We confuse elite, power, credentials, status, majority status

From What everyone misses about American elites by Daniel W. Drezner. I don't think his analysis is necessarily wrong, just that it is so incomplete that it can't be right.

This has not been a great moment for American elites. My Washington Post colleague Dan Balz wrote on Monday, “If the country once was seen as the world’s most effective and enduring democracy, the latest events tell a far different story, that of a nation at war internally and with its institutions under assault.” That seems like a problem with elites. As I noted in “The Ideas Industry,” respect for American elites is not high right now. It seems as though the constant theme of elite commentators this week will be to bash elites some more.

Along these lines, Eliot Cohen had a smart piece in The Atlantic over the weekend about two scandals involving two very different elite intellectuals: Judith Butler’s unthinking defense of fellow scholar Avital Ronell despite evidence that Ronell had abused her power as a senior scholar, and Ed Whelan’s badly misguided effort to claim that Christine Blasey Ford must have confused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh with some other dude.

Both Butler and Whelan have apologized for their egregious blunders, so this is not a case of Cohen attacking people who think they did no wrong. Rather, he asks how two very smart people could have messed things up so badly.

He then goes on several, to my view, marginal digressions.

But I do agree with this.

Even people who qualify as elites in every sense of the word can find a way to think of themselves as an outsider. This has been a theme of American elites for quite some time. George Kennan was the perfect embodiment of the foreign policy elite in this country, but one would not get that sense from his autobiography or biography. Kennan’s self-conception was that he was an awkward kid from Wisconsin who never fit in at Princeton or any of the later august societies he joined.

I suspect that Butler and Whelan also feel like outsiders. Butler is a big cheese in the academy, but I am sure she looks out at the country from her academic sinecure and views herself as part of an aggrieved minority. Similarly, Whelan is a conservative living in a very liberal legal town. No matter what his actual power as a key cog in the conservative legal movement, he considers himself part of a spirited minority.

I think we confuse elite, power, credentials, status, majority status.

We are each, ultimately, a minority of one because we are each unique individuals. While some ideologies seek to privilege particular attributes of individuality over others, such as race or religion or health or age or gender, etc. the reality is that we are each an amalgam of innumerable attributes on any one of which we might be in the majority or minority but in aggregate we are always a minority of one. There is no reason that age or sex or religion or race ought to be prioritized in salience or importance. That is simply an ideological choice - usually as a means toward obtaining power.

Additionally, one can have status without being elite; one can have power without status. One can be in the majority without power. One can have credentials and not be elite. There are near infinite combinations.

Butler and Whelan are elite (establishment), and have power, credentials, and status but they are not only a minority but a tiny minority. Being isolated among the establishment of power, credentials, and status; they lose sight of everyone else's experience and they lose the inhibitions which come from broadly shared norms.

Everyone, if they wish to, can see themselves as an oppressed minority. It is a choice independent of circumstances.