On the new elite

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In a roundtable organized for Tablet by David Samuels, Angelo Codevilla said,

The current American elites hold every lever of power. But their power is brittle. They no longer try to persuade. They command and find ways of hurting and mocking the reticent. No organization that lives by pulling rank can be considered strong.

I think of this in terms of the distinction between a prestige hierarchy and a dominance hierarchy. When the elite uses dominance moves, that shows that it has lost prestige.

You probably want to read the whole discussion. It concludes with Codevilla saying “If we end up looking like Brazil, we should count ourselves lucky.”

In other words, have a nice day.

18 thoughts on “On the new elite”

  1. There’s something else that’s been going on, started on 9/11/2001, got reinforced since the financial crisis, got the mask it was wearing ripped off under Obama, and turned to ’11’ under Trump. What Scott Alexander and denizens of Astral Codex Ten call a “respectability cascade”. Let me explain.

    For those that don’t know, respectability cascades are how fringe or crazy-at-the-time ideas (and people) evolve and grow to become normalized. The fringe-crazy-conspiracy idea that has been experiencing a 20-year respectability cascade toward normalization is:

    – Something sinister is actually occurring underneath the veneer of the US government’s respectability and its underlying system.
    – The people in charge of that system are A) not actually the best and B) do not in fact know what they’re doing.
    – A ‘deep state’ does exist, both nationally and globally that is fundamentally focused on itself and its interests.
    – Evidence exists that this cabal of highly-connected, pedigreed fools in charge of the “levers of power” are vindictively and maliciously aggressive against those they are supposed to serve and the optics of the ‘veneer’ they are supposed to protect.

    In other words, the person that would have said something to you – tin foil on or off – in any one of the above veins on September 10th, 2001 would have been considered by you, and me, and most others as more fringe and more conspiratorial than they are now.

    The “elite” (but they’re not really…) have been noticing these concepts gaining steam, slowly at first, but then like a lot of things suddenly and all at once. Their power and their prestige and respectability depends on their ability to maintain the veneer of both the system as people thought and expect it to work and also that they know what they’re doing when they definitely don’t…except when it is personally beneficial to them and their network.

    They are fighting an idea that is growing globally. An idea that threatens them personally and professionally, as well as everyone in their network. As you said, it isn’t working. This knob will go to 11.

  2. Given Kling’s open borders ideology, it’s amusing that he quotes Codevilla saying that the US will be “lucky” to end up looking like Brazil. Codevilla obviously regarded Brazil as a decline from what we used to be, but Kling seems to think looking like Brazil – at least demographically, culturally and in terms of wealth distribution – would be an improvement over the America of the past.

  4. See “Race and immigration” from 7/25/19 if you’d like to see our host’s view of immigration policy.

    I completely disagree with it, but definitely worth a review.

    In my mind, each immigrant (as an individual or as a family unit) ought to be able to pass some kind of NPV (net present value) test. That would eliminate like 99% of our current problems.

    I love how people like pretend that the lower end SES immigrants are somehow pulling their weight. Um…no.

    • Many low-SES immigrant workers absolutely pull their weight. Some don’t, just like some low-end native born Americans don’t pull their own weight. I find a low-SES worker highly sympathetic.

      What I find particularly unreasonable is foreign college students and grad students who are given stipends or grants to live and study with US taxpayer funding. It seems unreasonable to coerce US citizens to pay for the prestige education and social advancement of foreigners.

      • By low SES immigrant, we basically mean Hispanics in the USA.

        The average Hispanic will, over their lifetime, cost the state over $500,000 more then they pay in taxes. That is direct costs only, I’m not even getting into indirect.

        Is that sympathetic? Basically, this person stole $500k to spend on insulin so they could guzzle Coca Cola all day and bill it to medicaid. Generally speaking they tend to vote in favor of increasing the amount they can steal via the government.

        I don’t feel sympathy. If they were native I wouldn’t feel sympathy either, but I’ve got no pragmatic way to cut off underclass natives, whereas keeping out the foreign underclass is more feasible.

        The closest thing to sympathy I feel is a kind of pity. Like maybe they lack human agency and can’t be fully blamed for their actions.

      • So far as I know, there has only been one really rigorous study on the NPV of low SES immigrants in the world, and the data came from Denmark. It found that on average, low SES immigrants made Danes poorer, not wealthier, because of how much they received in state welfare.

        Now the US doesn’t have as generous of a social welfare system as Denmark, so who knows. But really, it should be the business of the US government to know, and it is damning that they don’t. And of course it would be even better to know what kinds of immigrants contribute most to making US citizens wealthier, so that US citizens would be better able to judge for themselves what kind of immigration policies they want.

        Immigration is simply an issue where folks with money don’t want the public to be well informed, and where the Left and the Democratic Party don’t want that either.

        • “Now the US doesn’t have as generous of a social welfare system as Denmark”

          Don’t know about that, actually.

  5. I read the transcript. Interesting reading. That and todays Kagan piece.

    “The current American elites hold every lever of power.” Well, that’s sort of the definition. If I were a Supreme Court justice, I would be an elite regardless of any other consideration.

    The idea that everything was great to the point of winning the Cold War seems odd. Viet Nam, the Iranian Revolution, Chile, Central America, Beruit, riots, assasinations, etc etc. A lot of those same cold war guys found homes in the GWB administration which the panel finds (I think) disasterous.

    “There are over a million of them!” How many should there be? Zero? That sounds kind of Maoist. The children of past elites and the products of our elite institutions! Yes, like noted populists Josh (Stanford Yale) Hawley or “Ted” (Princeton Harvard) Cruz! How about “populist” Senate candidate the venture capitalist JD Vance with his umbilical cord firmly attached to host Peter Theil – who the panel claims is even above an elite in status?

    Trump tried 6 different ways to overturn the 2020 election results to effectively end democracy in the USA. Yeah, have a nice day! And try not to get cancelled at Oberlin for calling a subway sandwich a bahn mi.

    • Please RIP.

      I cannot even imagine the difficulty and sadness for Mr. Codevilla’s family. We send our sincere regrets. Please be well!

  7. I read Kling’s blog to improve myself, but the pointer to this article is a big disappointment. Strangely, I’m feeling better after reading commentary from a bunch of elites talking about other elites in elite language, with the sole evidenced unifying theme being “orange man bad.” (Disclosure: Independent voter, Hillary guy in 2008 … I think Obama was is and will always be a poser.) I agree Trump’s nontraditional: In the vernacular, “Trump is a dick.” I didn’t vote for him. That said, I must admit that Trump did have significant wins; he did increase support among blacks and hispanics; and he did almost gain a second term. I am not willing to call ~50% of voters a bunch of clueless racists who are deluded, but my colleagues in a major high-tech firm do so. (Once, my admin wen to shaking her hands at me shouting “Hello, white privilege!!”) The NYTs willingly does so, and this rountable should have evinced much stronger condemnation for such baloney. By background, I went from engineering school, to English BA, and journalism grad school. The latter was ’89-’92, and the seeds of newspeak was already present, loud and proud in the corridors of liberal arts departments nationwide. Rather than submit to be what one professor called “a good liberal,” I pivoted to finish the EEing courses. Orthogonal? Yes. But, you know” “Safety in numbers.” I am so happy that I took that right-hand turn. The ongoing shift in elite attitudes has been a slow motion train wreck ever since: I am ashamed that what is framed as debate really comes off as a bunch dire justifications and platitudes. Even now, there are those who blabber specious arguments that math and physics are racist. They are coming for everyone. This roundtable hardly helps.

  8. The multinationals generally own the entire military-foreign policy community-chattering classes in the US.

    Has anything changed since Smedley Butler?

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