A sly examination of elitism
“Elitist” is the most wounding epithet in an epoch when millions of Americans, having the courage of their egalitarian convictions, have placed in the presidency someone innocent of any intellectual, moral or other excellence that might remind them that some people have superior attributes.
Elitism, more frequently deplored than defined, gets a sly examination in Joel Stein’s “In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book.” This subversive romp pretends not to be the defense that it really is.
After the 2016 election, Stein sojourned in Roberts County, Texas, which had the nation’s highest percentage (95.3%) of Trump voters and has several people named Rifle (the name Remington has become “too popular”) and a dog trained to emit a pained whimper at the word “Hillary.” But 33.2% of the residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, which is around the national rate.
When a Roberts County judge asks Stein, who lives in Los Angeles, “Would you leave your child with anyone in a 10-block radius of your house?” Stein thinks his community is “virtual”: “My friends appear on my phone far more often than on my doorstep.” Roberts County people are especially “connected” to each other and relish this. They are, however, “a remote tribal island , untouched by the last 30 years.” (Of the 25 states with the lowest percentage of passport holders, Donald Trump won 24.)
And they are increasingly “distanced from their country.” (“Even when things are desperate,” Stein writes, “people won’t venture far: Less than a third as many unemployed men move across state lines than they did in the mid1950s . ... White people who stayed in their hometown were 50% more likely to vote for Trump than whites who moved even two hours away.”)
It is, Stein says, understandable that people “still living in the 1950s” — in Roberts County, a cutting-edge, curved ultra-HD television is used to watch “Gunsmoke” — often feel disoriented and resentful. It is, however, “dangerous for people in the 1950s to vote on how people in the 21st century should behave.”
Back in Los Angeles, Stein worries that “our striving, global, diverse, loosely intertwined lifestyle is breaking the world into angry atoms.” At a dinner party with anti-Trump resisters, “I have never been part of a more heated conversation in which everyone agrees.” He is unenthralled with the elite milieu: “[The elite] are far more into impressing each other than into making money.
The elite dream is not to own a yacht but to give a TED talk.” Some of today’s elites are plebian, prominent without being distinguished, something that worried Winston Churchill nine decades ago: “The leadership of the privileged has passed away; but it has not been succeeded by that of the eminent.”
Today’s anti-elitism reflects the not-always-mistaken belief that eminence, even when validated by achievement, often reflects transmitted family advantages. It does not, however, follow that elites have neither earned their eminence nor are socially beneficial.
Granted, expert economists did not anticipate the 2008-09 financial crisis, but some of them prevented it from becoming Depression 2.0. Today’s anti-elitism wields what Stein calls the Meteorologist Fallacy — because forecasts are sometimes wrong, meteorology is worthless:
“Populists argue that banks can’t be trusted because their mortgage derivatives collapsed in 2008. It’s an argument that is tricky to refute unless you’ve ever dealt with a child. Their first method of challenging adults is to say that you were wrong this one time about that one obscure fact, so you’re probably wrong about humans needing to go to sleep at night.”
Elites are necessarily small groups that exercise disproportionate influence. In any modern, complex democracy, the question is not whether elites shall rule, but which elites shall, so the perennial political problem is to get popular consent to worthy elites. In their calmer moments, Americans do not idealize mediocrity cloaked with power. And they know that representative government means that “the people” do not decide issues, they decide who shall decide.
Away from politics, which most people treat more passionately than seriously, they are serious about depending on credentialed elites: “Nice landing, pilot.” “Who is the city’s best thoracic surgeon?”
“History,” said the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), “is a graveyard of elites.” Yes, but of everyone else, too. And elites have produced things — from vaccines to the globalized commerce that has reduced extreme poverty worldwide 70% since 1990 — that have made lives better and longer before graveyards beckon.