Harold Stone had kindness in his heart when he gave me the cross he carved out of a book. But a massacred book is a harsh gift to give an author. Though I will happily sell copies of In Defense of Elitism to whittlers.
It wasn’t any book he destroyed, either. It was a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book, a relic of the Intellectual Elite’s lost empire. Launched in 1950, these were bibles for Intellectual Elite missionaries, who took them from New York City to convert the vast suburbs. Every two months, 1.5 million subscribers received a volume containing three books by serious authors—William Faulkner, Pearl S. Buck, John Steinbeck, Shirley Jackson, Herman Wouk—that were destroyed by shortening them by up to 50 percent and removing all cursing, sex, violence, and politics. Again, though, feel free to buy this book and do that to it. Reader’s Digest didn’t only evangelize for great literature. They also created a subscription for albums of classical music with nonthreatening titles without “opus number”s or “in B minor”s or “bagatelles.” Titles such as The Romantic Rachmaninoff and Great Music’s Greatest Hits.
Suburbanites thrilled at being included in the Intellectual Elite conversation, even if they were confused about why the members of Faulkner’s Compson family were so mopey, considering nothing awful happened to them like forced castration or incestuous lust. They were eager to enter the aristocracy that had been flattened by capitalism. The participants in this neo-Enlightenment were called the middlebrow, but they identified more with highbrow culture than lowbrow entertainment. They joined the Book of the Month Club, which sent out works by authors who sometimes went on to win Nobels or Pulitzers; the key selling point was that the books were selected by six intellectuals who met over glasses of brandy in a wood-paneled office. By watching Dick Cavett and reading Time magazine, a huge swath of America was having the same conversations as the elites. In 1949, Life magazine ran a two-page chart listing the affectations of the middlebrows. The “lower middle brow” read book club selections, played bridge, and listened to light opera.
Two years after Reader’s Digest printed its first condensed book, Eisenhower beat Stevenson, the epithet egghead was coined, and the attack on the Intellectual Elite began. The middlebrow slowly withered. Everything the Intellectual Elite is into became labeled as self-important indulgence: majoring in the humanities, reading novels, watching foreign films, listening to classical music, reading anything that’s not a text message. Yes, the elite have stopped eating at McDonald’s and staying at Holiday Inns, but the middle class has stopped watching movies in which none of the characters have the power of flight.
Even the people who are in the middlebrow now refuse the term. They don’t want to be sullied by any connection to the elites. Cassandra’s dad, Ken Barry, is totally middlebrow: he watches a lot of PBS, listens to NPR, convinced me to read Guns, Germs, and Steel, goes to a museum in every place he visits, and uses his spare time to paint in a studio. The guy owns a tiny winery in upstate New York with his son. Ken hates Trump more than former Trump cabinet members. But Ken does not want to be associated with the elite. Because, like Scott Adams, he thinks they’re con artists. He thinks that meritocracy is a scam.
To Ken, an elite conference is another version of a country club designed to keep outsiders out of power. Only instead of being accepted based on your last name, you are accepted based on the name of the college you went to. And colleges are the biggest country clubs. The most popular of the fifteen seasons of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice was the one that pitted college graduates (“book smarts”) against those who didn’t finish college (“street smarts”). An overwhelming 72 percent of viewers were rooting for street smarts, though I believe that number is skewed by the fact that no one with book smarts would watch The Apprentice. The audience was disappointed, however, because Team Book Smarts won. But they were satisfied that, as they expected, they didn’t win because they were smarter. They won because they knew the ways of the modern country club. The college grads won the contest to sell rooms in a Jersey Shore motel they renovated not through accounting or marketing. They did it by throwing a killer opening party. Danny Kastner of the winning team explained that they were able to do it because they spent so much time in college blowing off classes to party.
There’s no meritocracy, Ken argues, when college buddies give each other all the sweet jobs. “Tell me there’s not a lot of talented people who can head these corporations?” he asks. But there aren’t enough talented people with experience who can. The fact that the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 is fewer than twenty years proves that there aren’t as many people who can take over multinational corporations as there are multinational corporations. Bob Iger has had to postpone his retirement as CEO of Disney twice because the board can’t find a successor despite the fact that their customers are prepubescent. Any movie is good enough for them. Then they’ll buy toys based on that movie. You know how good a movie for adults has to be to sell merchandise based on it? I have yet to be in someone’s bedroom and see a pillow shaped like the dead-horse head from The Godfather.
What’s strange about this loss of faith in meritocracy is that the meritocracy is more meritocratic than ever. Not long ago the pond meritocracy fished in was very small and very white. Students at Ivy League schools have never been more diverse as measured by gender, race, sexuality, parental income, country of origin, and every other gauge besides political party affiliation. I wouldn’t get into Stanford if I applied today. Not only because it would be creepy to have a forty-seven-year-old dude in your frosh dorm, but also because the vast array of people I’d be competing against would make my excellent work as vice president of my Model United Nations club seem less impressive. Elitism was so un-meritocratic in the 1960s that the University of Pennsylvania accepted Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, our meritocracy is still horrifyingly imperfect. Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard, found that kids with parents whose income is in the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to go to an Ivy League school than those with parents in the bottom 20 percent. We are tossing away what Chetty calls “lost Einsteins.” Still, it’s not as if those stats were ferreted out by a professor at Florida A&M University. The meritocracy is even more unfair on a global level. If you have the kind of genius brain that could cure cancer but you’re born in rural sub-Saharan Africa, there’s a good chance you’ll die from cancer. If you’re a female genius in Saudi Arabia who could cure cancer, there’s a good chance you’ll die from your husband beating you.
Back when the unfairness was worse, it didn’t turn people off as much. Free public education was uncommon in 1866, when Horatio Alger, a middle-class kid who went to Harvard, wrote children’s books celebrating the American Dream. He told the story of Ragged Dick Hunter, a homeless orphan shoeshine boy who seeks an education from Henry Fosdick. Other Alger characters include Tattered Tom, Phil the Fiddler, Chester Rand, Victor Vain, Randy of the River, and Joe the Hotel Boy. Apparently, Alger had gotten hold of a prototype of a gay-porn-star-name generator. These homoerotically named characters weren’t part of rags-to-riches tales. They were part of rags-to-middle-class tales. Ragged Dick quits smoking, gambling, and drinking and becomes an accountant to clients who undoubtedly get audited when the government sees their taxes were filed by “Ragged Dick.”
The Horatio Alger of our time, which I mean in the nicest way, is Joel Arquillos. He sells meritocracy to the Ragged Dicks of LA by running the Los Angeles branches of 826, the charity started by author Dave Eggers to tutor underprivileged kids in writing. Joel is a genius at making the Loop seem attainable. One of the songs that students wrote in the songwriting workshop was used in a Judd Apatow film. Each year, he publishes a collection of the students’ best writing. The books have been quoted in the New York Times and are sold at the stores attached to his tutoring centers, where they are sometimes bought by 826LA advisory board members such as J. J. Abrams, Judd Apatow, Miranda July, and Fiona Apple. “Publishing books written by these young people brings them into the conversation,” Joel says. “The conversation” is a phrase the Intellectual Elite use to refer to whatever the Intellectual Elite are talking about, which is usually based on an article in the New Yorker but sometimes an article in the New York Times and occasionally an article in New York magazine.
Joel also makes the Intellectual Elite look fun. You have to walk through a store to enter the front of the Sunset Boulevard tutoring center. That store is the Time Travel Mart, which sells food pills for homesick time travelers coming from the future, and Viking Odorant for travelers from the past. There’s also a huge display of the cosmos on one wall, though the only connection between time travel and space exploration I can figure out is marijuana.
Joel is thin, tall, smiley, bespectacled, prone to wearing hipster hats, and two weeks younger than I am. That’s not all we have in common. We are both from New Jersey, both have one kid, both have the same first name, and are both extraordinarily handsome. We run in somewhat similar elite circles, with forty-six mutual friends according to Facebook, including author Susan Orlean and NPR contributor Starlee Kine.
However, Joel grew up farther from the Loop than I did. His parents are religious, Trump-supporting Baptist immigrants who still pray for him to go to church. His high-school religious teachers warned him to be careful in college because professors taught dangerous lies that could damn his soul. His mom pushed him to go to college nearby at Montclair State University in New Jersey, fearing he would falter without his extended family nearby. But something drove him to seek out the Intellectual Elite. He has been bottling that something and selling it at 826LA, sometimes at the Time Travel Mart in a jar marked “Five More Minutes on Your Expired Parking Meter.”
Joel ignored his mom and went to Pace University in Manhattan. “I felt like I wanted to be near the city. That something bigger was happening there,” he said. “I was definitely drawn to improving my social status.” He couldn’t afford to keep living in his Pace dorm, so after a semester he dropped out and moved home, depressed to be pushed away from the Loop. But, even though he was underage, Joel landed a job bartending in Manhattan and found some roommates to live with in Hoboken, New Jersey, while he went to Hunter College in Manhattan. Still, he couldn’t quite get into the Loop. “I felt like I missed out on a four-year-college experience. That’s where a lot of elitism is born. I only have one to two people from college I stay in touch with. And they’re not entrepreneurs,” he says.
Still searching for a way into the Loop, Joel moved to San Francisco, where he started a punk band, married a photographer from Japan, and got a job teaching high school social studies at a school full of underprivileged kids. He ran a program called Advancement Via Individual Determination, which is what Horatio Alger would have titled his book if he sucked at writing. This is where Joel learned how to sell meritocracy.
It’s not that Joel thinks our meritocracy is giving the kids he works with a fair shot. It didn’t give him a fair shot. But he doesn’t want to tear it down like the populists do. He believes he can improve it from within, by injecting the elite with kids from less-privileged backgrounds who understand our meritocracy’s flaws. And I want to help him.
Theodore Roosevelt High School is 98.7 percent Latino; 97.2 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged. Only 5 percent of the kids who grow up in this neighborhood graduate from four-year colleges. There’s a Planned Parenthood–run clinic right inside the school that gives out condoms, though this is not why the sports teams are named the Rough Riders. It’s because the school is named after Theodore Roosevelt, a Manhattan-born, son-of-a-socialite-and-a-philanthropist, Harvard-attending, history-book-writing, monocle-wearing elitist who fought to make government hiring and starting a business more meritocratic.
At the school’s College and Career Center, I’m paired with William Jimenez, a thin, quiet, sweet kid who I like for many reasons, only one of which is the fact that he gave me permission to write about him. I’m going to help him write his essays for college. He is lucky to have gotten me, assuming he wants to go to the University of Mediocre Jokes Tacked onto the Ends of Paragraphs.
I struggle with William for a while, because he’s trying to write what he assumes the Intellectual Elite want to hear. His parables of sports (Teamwork! Determination!) and academics (Rugged Individualism! Determination!) are generic. So I ask William why he wants to go to college. Does he believe the system is meritocratic enough to let him into the elite? What type of elite does he want to join?
Asking questions for your book is not technically helping someone. So I come back the following week and focus on William, bringing him a burrito because he never bothers having lunch. While we’re eating, I notice that the lanyard holding the keys that hang around his neck is from Bad Boys Bail Bonds, a service whose motto is “Because your momma wants you home!”™ William’s family is going to bail out his brother later today. His home life is crowded and volatile. He quit soccer because he didn’t have a ride home and it’s too dangerous to walk through his gang-controlled neighborhood. His best friend, who lived three doors down from him, was shot and killed. The point is, William has it way easier as far as college-essay fodder is concerned than I had it. I had to go with that weak “my parents smoked marijuana” thing.
While William’s neighborhood is dominated by drug dealers striving to become Boat Elite, William wasn’t interested in that path. The ones who climbed up the gang ladder had the same lives they did before, only with more stuff. William didn’t want stuff. He wanted a bigger life, which was anything outside of this neighborhood. College is a way to get out, like it was for Joel and me. And I know William will get out, partly because of his determination but mostly because I made that essay sing.
Selling meritocracy is not impossible. It requires the Intellectual Elite to leave our paramilitary-protected neighborhoods and make the case that we’re not jerks trying to keep others out. Which is a complicated argument to make when you hire a paramilitary to keep others out of your neighborhood.
William gave me great hope in the future of the Intellectual Elite. I can see him coming home from work to his suburban house and rocking out to Great Music’s Greatest Hits while reading a fifty-page version of Ulysses. I see all this clearly, thanks to items I purchased at the Time Travel Mart. But I also see a different future. One where after William gets to college, he turns against the Intellectual Elite. Because while we can still recruit people, we’re losing a lot of them right after they join.
The far left is becoming populist. They subscribe to the tribalism of identity politics. They question the knowability of truth. And, based on the little I know about Greenpeace, they love boats.
Like Scott Adams, liberal senator Bernie Sanders doesn’t think much of mainstream economics. He argued in an essay that the Federal Reserve Board should include “representatives from all walks of life—including labor, consumers, homeowners, urban residents, farmers and small businesses.” Imagine if farmers were on the Federal Reserve Board, spending all their time trying to figure out how to establish central bank liquidity swap lines during a financial crisis. There would be two reasons we’d have nothing to eat.
In Europe, governments are being run by a coalition of populists from the far left and far right. In Italy, the Five Star Movement formed a government with the League; in Greece, Syriza aligned with Independent Greeks. In France, the left and right jointly protested gas taxes to reduce carbon emissions by burning cars in Paris while they wore yellow vests, because the French like to stay safe in traffic even when rioting. These groups have a thousand differences but one thing in common: a hatred of the Intellectual Elite.
If the far left and far right are combining their navies, conservative and liberal members of the Intellectual Elite have to team up, too. Likely in a conference room at a resort hotel.
It turns out it’s already happening. And one of the main participants is the person Tucker Carlson accused of leading the ship of elite fools off a cliff.