I think you’re onto something important here. While politically I’d like to see us make democracy into something much closer to true equality than social order implies, the ebbing away of that order is grating deeply on me. I don’t think we have a hope in hell of doing anything more without it.
You need to define elites clearly. The mega wealthy and politicians are not an identical class and elite the way you describe it includes some people on slightly lower rungs of society. I suspect you mean all of them, and probably some others, but I also suspect the ways of making the situation clear to them varies among the different groups.
Otherwise, no particular criticism, but I’m looking forward to seeing more.
Bravo. I particularly appreciated the extended quote from Postman. My only gripe is sometimes "elites" seems to refer only to politicians, other times to super-rich, and sometimes both. I appreciate the acknowledgement that of how horrible a breakdown of social order would be for all parties but especially the masses, this is far too often woefully unappreciated in these discussions.
There are so many directions the end of this essay could go, the obvious question ringing in my ears is what to do about the wicked problem described. Violent revolution is alluded to, and sensibly discouraged. So how to change elite behavior? What screws can be turned?
Public perception is one that works because people are vain. Keeping the "powers" or elites separated/distinct is also very sensible i.e. reducing the middle overlap in the venn diagram of politicians, billionaires, Hollywood (not on a good track...). Something about money in politics and lobbying (good luck to us). A little more stigma around habit-inducing lobotomizing media would be nice.
Alt response: society today allows most people the ability to meet their fundamental desires: food, family, safety, stability, entertainment. (Yes these all exist on a spectrum). Leading to the question: "where's the problem here?" With this POV the major elephant in the room is staggering (accelerating) inequality.
I think this argument conflates political elites with economic elites. The two are intertwined but not interchangeable; they have somewhat different incentives, and the status of the former is a lot more volatile than that of the latter.
When an economic elite, who expects to retain her status, advocates a course of action for the future, it may very well be because she anticipates being benefited by this policy. Yet when a political elite, who fears losing her status, advocates this course of action, it may be because she hopes to benefit from it in the future, but she can't feel certain of this. In all events, her support may be a trade: in return for supporting the preferred policy of economic elites, they promise to help her retain her elite status.
Political elites need not only be public officeholders and candidates; I think that popular advocates such as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly also qualify.
In all these cases, their elite status is conferred by something that they do not truly own – whether it's popularity, an electoral mandate, the support of a wealthy patron, column inches, or airtime.
Thanks, this is a useful note. I have in mind C. Wright Mills's classic book "The Power Elite" as a mental template, but the essay needs a whole section talking through both what Mills said then (almost 70 years ago) and how that framework applies to the current era.
It all makes sense in my head, and is nowhere at all on the page. I'll fiddle on that, thanks.
I completely agree. The super-rich and politicians are getting conflated in a confusing way. "Elites" does not seem to pertain to both consistently throughout the piece. The perspective of the author, that the mega-rich and the politicians are buddies who don't have the best interests of "the people" at heart, is pretty unobjectionable. But like Alex says, they are fundamentally distinct groups.
This argument sounds right to me. The New Deal, which bought decades of social peace, came about because our elites were scared of Communism and Fascism.
This is a really attractive premise because it both aligns with experience and describes our ongoing crisis in a fairly dispassionate way. Hatred of "elites" may be the only thing all Americans agree on, for varying values of elite. Orwell nailed the whole corruption of language thing, at least. Libertarian elites seem to come from wealth and power being conjured up from the Aether (an Aethernet, if you will) at a relatively young age. There's none of the old noblesse oblige with a handful of code monkeys and a warehouse full of servers somewhere. They do seem to be thinking hard (I almost wrote seriously) about managing a world with a greatly reduced population, because they're cold-eyed realists who see what's coming, but there's no evidence they have the intellect or testicular fortitude to grapple with the implications. Guys like Pregozhin or Prince are gonna do better than Musk or Theil. You'd need a loyal force more than a solar farm and defensible compound. Scalzi's quip about thin strips of Objectivist jerky comes to mind.
The Republican Party has been on a slow march to abandoning representative democracy for a long, long, time. The half-baked coup against FDR was a forgotten outlier, but they've always looked to gaming the system as their voting base contracted. Attempts like Rove's Latino outreach are slapped down in favor of media bites like Muslims against Trans or the famous 1 guy "Blacks for Trump". At some point, sooner or later, they're going to seriously go for it, because they've maneuvered themselves into that or irrelevance. If Trump is in charge, it will at least be incompetent, so we've got that going for us.
Pretty sure “We the People” is from the Constitution not the Declaration :)
On Rushkoff’s exiters and billionaire libertarians--I think the problem is that they *don’t* believe they deserve it. No one deserves THAT. And everyone can see this now. They doth protest too much.
This kind of meritocracy is distinctly American. Per Margaret Mead: “The insistence upon a relationship between what we do and what we get is one of our most distinguishing characteristics. On it is based our specific brand of democracy.”
As I wrote in an earlier post, she uses this framework to predict Trump exactly:
“It is this cynicism which could well form the basis for American fascism, a fascism bowing down before any character strong enough and amoral enough to get away with it, to get his....There are very few Americans who can identify with Hitler in his cold destructiveness, but they can identify with his success in getting away with it, in the way in which he has made monkeys of his opponents. The belief that all of life is a racket and the strongest racketeer gets the loot is the bastard brother of the belief that life is real and life is earnest...it stands as a terrible warning of what may come from any concerted attack on our success creed...”
So I agree with your diagnosis. But it is not only your political opponents who have contributed to the critical cultural corrosion
Certainly agree with your last point (though I think the portions are far from equally balanced).
And good catch on the first point. In my defense, if I'm going to spend my time in Paris writing an essay, I should at least have the good sense to write quickly and be light on the editing!
But on the middle point, hmm, I think once again that you are displaying an optimism about the current state of the world that deeply clashes with my "bah humbug" sensibilities. (Relates back to Elon Musk and NPCs, etc)
I just looked at the Supreme Court rulings from this morning and think that the Moore v. Harper case might be an example of the court elite responding to pressure. I note that Prof. Melissa Murray thinks they've left room to meddle with it, so maybe an argument for keeping up the pressure. (I used to practice law, so I pay attention.)
Spot on! You are on the right track. The only caution, as I have seen from comment below is our tendency to demonise those we don’t know. They are human beings like us. Many of the problems in those who do stand out like Musk and Kennedy Jnr can be explained through psychology. Success requires working long hours… Not talking to your children at those key stages ages 3 to 5 has serious long term consequences. Being isolated and removed from larger society also has consequences. You eluded to a Taoist concept of the illusion of immortality in those born into power without ever having to develop a sense of empathy. This leads to incompetence, which in the end is detrimental to ‘elites’.. There is nothing more narcissistic than someone believing that they are the Son of God, it is ironic then that biblical texts are filled with verses such as ‘be kind to the stranger in your land (be kind to refugees!) oppress not the poor, and defend the widow and the orphan.. Thus religion was a cure for narcissists as much as it attracts them.. I put the first part of that phrase in the past tense because the difference between before and now is people used to become wealthy in their advanced ages… Becoming a billionaire in our 20s is something beyond our evolution. The solution is a form of Social jujitsu where one uses their weaknesses, lack of social imagination and poor judgment to bring those who pose a threat to our democratic values and institutions to their inevitable conclusions before they can do too much harm. As you correctly point out: It is much easier to convert a the majority of a 1% that a small group are posing a threat to their wealth and power than to try to educate a 99% who rather spend Saturday afternoons watching a good game of football. How one does that one has to be creative, it is achievable because there is nothing harder than being evil. Being evil is like the illusion of the serial rapist, they keep committing the same evil only because the reality of the act never matches their expectations.
I think you’re onto something important here. While politically I’d like to see us make democracy into something much closer to true equality than social order implies, the ebbing away of that order is grating deeply on me. I don’t think we have a hope in hell of doing anything more without it.
You need to define elites clearly. The mega wealthy and politicians are not an identical class and elite the way you describe it includes some people on slightly lower rungs of society. I suspect you mean all of them, and probably some others, but I also suspect the ways of making the situation clear to them varies among the different groups.
Otherwise, no particular criticism, but I’m looking forward to seeing more.
Bravo. I particularly appreciated the extended quote from Postman. My only gripe is sometimes "elites" seems to refer only to politicians, other times to super-rich, and sometimes both. I appreciate the acknowledgement that of how horrible a breakdown of social order would be for all parties but especially the masses, this is far too often woefully unappreciated in these discussions.
There are so many directions the end of this essay could go, the obvious question ringing in my ears is what to do about the wicked problem described. Violent revolution is alluded to, and sensibly discouraged. So how to change elite behavior? What screws can be turned?
Public perception is one that works because people are vain. Keeping the "powers" or elites separated/distinct is also very sensible i.e. reducing the middle overlap in the venn diagram of politicians, billionaires, Hollywood (not on a good track...). Something about money in politics and lobbying (good luck to us). A little more stigma around habit-inducing lobotomizing media would be nice.
Alt response: society today allows most people the ability to meet their fundamental desires: food, family, safety, stability, entertainment. (Yes these all exist on a spectrum). Leading to the question: "where's the problem here?" With this POV the major elephant in the room is staggering (accelerating) inequality.
I think this argument conflates political elites with economic elites. The two are intertwined but not interchangeable; they have somewhat different incentives, and the status of the former is a lot more volatile than that of the latter.
When an economic elite, who expects to retain her status, advocates a course of action for the future, it may very well be because she anticipates being benefited by this policy. Yet when a political elite, who fears losing her status, advocates this course of action, it may be because she hopes to benefit from it in the future, but she can't feel certain of this. In all events, her support may be a trade: in return for supporting the preferred policy of economic elites, they promise to help her retain her elite status.
Political elites need not only be public officeholders and candidates; I think that popular advocates such as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly also qualify.
In all these cases, their elite status is conferred by something that they do not truly own – whether it's popularity, an electoral mandate, the support of a wealthy patron, column inches, or airtime.
I think this is a meaningful difference.
Thanks, this is a useful note. I have in mind C. Wright Mills's classic book "The Power Elite" as a mental template, but the essay needs a whole section talking through both what Mills said then (almost 70 years ago) and how that framework applies to the current era.
It all makes sense in my head, and is nowhere at all on the page. I'll fiddle on that, thanks.
I completely agree. The super-rich and politicians are getting conflated in a confusing way. "Elites" does not seem to pertain to both consistently throughout the piece. The perspective of the author, that the mega-rich and the politicians are buddies who don't have the best interests of "the people" at heart, is pretty unobjectionable. But like Alex says, they are fundamentally distinct groups.
This argument sounds right to me. The New Deal, which bought decades of social peace, came about because our elites were scared of Communism and Fascism.
This is a really attractive premise because it both aligns with experience and describes our ongoing crisis in a fairly dispassionate way. Hatred of "elites" may be the only thing all Americans agree on, for varying values of elite. Orwell nailed the whole corruption of language thing, at least. Libertarian elites seem to come from wealth and power being conjured up from the Aether (an Aethernet, if you will) at a relatively young age. There's none of the old noblesse oblige with a handful of code monkeys and a warehouse full of servers somewhere. They do seem to be thinking hard (I almost wrote seriously) about managing a world with a greatly reduced population, because they're cold-eyed realists who see what's coming, but there's no evidence they have the intellect or testicular fortitude to grapple with the implications. Guys like Pregozhin or Prince are gonna do better than Musk or Theil. You'd need a loyal force more than a solar farm and defensible compound. Scalzi's quip about thin strips of Objectivist jerky comes to mind.
The Republican Party has been on a slow march to abandoning representative democracy for a long, long, time. The half-baked coup against FDR was a forgotten outlier, but they've always looked to gaming the system as their voting base contracted. Attempts like Rove's Latino outreach are slapped down in favor of media bites like Muslims against Trans or the famous 1 guy "Blacks for Trump". At some point, sooner or later, they're going to seriously go for it, because they've maneuvered themselves into that or irrelevance. If Trump is in charge, it will at least be incompetent, so we've got that going for us.
Pretty sure “We the People” is from the Constitution not the Declaration :)
On Rushkoff’s exiters and billionaire libertarians--I think the problem is that they *don’t* believe they deserve it. No one deserves THAT. And everyone can see this now. They doth protest too much.
This kind of meritocracy is distinctly American. Per Margaret Mead: “The insistence upon a relationship between what we do and what we get is one of our most distinguishing characteristics. On it is based our specific brand of democracy.”
As I wrote in an earlier post, she uses this framework to predict Trump exactly:
“It is this cynicism which could well form the basis for American fascism, a fascism bowing down before any character strong enough and amoral enough to get away with it, to get his....There are very few Americans who can identify with Hitler in his cold destructiveness, but they can identify with his success in getting away with it, in the way in which he has made monkeys of his opponents. The belief that all of life is a racket and the strongest racketeer gets the loot is the bastard brother of the belief that life is real and life is earnest...it stands as a terrible warning of what may come from any concerted attack on our success creed...”
So I agree with your diagnosis. But it is not only your political opponents who have contributed to the critical cultural corrosion
Certainly agree with your last point (though I think the portions are far from equally balanced).
And good catch on the first point. In my defense, if I'm going to spend my time in Paris writing an essay, I should at least have the good sense to write quickly and be light on the editing!
But on the middle point, hmm, I think once again that you are displaying an optimism about the current state of the world that deeply clashes with my "bah humbug" sensibilities. (Relates back to Elon Musk and NPCs, etc)
I just looked at the Supreme Court rulings from this morning and think that the Moore v. Harper case might be an example of the court elite responding to pressure. I note that Prof. Melissa Murray thinks they've left room to meddle with it, so maybe an argument for keeping up the pressure. (I used to practice law, so I pay attention.)
Spot on! You are on the right track. The only caution, as I have seen from comment below is our tendency to demonise those we don’t know. They are human beings like us. Many of the problems in those who do stand out like Musk and Kennedy Jnr can be explained through psychology. Success requires working long hours… Not talking to your children at those key stages ages 3 to 5 has serious long term consequences. Being isolated and removed from larger society also has consequences. You eluded to a Taoist concept of the illusion of immortality in those born into power without ever having to develop a sense of empathy. This leads to incompetence, which in the end is detrimental to ‘elites’.. There is nothing more narcissistic than someone believing that they are the Son of God, it is ironic then that biblical texts are filled with verses such as ‘be kind to the stranger in your land (be kind to refugees!) oppress not the poor, and defend the widow and the orphan.. Thus religion was a cure for narcissists as much as it attracts them.. I put the first part of that phrase in the past tense because the difference between before and now is people used to become wealthy in their advanced ages… Becoming a billionaire in our 20s is something beyond our evolution. The solution is a form of Social jujitsu where one uses their weaknesses, lack of social imagination and poor judgment to bring those who pose a threat to our democratic values and institutions to their inevitable conclusions before they can do too much harm. As you correctly point out: It is much easier to convert a the majority of a 1% that a small group are posing a threat to their wealth and power than to try to educate a 99% who rather spend Saturday afternoons watching a good game of football. How one does that one has to be creative, it is achievable because there is nothing harder than being evil. Being evil is like the illusion of the serial rapist, they keep committing the same evil only because the reality of the act never matches their expectations.