Posts Tagged ‘Elites’
“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought… Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”*…
Stephen Colbert once observed that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” And indeed, liberalism— the political/moral philosophy rooted in individual liberty, consent of the governed, and equality before the law– has been a major ideology through modern times… and, of course, the major ideology animating the founding of the United States.
But as Easten European states turn to authoritarians, Western European nations wrestle with the rise of nationalist far-right parties, and the U.S. is “steered” by MAGA using Project 2025‘s “map,” there’s a concern that liberalism’s days may be past.
Persuasion is running a series of essays on “Liberal Virtues and Values.”
The series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, will make the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
The latest installment is from Martin Gurri, who argues that Liberalism needs a new foundation (and that how we handle AI will matter fundamentally)…
That liberal democracy is in a state of terminal decline I take to be beyond dispute. Like Alice in the rabbit hole, those of us who dwell in democratic societies suffer from a nauseating sense of falling without ever landing on solid ground. The usual suspects blamed for this tumble—populism, inequality, the economy—are mere surface symptoms of an internal breakdown. We have arrived at the conclusion of a world-historical cycle. Liberal democracy is the procedural embodiment of Enlightenment ideology—and after two centuries of dominance, that ideology has lost all purchase and stands utterly exhausted.
Radical alternatives confront us. Either we reorient our system to post-Enlightenment principles or we risk staggering into the nihilist’s paradise I have called the Endarkenment.
Enlightenment philosophers placed their faith in reason and science. These are purely critical disciplines: liberal propagandists wielded criticism like a scalpel to dissect conservative laggards and utopian revolutionaries alike. Once triumphant at the “end of history,” liberal democracy turned the knife on itself—a process of self-criticism and self-doubt that has shredded its own ideals to ribbons.
The positive values inherited from the Enlightenment—equality, individualism, compassion—were always parasitic on Christianity. But Christianity, like all religions, has no place in a universe ruled by reason and science. Nietzsche long ago brought us the troubling news: the Christian God is dead. Oblivious to the implications of this calamity, liberal democracy kept marching like a cartoon character over the edge of the abyss, until the laws of moral gravity asserted themselves. So began the Great Fall.
Criticism is a force for progress so long as there are blatant irrationalities, like slavery or Jim Crow discrimination, to overcome. But under the hammer of Enlightenment ideals, modern society has been flattened, centralized, and rationalized. Deprived of obvious superstitions to debunk and totalitarian rivals to defeat, liberal democracy has been revealed in all its internal contradictions.
One such contradiction, I contend, pits the cherished principle of equality against the chosen few who actually practice reason and science: let’s call this the problem of the elites.
A second contradiction finds freedom of the press and of opinion arrayed against the need to protect objective truth: call it the problem of information.
Finally, freedom of worship and the life of the spirit collide head-on with the materialist criticism favored by Enlightenment ideology: the problem of meaning.
Each of these contradictions could prove fatal to the democratic project, but none is insoluble, and the search for solutions offers an opportunity for renewal. While there are no guarantees, we could emerge from the crisis with a better understanding of the reach and limits of equality, a more transparent information sphere, and even, it may be, a rich infusion of the transcendental into everyday life…
[Gurri unpacks each of those contradictions…]
… So what is to be done?
The first, obvious step is to move the question to the center of our shared conversations. The most capacious thinkers of the age should contemplate first principles and ultimate goals with at least as much intensity as they invest in Donald Trump or the latest economic report. There’s nothing artificial about this. Science and reason are necessary for modernity. Meaning and moral aspiration are necessary for humanity. A balance must be struck that preserves the one and gives full weight to the other.
Materialism, we must understand, is a valuable perspective for science but not a realistic appraisal of the human condition. Scientists work as if on a geometric point, abstracted from nature and indifferent to its dispositions. In reality, however, we come from nature, we are of nature, and we are far from indifferent to our place in it. Our intuitions are internal to the system: humanity’s spiritual quest is, in every sense, nature reflecting on itself. One such intuition is agency—the belief that, at the crossroads, I am free to go right or left, and I alone make the choice. Another is faith in causation. These stances are irrational, or rather pre-rational, but without them liberal democracy as well as science itself would be impossible.
In the end, materialism is self-defeating. To say, “I choose to be a materialist” is to fall into an absurd fallacy. Either our bodies, which consist of matter, obey unchanging laws, or the mind, transcending matter, is capable of choice. There can be no middle ground.
Politics, in a metaphysical age, will resume its traditional place as a secondary activity—a means to an end. This will leave liberal democracy vulnerable to false prophets who are willing to trample on individual rights in pursuit of some apocalyptic scheme. The interesting question is whether the post-truth condition will make the peril greater or lesser. On the one hand, the lack of universal firewalls might make it easier for a fanatic to flood the system. Yet post-truth itself, I believe, is the strongest kind of firewall. In our fractured, eternally contested environment, the progress of any totalizing doctrine will be painfully slow. The quest for meaning and the struggle over frames of reference are, in the end, really one and the same.
We have inherited a rich and evocative spiritual vocabulary, but it belongs to a worldview thousands of years old. “King of kings,” to cite just one example, should sound archaic in a democratic age. Can we awaken the scientific world to the spirit? Is it possible to sanctify our largely instrumental relations? This shouldn’t entail a belief in fairies and goblins, or even necessarily in religion. Any good empiricist will admit that the richest human lives are lived symbolically. Can we climb the symbolic ladder to the mountaintop, where meaning and modern humanity come harmoniously together—anchoring, it may be, a loftier understanding of equality and social life, and of the sanctity of truth?
We won’t know until we try. Pessimism, let me suggest, is unwarranted. History moves in mysterious ways. We may be due for a second coming of historian Karl Jaspers’ “Axial Age”: preachers and philosophers who conceived a drastically updated transcendental vision, with the rational and the sacred, truth and meaning, reconciled with political freedom.
For 200 years, we placed society under the sway of universal principles. That’s gone with the wind. We have entered an era of radical contingency, in which even truth is indeterminate. The natural tendency is to retreat to the certainties of the past—but there’s no going back. If we hope to preserve the gains from Enlightenment society, and resolve its many contradictions, we’ll have to do so within a new and wildly unstable conceptual framework.
With the spell of the Enlightenment broken, liberal democracy will have to redefine what “created equal” means. This process could end in a rigid caste system, with the institutions in the hands of self-selected mandarins who wield the power of the state to impose their “solutions.” Preferably, and more likely given the thrust of the new technology, we’ll see a flattening of the institutions and the continued trampling by the public into the sacred spaces of politics and communication.
Equality, however understood, will be forged in the will of the citizenry rather than granted by a benevolent God. That will make it contingent like everything else, and so liable to variation and in constant need of defense. And if perfect equality is an impossible dream, eternal inequality requires impossible discipline. The current elite class, already under enormous pressure, may lose its cohesion and melt into the impermanence of the age, divided among the various schools and sects and frames of reference.
The structure of information will follow the definition of equality. The commanding heights will be control over AI. If AI development and deployment is a closed game, the elites could set themselves up as intermediaries in the oracle of an omniscient divinity. If AI is a competitive product, the public will gain the upper hand. In that case, we can expect a flowering of eccentric applications, the individualization of commerce and industry, and the final overthrow of the expert class. The information sphere will remain the mirror to our passions, divisions, and metaphysical longings. Freedom of speech, no longer “endowed by our Creator,” will become the battleground on which the question of equality is ultimately settled.
Here I finally reveal myself in my true colors. I’m an analyst. My task is to describe reality, and that’s what this essay is about. But I also lead an active life inside the world that I’m describing—and I have preferences. I see equality as a factor of opportunity, law, and human dignity, not of perfect outcomes. I think truth emerges from examining a subject from a large number of perspectives, even those that may seem disturbing or false. I hope that my story—as a person, a father, a grandfather—connects to other stories in the past and will connect to more in the future, in a pattern that is not entirely devoid of meaning. And I believe fervently in liberal democracy, because—born in Cuba—I have tasted the alternative.
The breakdown of Enlightenment ideology is only the latest challenge liberal democracy has faced in my lifetime. I’m not entitled, as an analyst, to downplay the perils ahead, but I’m allowed, as an American, to have faith that they will once again be overcome…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Search for a Post-Enlightenment Democracy”
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As we renew, we might send free-thinking birthday greetings to Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (or as he’s usually called, Benjamin Constant); he was born on this date in 1767. A French political thinker, activist, and writer on political theory and religion (whose work influenced, among many others, Sir Isaiah Berlin), Constant was a committed republican from 1795, backing the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor in1797, and the following one on 18 Brumaire, in 1799. He became the leader of the Liberal opposition in 1800, during the Consulate. Constant fell out with Napoleon, and had to flee (first to Switzerland, then to Saxony). Nonetheless, after his return to France, Constant sided with the Emperor during the Hundred Days, drafting the Charter of 1815. He became politically active again during the Bourbon Restoration and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1818 (where he remained until his death in 1830). As the head of the Liberal opposition, known as Indépendants, Constant was one of the most notable orators in the Chamber, especially in his role as a proponent of the parliamentary system.
“No one knows toward what center human things are going to gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has become scandalously provisional”*…
The estimable Ted Gioia has pulled a 2022 essay from his newsletter up from behind the paywall. It was very relevant then; if anything, more relevant now…
Back in 2014, I sketched out a widely-read outline of an alternative interpretation of cultural conflict. Curiously enough, the conceptual tools I used came from a 1929 book from philosopher José Ortega y Gasset entitled The Revolt of the Masses—a work that offers surprisingly timely insights into our current situation.
That article stirred up a lot of debate at the time, but the whole situation has intensified further since 2014. Everything I’ve seen in those eight years has made painfully clear how insightful Ortega had been. The time has come to revisit that framework, summarizing its key insights and offering predictions for what might happen in the future.
Here’s part of what I wrote back in 2014:
First, let me tell you what you won’t find in this book. Despite a title that promises political analysis, The Revolt of the Masses has almost nothing to say about conventional party ideologies and alignments. Ortega shows little interest in fascism or capitalism or Marxism, and this troubled me when I first read the book. (Although, in retrospect, the philosopher’s passing comments on these matters proved remarkably prescient—for example his smug dismissal of Russian communism as destined to failure in the West, and his prediction of the rise of a European union.) Above all, he hardly acknowledges the existence of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in political debates.
Ortega’s brilliant insight came in understanding that the battle between ‘up’ and ‘down’ could be as important in spurring social and cultural change as the conflict between ‘left’ and ‘right’. This is not an economic distinction in Ortega’s mind. The new conflict, he insists, is not between “hierarchically superior and inferior classes…. upper classes or lower classes.” A millionaire could be a member of the masses, according to Ortega’s surprising schema. And a pauper might represent the elite.
The key driver of change, as Ortega sees it, comes from a shocking attitude characteristic of the modern age—or, at least, Ortega was shocked. Put simply, the masses hate experts. If forced to choose between the advice of the learned and the vague impressions of other people just like themselves, the masses invariably turn to the latter. The upper elites still try to pronounce judgments and lead, but fewer and fewer of those down below pay attention.
This dynamic is now far more significant than it was eight years ago. So I want to share 15 observations on the emerging vertical dimension of cultural conflict—these both define the rupture and try to predict how it will play out…
Read on for: “15 Observations on the New Phase in Cultural Conflict” from @tedgioia.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses… where he also observed: “Liberalism – it is well to recall this today – is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy that is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so antinatural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.”
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As we contend with contention, we might send rational birthday greetings to an avatar of the Enlightenment (which did so much to spawn liberalism), Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he was born on this date in 1694. The Father of the Age of Reason, he produced works in almost every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works– more than 2,000 books and pamphlets (and more than 20,000 letters). He popularized Isaac Newton’s work in France by arranging a translation of Principia Mathematica to which he added his own commentary.
A social reformer, Voltaire used satire to criticize the intolerance, religious dogma, and oligopolistic privilege of his day, perhaps nowhere more sardonically than in Candide.
“Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried”*…
… Still, ours is clearly going through a rough patch. David Karpf offers a pragmatic– and provocative– perspective on how we might begin to heal it…
Let me begin from first principles: much of the rhetoric surrounding democratic theory and practice begins from a presumption of equality. We invoke the first clause of the Declaration of the Independence — “We the People” — and consider democratic forms of government to be a thing that manifests from the shared deliberation of the public at large. Through this rendering, it follows that all people have equal voice, equal protections, equal representation under and by the law. We imagine that the purpose of a democratic government is to produce wise and just outcomes for the whole of society.
From this presumption of equality, a whole field of study has arisen, asking whether citizens have the requisite skills and knowledge for democracy to live up to these ideals. This field dates back roughly a century, at least to the time of Walter Lippmann. (Sean Illing and Zac Gershberg wrote an excellent historically-engaged book on this topic last year, btw, titled The Paradox of Democracy.) For the past couple decades, contributors to the field often turn their focus toward the internet, asking whether we are enhancing or degrading the capacity of citizens to engage in productive democratic practices.
I will grant that this is a powerful and attractive rhetorical trope. Indeed, it might be the case that it is an essential constitutive myth — that in order for democracies to succeed, we must pay rhetorical homage to the collective presumption of equality.
But it is also, as an empirical matter, clearly suspect. If we want to make sense of contemporary elite political behavior — of how the powerful act and what they prioritize — I think the presumption of equality does us a disservice. And that’s because it has never, empirically speaking, been an accurate description of actually-existing democracy. We have, for starters, never had a mass public that lived up to our imagined ideals for good citizenship (c.f. Michael Schudson’s book, The Good Citizen).
American democracy was not founded by a mass citizenry coming together and uniting around a single set of shared principles. It was founded by elites — men who owned land, men who owned printing presses, men who owned people. America, just like every other mass democracy on the planet, was founded by an elite. And the purpose of democracy as a form of government was to maintain the privilege and status of that elite — to preserve the social order. We can better make sense of democratic practice today if we instead proceed from a presumption of hierarchy.
The presumption of hierarchy turns our focus away from “We the People,” toward another bedrock phrase: “the consent of the governed.” We ought to parse that term. It suggests the existence of two distinct groups — those who govern (the elites) and those who are governed (the masses). And from the masses, it merely requires that we reach a minimal threshold of “consent.” Consent is not robust, informed participation. It does not require deliberation or engagement. or engaged. We can consent to being governed in much the same passive way we consent to a website’s terms of service. Consent, in this context, can best be understood as social stability. Social unrest is synonymous with the governed withdrawing their consent. The lack of social unrest is synonymous with consent being maintained.
More provocatively, let me suggest the following: from the perspective of political elites, the central purpose of any form of government is the preservation of social order. And by that I also mean the preservation of the existing status hierarchy. Let’s call this the outcome of social order, by which I mean that governments are actually, in practice, evaluated on how well they preserve the status hierarchy with minimal changes.
From this perspective, the key innovation that has made democracy preferable to all other forms of government is that it produces a legitimate avenue for social dissent…
…
Neil Postman famously remarked in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) that the real threat to Democracy came not from the ubiquitous government surveillance depicted in George Orwell’s (1949) 1984, but rather from the ubiquitous entertainment options that leave citizens passively disengaged in Aldous Huxley’s (1931) Brave New World. Many cultural commentators have noted in recent years how well Postman’s broadcast-television-era warning seems to fit the age of digital entertainment…
In the 2000s, it was common among political communication scholars and civic technology practitioners to look with hope at the influx of new technologies. There was, amongst many of us, the shared belief that, as information and communication technologies lowered the cost of citizen engagement, we would witness the emergence of a more engaged, informed citizenry.
I was always a bit suspicious of that instinct…
But even my early-onset-orneriness did not prepare me for the authoritarian turn of the mid-’10s. Ethan Zuckerman described this well in his essay “QAnon and the Emergence of the Unreal.” The same civic technologies that were being used to build and support civic communities in the ‘90s and ‘00s were used to support conspiracy theories and hate groups in the ‘10s. Likewise, as I noted in a 2018 essay, the thing that made QAnon different from past conspiracy theories was that it had all the trappings of an immersive ARG (alternative reality game). QAnon is not just a means of making sense of a chaotic world that has not gone your way. Participating in QAnon forums is the same type of fun as participating in Reddit forums or other online communities. The people who get involved in politics are the people who attain joy or profit from that involvement…
At the elite level, I fear what has happened is the erosion of the “myth of the attentive public” among our political elites. As I described in a 2019 essay, this was a load-bearing myth, necessary for the maintenance of an at-least-barely-functional democracy…
Over the past almost-decade, this myth has been eroded as the Huxleyite version of the public on stark display. If misinformation and propaganda flow at least as well as truth and adversarial journalism, then why bother worrying about the potential effects of negative news cycles? If the only members of the public engaging in political life are your worshipful fans and your crazed enemies, why bother focusing on the messy, complex work of actual governance? (It’s all just kayfabe anyway, right?)
We don’t solve these problems by building better citizens through media literacy camapaigns. We don’t solve them through kumbaya efforts that hearken back to an era when “people could disagree without being disagreeable” (which people, one ought always ask in response).
We solve these problems by building better elites — and by better elites, what I probably mean is elites who are appropriately concerned that they are going to lose the social order and stability they have come to take for granted.
…
The trouble with the presumption of equality is that it leads us to pursue fantasy solutions to the crisis of democracy. We begin by asserting that all citizens are equal under the law, and then find ourselves asking what all citizens should expect from one another. This can be an interesting thought experiment, I suppose. But it is a dead end for pragmatists trying to diagnose how we got where we are today.
I find the presumption of hierarchy more fruitful because it more accurately describes what actual, existing democracy is, and has been. It is a marvelously effective means of maintaining social order. Social order is generally good. We would sorely miss it if it were gone. Countries that face violent overthrow are not prosperous or great to live in. (It’s easy for revolution-minded intellectuals to imagine chaos and anarchy as a welcome change. It is not.)
And that’s particularly true in todays United States. I have mentioned this elsewhere, but it’s worth saying explicitly here as well. One ought not hope for violent confrontations when the opposition has all the guns…
The nice thing about focusing on elites is that there are, relatively speaking, not a lot of them. It is less work to convince the wealthiest 0.1% of the country that they ought to alter their behavior/have an ounce of shame or humility than to convince the other 99.9% that they should all be civil and respectful of their betters and pursue civic engagement but only in the right channels at the right times…
Pragmatic or defeatist? Read the full article for Karpf’s “basic elements of a successful mass democracy,” or as he styles it, “a minimalist theory of democracy”: “Huxley’s Electorate,” from @davekarpf.
[Image above: source]
* Winston Churchill
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As we get down with government, we might recall that on this date in 1956 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, landmark legislation that funded a 40,000-mile system of interstate roads (commonly known as the Interstate Highway System) that ultimately reached every American city with a population of more than 100,000. Today, almost 90% of the interstate system crosses rural areas, putting most citizens and businesses within driving distance of one another. Although Eisenhower’s rationale was martial (creating a road system on which convoys could travel more easily), the results were largely civilian. From the growth of trucking to the rise of suburbs, the interstate highway system re-shaped American landscapes and lives.
“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all”*…
To be sure the 1% deserves scrutiny, but there is another– much larger– kind of elite entrenched across the U.S…
American wealth and power usually have a certain look: glass-walled penthouse apartments in glittering urban skyscrapers, sprawling country mansions, ivy-covered prep schools, vacation homes in the Hamptons. These are the outward symbols of an entrenched oligarchy, the political-economic ruling class portrayed by the media that entertains us and the conspiracy theories that animate the darker corners of the American imagination.
The reality of American wealth and power is more banal. The conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet-setting cosmopolitans of popular imagination exist, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies that govern daily life for tens of millions of people. Donald Trump grasped this group’s existence and its importance, acting, as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct. When he crowed about his “beautiful boaters,” lauding the flotillas of supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January 6 crowd that included people who had flown to the event on private jets, he knew what he was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry, the salt-of-the-earth millionaires who see themselves as local leaders in business and politics, the unappreciated backbone of a once-great nation.
…
These elites’ wealth derives not from their salary—this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, such as doctors and lawyers—but from their ownership of assets. Those assets vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi; a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas; a construction company in Billings, Montana; commercial properties in Portland, Maine; or a car dealership in western North Carolina. Even the less prosperous parts of the United States generate enough surplus to produce a class of wealthy people. Depending on the political culture and institutions of a locality or region, this elite class might wield more or less political power. In some places, it has an effective stranglehold over what gets done; in others, it’s important but not all-powerful.Wherever these elites live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. In the aggregate, through their political donations and positions within their localities and regions, they wield a great deal of political influence. They’re the local gentry of the United States.
These folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions we typically associate with the world-shaping clout of international oligarchs. There are, however, a lot more of them than the global elites who get all of the attention. They’re not the faces of instantly recognizable brands or the subjects of award-winning New York Times profiles; they own warehouses and Applebee’s franchises, concrete companies and movie-theater chains, hops fields and apartment complexes.
Because their wealth is rooted in the ownership of physical assets, they tend to be more rooted in their place of origin than the cosmopolitan professionals and entrepreneurs of the major metro areas are. Mobility among major metros, the characteristic jumping from Seattle to Los Angeles to New York to Austin that’s possible for younger lawyers, creatives, and tech folks, is foreign to them. They might really like heading to a vacation home in Bermuda or Maui. They might plan a relatively early retirement to a wealthy enclave in Palm Springs; Scottsdale, Arizona; or Central Florida. Ultimately, however, their money and importance comes from the businesses they own, and those belong in their locality.
Gentry classes have been a common feature of a great many social-economic-political regimes throughout history. Pretty much anywhere you have a hierarchical form of social organization and property ownership, an entrenched gentry class of some kind emerges. In the course of working on my doctorate in history and years of research for my podcast, Tides of History, I’ve come across many different gentries, each with its own ideas about its legitimacy, role in society, and relationship to those above and below on the social scale: the local civic elites of the Roman Empire, the landlords of late Han China, the numerous lower nobility of late medieval France, the thegns of Anglo-Saxon England, the Prussian Junkers, and the planter class of the antebellum South. The gentry are distinct from the highest levels of a regime’s political and economic elite: They’re usually not resident in the political center; they don’t hold major positions in the central administration of the state (whatever that might consist of); and they aren’t counted among the wealthiest people in their polity. New national or imperial elites might develop over time from a gentry class, even rulers—the boundaries between these groups can be more or less porous—but that’s not typically the case.
Gentry are, by definition, local elites. The extent to which they wield power in their locality, and how they do so, is dependent on the structure of their regime. In the early Roman Empire, for example, local civic elites were essential to the functioning of the state. They collected taxes in their home city, administered justice, and competed with one another for local political offices and seats on the city council. Their competition was a driving force behind the provision of benefits to the common folk, in the form of festivals, games, public buildings, and more basic support, a practice called civic euergetism.
…
When we talk about inequality, we skew our perspective by looking at the most visible manifestations of it: penthouses in New York, mansions in Beverly Hills, the lavish wastefulness of hedge-fund billionaires or a misbehaving celebrity. But that’s not who most of the United States’ wealthy elite really are. They own $2 million houses on golf courses outside Orlando, Florida, and a condo in the Bahamas, not an architecturally designed oceanfront villa in Miami. Those billionaires (and their excesses) exist, but they’re not nearly as common as a less exalted category of the rich that’s no less structurally formative to our economy and society.
An enormous number of organizations and institutions are dedicated to advancing the interests of this gentry class: chambers of commerce, exclusive country clubs and housing developments, the American Society of Concrete Contractors, and fruit growers’ associations, just to name a small cross section. Through these organizations and their intimate ties to local and state politics, the gentry class can and usually does wield significant power to shape society to its liking. It’s easy to focus on the massive political spending of a Sheldon Adelson or Michael Bloomberg; it’s harder, but no less important, to imagine what kind of deals about water rights or local zoning ordinances are being struck across the U.S. on the eighth green of the local country club.
Some people work their way into this property-holding gentry class by virtue of their blood, sweat, and sheer gumption. That’s one variant of the American dream: the belief that hard work and talent, and maybe a bit of luck, can take a person into the ranks of the elite. But far more members of the gentry class are born into it. They inherit assets, whether those are car dealerships, apple orchards, or construction companies, and manage to avoid screwing things up. Managers run their companies, lawyers look over their contracts, accountants oversee their finances, but they’re the owners, whether or not they’ve done a single thing of their own volition to accumulate those assets. This is broadly true of gentry classes: They’re hereditary. Large amounts of property of any kind form a durable base for generational wealth, whatever specific shape it might take. The American gentry class isn’t entirely closed to new blood, but it, too, is hereditary.
Equating wealth, especially generational wealth, with virtue and ability is a deeply American pathology. This country loves to believe that people get what they deserve, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Nowhere is this more obviously untrue than with our gentry class.
The American gentry stands at the apex of the social order throughout huge swaths of the country. It shapes our economic and political world thanks to its resources and comparatively large numbers, yet it’s practically invisible to the popular eye.
Forget the skyscrapers and opulent country mansions, the elite family dynamics of Succession and the antics of the Kardashians and Kardashian-adjacent; look instead to the far more numerous multimillion-dollar planned golf-course communities and their controlling homeowners’ associations. Think about the informal property-development deals struck between sweating local grandees at the country-club bar in Odessa, Texas, or Knoxville, Tennessee.
Power resides in gated communities and local philanthropic boards, in the ownership of staggering numbers of fast-food franchises, and in the smooth transmission of a large construction company’s assets to a new generation of small-yacht owners. Power can be found in group photos of half-soused, overweight men in ill-fitting polo shirts, and in the millionaires ready and willing to fly their private jets to Washington, D.C., in support of a certain would-be authoritarian. The yeoman developer of luxury condominiums, the single-digit-millionaire meatpacking-plant owner, the property-management entrepreneur: These were the people who, remembering or inventing their tradition of dominance over their towns and cities, flocked to Make America Great Again. As much as the United States loves to think of itself as an egalitarian paradise open to talent of any stripe, hierarchy and local power are no less the American way.
“American Gentry“: the jet-setting cosmopolitans of popular imagination exist, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of America’s local hierarchies. From the invaluable Patrick Wyman (@Patrick_Wyman) , author of The Verge, newsletter writer– both of which are eminently worthy of reading, as is the full article excerpted above.
* Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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As we ponder privilege, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published. A pioneering study of the long-term dangers of pesticide use, it challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind relates to the natural world.
Carson documented her accusations that the chemical industry spread disinformation, and that public officials accepted those marketing claims unquestioningly. Unsurprisingly, the book was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies; but, thanks to public opinion, it sparked numerous changes: it led to a reversal in the United States’ national pesticide policy, and a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses, and helped to inspire an environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict”*…
States within the global political economy today face a twin insurgency, one from below, another from above. From below comes a series of interconnected criminal insurgencies in which the global disenfranchised resist, coopt, and route around states as they seek ways to empower and enrich themselves in the shadows of the global economy. Drug cartels, human traffickers, computer hackers, counterfeiters, arms dealers, and others exploit the loopholes, exceptions, and failures of governance institutions to build global commercial empires. These empires then deploy their resources to corrupt, coopt, or challenge incumbent political actors.
From above comes the plutocratic insurgency, in which globalized elites seek to disengage from traditional national obligations and responsibilities. From libertarian activists to tax-haven lawyers to currency speculators to mineral-extraction magnates, the new global super-rich and their hired help are waging a broad-based campaign to limit the reach and capacity of government tax-collectors and regulators, or to manipulate these functions as a tool in their own cut-throat business competition.
Unlike classic 20th-century insurgents, who sought control over the state apparatus in order to implement social reforms, criminal and plutocratic insurgents do not seek to take over the state. Nor do they wish to destroy the state, since they rely parasitically on it to provide the legacy goods of social welfare: health, education, infrastructure, and so on. Rather, their aim is simpler: to carve out de facto zones of autonomy for themselves by crippling the state’s ability to constrain their freedom of (economic) action…
From Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman), a sadly prophetic 2014 piece– the postmodern state is under siege from plutocrats and criminals who compound each other’s insidiousness: “The Twin Insurgency.”
For a more current– but altogether resonant– take (one that arrives at a similar conclusion from a different point of origin), see Harvard Law School professor and Berkman Center co-director Yochai Benkler‘s “The Real Reason the GOP Suppresses the Vote.
(This is being written the day before the election; sadly, the issues raised here will be with us regardless of the outcome…)
* Walt Whitman
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As we watch our flanks, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that Salvador Allende took office after being elected President of Chile. He was deposed in a military coup, actively supported by the U.S. CIA, in 1973.
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