CONSERVATISM FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE: Liberal elites’ secret weapon is conservative family values.

A new study by Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang at the Institute for Family Studies lays out the real picture.

“When it comes to their own families,” the authors discovered, “California elites with kids overwhelmingly ‘live right’ in private, giving their children the benefit of growing up in a two-parent family.”

Wilcox and Wang reveal granular data showing “that some of the most elite neighborhoods in the state — including several in Hollywood and San Francisco — have virtually no single parents.”

This is a far bigger story than Hollywood’s message vs. Hollywood’s lifestyle, of course. Across the country, Americans in the upper class are much more likely to profess liberalized teachings on family and marriage while personally practicing conservative family values. Wilcox and Wang just happened to get the data for California.

Among Californians aged 18-50, the college-educated were far more likely than those with no college degree (85% to 69%) to agree that we should celebrate the diversity of family structures, including single parenthood, unmarried parents, and other alternative family structures. The college-educated were specifically far more cheerful toward single motherhood.

That’s how they feel about others. How do the elites feel about their own lives? “It’s very important for me, personally to be married before having children,” 68% of the college-educated sample agreed. That number was only 59% for those who never went to college.

So the elites are more “tolerant” than the working class ideologically, but they are much more conservative about how they plan to live.

Roger Simon was pointing this out over a decade ago.