Two bad essays illustrating an interesting point between them

An odd juxtaposition of two peculiar articles, one following the other this morning. The first is The 2016 Election is Not Reversible by Angelo Codevilla. He spends some time critiquing Trump for failing to follow through on expectations but shifts gears to a broader critique which is that the meritocratic elite (Republican and Democrat) are both out of touch with the remaining 90% of America and are reviled by the public for their abrogation of the American Creed. While there is much noise in the article and much with which to disagree, I think Codevilla has this right:

To ordinary Americans, the winds that now blow downwind from society’s commanding heights make the country seem more alien than ever before. More than ever, academics, judges, the media, corporate executives, and politicians of all kinds, having arrogated moral legitimacy to their own socio-political identities, pour contempt upon the rest of America. Private as well as public life in our time is subject to their escalating insults, their unending new conditions on what one may or may not say, even on what one must say, to hold a job or otherwise to participate in society.

And then immediately following Codevilla, there is this piece, $330,000 in financial aid bought me a slot in the American meritocracy. Now I see its flaws. by Andrew Granato. It is somewhat incoherent but the basic line appears to be something along the lines of: I come from the middle class but through charity and taxpayer largesse, was able to breech the educational barriers to reach the upper echelons of meritocracy.

From there, his argument becomes less discernible. At least part of his argument is that the meritocratic elite should quit pretending that they are not elite.

It’s the sort of blithe misrepresentation long practiced by elected officials like our current president: I’m not one of them; I’m one of you, the common people. But it is also part of the rhetoric that is employed on privileged campuses, by the left as well as the right: that while others might be part of this disconnected elite, the person who is speaking is not, because of their origins in or connections to literally anything that isn’t considered part of that elite. As if spending years getting enveloped in a culture and getting a permanent mark of a class stamped on your résumé for the rest of your life is something that only affects other people.

Acts of performative populism that place the speaker in the crowd, which are made very explicit when done in electoral politics but pervade elite culture at large, are simply dishonest.

But here is where it gets odd. After all the chatter about personal story, meritocratic elites, need for greater awareness, what does Granato recommend? He regurgitates exactly the same tired old policies that have been a mainstay of Plato's Philosopher King meritocrats for the past fifty years.

The more I read about and study these issues, the more I realize that changes need to happen on a national, systemic level. We should move education funding away from local property taxes that pour resources into schools in wealthy districts. We should enforce anti-discrimination laws to blunt the impact of legacy and modern racism on people of color. We should dismantle archaic, segregation-generating housing regulations and unnecessary occupational licensing restrictions, tax the wealthy, and move to ensure universal health coverage, a goal every other advanced democracy has already achieved.

So a newly minted member of the meritocratic elite, based on his readings, thinks he should be able to impose the solutions he thinks are best onto the unenlightened proletariat. And apparently, the best thing that could happen to America is to become more like low-growth, socially tense, financially dodgy Europe.

It does not help his laundry list of archaic, failed social policies that they are anchored in assumptions so ungrounded on measured reality. But the real problem is not that his policies are wrong. The problem is that, like so many "elite" peers who have been credentialed and indoctrinated in postmodernist critical theory rather than reality, Granato takes it for granted that the credentialed elite should be empowered to make decisions on behalf of everyone else. He is illustrating the very point being made by Codevilla.

Granato almost seems to be complaining that it costs too much to become a member of the meritocratic elite. It should be cheaper and easier for Andrew Granato to circumvent the will, goals and values of his fellow Americans. It takes too long for them to grant him the power to make their lives better. What incoherent claptrap. It appears as if Granato is Exhibit A for the accusation that our elite universities are producing well-credentialed people but not necessarily well educated people. And certainly not well-intended people. And there he now sits in the Federal Reserve Banking system, wanting to pull the levers on everyone else's lives without having actually demonstrated accomplishment or morality. The only thing that has gotten him there is an elite education paid for by others, including the very fellow citizens on whom he "pour[s] contempt."

His closing paragraphs seem to make the argument that those who have been heavily credentialed should quit pretending to be just folks. They are philosopher kings and they ought to say so seems to be the drift.

On a more personal level, we should be more truthful, with others and with ourselves, about the situation we are in. This does not, and should not, require a performance of guilt — this has nothing to do with being a “bad” person — but we need to be honest about our relative advantages.

Of course he is just a newly graduated kid. Hard to blame him for a malformed vision of his role in an America so different from his postmodernist critical theory illusions. His is just an embarrassing argument, such as it is. The blame lies elsewhere. Ahem. Stanford.