Pity the Poor Elite

From The Wilson Quarterly:

“Elite” is the laziest slur in the book. Yet, on both the left and right, “elites” — however we define them — are getting whupped.

Pat McCrory needed a breather.

Though he won the North Carolina governorship in November 2012 with a pledge of centrist moderation, in the less than two years he had been in office, a relentless stream of criticism had washed away the Republican’s bipartisan goodwill. His positions on teacher pay, unemployment benefits, voter ID laws, and abortion rights — to list but a handful of his trespasses — provoked tremors of outrage that radiated far beyond the Old North State’s borders. Six months into his term, no less than a New York Times editorial was mustered in protest, an unsigned op-ed with a declarative title: “The Decline of North Carolina.”

In July 2014, McCrory stumbled into a chance to strike back. The tenure of North Carolina’s poet laureate had expired the previous month. While the position is ceremonially appointed by the governor, the nitty-gritty of selection is traditionally left up to the North Carolina Arts Council, the state’s arts agency. A special committee organized by the Council does the heavy lifting, soliciting applicants, evaluating them, and making a recommendation — in effect, only bothering the governor for a rubber stamp. Presumably, the leader of the nation’s tenth most-populous state has more important things to do.

On a Friday afternoon, a time slot typically reserved for news dumps of information you don’t want the press to cover, McCrory’s office issued a press release introducing the state’s new poet laureate: Valerie Macon, a state employee with the Department of Health and Human Services and the author of two works of poetry, both self-published.

Established North Carolina poets were livid. A Durham-based literary magazine publisher told the Charlotte Observer that the selection “was an act of utter arrogance,” and a former laureate complained to the Raleigh News & Observer that the governor “just didn’t give a damn.” This may not be an unfair assessment. Emails released in October revealed that McCrory's staff had requested information about selection protocol two days before Macon's appointment, but declined to act on it.

The governor may not have predicted the strong reaction to his announcement — the selection process for a poet laureate isn’t exactly known as a political “third rail” — but he seemed to relish a newfound opportunity to answer his critics. The seven poets who had served since the position was created in 1948 may have been distinguished, Gov. McCrory conceded, but this time, the door would be open to “people that aren’t always a part of the standard or even elite groups that have been in place for a long time."

This pivot to populism wasn’t an accident. In doing so, McCrory deployed the oldest tactic in the book of political warfare: elite bashing.

Pity the poor, unloved elite. Everywhere you turn, they’re getting whupped. Nary a day goes by that you don’t hear about their evil plans to bring ruination to our once-great nation. It’s hard to think of any other group as routinely and unquestioningly pilloried by commentators across the political spectrum, with the possible exceptions of ISIS and the Kardashian family.

Talk radio tirades against culture-making Hollywood mandarins and the New York Times-reading Prius drivers who worship them are a cliché by now — ditto attacks against the “liberal media” — but elite-pummeling isn’t restricted to pundits on the right. In books and blogs and TV, elites are being disdained and disowned by talking heads on the left, too.

Count MSNBC host Chris Hayes’s 2012 book, Twilight of the Elites, among a bountiful supply of examples. Stories on reliably liberal online outlets like Salon and Alternet regularly boast titles like “How Inbred Elites Are Tearing America Apart,” “Elites’ Strange Plot to Take over the World,” and “Bush Is the King of All Elite, Effete Snobs.”

The elites, we are to believe, are everywhere, lurking in the shadows as they plot society’s ruination. “Powerful and greedy elites,” warns The Huffington Post, will “scapegoat the schools.” In Jacobin, the feisty socialist magazine upstart, one recent (and representative) essay lamented “the near-total capture of the political system by elites.” Another HuffPo title reminds us that no one is safe from their clutches, not even little league and AYSO teams: “Youth Sports: For Everyone, or Elites?”

Peak elite-hate may have actually been reached in July 2014, when The New Republic published William Deresiewicz’s cover-story essay blasting the Ivy League. In the article — one of the most-shared pieces in TNR’s history — the former Yale instructor bemoaned that the Ivies are “exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead.” The following month, Deresiewicz released a book. Its title? Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life.

 

All of this handwringing raises an obvious question: what actually makes an “elite”?

One place to start, perhaps, is the reliable stereotype from American popular culture: a WASP, probably of old-line stock, probably from America’s northeast, resplendent in topsiders and blue blazers, with second homes on Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons, perhaps speaking in a Boston Brahmin accent. Think of Thurston Howell III, or the characters in books like A Separate Peace.

This milieu is the setting of Columbia sociologist Shamus Khan’s 2012 book, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, an ethnography of the prestigious New Hampshire boarding school. The “elitist” tropes aren’t entirely true: Khan, himself an alumnus of Pakistani and Irish heritage, observes that St. Paul’s has been drifting toward meritocracy, resulting in “an intentional diversity that few communities share or can afford.” 

Still, while the school may be shedding some of its aristocratic traits, its role as proving ground for the future wealthy and high-achieving seems to remain in force. Within this context, "elite" seems to be objectively descriptive. It’s not a slur.

In foreign affairs, the traditional definition of “elite” has been more straightforward. With so many countries in the grip of dictatorship, oligarchy, or kleptocracy, elites have been easy to identify: they’re the ones with money to spend and, frequently, immunity from the law....MUCH MORE