[Article] The Rise Of The Overclass (Newsweek 1995)

They are the people who... keep loaning money to Donald Trump–not out of any sinister conspiracy to ruin the country but because, well, it’s their job.

You sure about that?

But they're talking about the same people, who are also part of the IQ elite described in last year's best seller "The Bell Curve."

This is the book that turned out to be a lot of pseudoscience and thinly veiled racist propaganda, right? Edit: yes

The overclass, in fact, is one of the most anguished and self-doubting oligarchies in history, a habit of mind that began in the first act that defined it as a generation, its resistance to being drafted for Vietnam. "We've kept our compact with ourselves," says Chicago novelist and lawyer Scott Turow. "We know the unexamined life is not worth living, we're good parents, we recycle. But what have we done for anybody else? That's the question people of this class will ask when their kids are grown."

Lol no they won't.

Who wants to be in that position? Not I, says Eric Redman, a partner in a big Seattle law office, with a corner office on the 61st floor of Seattle's tallest building. Also a Rhodes scholar, a Harvard Law graduate and a member of the Harvard class of 1970--of whom nearly 30 percent, responding to an anonymous survey for their 25th reunion, reported a net worth of more than $1 million. But Redman describes himself as just a "glorified hourly wage slave . . . My broker told me the really big money isn't being made in salaries, but real estate and stock options." So count him out. What about Faith Popcorn, the endlessly quotable president of a marketing firm called Brain Reserve, who lives and works in her own town house in the most expensive part of Manhattan? Not her either. "I'm not psychologically like those rich people," she says. "I lived in a studio apartment for 25 years before I bought my brownstone, and my cottage in Wainscott [a fashionable section in the Hamptons] is only 750 square feet."

🙄 Maybe I'm being too quick to judge, but have you ever wanted to reach back into the past and just slap some fuckin sense into people?

The overclass was made possible by the transformation in the 1950s and 1960s of the Ivy League from a closed network dedicated to serving the least disreputable offspring of the WASP elite into a great machine for identifying future national leaders. A degree from an Ivy League or equivalent school is an almost indispensable credential of overclass membership--and not only because it presumes that you learned something while getting it. "At the highest levels," Lind says, "everyone was a roommate in college." Turow, who has degrees from Amherst, Stanford and Harvard, says friends sometimes ask him whether their children really need $100,000 worth of higher education to get ahead in life. "If you're asking me whether an Ivy League graduate will have access in ways that don't exist to graduates of otherwise outstanding schools like the University of Illinois," he tells them, "the answer is yes."

Politically, the overclass exists in a state of perpetual tension between its economic interests, which lie with the Republicans, and its psychological affinity for the Democrats. "One trait that comes through the data is the economic conservatism of this group," says Tom W. Smith of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. "They don't like to give money away." But their values are libertarian and cosmopolitan-typically pro-choice on abortion, pro-NAFTA on trade, environmentally aware. And at odds, therefore, with the Republican social agenda, which is driven by groups like the Christian Coalition (founded by Yale Law School alumnus Pat Robertson) and The Family Research Council, which actively loathe everything about the overclass, except its money.

And Unfortunately when it came to ~~paying more in taxes, ensuring a livable minimum wage and bare minimum quality of life for the underclass~~ "giving money away," a big chunk of those in the overclass realized there was a cap on how important social values really were.

If it lacks a distinctive political interest, the overclass nevertheless has an ideology, the ideology of "merit." Its success validates its intelligence and effort. Other oligarchies in the past have made similar assertions, of course, but the overclass is the first that is able to demonstrate superiority mathematically, with the help of SAT scores. "They believe they create their job, their opportunity and their wealth,"

Ok, if I had any guilt about being too judgy, this killed it. Reading this article in 2025 is like reading about a babyboomer trainwreck that disassembled itself and wrote an unapologetic biography to justify all the warning signs it ignored while speeding towards a brick wall.

You managed to break into a world previously reserved for old money. You could have used your success to fix the fucked up system from the inside. Instead, you just made sure your own kids would have the same "merit based" opportunities, and decided to do your new-old money friends a solid by ensuring the door was tightly shut and locked behind you.

1 comments

They are the people who... keep loaning money to Donald Trump–not out of any sinister conspiracy to ruin the country but because, well, it’s their job.
You sure about that?
But they're talking about the same people, who are also part of the IQ elite described in last year's best seller "The Bell Curve."
This is the book that turned out to be a lot of pseudoscience and thinly veiled racist propaganda, right? Edit: yes
The overclass, in fact, is one of the most anguished and self-doubting oligarchies in history, a habit of mind that began in the first act that defined it as a generation, its resistance to being drafted for Vietnam. "We've kept our compact with ourselves," says Chicago novelist and lawyer Scott Turow. "We know the unexamined life is not worth living, we're good parents, we recycle. But what have we done for anybody else? That's the question people of this class will ask when their kids are grown."
Lol no they won't.
Who wants to be in that position? Not I, says Eric Redman, a partner in a big Seattle law office, with a corner office on the 61st floor of Seattle's tallest building. Also a Rhodes scholar, a Harvard Law graduate and a member of the Harvard class of 1970--of whom nearly 30 percent, responding to an anonymous survey for their 25th reunion, reported a net worth of more than $1 million. But Redman describes himself as just a "glorified hourly wage slave . . . My broker told me the really big money isn't being made in salaries, but real estate and stock options." So count him out. What about Faith Popcorn, the endlessly quotable president of a marketing firm called Brain Reserve, who lives and works in her own town house in the most expensive part of Manhattan? Not her either. "I'm not psychologically like those rich people," she says. "I lived in a studio apartment for 25 years before I bought my brownstone, and my cottage in Wainscott [a fashionable section in the Hamptons] is only 750 square feet."
🙄 Maybe I'm being too quick to judge, but have you ever wanted to reach back into the past and just slap some fuckin sense into people?
The overclass was made possible by the transformation in the 1950s and 1960s of the Ivy League from a closed network dedicated to serving the least disreputable offspring of the WASP elite into a great machine for identifying future national leaders. A degree from an Ivy League or equivalent school is an almost indispensable credential of overclass membership--and not only because it presumes that you learned something while getting it. "At the highest levels," Lind says, "everyone was a roommate in college." Turow, who has degrees from Amherst, Stanford and Harvard, says friends sometimes ask him whether their children really need $100,000 worth of higher education to get ahead in life. "If you're asking me whether an Ivy League graduate will have access in ways that don't exist to graduates of otherwise outstanding schools like the University of Illinois," he tells them, "the answer is yes."
Politically, the overclass exists in a state of perpetual tension between its economic interests, which lie with the Republicans, and its psychological affinity for the Democrats. "One trait that comes through the data is the economic conservatism of this group," says Tom W. Smith of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. "They don't like to give money away." But their values are libertarian and cosmopolitan-typically pro-choice on abortion, pro-NAFTA on trade, environmentally aware. And at odds, therefore, with the Republican social agenda, which is driven by groups like the Christian Coalition (founded by Yale Law School alumnus Pat Robertson) and The Family Research Council, which actively loathe everything about the overclass, except its money.
And Unfortunately when it came to ~~paying more in taxes, ensuring a livable minimum wage and bare minimum quality of life for the underclass~~ "giving money away," a big chunk of those in the overclass realized there was a cap on how important social values really were.
If it lacks a distinctive political interest, the overclass nevertheless has an ideology, the ideology of "merit." Its success validates its intelligence and effort. Other oligarchies in the past have made similar assertions, of course, but the overclass is the first that is able to demonstrate superiority mathematically, with the help of SAT scores. "They believe they create their job, their opportunity and their wealth,"
Ok, if I had any guilt about being too judgy, this killed it. Reading this article in 2025 is like reading about a babyboomer trainwreck that disassembled itself and wrote an unapologetic biography to justify all the warning signs it ignored while speeding towards a brick wall.
You managed to break into a world previously reserved for old money. You could have used your success to fix the fucked up system from the inside. Instead, you just made sure your own kids would have the same "merit based" opportunities, and decided to do your new-old money friends a solid by ensuring the door was tightly shut and locked behind you.