Seeds of Conflict

For a large percentage of my life, I lived relatively close to Yale University, an elite Ivy league school whose graduates (along with graduates from other elite universities) feed senior management positions in government, the judiciary, intelligence agencies, and the mainstream media.

Throughout my career, I've had an opportunity to interact and work with graduates from elite schools. They are, by and large, smart and competent, but no more so than smart and competent people who come from less prestigious backgrounds. 

There's an amusing characteristic that I'd often (but not always) encounter when meeting Ivy leaguers. Within the first 15 minutes of the meeting, that person would begin a random sentence with "When I was at Yale (or Harvard or Princeton) ... " letting you know their pedigree.

If the person was a bit more subtle, he or she might begin a sentence with: "When I was in New Haven (or Cambridge) ..." hoping that you'd ask, "What were you doing in New Haven (or Cambridge)?" thereby giving them an opening to let you know that they had attended an Ivy.

I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but it does provide insight into the self-perception of elite school graduates as one of a cadre of the "best and brightest."

There's only one problem. The "best and brightest" have collectively done a pretty awful job of running their respective organizations in recent years. The federal bureaucracy is grossly inefficient, wasteful, and often corrupt. The State Department controls a foreign policy that has had far, far more failures than successes, The intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies have allowed themselves to be weaponized in a partisan fashion, and the mainstream media is no longer trusted by tens of millions of citizens. 

In a recent oped entitled, "Maybe We're the Bad Guys," David Brooks writes:

Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

Members of our class [graduates of elite schools] also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own ...

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable ...

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

Brooks is to be commended for an honest assessment of the current class milieu, but there's a bit more to it than that. Lincoln Brown provides a somewhat harsh but nonetheless honest rejoinder to Brooks' comments:

First, allow me to sincerely congratulate you on taking a hard look at you and yours. What you have failed to understand, Mr. Brooks, is that we less-educated members of the proletariat (and by less educated, we’re talking anyone without an Ivy League education) have pretty much been putting up with you all this time. We have swallowed more words than can be found in Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. We weren’t walking on eggshells. We were rolling our eyes and gritting our teeth and waiting to see if at some point you came out of your derangement. We were waiting to see if perhaps it might dawn on you that we don’t hate black or brown people. We don’t hate gay people or lesbians. We don’t even hate trans people. ... Those in our ranks who keep guns don’t do so because they plan to shoot up a school or church. They keep them because the people who ostensibly run the country have abandoned every pretense of law and order ... We don’t want to see the world burn, but we can’t afford $5.00 for a gallon of gas and astronomical grocery bills for the rest of our lives ... We wanted to be left alone. But that wasn’t good enough for you.

There is an old joke which I believe is from Jeff Foxworthy, “Nobody likes a redneck around until their car breaks down.” And there is a great deal of truth in that. The American elites have showered disdain and outright hatred on those of us not lucky enough to be numbered among their ranks. And yet, without this despised class, life in America would be impossible. You elites have no idea how to manage livestock or crops. You cannot frame houses, install plumbing, or run electrical wires ... [Those things] all require a great deal of intelligence and an education that cannot be found in the Ivy League. These people who you have hated so much don’t just do the jobs the elites won’t do. They do the jobs the elites can’t do.

There is a certain cognitive dissonance that occurs when one listens to the ideological tsunami that moves through government and the media and then out into the "less educated" masses. In many cases, it's painfully obvious that what the elites preach and what they do in conducting their own lives don't line up. Recently, newly-minted climate activist, Bill Gates, was asked whether his use of a private jet (a mode of transportation that emits more pollutants in one flight that the average "redneck's" pickup emits in an entire year) might not be good for the environment. He suggested that his use of a private jet was beside the point. No ... It. Is. Not. 

To paraphrase a famous quote by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The elites believe the 'rules' they espouse for us don't apply to them. We know the elites believe the 'rules' they espouse for us don't apply to them. They know we know the elites believe the 'rules' they espouse for us don't apply to them. But they continue to espouse the 'rules' anyway.

And therein lie the seeds of conflict.