Who are "The Elites?"

Everybody denounces "The Elites," but nobody can agree upon who they are.

From Marginal Revolution:

A simple theory of which thinkers support the elites, or not

by  Tyler Cowen September 3, 2024 at 12:19 am in

I don’t agree with this theory as stated, but it can be worth spelling such things out, if only to see their weaknesses, or perhaps some strengths at some of the more unusual or less likely margins.  Here goes:

People, especially “thinkers,” like to believe they serve all sorts of noble purposes in the intellectual infrastructure.  But in reality their main effects are either to raise or lower the status of the elites in their society.

Noam Chomsky, for instance, has lowered the status of American elites.  That is his net long-run effect, not that he drummed up sympathy for the Khmer Rouge.  A lot more people, for better or worse, are more skeptical of a bunch of things because of Chomsky.

I have to admit to having a soft spot for Dr. Chomsky because he’s unbelievably conscientious about answering emails from random nobodies.

Back in 2000 during my brief foray as a reporter, I’d ask Chomsky for quotes applying his linguistics expertise to hot political topics like bilingual education, and he’d helpfully respond, not particularly worrying about which of his allies he might offend by offering qualified support to, for instance, my take that the then-fashionable policy of delaying teaching English to Spanish-speaking immigrant kids until adolescence could leave them permanently stuck with an accent that would damage their job prospects. For example, I wrote in 2000:

MIT linguist Noam Chomsky is famous for demonstrating that children are born with an innate ability to learn words and grammar. He suggests caution on the subject but pointed out, “There is no dispute about the fact that pre-puberty (in fact, much earlier), children have unusual facility in acquiring new languages.”

As for the Khmer Rouge, obviously, Chomsky screwed up his take on Cambodia massively. On the other hand, during the exact same period, the mid-1970s, he made one of his better foreign policy calls on the extraordinarily obscure subject of East Timor. I can recall reading a couple of his op-eds in the Los Angeles Times about 50 years ago on how Kissinger was screwing up badly by letting Indonesia take over the East Timor colony of the collapsing Portuguese Empire.

The argument back then for letting Indonesia have East Timor was, in my mind: Whoever heard of this place? It is [thumbing through the Encyclopedia Britannica] half of one of the thousands of islands in the East Indies archipelago, most of which are now part of Indonesia. So why not let Jakarta rule this ex-Portuguese colony the way it already runs West Timor? Sure, the generals who run the Indonesian military dictatorship are not nice guys, but they are neither Communist nor white, so what’s the problem? It’s just like India taking over the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1962. Isn’t it? And I don’t see leftists complaining about that.

That was my teenage attitude and I presume that was Kissinger’s as well. But Chomsky’s op-eds left me uneasy because he obviously knew vastly more about East Timor than I ever would.

Chomsky’s head is photoshopped onto Mao’s body

And he mostly proved to be right on East Timor. The Indonesian generals exploited their windfall shamefully to line their own pockets at the expense of the islanders. During the 1998 Asian economic crash, the Indonesian military regime fell and Australia stepped in to help East Timor become independent. (Granted, from what little I know of the last quarter of a century, independent Timor-Leste remains in pretty rotten shape. But still …)

The New York Times, in contrast, works hard to raise the status of elites.  It tries especially hard to raise the status of Democratic elites, but still it is raising the status of elites for the most part.

Most “heterodox” thinkers like to think they are encouraging a more nuanced understanding of when the elites are right and when they are wrong.  And indeed that is what some of their more perceptive readers take away.  But their overall important gross effect is typically to raise the status of elites.  They make the public discussion of issues better and more vibrant (one hopes).  And thus, if only in a longer run, the status of elites goes up.  Sorry buddy, I know that wasn’t exactly your goal!

If you teach at a top or Ivy League school, your net effect is to raise the status of elites.  With the exception of a few such people who make horrible blunders and end up disgraced.  Or in fewer cases they may be accused of false charges.  Otherwise, the simple fact of “a smart, accomplished person affiliating with elite institutions” is the main message you are sending.

Chomsky has been a professor at MIT, which, granted, isn’t in the Ivy League, since 1955. He began to undermine B.F. Skinner’s then-dominant behaviorist paradigm in the late 1950s. My vague impression is that in the 2020s MIT seems to be displacing Harvard as the most influential university. Chomsky’s 69 years at MIT haven’t hurt its status in 2024.

In earlier media ecosystems, it was relatively difficult to act to permanently lower the status of elites.  It is in fact quite impressive that Chomsky managed this, and without (earlier) the aid of the internet.

Or perhaps Professor Cowen's use of "elite" is too narrow? In his example involving Chomsky, his usage of "elites" seems largely to apply to foreign policy mandarins like McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger, but not even to the titanic Dr. Chomsky.

In truth, all three of them were academic stars in Cambridge, MA in the 1960s. Bundy and Kissinger became the National Security Advisor in the LBJ and Nixon administrations, respectively, while Chomsky earned immense nongovernmental influence in both linguistics and as a critic of American foreign policy.

Hasn't Chomsky, over the course of his energetic career going back to the 1950s, earned himself the description of being "an elite?"

Tyler's usage of "elites" as being those whom Noam Chomsky tries to undermine mostly makes sense within the context of American foreign policy, where there more or less has to be an official hierarchy of decision makers and a semi-official hierarchy of their advisors. And yet, I'd suspect that even among the National Security Advisor’s staff in the White House, most of them feel that the problem is that their rivals are the real elites, not them.

In domestic policy, there is even less hierarchy and more of just an on-going brawl for influence. And while foreign policy elites tend to at least know quite a bit about their subject areas, domestic policy elites in many of the non-economic fields, such as education school professors and politicians, are often ignoramuses. Recall, for instance, the 2002 Leave No Child Behind act in which the alcohol-wrecked minds of George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy teamed up to mandate that all American public school students score above average by 2014.

Or, for example, after the collapse of the educational reform delusion and subsequent rise of the Great Awokening, we've seen mental minor leaguers like Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ibram X. Kendi suddenly shoot up to vast national influence … and then plummet back into obscurity as their one-time supporters, like at least one Presidential candidate, now try to memoryhole their enthusiasm for the once-dominant ideas and movements of recent years.