It is unfashionable to say good things about the “elite,” but it is time to do so, writes hgurdon.
irrupted into U.S. politics because a portion of the electorate accurately judged that Washington governed not in the interests of the nation’s 333 million inhabitants, whose concerns were often ignored, but for the benefit of a comfortable, smug, entitled, and arrogant upper stratum. Eventually, in 2016, despairing voters elected a sledgehammer to be president because their patience had ended and they wanted things smashed.
just anybody. It is distinctly worse for America to have fools and cranks running the show than to have elected representatives with wisdom, knowledge, judiciousness, and a strong sense of decency and proportion. This elite, this governing class, should not be a closed and permanent caste of the privileged. It should constantly be replenished and refreshed by an influx of high-caliber people from all walks of life. It should be open to anyone with the intelligence, learning, energy, and achievements to enter it.
But we have a problem. Our culture’s extreme egalitarianism has obliterated vital distinctions. It has erased the dividing lines between good and evil, right and wrong, criminal and victim, success and failure, couth and uncouth. That is why socialism is so corrosive of high standards everywhere it is tried.
That same blunt egalitarianism has also deliberately obscured the difference between ignorance and knowledge, foolishness and wisdom, impressive and contemptible, compelling argument and shallow show. And the ugly results are apparent not just on the traditionally egalitarian Left but also, ironically, on the Right, which wrongly thinks itself free of socialist impulses.
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