Elites built moats and fences not just around neighborhoods but also around cultural artifacts. The Metropolitan Opera made cultural performances more “pure,” dropping the vaudeville. High ticket prices made the popular music of Verdi less accessible; soon it was the rich and not the rest who enjoyed this music. Even great public institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art were only nominally so. It was far from the homes of workers, closed on the one day they had free (Sunday) and known to remove working-class patrons for, as the director of the museum put it, “offensive odors emitted from dirt on their apparel.” The sociologist Nicola Beisel has shown how the fine-art nudes that had once circulated among workers on postcard replications were banned as pornography through the Comstock laws and limited to an imposing building that only “respectable” New Yorkers would enter.

This was the birth of the modern upper-class elite; its own schools, clubs and cultural artifacts made it quite distinct from other Americans.

HOW far we’ve come! Our modern omnivores have filled in the moats and torn down the fences. With exclusion and snobbery a relic, the world is available for the most talented to take advantage of. To talk of “elite culture,” it seems, is to talk of something quaint, something anti-American and anti-democratic. Whereas the old elites used their culture to make explicit the differences between themselves and the rest, if you were to talk to members of the elite today, many would tell you that their culture is simply an expression of their open-minded, creative, ready-to-pounce-on-any-opportunity ethic. Others would object to the idea that they were part of an elite in the first place.

But if you look at the omnivore from another point of view, a far different picture emerges.

Unlike the shared class character of Gilded Age elites, omnivores seem highly distinct and their tastes appear to be a matter of personal expression. Instead of liking things like opera because that’s what people of your class are supposed to like, the omnivore likes what he likes because it is an expression of a distinct self. Perhaps liking a range of things explains why elites are elite, and not the other way around.

By contrast, those who have exclusive tastes today — middle-class and poorer Americans — are subject to disdain. If the world is open and you don’t take advantage of it, then you’re simply limited and closed-minded. Perhaps it’s these attributes that explain your incapacity to succeed.

And so if elites have a culture today, it is a culture of individual self-cultivation. Their rhetoric emphasizes such individualism and the talents required to “make it.” Yet there is something pernicious about this self-presentation. The narrative of openness and talent obscures the bitter truth of the American experience. Talents are costly to develop, and we refuse to socialize these costs. To be an outstanding student requires not just smarts and dedication but a well-supported school, a safe, comfortable home and leisure time to cultivate the self. These are not widely available. When some students struggle, they can later tell the story of their triumph over adversity, often without mentioning the helping hand of a tutor. Other students simply fail without such expensive aids.