The Authoritarian Moment
Page 8
Chapter 3
The Creation of a New Ruling Class
On March 12, 2019, federal prosecutors revealed a bombshell case involving at least fifty defendants, a case spanning from 2011 to 2018. Dozens of the defendants were extraordinarily wealthy; many were preternaturally famous. The two biggest names were Lori Laughlin, star of Full House, and Felicity Huffman, Oscar-nominated actress. Their crime: trying to bribe their children’s way into college, by either paying someone to cheat on tests, paying someone to create fake résumé enhancers and bribe college administrators, or other means. Laughlin, according to prosecutors, “agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team—despite the fact that they did not participate in crew”;1 Huffman paid $15,000 to inflate her daughter’s test score by paying a proctor to correct her answers.2
College officials involved in the scheme hailed from some of the most prominent schools in the country: Yale, Stanford, UCLA, and USC, among others.3 For her crime, Laughlin did two months in prison, two years of probation, 100 hours of community service, and paid a $150,000 fine; Huffman did 14 days in prison, 250 hours of community service, and paid a $30,000 fine.4
The scandal made national headlines. Those on the political Left suggested that the story smacked of white privilege—after all, these were all people of means, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to game the system on behalf of their children. Those on the political Right suggested that the story was just more evidence that the college system itself had become a scam.
All of this missed the real point: why in the world did rich, famous parents—millionaires and billionaires—feel the need for their children to go to “good schools”? That question was particularly pressing with regard to Laughlin’s daughter, Olivia Jade, already a social media celebrity with millions of followers. And after the scandal broke, Jade lost sponsorships with makeup companies like Sephora.5 So why, exactly, was it vital for Laughlin and her husband, Mossimo founder Mossimo Giannulli, to drop half a million dollars to send their daughter to the second-best school in Los Angeles?
The question becomes even more puzzling when we reflect that Jade had no great aspirations for college. It’s not as though she was looking forward to a career in genetic engineering. In fact, Jade drew outsized criticism when she posted a social media video describing her hopes for her university career to her 2 million followers, explaining, “I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend. But I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all. But I do want the experience of like game days, partying . . . I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”6
But here’s the thing: Jade was right.
The real reason many Americans go to college—particularly Americans who aren’t majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math fields—is either pure credentialism, social cachet, or both. College, in essence, is about the creation of a New Ruling Class. It’s an extraordinarily expensive licensing program for societal influence.
Americans simply don’t learn very much if they’re majoring in the liberal arts. Yes, Americans may have a higher career earnings trajectory if they attend a good college and major in English than if they stop their educational career after high school. But that’s because employers typically use diplomas as a substitute for job entrance examinations, and also because college graduates tend to create social capital with other college graduates. College, in other words, is basically a sorting mechanism. That’s why Olivia Jade’s massively wealthy parents would risk jail time and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get her into a good-but-not-great school like USC.
Begin with credentialism. In 1950, only 7.3 percent of American men and 5.2 percent of American women had gone to college; in 1980, that number was 20.9 percent of men and 13.6 percent of women, a nearly threefold increase. As of 2019, 35.4 percent of men had gone to college, and so had 36.6 percent of women.7 This trend, which relies on the simple fact that Americans on average earn more with a college degree than without, has led to tremendous inflation in the credential market: where you could get a job as a dental lab technician or medical equipment operator just a few years ago without a college degree, that’s no longer true. You now have to outcompete others who have graduated from college for the same job—and this means that colleges have an interest in churning out as many degrees as possible, given that employer demand for college graduates continues to increase.
One October 2017 study from Harvard Business School professors Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman found that “degree inflation is undermining US competitiveness and hurting America’s middle class.” Fuller and Raman explained that “[p]ostings for many jobs traditionally viewed as middle-skills jobs (those that require employees with more than a high school diploma but less than a college degree) in the United States now stipulate a college degree as a minimum education requirement. . . . Our analysis indicates that more than 6 million jobs are currently at risk of degree inflation.” Damage from degree inflation particularly targets those who disproportionately don’t go to college—namely, low-income students, many of whom are minority. During economic downturns, those trends are only exacerbated as newly unemployed college graduates crowd out those who don’t have college degrees in middle-skills professions.8
Naturally, the demand for college graduates has led to a massive increase in the number of Americans pursuing postgraduate degrees. According to the Census Bureau, the number of Americans over twenty-five with a master’s degree doubled between 2000 and 2018, and the number of Americans with a doctorate increased 125 percent. Overall, while only 8.6 percent of Americans had a postgraduate degree in 2000, 13.1 percent did in 2018.9
Degree inflation doesn’t necessarily mean that Americans are better qualified for work than they were when they didn’t go to college—nothing about a queer studies theory bachelor’s degree will make anyone ready for an entry-level position as a dental assistant. In fact, top high school graduates who don’t attend college tend to do just as well as college graduates. As a recent Manhattan Institute study found, high schoolers who graduate within the top 25 percent of their class but don’t go on to college routinely outperform college graduates who finish in the bottom 25 percent of their class. And as the study authors point out, “more than 40 percent of recent college graduates wind up in jobs that do not require a degree . . . on top of the roughly half of college attendees who fail to earn a degree at all.”10
College, then, may grant an undue advantage to graduates based on credentials. But that’s not the only advantage. The other advantage is access to a new class hierarchy.
In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance writes of his ascension from growing up poor in Appalachia to graduation from Yale Law. For Vance, the transition wasn’t merely economic or regional—it was cultural. As Vance writes, “that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn’t know how the world of the American elite works.” Vance was embarrassed to find at a formal dinner that he didn’t know what sparkling water was, how to use three spoons or multiple butter knives, or the difference between chardonnay and sauvignon blanc. But this was all part of a test: “[law firm] interviews were about passing a social test—a test of belonging, of holding your own in a corporate boardroom, of making connections with potential future clients.”11
That test of belonging separates college graduates from everyone else. As Charles Murray notes in his seminal 2012 work, Coming Apart, Americans—he focuses on white Americans particularly—have separated into two classes: an elite, “the people who run the nation’s economic, political and cultural institutions,” those who “are both successful and influential within a city or region” . . . and everyone else.12 Murray calls the former group the new upper class, “with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America.” They are better termed the New Ruling Class, given that e
conomic strata are not the main divider.
The members of the New Ruling Class have almost nothing in common with the “new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.” Members of the New Ruling Class are more likely to be married, less likely to engage in single parenthood, less likely to be victimized by crime. They are also more likely to be political liberal. Murray describes their viewpoint as “hollow”—meaning that they refuse to promulgate the same social standards they actually practice. They stand firmly against propagating and encouraging adherence to the life rules they have followed to success. Left-leaning historian Christopher Lasch says the New Ruling Class (he calls them the “new elites) “are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it: a nation technically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. . . . It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all.”13
The ticket to membership in the New Ruling Class is often credential-based. Members of the New Ruling Class know this. In December 2020, Joseph Epstein, who taught at the University of Chicago, wrote a column pointing out that incoming first lady Jill Biden was not in fact a doctor—her doctorate was in education from the prestigious University of Delaware. “A wise man once said that no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child,” Epstein wrote. “Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.”14 The media reacted with unmitigated scorn and fury. Dr. Jill, they said, was not merely a doctor—she was the greatest doctor since Jonas Salk.
Michelle Obama posted in umbrage on Instagram: “All too often, our accomplishments are met with skepticism, even derision. We’re doubted by those who choose the weakness of ridicule over the strength of respect. And yet somehow, their words can stick—after decades of work, we’re forced to prove ourselves all over again.” Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff tweeted that Biden “earned her degrees through hard work and pure grit. She is an inspiration to me, to her students, and to Americans across this country.” Dr. Jill herself went on Stephen Colbert’s propaganda hour, where he cloyingly read from her book and nodded along as she intoned, “One of the things I’m most proud of is my doctorate. I’ve worked so hard for it.”15
There is only one problem. Dr. Jill is not a doctor in any meaningful sense. That’s not just because her supposed hard work amounted to receiving a degree for a dissertation from a university with a public policy school named after her husband in a state represented by her husband for decades (although one could make the case that such a degree is a tad . . . well . . . unearned). It has to do with the fact that only actual doctors—you know, people you’d call if your kid had an ear infection—should be called doctor. I have a juris doctor from Harvard Law School. I am not a doctor. My wife has a medical degree from UCLA. She is a doctor. There is, in fact, a terribly simple test of whether someone ought to be called doctor in daily life: if you’re on a plane and the pilot asks if there is a doctor available, do you raise your hand? (Note: if you raise your hand because you have a doctorate in education, your fellow passengers should be allowed by law to send you through the exit door at 30,000 feet.)
So, what was the big deal? Why, in fact, does Dr. Jill insist that everybody call her doctor, when she is about as much of a doctor as Dr. J, and boasts a significantly lower lifetime PPG average? (Dr. J does have an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts.) She insists on being called “doctor” because it’s a mark of membership in the New Ruling Class. As Dr. Jill once told her husband, Joe Biden, “I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted the mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.”16
This is, technically speaking, the height of obnoxious silliness. My wife—again, an actual doctor—is frequently referred to as Mrs. Shapiro. And as she told me, she doesn’t care one whit, since she knows what she does for a living, and her identity isn’t wrapped up in whether others know her degrees.
Credentialism, in other words, isn’t generally about recognition of merit. It’s a way of signaling commonality with the patricians of our society.
But something has happened since Murray’s book came out that has deepened cultural divides even further: members of the New Ruling Class aren’t merely constituted by educational history. They must now speak the language of social justice. There is a parlance taught at America’s universities and spoken only by those who have attended it, or adopted by those who aspire to membership in the New Ruling Class. That parlance is foreign both to non–college graduates and to those who graduated from college years ago. It sounds like gobbledygook to those who haven’t attended universities; it’s illogical when rigorously examined. But the more time you spend in institutions of higher learning, the better you learn the language.
Quibbling with that language earns you a ticket to the social leper colony. While from the 1990s to the 2008 election, the voting gap between high school and college graduates was “small, if not negligible,” it opened wide between 2008 and 2012. As Adam Harris of The Atlantic observes, “white voters without a college degree were distinctly more likely to vote Republican than those with college degrees.” In 2016, 48 percent of white college graduates voted for Trump, compared with 66 percent of those who didn’t graduate from college.17 In 1980, the 100 counties with the highest share of college degrees went Republican, 76 to 24; in 2020, Democrats won top college-graduate counties 84 to 16.18
Naturally, leftist commentators attribute this emerging voting gap to both Republican stupidity and Republican racism. But that’s not the story. The story is the creation of an elitist group of Americans who speak the Holy Tongue of Wokeness—a language built for internal solidarity and designed for purgation of unbelievers.
LEARNING THE WOKABULARY
Wokeism, of course, is rooted in identity politics. It takes cues from intersectionality, which suggests a hierarchy of victimhood in which you are granted credibility based on the number of victim groups to which you belong. But it doesn’t stop there. Wokeism takes identity politics to the ultimate extreme: it sees every structure of society as reflective of deeper, underlying structures of oppression. Reason, science, language, and freedom—all are subject to the toxic acid of identity politics.19 To stand with any purportedly objective system is to endorse the unequal results of that system. All inequality in life can be chalked up to systemic inequity. And to defend the system means to defend inequity.
This argument, which fell out of favor over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, suddenly roared back in full force in the 2010s in the universities. To be fair, the philosophy had never truly disappeared—even when I attended UCLA in the early 2000s, calls for mandatory “diversity courses” steeped in intersectionality were commonplace. But in the 2010s, wokeism moved from a prominent but minority philosophy to the dominant philosophy of America’s major universities. Suddenly, discredited theories of inherent American evil sprang back to the forefront.
But these theories don’t constitute another mere trend. They represent an entire religious, unfalsifiable worldview. To deny that an inequality means an inequity has taken place became sinful and dangerous: by suggesting that perhaps inequality resulted from luck, natural imbalances, or differential decision making, you are a threat to others, a victim-shamer. As Boston University professor of history Ibram X. Kendi, perhaps the most popular of the woke thinkers, states, “Racial inequality is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.”20 Robin DiAngelo, Kendi’s white woke counterpart and a professor at the University of Washington, summarizes: “if we truly believe that all humans are equal, then disparity in condition can only be the result of systemic discrimination.”21 In other words, all decisions should create the same result—and if you disagree, you are racist.22
“Social justice” dictates that you sit down and shut up—that you listen to others’ experiences, refrain from judgment, and join in the anarchic frenzy a
t destroying prevailing systems.
And it is a cult. It is a moral system built on anti-conventionalism—on the belief that its expositors are the sole beacons of light in the moral universe, and therefore justifiable in their revolutionary aggression and top-down censorship.
To be deemed anti-racist, for example, one must take courses with Robin DiAngelo, participate in Maoist struggle sessions, and always—always—mirror the prevailing woke ideas. To fail to do so is to be categorized as undesirable. All “microaggressions” must be spotted. All heresies must be outed. And all logical consistency—even basic decency itself—must be put aside in the name of the greater good. As Kendi puts it, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”23
Repeat and believe. Or be labeled evil. For Ibram X. Kendi, America has two souls. One is the soul of justice, which “breathes life, freedom, equality, democracy, human rights, fairness, science, community, opportunity, and empathy for all.” The other is those who disagree, who breathe “genocide, enslavement, inequality, voter suppression, bigotry, cheating, lies, individualism, exploitation, denial, and indifference to it all.”24 Notice the inclusions of the terms “individualism” and “denial” in Kendi’s litany of evil. If you believe that individuals have rights, that in a free country you are largely responsible for your own fate, or if you deny the clearly false proposition that all inequality is evidence of inequity, you are inhabited by the soul of evil.