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.
请想象地球上几乎任何一座大城市的一间咖啡店，里面满是穿着入时、身形健美、年龄不到50岁的人在喝着5美元一杯的咖啡。他们刚上完瑜伽课，这会儿读着《纽约客》(New Yorker)上关于不平等的文章，一会儿会回到他们150万美元的小公寓里。这就是文化精英，或者用南加州大学(University of Southern California)公共政策教授伊丽莎白•霍尔德—哈尔凯特(Elizabeth Currid-Halkett)的话来说，“有抱负的阶层”。她的新作《琐事的总和》(The Sum of Small Things)利用引人入胜的美国消费数据对该阶层进行了剖析。虽然霍尔德—哈尔凯特本人即该阶层成员（我的一些至交好友也是），但她帮助解释了为什么文化精英如此遭人鄙视，以致催生了一个manbetx app苹果 政治运动来反对它。虽然在她这本书里，特朗普是未提到的房间里那头大象，但几乎每一页都会让你想到他，他就是该阶层的对立面——的确，在其支持者脑海里，他是对抗文化精英阶层的良方。