bloodygranuaile

Here is a story of the kind of mood I was in for the entirety of 2017: In October, Mom and I went to see Chris Hayes and James Forman Jr. talk about crime and racism at the Boston Book Festival. At this event I bought Hayes' new book A Colony in a Nation, and got it signed, and I was VERY EXCITED to read it, as the excerpts I'd seen were quite good. I brought it home and put it on top of my TBR pile, which is an actual pile, since the TBR shelf is full. The pile is supposedly higher priority than the shelf since it is more in my way.

Every single day for two months, I would look over at the side of my room that the TBR pile is in, see the front cover of the book sitting right on the top of it with the title clearly visible, and think to myself: That reminds me, I gotta pick up a copy of Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. (I read Forman's Locking Up Our Own in the meantime, which required borrowing it from my mom; Colony is still sitting at the top of its stack under the window, judging me every day, feeling sad and neglected as its cover slowly bleaches in the sunlight.)

Last month I finally bought Twilight of the Elites and skillfully manipulated my book club into voting for it for January, which is the only way I read anything these days. Like, I am currently in the middle of three separate books for book clubs, and it's only that few because I already finished Twilight of the Elites.

So, basically, that was my 2017 mood: Restless, and overly dependent on external motivation to do things that I supposedly wanted to do, reluctant to do anything that was actually at my immediate fingertips. It's not the first time I've found myself in a headspace of just irrationally rebelling against the expectation that I use my time to work toward meeting my goals, even though I am usually a pretty goal-oriented person, and I know I'm not the only person who had massive issues with productivity this year. But this was an interesting book to read coming off a whole year of being generally put off at the notion of doing literally anything because have you seen how useless these other fucks can get away with being?

The thesis of Twilight of the Elites is, at its most basic, that meritocracy is a bourgeois lie, which is obviously something that any downwardly mobile rose emoji on Twitter can tell you. But more specifically, Twilight of the Elites advances an argument about how meritocracy becomes a bourgeois lie, tracing the giant post-'60s game of Monopoly from its origins in the (cooptation of) the various social liberation movements of the second half of the 20th century through the era of neoliberal technocracy and its accompanying increase in inequality, and up through what Hayes terms the Fail Decade: the period from 2000 onward where every major institution in American life imploded in ignominious mushroom clouds of WTF-ery.

The Bush/Gore election was the first major political event I paid close enough attention to to feel like I had any idea what was going on (the first major political event I remember hearing stuff about was the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal but I didn't understand a lot of it because I was 10 and it was not a very child-appropriate subject), and what was going on was that the Bush family political patronage machine successfully railroaded the Supreme Court into not counting the votes because it's not like we're supposed to be a democracy or anything, and just giving Florida to the guy who got fewer votes and whose brother is Governor, this is a fine and normal decision which is why you can't use it as precedent for anything later. In retrospect, it is an indictment of the complacency of American society that we sort of just put up with this and the only people with the decency to riot during the whole thing were some assholes in Brooks Brothers suits. From there, things got worse. The Bush administration blew off warnings about 9/11 because they were obsessed with finding excuses to invade Iraq and did not appreciate intelligence agents being obsessed with different things such as "stuff that was likely to actually happen." Then 9/11 actually happened because the giant American security apparatus didn't lock the fucking doors on the planes; since then, we have not only started locking doors on planes, but we also make people take their shoes off and take X-ray pictures of them naked and steal their toothpaste and all sorts of other stuff that doesn't make anyone safer, but it's less embarrassing to pretend that proper security is hard and requires a lot of resources -- all of which cost money, which I'm sure is a coincidence -- than it is to be like "Sorry, that was dumb, it won't happen again."

Oh, and then Enron happened and it was still only 2001. Alright, I'm gonna fast forward through recapping the Iraq War invasion, Katrina, the baseball doping scandal, the Catholic Church child abuse scandal, the housing bubble, and the stuff WikiLeaks dumped back when it was still doing anything remotely resembling whistleblowing. Suffice to say that Hayes recaps them all, and rereading about this stuff gave me traumatic flashbacks to when it all was going down (which is when I was a teenager and everything was extra miserable anyway, because teenager) and really made me wish that I had been more politically active in pushing back against it, instead of doing what I actually did in my teens, which was read newsmagazines, pretend that made me an Informed Citizen, and go to therapy to wrestle with the implications of the lesson my parents and school were belatedly trying to imprint upon me that I was not, in fact, going to be set for life just because I had really high standardized test scores, and I needed to figure out how to do work.

So, Chapter Two in the book discusses elite formation through the education system, using Hayes' own experience in a prestigious New York magnet school as an entry point into a discussion of standardized testing, the test prep industry, the norms and expectations of elite education, social mobility, and generally what it is that we mean when we talk about "merit." He returns to similar ideas later when he discusses the Cult of Smartness and what it means for public knowledge production and elite credibility.

As a former gifted kid who has underperformed expectations at each new stage of her life in ways that I have since learned are frequently typical of gifted kids (I am not a full-blown "gifted slacker," which would probably have been my lot if my parents hadn't gone to great lengths to get me tested and tutored and enrolled in private school and otherwise "challenged" enough to train me at least a little in the humble art of Expending Effort On Things), I have many, many opinions on standardized testing and especially on test prep culture. It was a point of pride for me in my younger days that I never engaged in any sort of test prep if I wasn't mandated to, which is great for aptitude tests (I believe that test prep for aptitude tests should be banned or at least reporting what kind of test prep you took should be mandatory), but is less good for the sorts of knowledge mastery tests that you're supposed to study for. As a youngun, I took a test that told me that I had a very high IQ, and I still have the test results around because... well, mostly in case I ever forget what test it was and what year I took it, so that I can be a giant asshole to people who want to talk about how high their IQs are but don't know anything about how IQ tests work. Now, I come from a socioeconomic background where a reasonably high IQ is expected--a white petit bourgeois family in a safe, quiet, non-polluted suburb with well-funded public schools--so the purpose of testing as I was subjected to it was to sort out who needed extra support or extra challenging within that milieu. Which is probably fine.

The problem is that this all falls apart as soon as you expand testing outside of one socioeconomically homogenous population, because intelligence is actually an incredibly complex subject. Widespread societal myths about what intelligence is and how it develops are part of why the Cult of Smartness is actually very, very dumb and frequently degenerates into horrifying eugenics crap.

I don't remember when I first started internalizing the idea that smart people are dumb, but I think the New York Times had a lot to do with solidifying it as one of my most-often-used heuristics about how things work. It is an idea I have internalized really well but with only a half-thought-out explanation as to why, to the point where I spent half the book going "A cable news show host wrote this?!" because I consider it self-evident that cable news show hosts are dumber than regular working reporters; you can tell because the big corporations that own all our media are willing to pay them more and give them bigger platforms.

This is, of course, not really an analysis; it is the resentment of an underperforming layabout who failed the elite formation process, wiped out of the petit bourgeoisie and landed on her ass in the working classes with most of her peers, and is faced with the choice of spending all her energy obsessing over every mistake she ever made in her life (these mistakes include things like rejecting a diagnosis of ADD because I wanted to assert my right to find boring stuff boring, goddammit) or finding someone else to blame. I am actually inclined to the first, as I have been trained by a lifetime of our dominant culture and some depressive issues, but then eventually I read a newspaper or otherwise run face-first into some incredibly high-paid, high-powered, well-educated stable genius crashing the entire world economy because they'd gone and talked themselves out of knowing basic shit about how the world works, like "Capitalism has business cycles," and I start to see the appeal of all that anti-intellectual "common sense" garbage that's so popular on the right wing and among the apolitical.

One result of this mess of resentment and self-loathing is political radicalization; another result is snide cynicism and anti-elitism, a psychological posture that's incredibly taxing to hold in tandem with not actually having unlearned the elitist assumptions that undergird American thought. A third result is fear of success. Being afraid of failure and of success at the same time can be quite paralyzing, as you can probably imagine. My dad scolds me not to be afraid of success a lot. It doesn't work. My dad is successful and it seems to be working out pretty well for him, but it doesn't seem to be working out well for a lot of other people, especially the smart nerds like I was supposed to be.

Twilight of the Elites, on the other hand, gives a calmly thought out and well-reasoned analysis of why meritocratic success sets people up for elite failure, which on the one hand is validating but also hands me some useful analytical tools to start working through the contradictions inherent in concepts like "success" and "failure" and how they relate to our current crisis of authority, how institutions become self-protecting and able to insulate themselves from accountability, the deleterious effects of social distance on institutional decision-making, and social immobility and oligarchy.

My academic background, inasmuch as I have a background in learning things at school, is largely in media studies, and more specifically my BA is in English with a concentration in something called "Discourse Studies." (What was I going to do with a degree in Discourse Studies? Idunno, man, study the discourse? I wasn't disciplined enough to choose my major via any sort of career planning; I just did what I thought was interesting.) (This is why I'm not an elite, despite my seditious cheese-eating habits.) You may therefore be not at all surprised to hear that my favorite part of the book was the discussion of anti-elite sentiment and semantic obfuscation as practiced by right-wing propagandists. The digs at John McCain are satisfying, but the look into the (well-funded and run by a small number of powerful people) conservative media machine and the alternate reality it constructs--the one in which multimillionaire U.S. Senator John McCain is not an elite, but the ghost tenants in New York's public housing projects are because NEW YORK!!--is an incredibly important window into the mechanisms by which the actual elites misdirect rage away from themselves when they fuck up. (For further reading I recommend Jane Mayer's Dark Money, which more closely tracks individual propaganda projects, and as a result is three times as long.)

This rage is not always successfully misdirected, of course, and a lot of elite figures, having earned vast powers over other people's lives and usually accumulating enormous wealth in the process, are apparently feeling real persecuted these days that people don't appreciate how hard their jobs are. For some reason, the rest of us are supposed to remember and care that U.S. Senators and corporate CEOs and other high-powered capitalist brain geniuses are only human, but also not question why we're giving them more responsibility than someone who's only human can actually handle. Nevermind that we don't pay them the big bucks to be human; we pay them the big bucks to do their jobs. All the rest of us are human too, and we don't get paid for it. (To be clear, I think we all should.)

It's been six years since Twilight of the Elites was published, and one thing I'd like to see, maybe in a few years for a 10th anniversary edition, would be an addendum applying this analysis to the 2016 election. Donald Trump is, obviously, the incarnation of everything that is bunkum about the concept that we even live in a meritocracy to start with; he inherited his wealth, is basically feral due to a lifelong amount of social distance that means he functionally skipped the process of socialization altogether, and is bad even at owning things, which is the only thing he was ever expected to be able to do. But Hillary Clinton is the much more interesting case here, being actually a product of the meritocracy, and I think even the people who relentlessly dinged her for being "establishment" don't have a full grasp of what that means, about the degree to which Hillary Clinton was literally exactly what is expected of her class; she is exactly the person the system is designed to produce to put in a position like the Presidency. Instead, we all pretend it's something about Hillary Clinton specifically as an individual, since neoliberal meritocracy trains us to focus on individuals. This, I think, is unfortunate because it allows people to pretend that we can easily just elect people who aren't Hillary Clinton to office, and I don't think we can, not until there's massive changes to the system itself and the sort of processing that happens to people on their way to the top of it. The analysis of elite formation also I think could explain why there seemed to be so much talking past each other between Clinton's supporters and her detractors, with her supporters mostly pushing back against the charges of "establishment"-ness by telling what Hayes refers to as a "scrappy underdog story"--the litany of things that a person Worked Hard And Overcame to earn their place in the elite. I, for one, distinctly remember spending a lot of the election quietly cringing at reiterations of Clinton's impressive public service resume and pretending I wasn't, because clearly having experience must be better than not having experience, right? But also, do you really want to remind voters that Clinton has what is essentially the stain of so many major institutions on her, given that all of our major institutions have sucked for decades?

This is the central dilemma for our highly specialized, technical, hierarchical society: Who do you put in charge of things, if everyone who doesn't have the training obviously has no way to know what they're doing, but everyone who does have the appropriate background also appears to have no idea what they're doing? How do you replace these people, and who with? A lot of the societal rage we see these days is basically a variety of simultaneous hangovers from earlier crises that not only happened, which was destabilizing enough, but for which nobody was really held accountable. No bankers went to jail after the mortgage crisis. Multiple Democrats who voted for the Iraq War still enjoy prominent positions within the party--Chuck Schumer is Senate Minority Leader; people keep saying Joe Biden should run for President in 2020 (he should not). Judith Miller was fired from the New York Times... and is now a contributor on Fox News. None of the other pundits that cheerled the war lost their positions. Could you imagine what the TV panels and newspaper op-ed pages would look like if nobody who supported the war in the media at the time was allowed to be on them? These folks can fuck up endlessly and we can't seem to manage to replace them, which is infuriating enough even before you start looking at the contrast between that and the lives of regular people, where fucking up tends to have material consequences for the fuck-upper, not just for everyone else.

Since I am the living embodiment of all the most overanalyzed trends of my generation, this educated, downwardly mobile white girl with anxiety has come to the same conclusion as a record-breaking number of her peers and decided that the solution is socialism, which doesn't by itself necessarily fix all of the potential problems with specialization and rareification (Ursula Le Guin explored this better than I'm going to ever be able to in The Dispossessed), but I think it would help. Hayes does not use ~the S word~ but in the final chapter talks a lot about Occupy Wall Street, bottom-up social change, and political imagination, along with some observations about the radicalization of the middle/professional classes that made me feel extremely called out. In a somewhat unusual move, the "vision of tomorrow" he closes the book on is a reminder that societies are dynamic and that therefore the struggle will never be over, which seems like it ought to be disheartening--don't we all engage in activism in the hope that eventually, things will be OK and we can live our lives in peace?--but which I found to be a refreshing rebuke to the "end of history" triumphalism that immediately preceded the Fail Decade and to which a lot of people seem to want to return. History didn't end, and it's never going to, so get off your ass and participate in democracy. It's too important to be left to the experts.

I'm expecting a long an intense discussion at book club, if the conversations I've already with book club members are any indication. I still have to draw up questions, and I'm afraid I'll wind up with too many--I've started putting Post-It flags at key ideas in the book to organize my thoughts, and so far that means I'm flagging nearly every other page. (I'm also expecting that I'm going to end up talking about this one a bit during the DSA/ISO book club for Naomi Klein's No Is Not Enough; there are some things that I think overlap, so I'm going to have to work hard to not be That Asshole who shows up to talk about their pet reading instead of the assignment.)

Anyway. In addition to challenging my biases about cable news hosts and validating that I am not crazy for feeling generally destabilized for my entire adult life, Twilight of the Elites analyzed my entire political coming of age and explained it to me in an accessible, occasionally humorous way that both made it all make sense and challenged me to rethink and reanalyze what I thought I'd already figured out. It's an analysis that (perhaps unfortunately) I think you can carry forward through the following decade, and that may in fact have become even more true in the time since it was published. Highly, highly recommended.