Check Your Condescension

By Rich Lowry, Charles C. W. Cooke, Noah Rothman,  & Dominic Pino

Thursday, August 10, 2023

 

This conversation is drawn from The Editors podcast earlier this week.

 

Rich Lowry: So Dominic, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a piece last week asking, “What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?” meaning the highly educated, meritocratic elite in this country that is very self-satisfied and smug, that doesn’t get to know anyone outside of its social circles, that takes over every appealing job in the country and emphasizes skills more and more in those occupations. So you need more members of the meritocratic elite to fill these jobs, and people who aren’t part of this elite are screwed over and excluded. The elite speaks this esoteric language of woke, you know, Latinx and all the rest of it, and has these constantly shifting moral and social standards where the non-elite can’t keep up and have to face the prospect of being punished if they’re not keeping up. And this is why we have Donald Trump. Is that a persuasive argument for you?

 

Dominic Pino: Overall, I don’t think so. I think he makes some good points about how elites don’t preach what they practice. This is something conservatives have talked about for a while, that people that are well off in the United States generally tend to actually uphold very traditional family values. You know, getting married before you have children, believing that it’s important to have a secure source of income before you get married, those sorts of things. They actually tend to do that and it tends to work out very well for them. But instead of saying, “Hey this works out. People should do this,” they then assume this very non-judgmental, “Oh, you know, everybody should do whatever and we shouldn’t we shouldn’t say that this is a model for success,” even though it’s demonstrated to be one. So I think that’s true.

 

But I think the problem that Brooks runs into is that the vast majority of people just don’t think about the elites all that much. They’re not sitting around thinking about how much they want to be elites. Most people don’t want to be elites, actually. And that’s not to say that they don’t want to do well. That’s not to say they don’t want to be successful. They just don’t define success as going to an Ivy league school and serving on the Supreme Court.

 

They define success as having a stable job and providing for their family. And you can do that by attending a state school, or attending a technical college, or doing any number of different jobs out there that will allow you to work your way up and make six-figure income and do really well for yourself and really well for your family while also being a part of your church community or a local club or organization. And the fact that you didn’t go to law school or that you didn’t get a clerkship on the Supreme Court just really never crosses your mind at all.

 

So I just don’t think that there is actually this huge group of people out there that are really resentful of this very specific kind of elite achievement that Brooks is talking about. I just don’t think most people really think about it that much at all and they’re not really bummed out that they are functionally excluded from it, even though they are functionally excluded from it. They’re just okay with that.

 

Rich: So Noah, it does seem to me that there is an aspect of Trump which is a gigantic middle finger to the elite. And we’re not going to play by your rules. We think you’re arrogant and out of touch. You’ve screwed us. And hey, I’m the working class’s revenge.

 

Noah Rothman: Sure, and it’s extremely potent. And I think that’s a conscious thing at this point. I don’t think it was conscious in 2016. There was an animal cunning that Donald Trump tapped into insofar as he had been in touch with sort of the cultural products and cultural ethos that prevails way outside high culture in this country. You know, his fans in the wrestling community, for example.

 

To Dominic’s point . . . David Brooks coined the term “status income disequilibrium syndrome,” and the people in our country who suffer most from it are journalists, are reporters who have high-status jobs and incomes that don’t match the rarefied company they keep. So, Brooks is talking about himself, sure, but he’s talking about a community, a very small community, who consumes a lot of journalism or are journalists themselves. . . .

 

Charles C. W. Cooke: . . . . I didn’t like the David Brooks column either. The first thing is that I didn’t believe him. I thought it was a condescending humble brag listing all of the great things that he has. The second is that he treats the Trump-supporting people who made these decisions of which he disapproves as if they’re automatons, as if they’re below him. Well, of course they would make these decisions because we up here are so educated and have put them in this difficult circumstance. No, no. The choice to nominate Donald Trump twice and perhaps a third time lies with Republicans. They can’t be tricked into it. They have agency and they must exercise it.

 

Dominic: Yeah, I think Charlie’s right. I think one of the big problems that we have with political discourse on both sides of the aisle actually is that there are lots and lots of people who live in the middle of this country who are satisfied with their lives. They really are, I promise. They are not constantly resentful. They are not constantly angry at some outside group of people that they believe is keeping them down. And I think those are the people who are really kind of left out of this whole conversation.

 

Noah: Well, I agree with everybody, but I don’t think you can entirely discount social phenomena. In part, the decrease and lack of trust in American institutions, I think, contributes to that phenomena. And yes, there’s a lot to say for the fact that institutions have sacrificed quite a bit of trust. In part, because the lack of trust is mutual. Our institutions do not trust the American public, American voters, to reach the right decisions and believe they have to be nudged or manipulated into doing the right thing. Second, there are elements of our society that benefit from that lack of trust and exacerbate that condition and sow mistrust. Is that responsible for the Trump phenomenon? No, certainly not entirely, maybe not even in large measure, but I don’t think it can be just dismissed.