the idealized view of the meritocrats, those schools were once the bastion of the Northeastern Establishment, favoring bluebloods and the wealthy, but now they are peopled by youth from all backgrounds who have gained admittance through talent, pluck and hard work. That idealized view is only half-right. Over the past several decades, elite schools have indeed sought out academically talented students from all backgrounds. But the skyrocketing test scores of the freshman classes at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other elite schools in the 1950s and 1960s were not accompanied by socioeconomic democratization...The student bodies of the elite colleges are still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper middle class. According to sociologist Joseph Soares's book "The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges," about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupations put them in the top quarter of American families, according to Soares's measure of socioeconomic status. Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families.

And why would that be? Could it be because America's highly class-stratified public primary and secondary schools give poor students a dismal education? Not according to Mr Murray:

The discomfiting explanation is that despite need-blind admissions policies, the stellar applicants still hail overwhelmingly from the upper middle class and above. Students who have a parent with a college degree accounted for only 55 percent of SAT-takers this year but got 87 percent of all the verbal and math scores above 700, according to unpublished data provided to me by the College Board. This is not a function of SAT prep courses available to the affluent—such coaching buys only a few dozen points—but of the ability of these students to do well in a challenging academic setting.

Mr Murray goes on to describe how self-sorting among the new cognitive elite leads to ever-increasing stratification. Following an example set by David Brooks in "Bobos in Paradise", he looks to the New York Times' weddings announcements.

Three examples lifted from last Sunday's Times: a director of marketing at a biotech company (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MBA) married a consultant to the aerospace industry (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MPP); a vice president at Goldman Sachs (Yale) married a director of retail development for a financial software firm (Hofstra); and a third-year resident in cardiology (Yale undergrad) married a third-year resident in pathology (Columbia undergrad, summa cum laude). The New Elite marry each other, combining their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the benefit of both. 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.

"Genius genes." "Cognitive stratification." "Passes on ability." Let me put this plainly here, because Mr Murray won't. Attention all tea-partiers: Charles Murray thinks Barack Obama is smart, and you're dumb. Just as, in "The Bell Curve", he argued that the main reason black people earn less than white people is that most black people aren't as smart as most white people, he argues here that the main reason people in small towns and rural areas earn less than people in coastal creative-class cities, and why they have less influence on national culture and government policy, is that they were by and large too dumb to get into good colleges. Furthermore, he argues that the main reason they were too dumb to get into those colleges is that their parents were dumb, too.

Kevin Drum tees off on the unoriginality of Mr Murray's cultural complaints. In the old days, he notes, the elites "summered in Maine, but wouldn't be caught dead at Coney Island". What's the difference now? So what if today's elites watch "True Blood" while commoners watch...wait, I think they watch "True Blood" too. Actually I think Mr Murray is just flat-out wrong here; elite and middlebrow culture is probably closer today than it ever has been before. In any case, what exactly is Mr Murray asking the "New Elite" to do? Pretend to like NASCAR and three-wheeling, or other things they don't actually like? Does Mr Murray himself, certainly a member of the symbolic-processing elite, do this?

But that's not really what I would focus on in Mr Murray's piece. Instead, I'd contrast Mr Murray's views on the sources of class stratification with the liberal views which he claims most in the "New Elite" hold. Liberals generally agree with Mr Murray that America is a highly class-stratified society, but think that much of this stratification comes about because entrenched elites use their financial and institutional power to preserve their status and pass it on to their often undeserving kids. They believe that approaches which allow private cliques to accrue ever-greater wealth and power are "elitist", while efforts to improve public schooling and guarantee everyone equality of opportunity are anti-elitist. It is one of the more remarkable aspects of American political culture that Mr Murray's position might be characterised as a "populist" one, while liberal efforts to, say, provide every poor and working-class American with health insurance are seen as elitist and condescending. Then again, I'm not sure that Mr Murray's views on the "New Elite" really have much to do with what tea-partiers think. I doubt that when Christine O'Donnell advertises herself as not having gone to Yale, she means to say that she's not very smart, or to imply that her viewers and their parents aren't either.

(Lexington deals with the same subject over on his blog.)