Should we, in fact, reject our cultural elites? This is one of the more pressing questions of our volatile political moment. My id—my inner, nastier Ross Barkan—says yes, absolutely. I could stand here for an hour or more and barrage you with furious facts on the failures of our so-called elites over the last thirty years. In much of my working life, as an author and essayist, that is what I do. To this day, I fancy myself something of an outsider, even if I’ve accrued a CV laden with prestige publications you might revere or perhaps revile. I am, by definition, an elite now—the terms Emily and I have settled on is the most successful 5 percent in a given profession in that much-maligned professional managerial class—and I suppose the Brooklyn boy inside of me will always feel a bit of conflict about that. And as someone who agrees that elites have failed, again and again, whether it was leading us into Iraq or to a financial crash or disillusioning Americans just enough that they’d turn to a former reality television star not once but twice for salvation, I can understand the overriding desire to reject or obliterate them altogether. I think often about the state of our elite, institutional culture right now—what I’ve termed the macroculture—and I see little but failure, impotence, and stagnation.
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