The Elite Catch-22

Below, my thoughts on Biden’s backward backdown, and my sympathy for economics reporters still calling Larry Summers for comment. But first…

THE ELITE CATCH-22

An ugly undercurrent on the corporate Right has always pushed the absurd position that members of the elite—Americans with the highest incomes, the most university prestigious degrees, the positions of power—must not criticize their own, challenge the justice of the system that has blessed them with success, or attempt to speak on behalf of the common citizens ill-served by the status quo.

The grumbling burst into plain view over the past few weeks, amidst the solidification of the Republican Party’s turn toward populism, my own New York Times essay on “This Is What Elite Failure Looks Like,” and Senator JD Vance’s elevation to the presidential ticket.

“You can’t criticize elites when you are the elite,” says Avik Roy, Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity founder and president. “You’re the ones who are having disproportionate influence in the conversation.”

Scott Winship, director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute warns, “if you’re in the top fifth of the income distribution, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to hear your play-criticism of ‘elites,’” while his colleague Stan Veuger observes, “funniest thing about the New Populism is it’s Yale JDs all the way down.”

In an extended post on Twitter, Heath Mayo, an attorney at Wachtell Lipton and the founder of “Principles First” goes furthest of all:

I typically try to assume good faith and engage critics on the merits of their arguments, but here such an assumption is clearly inappropriate and the argument lacks merit with which to engage. So to be blunt: This is gross, and doubly so for what it says about the environment in which these folks are all operating. Let’s count the ways:

1. Beginning with the straightforward, it’s an ad hominem attack. It has no bearing on the underlying critique of the elite that it seeks to defuse.
2. But it’s also a particularly toxic form of ad hominem attack, because it seeks to disqualify honesty and introspection. It’s quite the defective worldview, and misunderstanding of one’s own role as a public commentator, that sees someone criticize their own tribe, against self-interest, as cause for suspicion. Do you have to think all Yale lawyers are going to be a good Yale lawyer? Is it that hard to imagine someone who earns more than $100,000 questioning the basis of six-figure incomes?
3. Note that this policing of who can speak for whom is precisely the behavior exhibited so frequently and foolishly on the Left and otherwise rejected on the Right. At least the Left then makes a point of finding speakers to elevate who can represent otherwise marginalized groups. The plan here seems to be to just ensure the issues do not get discussed at all.
4. Indeed, the position that elites cannot be taken seriously in criticizing the elite, or leading populist movements, creates a Catch-22. Elites must defend the elite, while non-elites get dismissed for insufficient understanding and inability to communicate their views in terms the elites will accept. Unsurprisingly, the same people who refuse to hear criticism from the elite also deride the common citizen for grievance and nostalgia and not understanding how wonderful everything is. What critique of elite failure would these self-appointed gatekeepers accept? None. And that seems to be the point.

What sort of institutional environment incubates such nonsense? Welcome to the corporate Right, where “profits [are] the mother’s milk of prosperity” and “cheap labor leads to a booming stock market? That benefits everyone.” The market is operated for the benefit of the winners, and if you are one, it is the height of ingratitude to do other than keep the gravy train rolling.

Mayo’s comment is particularly telling in this regard: “JD Vance’s own personal story from holler to high finance refutes the notion of American decline he tries to sell. … America gave him immense opportunity and he was able to seize it. … It’s a shame Vance now insults for political gain those who helped build his.”

But as Vance said in his Republican National Convention speech last week: “Things did not work out well for a lot of kids I grew up with. Every now and then I will get a call from a relative back home who asks, ‘Did you know so-and-so?’ And I’ll remember a face from years ago, and then I’ll hear, ‘They died of an overdose.’ As always, America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price.”

For Mayo, a system in which one J.D. Vance makes it to the top is self-validating and, from the top, Vance’s task is to shout platitudes down to all those who cannot possibly make the same climb. For Vance, the system’s efficacy is measured by its failure for the majority left behind. For conservatism to succeed, politically and substantively, it must transit the vast distance from the former to the latter. We are making progress.