While these professional middle-class boomers were by no means the majority—making up just 20 percent of the population—their proximity to levers of power and cultural visibility gave them, and the ideologies they embraced and propagated, outsize force. They were “the elite,” and as Ehrenreich argues, “an elite that is conscious of its status will defend that status, even if this means abandoning, in all but rhetoric, such stated values as democracy and fairness.”
