In Defense of Elitism

I am carrying a bottle of 2012 Trump Winery Sparkling Blanc de Blancs. I received the bottle ironically, and I am regifting it even more ironically to liberal radio talk show host Stephanie Miller for the election party she's throwing four houses up from mine in the Hollywood Hills. We shall toast Donald Trump's concession speech with glasses of his own sorry attempt to mimic the elite he tried to bring down. It shall taste sweet. Slightly too sweet, due to the low acid levels in the Virginia grapes.

While Stephanie's guests chat and sip better wine than I brought, I nerd out on a couch with my computer, tracking county results. As I calculate the inevitability of Trump's victory, my vision narrows, and my blood pressure drops. It is awful to be the only person at a party who knows something, especially when it's that human existence is about to end.

I am not panicked because a Republican has won. Some of my best friends who own wineries are Republicans. Besides, I know Democrats lose half the time. But it had been 188 years since the elite lost the presidency, when the aristocratic founding fathers went down for good in the election between "John Quincy Adams who can write and Andrew Jackson who can fight." The results were not good for black people, Native Americans, the economy, or the smell of the White House, due to the enormous wheel of cheese Jackson stored in a closet.

The populist revolution succeeded tonight for the same reason it did nearly two centuries ago. The main reason Trump won wasn't economic anxiety. It wasn't sexism. It wasn't racism. It was that he was anti-elitist. Hillary Clinton represented Wall Street, academics, policy papers, Davos, international treaties, and people who think they're better than you. People like me. Trump represented something far more appealing, which is beating up people like me. A poll taken a month before the 2016 election showed that only 24 percent of voters disagreed with the statement "The real struggle for America is not between Democrats and Republicans but between mainstream America and the ruling political elites."

People are foolish to get rid of us. Elites are people who think; populists are people who believe. Elites defer to experts; populists listen to their own guts. Elites value cooperation; populists are tribal. Elites are masters at delayed gratification, long-range planning, and controlling our emotions. The most accurate way to determine if a child will be a member of the elite isn't an IQ test. It's the Stanford marshmallow experiment, in which you put a treat in front of a preschooler and tell her that if she doesn't eat it for fifteen minutes she'll get a second one as a reward. If she holds off for long enough, she might one day go to Stanford and create her own method of torturing children. Trump is a mouth stuffed full of marshmallows, little bits of white fluff flying out as he yells whatever occurs to him in the moment, which is usually a demand for more white things.

I started worrying about populism in 2008, when vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin chastised the elitists, whom she defined as "people who think they're better than anyone else." Meanwhile, she thought she was so much better than anyone else that she could serve as backup leader of the world despite the fact that she believed that the political leader of the United Kingdom is the queen. After she lost she vowed, "I'm never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I'm not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I'm going to fight the elitist." She was unaware that there is a third option: to study so that you know more than the next person.

I became more worried two years later, when I was watching an episode of the Today show. Like all elites, I will claim that I saw the Today show accidentally, likely in a local NBC greenroom while waiting to prerecord a segment. Matt Lauer was interviewing Vice President Joe Biden about Elena Kagan's Supreme Court nomination:

No, Matt Lauer's point wasn't well made, possibly because he was distracted by looking around the studio for an employee to sexually harass. Also, if I went to Syracuse I'd be furious that the most powerful alumnus in our history was changing our messaging from "Knowledge crowns those who seek her" to "We could not be more different from Harvard and Yale!"

A rigorous legal education is a prerequisite for a Supreme Court justice. Someone armed with only the common sense that Syracuse professors apparently don't ruin with book learnin' is going to have a tough time figuring out how Congress's right to "grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal" applies to cyberterrorism. Which it does. The last time someone made this inane argument that Supreme Court justices are over-educated was when Richard Nixon nominated G. Harrold Carswell—a man so dumb he apparently could not spell either of his own first names. Senator Roman Hruska defended Carswell's worthiness to be a Supreme Court justice by saying, "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?" Back then everyone mocked Hruska and didn't confirm Carswell. Now it feels like the opposite would happen.

We can't afford that. Populists believe our complex society is so secure that disaster is near impossible no matter who is in charge. Elites know it's not. Most of our work is calculating risk and planning for contingencies. We invented reinsurance, and if you give us a few years, we'll come up with rereinsurance. The myth that the elite are selfishly rigging the system while doing nothing useful conveniently ignores the fact that the system we've built is great. If this were a book about any other group of people besides the elite, this would be the part where I list all the amazing contributions we've made throughout history. I do not need to do that because elites created everything that ever existed except for Jell-O wrestling. The ancient Greeks came up with wrestling and university founder Peter Cooper got the patent for manufacturing gelatin, so the populists' only accomplishment is putting the two together.

When populists get rid of the elite, the results aren't pretty. In Cambodia in the 1970s, Pol Pot killed everyone who could read, wore glasses, spoke a foreign language, or was a doctor. Cambodia today is filled with some of the nicest, friendliest people on earth and has a thriving tourism industry. So that's not a great example. Still, you know how many Nobel Prize winners have come from Cambodia in the last forty years? Zero. Though I could see why you'd rather have nice people and tourism than a Nobel Prize, so again, bad example. Luckily there are plenty of other horrifying examples of the destructive power of populism: the Dark Ages, China's Cultural Revolution, North Korea, network television.

Populists choose incompetent leaders because their main criteria is whether they'd like to get a beer with that person. Elitists detest this idea, and only partly because we rarely drink beer, and when we do, we are less concerned about whom we drink it with than if it's made by a small craft brewer who was able to balance the malt with the International Bitterness Units. It's also irrelevant. Do you think Abraham Lincoln was fun to get a beer with? Our greatest president said drinking made him feel "flabby and undone," which is what your friend says right before you never take her anywhere ever again. The president who was the most fun to drink with was lifelong bachelor James Buchanan, who had a fauxhawk, was nearly expelled from college twice for partying, bought a ten-gallon cask of whiskey every Sunday, complained that the White House's champagne bottles were too small, and led us into the Civil War.

People's disdain for the elite has led us to downplay our importance, claiming, like Biden did, that we're all equal in every way. We learned this method of self-protection the hard way after being picked on in high school and beheaded in late-eighteenth-century France. It's why people who went to Harvard say that they "went to school in Boston" and people who went to Yale say they "didn't get into Harvard."

A New Yorker editor asked Andy Borowitz not to call Trump voters idiots in an article by explaining that "we don't want the New Yorker to appear elitist." Andy pointed out how that ship sailed in the magazine's first issue in 1925, when it chose a mascot with a top hat and monocle. Andy went to school in Boston.

We need to reappropriate the word elite. The only time elite is used positively is when it comes before military, model, or athlete. Even athletes aren't completely spared antielitist anger once they get too successful. Most Americans hate the Yankees, Duke basketball, and any other team that consistently achieves greatness. They think it's virtuous to root for underdogs, which is idiotic because preferring the worse team is valuing luck over talent and preparation. I am surprised people don't spend Sundays watching the National Slot Machine League.

Instead of fighting back, elites smugly quote Martin Luther King Jr., who rephrased these lines from minister Theodore Parker in 1850 about the evils of slavery:

That's arguably true, but it's undeniable that the arc of a launched nuclear missile is short and bends toward the cities where most elites live.

We need to fix this while we still can, which is why I decided to become a full-time activist. Then I learned that being an activist pays even worse than being a writer. So instead I decided to find out who these people are who threw out the elite, what they want, and why—all of a sudden and all around the world—they have become so angry. I will bravely enter the centers of the populist revoltion, meet their leaders, and eat their fattening fried foods. Then I will analyze my data, reach conclusions, and issue a report suggesting we pretend to give these people what they want and do what's best instead.

This book is a call to arms for the elite. Not actual arms, since we don't think people should have those, but metaphoric arms, which are the type of arms that will be useless against the populists' arms, which are real arms. Which is why I am not standing up to the populists in person but here in print, where none of them will know about it.

I gather my lovely wife, Cassandra, and my seven-year-old son, Laszlo, and snake my way through the drunk, happy, clueless, soon-to-be-former elites at Stephanie's party. As I zombie toward the door, a woman sees my ashen face and asks if I really think Trump will win. I mumble, "I'm just a guy at a party," which she finds hilarious. But as of this moment, I know that's all I am.

At home, I force a smile as Laszlo gets into his pajamas. He's spent a year hearing every adult he knows demonize Trump, so I assure him that the election will not affect his future, which I believe insofar as he is seven and his definition of the future is one week. But I don't know what will happen after that. My stomach hurts. I know I will have to spend the next few days eating only bland, sweet foods, as if I had some kind of populist-induced disease that caused me to revert to their diet.

I fall asleep right after I say good night to Laszlo, exhausted by fear. At 3:00 a.m. Cassandra wakes me. "I don't know what's going on with New Zealand, but they're going to be full. I need other options," she says. It's hard to dismiss warnings from someone named Cassandra, but I tell her that the tricky thing about living through history is that you don't know which way it will go. Maybe populism will burn itself out like it did during McCarthyism. I add something about America's system of checks and balances, but she is not seven, and is disgusted by my forced optimism. "I need a plan, because you'd be one of those Jews who got on a train and said, 'Oh, fun! Camp!'" she yells.

She keeps naming countries we should move to, and I groggily spit out the names of rising far-right populist parties in each of them, some of which I may have gotten wrong, such as the Slovenian Justice League and Gunter Glieben Glauten Globen. As I do this, I think about the story Ronald Reagan told to the 1964 Republican convention:

This is what I didn't know how to tell Cassandra: we Americans have nowhere to go. We have to save the elite.