Elites
Story Stream
David Brooks Misunderstands the Miseducation of Elites January 28, 2025
Donald Trump won a return to the White House in no small part because America’s progressive elites alienated significant swathes of working-class and middle-class Americans. For decades, progressive elites have exercised near-hegemonic control over A...
"A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims" by Andrew F. Puzder January 27, 2025
Over the last thirty-five years, asset manager mega-giants BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard have accumulated unprecedented levels of stock ownership in virtually every major US company. Voting the shares they hold for clients allows these compan...
Ill Legal January 22, 2025
There were some things I really loved about working for Columbia Law School. I had a fantastic team of colleagues in the Office of Public Affairs who taught me much of what I know about journalism and PR alike. It was a great honor to get to work wit...
Two Dad Memoirs and the End of Fatherhood January 16, 2025
In 2005 I married a man whose detailed thoughts about parenting, childcare and family life I knew very little about. We’d agreed that we wanted children—or, rather, I’d said I wanted a large family and he’d said, “well maybe not too large,” and we’d ...
How 4chan Became the Mome of the Elite Reader January 10, 2025
It’s a Friday in early January and someone on 4chan has invented a new philosophical doctrine: “esoteric Kantianism”. “You must not take Kant’s words at face value,” the anonymous user warns – readers who do so will only take away shallow insights ab...
The Woman-of-Color Nanny Novel January 07, 2025
The young nanny has long captured our collective imagination as a feminine ideal: youthful, vulnerable in a stranger’s home, and professionally obligated to please. She’s invariably beautiful, or at least sexually appealing in her availability, and i...
America’s Impotent Elite December 09, 2024
Has the celebrity era in American politics come to a close?This might seem like a peculiar question to ask in the wake of Donald Trump’s second presidential victory. Here he comes, again, the faded reality TV star-turned-world-historical disruptor, a...
Trump Must Break Up the College Cartel December 09, 2024
Perhaps no sector better exemplifies the economic recklessness, inflation, and elitism that Americans rejected last month than academia. What was once a beacon of Western enlightenment has devolved into a profiteering industry that survives on Washin...
There Is No Surplus Elite in America December 06, 2024
Over the course of the last decade, a seductive idea has conquered the discourse: the notion that the sudden surge in political instability in democracies like the United States has been due to “elite overproduction” and the subsequent formation of a...
Trump Should Restart His Bid to Defend America’s Heritage December 04, 2024
Donald Trump has big Day 1 decisions to make. Monumental ones, in fact.Such as the decision to champion America’s heritage again.Courtesy of our elite, that heritage was under attack during his first term....
Whose Weil? December 04, 2024
During the First World War, a six-year-old Simone Weil learned that soldiers on the Western Front were not rationed sugar, so she refused to eat it until conditions improved. But whereas most leave such zealous empathy in childhood, Weil’s commitment...
Twilight of the Elites? November 07, 2024
In light of Donald Trump’s second election to the presidency, many observers, especially those in the luxury-belief class, are bewildered. Branding Trump and his supporters as everything from “fascist” to “deplorable” to “racist” to “garbage” did lit...
The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite October 09, 2024
The central virtue of Columbia sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke consists in its documented argument for what has been intuitively clear for some time: that influential elites who support the various causes generally going under th...
Eligible Bachelors October 07, 2024
The English writer Rupert Croft-Cooke was onto something when he observed in 1963 that “we are one of the world’s most homosexual races.” My own sense is not that the British are more prone to homosexuality than other peoples but rather that gay men ...
Contradictions of the New Elite October 02, 2024
Starting in the interwar period (between World Wars I and II) and rapidly accelerating in the 1970s, there were shifts to the global economy that radically increased the influence of the “symbolic industries” — science and technology, education, medi...
A Constructed Crisis in Charleroi September 27, 2024
“If you showed people in Haiti a map of the United States, the likelihood that they’d put their finger on Charleroi, PA and decide to come here is close to zero.” It’s a good point made to my America 2100 colleagues by a local resident of Charleroi, ...
The Inequality Hoax September 26, 2024
The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on The Myth of American Inequality.Americans should be forgiven if they are suffering from a condition that might be called “crisis overload.” After all, thanks mostly to liberals ...
The Great American Malaise September 11, 2024
An observation. There are few interesting and new political ideas, and few innovative works of imaginative literature. Politics and literature are both on a decline; political and literary genius are increasingly rare. American politics and literatur...
The Blindness of Elites May 06, 2024
One afternoon in the mid-1980s, while on scholarship at the University of Oxford, Walter Kirn came upon a bulletin announcing that Jorge Luis Borges was visiting the campus and wished to meet students informally. Kirn, the future writer and critic, t...
How Luxury Beliefs of an Educated Elite Erode Society February 26, 2024
Born in Los Angeles into what many would consider the American lower class, I entered the foster system aged three after my drug-addicted birth mother, originally from Seoul, was unable to care for me. Over the next five years, I moved through seven ...
'Loudermilk' Is a Refreshing Comedy in an Unfunny Time February 16, 2024
These days, it’s nearly impossible to create a new comedy film or television series. First, today’s media environment is globalized, and humor doesn’t translate well for non-American audiences. Second, streaming platforms usually want pre-written scr...
The Winding Passage Back to Plato February 07, 2024
Two years ago, Glenn Ellmers caused both the mouth-foaming Left and the surrendered Right to soil their undies by arguing that radicals have changed America so significantly that the Right must no longer speak of conservation but of counterrevolution...
Behind The Messenger’s Implosion February 07, 2024
In the basement of a car dealership in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district last spring The Messenger chairman and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein addressed a throng of New York’s media elite. Finkelstein was there to unveil his grand plans for a new website that ...
