Growing up, I was energized by left-wing struggles of workers against elites. But by the information age, progressive energy had shifted from the working class to elite universities, where a large majority of students now identify as progressive.
Elite universities have drifted further left in recent decades. Student opinions at places like Harvard are now much more progressive compared to non-elite schools. Students at elite universities also have different concerns, with protests over issues like Gaza happening almost exclusively at high-tuition schools with few low-income students.
The contradiction of today's educated class is that while progressivism is defined by being anti-elite, the highly educated now constitute a big part of the elite themselves. This cognitive dissonance pushes them further left to prove their progressive bona fides, contributing to the "wokeness" of educated white liberals.
Progressivism has practically become an entry ticket to the elite, with little ideological diversity remaining. Many in the center-left and center-right are uncomfortable with this conformity.
Another issue is elite overproduction - elite universities are churning out more graduates than there are jobs meeting their expectations, especially outside lucrative business fields. The resulting alienation and intra-elite competition fuel social decay and political extremism on both left and right.
The information age has also created an unstable world where status depends on having the right opinions. Political views become tools for educated elites to gain prestige and power. The resulting perpetual culture wars provide a sense of meaning but polarize society.
One hopeful possibility is for the educated class to openly reckon with its role in inequality, engage across divides, and reform institutions to expand access to opportunity. But a darker possibility is that today's educated elite, like historical elites, will fiercely protect its privileges.
Musa al-Gharbi warns that white liberals use social justice to build status while doing little to redress material harms, restricting action to symbolic gestures while practicing a form of trickle-down economics. He sees potential for a cross-partisan, multiracial backlash against the educated class.
To avoid this, the educated class must undertake serious reforms or risk being steamrolled by populist uprisings.
12 comments:
Right. Only elites can afford to be progressive. The marginalized just want to tear the whole structure down because reform isn’t possible.
There is a lot of talk here about the “elite,” but who are they? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the "elite" are "the richest, most powerful, best-educated, or best-trained group in a society." I’m sure our felonious ex-president would consider himself all of the above. The Republican Party’s biggest donors are elites, and they certainly aren’t progressives. For years, Republicans tried to turn "liberal" into a bad word by calling them "progressives." Now they're trying to turn "progressive" into a bad word by calling them "elites."
Hopefully we can all agree that helping others is good, harming is bad. Right now, the leader of the Republican Party and the party itself is causing grievous harm to the very foundation of our government – elections and the rule of law. Our government has its share of problems, but we’re free to fix them. As Peter said, the educated class (whether left or right) needs to openly reckon with its role in inequality, engage across divides, and reform institutions to expand access to opportunity. If Trump has his way, any such reforms are highly unlikely.
For those of somewhat up-to-date on popular culture, here’s a summary of Brooks’ article in the form of a haiku:
Virtue signaling
Woke elites have jumped the shark
Way too progressive
I thought Brooks' essay a bit goofy. He thinks he's an egghead but really not too smart or original, and certainly not a scholar although he tries to fake it. Crazy for him to say the tumult of the 1960s was about too many educated people. Seems more like, at the mega level, too great a proportion of young males, educated or not; demographics explains more...plus, of course, Vietnam draft. However, I must say I agree with the author he highlighted, writer of the "never woke" book, pointing out Land Acknowledgements as painfully stupid virtue signaling. And is Brooks saying the shocking racism of the 40s and 50s was somehow more tolerable than perhaps overly woke antiracism among progressives is today? I don't think that's a balanced view of things. Is he saying "go back"?
Progressivism today is not defined so much as being anti-elite as it is by being anti-meritocratic—not at all the same thing. Social justice defined as government-gerrymandered equality of outcome except, of course, for those administering society.
My American Indian friend has this to say about land acknowledgments:
So, are you going to give the land back?
I’m glad we have that clarified:
Social justice (equal rights and equitable opportunities for all) = bad.
Woke (aware of and attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice) = bad.
Desperately clinging to White privilege = good.
I’m sure Trumps’ chumps would see the light and become pro-American if we could just pretend the centuries of racism at the heart of so many of our nation’s problems had suddenly disappeared.
Todays David Brooks is a really good one of many reasons I cancelled the NYT, along with Maggie Habetmans continual tongue bathing of Trump.
Todays David Brooks is a really good one of many reasons I cancelled the NYT, along with Maggie Habetmans continual tongue bathing of Trump.
Someone seems to think the opposite of woke is racist.
How very woke…
Anonymous @ 10:10;
Your analysis of David Brooks is spot on. He's as phony as George Effing Will, who for some unknown reason is allowed to continue posing as the "Intellectual for Conservatives", despite having been wrong on just about everything for the last 50 years.
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