In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

by Joel Stein

Convincing these people to trust the elites is going to be harder than I thought. They don’t dislike us because they’re poor and jealous. They don’t dislike us because they don’t understand our lifestyle, which they have seen not only in movies and television shows, but also in person. No, they gathered a lot of information, weighed the evidence, and then decided we were awful.

the main difference between the people of Miami and me is that they believe there is only one right and one wrong and they’re always right, whereas I believe that there is a shifting, multidimensional matrix between right and wrong and I’m always right.

The people in Miami are far more connected to each other than the people I live with. Most of them told me they were going to drive an hour each way to see the high-school football team’s away game, even though the school plays six-man football, a version of the game originally developed for towns decimated by the Great Depression. I, meanwhile, don’t know the name of my local LA high school. I can’t leave my son with all my neighbors because my community is virtual. My friends appear on my phone far more often than on my doorstep. I don’t know everyone who lives on my block by name. One of the first sets of questions on the government of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness questionnaire is a version of the one the judge asked. It reads, “How many people are so close to you that you can count on them if you: Are sick? Have financial problems? Have emotional problems? Have to attend to important personal events (childbirth, funeral, wedding, etc.)?” Cassandra and I, meanwhile, see a wedding invitation less as “an important personal event” and more as “an obligation to sit down together for a half hour and come up with an excuse for not going.”

Globalism has reduced the value of goods so quickly that people have trouble processing this change, paying more for storage units than the value of the items they keep there. Elites understand this, which is why when you first walk into our houses, it takes a while to figure out if we just moved in or have lived there for twenty years. A New Yorker cartoon from 2015 shows a couple sitting on two chairs drinking wine in a huge empty space with the caption, “Only the rich can afford this much nothing.”

There are a dozen adults of various ages and genders but not races seated around a table in a small conference room. Jerry sits at the head, wearing a white button-down shirt and no baseball cap, looking like Tom Sawyer bathed by his aunt for church. I am welcomed to the room with a verse from Hebrews 13:2 written on the wall: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers. For some have entertained angels unaware.” Though I like this line a lot, I don’t understand it. We should only be nice to people because they might have hung out with angels? How great can these people be if angels were sent to spy on them? What kind of idiot has an angel over for dinner and doesn’t notice the wings and halo? What types of entertainment do angels prefer? Should you put on Handel’s Concerto in B-Flat Major for Harp or would that be racist? We hadn’t even started Bible study and I already had a lot of questions.

“There’s no such thing as expertise. It just doesn’t exist,” Scott says. “The expert is full of shit.”

The world seems fragile and I want trustworthy, trained people running it. I want that more than I want it run by people who share my values or act like me. I want that more than I want to be funny. I want that more than I want great memes.

When you distrust elites it seeps into everything. Back in 1960, 58 percent of Americans believed “most people can be trusted.” In 2014, that number had dropped by nearly half. When people don’t gather in person to grind out differences at their church groups, town councils, and Odd Fellows embalmings, they stew in their houses, ascribing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Once you suspect everyone else is a selfish liar, it’s hard for a society to function. When you have no trust in institutions, you don’t believe that mom or dad can settle an argument. So you have to fight to the death.

The elite, with our pesky qualifiers and annoying exceptions, are the thin line between democracy and tyranny.

There exists a caricature of this modern anti-intellectualism which has nothing whatever to do with democracy, but which lands us in the middle of the base demagogic world of fascism. This is the contempt of pure reason, the denial and violation of truth in favor of power and the interests of the state, the appeal to the lower instincts, to so-called “feeling,” the release of stupidity and evil from the discipline of reason and intelligence, the emancipation of blackguardism. In short, a barbaric mob-movement, beside which what we call democracy certainly stands out as aristocratic to the highest degree.

Fear is not a good reason to surrender to the gut instinct to fight. The most important thing we elite can do is act elite. If we sacrifice our commitment to civility, discourse, reason, inclusion, and cooperation—if we bully people for their beliefs—we have abandoned our values for theirs. We will become Boat Elite. In 1945 Pauli Murray, the civil rights activist and cofounder of the National Organization for Women, wrote: I do not intend to destroy segregation by physical force. I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.

We need whatever medicine will cure the disease that threatens to decimate the society we nurtured. For decades we had the luxury of going days without checking the news. We no longer do. Populism endangers not only peace and prosperity but also the essence of elitism by enraging us into a tribal battle fought with emotions and body count. It’s a war we can’t win.

The fuel of populism is rage at those who claim higher status. To extinguish the populists’ fire, we have to stop dismissing them as deplorable, racist, ignorant, unsophisticated, sexist, and I’m going to stop here in case someone tweets this sentence, which will impede my strategy. We have to bite our lips, feel their pain, and do that thing where you slowly nod while squinting.