Picture a coffee shop in a big city almost anywhere on earth. It is filled with stylish, firm-bodied people aged under 50 drinking $5 coffees. Fresh from yoga class, they are reading New Yorker magazine articles about inequality before returning to their tiny $1.5m apartments. This is the cultural elite — or what Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, calls the “aspirational class”. Her book The Sum of Small Things anatomises it using fascinating American consumption data. Currid-Halkett herself is a class member (as are some of my best friends), and yet she helps explain why the cultural elite is so despised as to have generated a global political movement against it. Though Trump is the unmentioned elephant in the room in her book, you think of him on almost every page as the antithesis of this class — indeed, in the minds of his supporters, as the antidote to it.
Trump likes to tag the cultural elite as “the elite” but not all class members are rich. Adjunct professors, NGO workers and unemployed screenwriters belong alongside Mark Zuckerberg. Rather, what defines the cultural elite is education. Most of its members went to brand-name universities, and consider themselves deserving rather than entitled. They believe in facts and experts. Most grew up comfortably off in the post-1970s boom. Their education is their insurance policy and, so almost whatever their income, they suffer less economic anxiety than older or lesser educated people. Their political utopia is high-tax, egalitarian, feminist and green. They aim to be “better humans” rather than simply rich, writes Currid-Halkett. Though often too busy to be happy, they feel good about themselves. The inequality they see everywhere is never their fault.
When it comes to consumption, the cultural elite’s core belief is a scorn for stuff. Branded goods no longer convey status now that any old oaf can buy them. The top 10 per cent of American earners (which includes most of the cultural elite) spends a shrinking slice of its income on cars, TVs and household items, things that the middle class still values. With the sharing economy taking off, hipsters barely own anything at all. Forget shared bikes — Americans can now rent designer dresses.