Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and WaPo discover there are elites in America.

This Washington Post article describes a class of elite Americans who are physically, educationally, and culturally isolated from ordinary people to the point that they basically have no first hand information about how non-elites live and think. It is interesting for its numbers, detail and references to similar findings in other writings including the author's own. Hat tip to Christine.  Among the factoids in the article: 

Although only 55% of high-schoolers taking the SAT have at least one college educated parent, 87% of those scoring over 700 do. 

Harvard seniors surveyed in 2007 were headed toward a small number of elite graduate schools (Harvard and Cambridge in the lead) and a small number of elite professional fields (finance and consulting were tied for top choice). Jobs in businesses that provide bread-and-butter goods and services to individual Americans, which make up the overwhelming majority of entry-level openings for aspiring managers, attracted just 1.7 percent of the Harvard students who went to work right after graduation.

Part of the isolation is political. In that Harvard survey I mentioned, 72 percent of Harvard seniors said their beliefs were to the left of the nation as a whole, compared with 10 percent who said theirs were to the right of it. The political preferences of academics and journalists among the New Elite also conform to the suspicions of the tea party.

The description of the New Elite seems pretty accurate to me, but is this really different?  I remember Presidential Candidate George Wallace telling voters he was going to go to Washington and throw all of those pointy-headed liberals and their brief cases into the Potomac River.  When have we not had elites running our institutions? 

Is there a call for action here?  Or is it enough to improve our understanding? 

Comments

[Paul Fernhout]

If you google on: "Top French Schools, Asked to Diversify, Fear for Standards" you'll find a similar statement in a NYTimes article about France: "The result, critics say, is a self-perpetuating elite of the wealthy and white, who provide their own children the social skills, financial support and cultural knowledge to pass the entrance exams, known as the concours, which are normally taken after an extra two years of intensive study in expensive preparatory schools after high school."

I tend to get my most interesting insights about the USA these days by reading things the US press says vilifying other countries. :-)

G. William Domhoff is a sociologist who wrote "Who Rules America" and concluded about the uSA is ruled by about 200,000 intermarrying families with a mostly common world-view who own a lot of the commercial real estate and stocks and other income producing assets. These people form the core of a ruling elite just exercising their control through the regular political process which they have the money and, more importantly, spare time to be involved in.

About two and a half years ago I wrote an online book about re-envisioning Princeton University as a non-elite post-scarcity institution.
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"

From the introduction: "So, here is some advice to prospective Princeton University (PU) students based on reading between the lines of the current (May 14, 2008) issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW). And maybe it offers some advice for PU administrators and trustees too. And maybe even some alumni might get something out of it, as it brings up global trends related to an emerging post-scarcity society. But many others may find it of interest even if they have never heard of, say, Nassau Hall (where the office of the PU president is). I am sorry that to even begin to expose the scarcity-related (and other) mythology interwoven in only a few selected PAW articles, it has taken me about four times as many pages as the entire issue. :-( And all this is without even looking at the ads or class notes. :-) The fundamental issue considered in this essay is how an emerging post-scarcity society affects the mythology by which Princeton University defines its "brand", both as an educational institution and as an alumni community. "

Can't say I think more than one person besides me has had the stamina to wade through the entire mucky thing. :-) And of course my letter to the alumni magazine about it was ignored. A shorter version is linked at the top of that which just focuses on post-scarcity issues and leaves out the personal bits and more Princeton specific in-jokes.

Anyway, I'd say I agree with the main thrust of the Washington Post article. But I think there are also specifics about the elite experience that relate to shadow ideas (listed in parentheses): elitism (alienation), competition (destructiveness), and excellence (perfectionism). It is those shadows of high aspirations that can cause a lot of damage, regardless of whether the primary things are sometimes destructive too. But in general, my book attempts to paint Princeton as a very confused and conflicted institution, even given its well-deserved position as a top liberal arts institution in a conventional sense. Although as I say there, it's hard to usefully characterize a big institution very simply, and also one may well just say the long essay just more reflects its author. :-)

When I was younger, I really thought "exclusive" meant "good" as in "high quality". Only as I got older did I understand it meant "excluding" and "bad" as in "left out". Funny how one can ignore things staring you in the face for years.

Ultimately a core aspect of elites as we know them is an assumption of scarcity which then implies exclusiveness. For example, there is an assumption there is not enough high quality education to go around and so only some can have access to it at elite schools (even if Princeton's endowment is large enough to give the poorest billion children on the planet access to the internet -- but instead only graduates about a thousand undergrads a year). There is an assumption there are not enough well-paying interesting jobs or internships or professor positions to go around, even as there are endless species still to study or endless good works to do (even if little of that is profitable). There is an assumption that there is not enough money or resources to just let anyone do what they really want (even if our primary problem these days is lack of demand). And so on. (All these assumptions are essentially either false now or will be soon, by the way, between lectures on YouTube, internet discussion groups, cheap computers, the potential for a basic income, robotics, advanced material science, and so on.) And all this scarcity ideology then justifies the filtering process that Noam Chomsky talks about in "What Makes the Mainstream Media Mainstream" or David Goodstein talks about in "The Big Crunch".

Now, it may be true that all living things take on a specific identity at some moment along with filters to maintain that identity. But we can still ask then, what is the identity of the elite or an elite school? What should it be in a healthy democracy?

This may be hard to believe given the mainstream media or even the progressive press, but scarcity is a very dangerous assumption these days when we have unlocked the power of the atom, the power of automation, the power of biotechnology, the power of social networks, the power of chemistry, and the power of nanotechnology. As Albert Einstein said, with the unlocking of the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Alfred Nobel understood this when he used advanced chemistry to invent dynamite and then used a lot of the vast fortune from it to fund the Nobel prizes including one about World Peace (even as I can wonder if today any of that original spirit and optimism is left in the prize committee or the winners). The world's elites control these immense magical powers (in the Arthur C. Clarke sense of "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"), but they do so from a perspective of competition and scarcity and exclusiveness. That is a very dangerous mix.

Of course, the Tea Party uses similar magic, flying to conventions in magical flying machines made of a material that cost more than gold in the days of the first Tea Party, talking to each other across the country via magic crystals, and printing signs using magic materials in magic desktop minifactories, all to tell the world there is no magic and we should all go back to our wage-slavery. I could fault many in the Green Party on this issue, too, even as I'd agree we need to look very closely at what magic we do decide to put in our lives.

When people use powerful magic without understanding the implications, disaster often ensues. In a previous post to your blog I linked to some possible alternatives to disaster (a mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and stronger local subsistence production). There are solutions -- but they only make sense from an abundance paradigm. That is why, say, with already one third of US citizens (the old on social security and the young in school) receiving directly or indirectly over$1000 a month from the government, people won't consider extending that to every citizen. Or why, with Linux and Wikipedia and other free content so popular, Congress still lengthens copyrights and why charitable dollars still go to make more proprietary works with FBI warnings threatening imprisonment for sharing. And so on.

I've written another essay on how recognizing irony is a key to transcending militarism -- because with all that technological capacity, there is not much reason for fighting over things like oil or land. Key is to redefine security as intrinsic and mutual, not extrinsic and unilateral. I hope the elite may be slowly understanding this in tandem with a growing awareness in our broader culture.

Anyway, most of the people I've met in relation to Princeton have been very nice people, but, looking back, or even considering current alumni mailing lists, many are caught up in a certain world view and various habits. I saw one older alum kicked off the Princeton alumni network for repeatedly posting alternative views. See the book "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt for part of the explanation about how political subordination and professional certification are interwove. There are exceptions, but they tend to be marginalized.

But I don't think that common elite world view and related political subordination (as Jeff Schmidt discusses) is necessarily that different from much of our culture which the elite shapes and then is shaped by in return. The two can be intertwined even as the elite may see their role in that culture as being a little different and the elite may have their own unique foibles and failure modes. The average person voting to cut government regulation of their food and water supply, to cut social benefits for the unemployed and welfare moms, to vote of welfare-to-work when there is no work to be had, to defend their jobs when their jobs are killing them through occupational hazards like in mines, or are just about being a guard at a school day-prison, or even killing others who have done them no harm as soldiers, and so on, are just examples of most everyone having a certain stake in the status quo and a related world view.

As Michelle Obama wrote in her senior thesis at Princeton (same year as mine), Blacks who came to Princeton became alienated from their roots as the joined an elite. In my book, I generalized that to suggesting that most people who came to Princeton from an alternative background became alienated from their roots at Princeton. That is a major purpose of such a place, to forge people into a new identity (unless people are already mainstream upper middle class or above) as Jeff Schmidt talks about mostly at the graduate school level. But, while I did not say that in the book, as I write this I realize that new identity is still very connected to the broader culture in certain ways. And all cultures have ways of getting people to accept a dominant world view. This also interweaves with a broader issue of schooling in our culture that people like John Taylor Gatto writes about, including how the role of much schooling can be to dumb people down.

Again though, those may be overly broad as a generalization. I can certainly point to some exceptions to the rule. But, even for those who were exceptions, the constraints of power structures in our culture keep things from changing very much in certain obvious ways you would think they should change (just to begin with, the defeat of California's Proposition 19 when even law enforcement thinks legalization is a good idea).

Still, I think the technological trends we have set in motion will continue to play out, and at some point, despite endless foot dragging (like by RIAA or Disney on copyrights, or Republicans on income transfers), our social institutions and elites and everyone else will need to confront the fact that we are living in the 21st century and there is (technological) magic all around as well as social dysfunction we need to address with such magic of various sorts. And we can and should use that magic even as we still need to make choices about what magic we develop and how we want to use it. "Better living through chemistry" really does have some meaning to it, even as, say, Bisphenol-A is now thought to be problematical.

What's maybe most sad about the US elite is how disconnected most of them are from science, engineering, agriculture, forestry, and manufacturing as an active practice. The article touches on it, but more in a sense of the elite's separation from the common laborer on the shop floor. There is something deeper going on when most of the graduates of these elite schools are going into finance, law, management, and even medicine, but not engineering, the sciences, agriculture, forestry, or manufacturing, because those are the wellsprings of much of the magic that surrounds us. There are always exceptions of course (Yale has a whole school of Forestry), but even when there are, these exceptions become subordinate to their classmates who go into finance, law, and management. Google might be a bit of an exception with two top people with an engineering bent. But the recent meltdown was brought about by all those elite graduates in finance (basically about moving imaginary fiat dollars around) and so on who have no connection with the magic that sustains us day-to-day.

Of course, there are probably deeper magics than clunky human technology. :-)