The New Elites: making a career in the masses George Walden Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 209pp, £18.99 ISBN 0713993170

George Walden's new book - a hot-tempered rant against the populist mediocrity of Britain's new elites - has already attracted more than its fair share of scorn. There is nothing too surprising about that: in railing waspishly against the dumb, pandering attitudes of politicians, media types, writers, artists, educationalists and cultural trend-spotters, he has given plenty of likely readers good reason to bristle.

But the tone of the sneering that Walden has provoked is interesting. His central point is that our modern elites have abdicated the responsibility conferred on them by their well-favoured educational backgrounds. Far from deploying their talents with a view to raising people's horizons (or even doing the best work of which they are capable), they simply suck up (or down) to mass taste - a taste they themselves help to form through expensive marketing and advertising. They are like weak generals who have lost or sacrificed the confidence of their armies, he suggests, and the result is a "culture of condescension" - government by focus group, entertainment and art courtesy of market research - presided over by affluent top dogs who disguise their wealth and power in anti-elitist robes.

This quite serious argument has not been challenged, far less refuted: on the contrary, Walden has simply been laughed out of court as a bilious old fart banging on about how things were so much better in his day. He has been depicted as embittered, snobbish, jealous of the young and - the worst crime of all, in these trendy times - "out of touch". I was half looking forward to having a bit of a sneer myself, but criticism of this sort is enough to give anyone pause. If anything, it quite elegantly makes Walden's point for him. His book takes a lot of sharp and well-aimed swipes at those who are too quick to cry "elitist" as a form of abuse.

Naturally, a good few objections remain. The book is written with a snappy relish that directly contradicts its plea for a cooler, more considered public vocabulary. Its prose hammers away like a woodpecker. "An egalitarian educational culture," Walden writes, in one contemptuous flourish, "delivers consumers to business like heifers to the abattoir, except that even heifers can put up a bit of a struggle when they see what's coming to them." He frequently falls prey to the kind of hyperbole that so dismays him in other people's work. "Criticising pop is like railing against the atmosphere," he writes. "You may fear for your lungs, but there is nothing else to breathe." This is pretty babyish, no more than the sound of huffish indignation cranked carelessly into top gear (the man has spent most of his life in the Foreign Office and the Tory party, after all). There are two radio stations exclusively devoted to classical music, and half a dozen concerts a night in London alone; not to mention Walden's own presumably well-worn collection of Schubert and Schoenberg CDs.

Walden is at his weakest, too, when he falls into the oldest newspaper columnist's trick in the book - dressing an enemy in cartoon clothes, the better to take a whack at him. Deriding our dumbed-down aesthetic sensibilities, he writes: "We pretend that the Nineties were the Sixties, that Oasis are the Beatles, that Stephen Fry is Oscar Wilde, that Ken Livingstone is John Wilkes, that Damien Hirst is Duchamp . . . we go through the motions of believing that the English novel and English poetry are on a historic high." These constructions always make me sigh. We? Who are "we"? Not me. Not Walden, that's for sure. Probably not many of his friends, either. Again, it is ironic that a book so zealous in its disdain for pundits who suck up to the masses should so blithely tinkle these little "we's" all over the place.

What this means is that Walden's polemic is not really an analysis of the subject, merely a contribution to such an analysis. But that does not mean that it isn't a good subject, or that he is not right about a lot of things. Populism assumes that what is popular is, by definition, what is desirable, something Walden is properly reluctant to accept. A culture driven by ratings has forgotten that crowds can be drawn to, and swayed by, almost anything - a plane crash, a fire, a massacre. This does not mean that anyone enjoys them or finds them instructive, or that we should have more of them because they prove such a hit. Nor does this impulse proceed, Walden is at pains to insist, from a snobbish disregard for "the people" in the first place. On the contrary, he argues, nothing could be more patronising than assuming that "the people" have worse taste than oneself, and they deserve to be congratulated for enjoying whatever lucrative trash our media magnificoes decide to shove their way.

The mark of true wisdom is sometimes held to be the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind at once. Walden has the odd stab at this, such as when he concedes that we might be both braining up and dumbing down at the same time. But, in the end, he is sucked towards a slightly monotonous negative view. It seems the easier option. Even in the trendy egalitarian circles he likes to satirise, pessimistic dismay looks like the smart move - more penetrating, less easily fooled than optimism or (perish the thought) earnestness. Readers will search in vain for anything resembling a constructive proposal in Walden's fervently argued pages: he is having too much fun slitting the throats of sacred cows. At its worst, it resembles a child let loose in the kitchen, very keen to help break the eggs, not so crazy about actually making the omelette. For a more scholarly (although no less pointed) consideration of the same issue, see The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch's scathing, albeit less intemperate, account of the betrayal of America.

But at least there is room for a few such jeremiads in our spacious and argumentative (although hard to pin down) modern culture. Not that Walden is anything like so abrasive as the original Jeremiah, who really did refuse to mince his words. "Circumcise yourself to the Lord," he raged against the worshippers of false gods, "and take away the foreskins of your heart . . . My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart." Poor fellow. The ancient Israelites probably just laughed and said he was out of touch.

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