United States Politics: ∆τ_i*ε*φ*m_i<0 where ε=4 and φ=0.25

[Potato]

Same writer, different article

https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/the-educated-elite-is-destroying-america-20240611-p5jkxj

NYT link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/opinion/elites-progressives-universities.html

To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today, progressives dominate elite institutions such as the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well-educated and urban, and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds.

The virtuous
This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it. Many of the curiosities of our culture flow as highly educated people try to resolve the contradiction between their identity as an enemy of privilege and the fact that, at least educationally and culturally – and often economically – they are privileged.

Imagine you’re a social justice-oriented student or a radical sociologist, but you attend or work at a university with an $80 billion endowment, immense social power and the ability to reject about 95 per cent of the people who apply. For years or decades, you worked your tail off to get into the most exclusive eyries in American life, but now you’ve got to prove, to yourself and others, that you’re on the side of the oppressed.

Imagine you graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college with a degree in history, and you get a job as a teacher at an elite Manhattan private school. You’re a sincere progressive down to your bones. Unfortunately, your job is to take the children of rich financiers and polish them up so they can get into Stanford University. In other words, your literal job is to reinforce privilege.

This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalising effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalised, but you work at Horace Mann School or Princeton University, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You’re bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man.

This, I think, explains the following phenomenon: Society pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into elite students, gives them the most prestigious launchpads fathomable, and they are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.

This also explains, I think, the leftward drift of the haute bourgeoisie. As sociologist Musa al-Gharbi puts it in his forthcoming book, We Have Never Been Woke, “After 2011, there were dramatic changes in how highly educated white liberals answered questions related to race and ethnicity. These shifts were not matched among non-liberal or non-Democrat whites, nor among nonwhites of any political or ideological persuasion. By 2020, highly educated white liberals tended to provide more ‘woke’ responses to racial questions than the average black or Hispanic person.”

Joining the elite
Progressivism has practically become an entry ticket into the elite. A few years ago, a Yale University admissions officer wrote, “For those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice.” Recently, Tufts University included an optional essay prompt that explicitly asked applicants what they were doing to advance social justice.

Over the years, the share of progressive students and professors has steadily risen, and the share of conservatives has approached zero. Progressives have created places where they never have to encounter beliefs other than their own. At Harvard, 82 per cent of progressives say that all or almost all of their close friends share their political beliefs.

Over the past few decades, elite universities have been churning out very smart graduates who are ready to use their minds and sensibilities to climb to the top of society and change the world. Unfortunately, the marketplace isn’t producing enough of the kinds of jobs these graduates think they deserve.

The elite college grads who go into finance, consulting and tech do smashingly well, but the grads who choose less commercial sectors often struggle. Social activists in Washington and other centres of influence have to cope with sky-high rents. Newspapers and other news websites are laying off journalists. Academics who had expected to hold a prestigious chair find themselves slaving away as adjunct professors.

In a series of essays culminating in his book End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin argued that periods of elite overproduction lead to a rising tide of social decay, as alienated educated-class types wage ever more ferocious power struggles with other elites.

This phenomenon most likely contributed to surges in social protest during the late 1960s, the late 1980s and then around 2010. Research using Google Ngram shows that discourse mentioning “racism” spiked around each of these three periods.

Probably bordering more culture war here, but