FRED TURNER WONDERS when the 1960s generation bought into the class system:

But there is another flavor in the fear. I recognized it with astonishment, and once I did, it was unmistakable. It was the fear of losing one’s class standing, of being “cut” by one’s “set,” of being labeled not quite “pukka,” not quite “our sort,” a loss of caste. What had happened, I realized, was something absolutely astonishing; that in some way the cultural revolution of the ’60s had begun an attempt to reinstitute a class system that America had, out of its own inner nature and best genius, rejected. Rejected in the American Revolution, rejected in the Civil War, rejected in the decision to welcome immigration from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe and China, rejected in the Civil Rights movement. But still the urge toward the pleasures of snobbery kept reasserting itself in new forms; this time it was a snobbery of radical liberal intellectuals in the university, the school system, the press, the judiciary, and the charitable foundations, with wannabes in government, the caring professions, and even the hipper reaches of the corporate campus.

Aspiring middle-class folk adopt this snobbery in order to sound “Ivy”; Ivy people wear it like a comfortable old pair of $500 loafers; the rich, once the best educated people around, put it on in order to keep up with the better-educated professionals that define its canons.

So Eustace Tilley, the gentleman with the monocle on the cover of The New Yorker, is now the heir of Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza protests, beards and beads and all. You can see the class system evolving in the movie “The Big Chill,” where William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, and Meg Tilley all articulated its characteristic cool and style. Of course it has settled down since then, and has adapted to tweeds and fume blanc and Francophilia. It is an entirely unconscious snobbery.

Oh, not entirely.

UPDATE: Talk about ahead of the curve — Michael Barone wrote about “The New Snobbery” back in 1966! Advantage: Barone. Which isn’t to say that Turner hasn’t done a good job of noting its spread, and the signs of its blooming decay.