Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, Christopher Hayes, Crown Publishers, 292 pages
“Elite” wasn’t always a dirty word. Before the 19th century, the term described someone chosen for office. Because this typically occurred in the church, the word possessed distinctly ecclesiastical connotations. The pre-Victorians transformed a word imputing religious status to individual persons into a collective noun with class implications. By the 1830s, “elite” referred to the highest ranks of the nobility.
Those meanings are no longer primary. As invoked by followers of the Tea Party movement, for example, “elite” means essentially a snob. Not, however, a snob of the old, aristocratic breed. In this context, “elite” means men and women who think degrees from famous universities mean they know better than their fellow citizens.
Elites like these don’t just look down on regular folks from provincial perches in Boston or Palo Alto. According to stump speeches, blogs, and TV commentators, they’ve been getting their way on Wall Street and in Washington for years, with disastrous results for the country.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes is no conservative. But he agrees that America is governed by a ruling class that has proved unworthy of its power. According to Hayes, the failures of the last decade created a deep crisis of authority. We counted on elites to do the right thing on our behalf. The Iraq War, steroid scandal in baseball, abuse cover-up in the Catholic Church, incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina, and, above all, financial crisis showed that they didn’t know enough or care enough to do so.
Twilight of the Elites advances two explanations for these failures. The first emphasizes elite ignorance. People with a great deal of money or power aren’t like the rest of us. Their schedules, pastimes, and even transportation are different to those of ordinary people. This isn’t always because their tastes are distinctive, at least initially. It’s often a job requirement.
In addition to their unusual lifestyles, elite types don’t spend much time with averages Joes. At work, they’re surrounded by subordinates. At home, they live in literally or metaphorically gated communities and socialize with people similar to themselves. Again, there’s nothing sinister about this. Because of their distance from the rest of the population, however, members of the elite often have little idea what’s going on in less rarefied settings.
One consequence, Hayes argues, is that elites have trouble making good decisions. Ignorant of the challenges that the poor and middle-class face and separated from the consequences of their actions, elites are susceptible to making policies that seem reasonable, but which on-the-ground experience would expose as ineffectual. Take the evacuation of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. It didn’t succeed because many New Orleanians had nowhere to go, no money to get there, and no cars in which to escape—facts the mayor and governor should have known.
The distance of elites can also have moral consequences. When policies fail, isolated elites are more likely to blame their subjects than themselves. Politicians blamed poor New Orleanians for being too lazy to evacuate. Similarly, the sellers of toxic securities blamed their customers for being too stupid to appreciate the risks that they were accepting. In an especially revolting example, members of the national-security establishment blamed Iraqis for failing to appreciate invasion and occupation. For elites like these, it’s always someone else’s fault.
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