The isolated and alienated elite

Several weeks ago, millions of people watched all or part of the memorial service for Charlie Kirk. A surprising number of people, mostly well-educated progressives, admitted on social media that what they saw seemed foreign and alien to them. They took it as a sign of some great detachment by evangelicals from society. In reality, it was another data point in how detached our elite have become.

The most viral of all the comments came from Thomas Chatterton Williams. His Twitter biography describes him as a staff writer for The Atlantic, a member of faculty at Bard College, a trustee of the American Academy in Berlin, and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Williams tweeted, “I’ve spent half of my adult life in one foreign country or another and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so estranged from the surrounding culture as I am from the aesthetics and sensibilities of this movement. Not even a criticism, I just feel more at home in Greece than in these images.” The images were of Erika Kirk hugging Donald Trump as he pointed up and of worshippers at the memorial service with their arms in the air singing praise music. Williams followed that tweet with, “I feel more at home in spots where I can’t read the road signs than here.”

I grew up in the Middle East. From five to 15, my family lived in Dubai. Every few months, we had to leave for visa renewals and my father’s oil company would send us to just about any country in the Eastern Hemisphere. At 50, I have still been to more nations than states in our union. At seven, I was eating Toblerone bars out of a mini fridge in Malaysia with the president of Pakistan. At 15, I met Margaret Thatcher. I speak multiple languages, have a post graduate degree, and have had multiple passports because I’ve filled up all the pages. I should be among the elite of the elite.

But at 15, when my family repatriated to the United States, we settled in rural Louisiana, where I had been born. Our parish (Louisiana has parishes instead of counties) remains one of the poorest in the state. My mother is from there. I was born there. Thirty-two years after graduating from high school, I still hold the record for the largest academic scholarship awarded by my high school. Only two of my graduating class left the state, a girl with a sports scholarship who went to Indiana, and me.

Rural Louisiana, like so many places in America, has a rhythm. Sundays still involve church and family lunch and afternoon football. The small-town restaurants are more integrated in the kitchen and the dining room than many restaurants in Manhattan. The schools are more integrated too. The taco is as ubiquitous as the pot of gumbo and the hamburger. It is an American culture that would be recognizable to a person from rural Wisconsin or the exurbs outside the D.C. Beltway.

Christianity is similar. There are approximately 2.6 billion Christians on Earth. Christians have worshipped for 2,000 years. Drop a Christian from one part of the world into another and, though he may not speak the language or recognize all the songs, much of the flow of worship will be recognizable and even understood. Even across the expanse of Christendom from Catholicism to the Greek and Russian Orthodox to the strip mall nondenominational Protestant church, Christians can recognize Christian worship.

What is amazing is how so many of the elite who shape the opinions of their fellow elite cannot recognize either the patterns of living outside a metropolis or even Christian worship. The national press corps drops into Des Moines, Iowa, once every four years in the middle of January to cover presidential primaries and perhaps goes to Ames, Iowa, for a fair in the preceding autumn. Lafayette, La., Bainbridge, Ga., Carbondale, Ill., and Dodge City, Kan., are all foreign lands to our elite. The local worship services of authentic Christians even in New York City are just as foreign to them.

Mr. Williams and his cohort of elite writers, thinkers, and commentators at The Atlantic, the New York Times, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, etc. should perhaps spend less time in Athens, Greece, and more time in Athens or Rome, both in Georgia, or maybe Paris, Texas. I would invite them to join me in a pew at the First Presbyterian Church in Macon, Ga., and on my front porch on a Sunday night for bourbon, cigars, and Sunday Night Football, where a group of friends spend the night eating and talking about life.

Americans, post COVID, increasingly live isolated existences, but so much of the American elite have chosen, well before COVID, to isolate themselves from Americans who live different lives at a different pace. Isolation is unhealthy, more so for an elite who increasingly feel entitled to wield the levers of technocracy and bureaucracy for and against a population they no longer understand or relate to.