As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”
As a teen-ager, Carlson attended St. George’s School, beside the ocean in Rhode Island, one of sixteen American prep schools that the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell described as “differentiating the upper classes from the rest of the population.” Carlson dated (and later married) the headmaster’s daughter. His college applications were rejected, but the headmaster exerted influence at his own alma mater, Trinity College, and Carlson was admitted. He did not excel there; he went on to earn what he described as a “string of Ds.” After college, he applied to the C.I.A., and when he was rejected there, too, his father offered some rueful advice: “You should consider journalism. They’ll take anybody.”
[H]e found success at Fox News. There, he developed a dark new mantra. “American decline is the story of an incompetent ruling class,” he told his audience, in 2020. “They squandered all of it in exchange for short-term profits, bigger vacation homes, cheaper household help.” It was an audacious message from a man with homes in Maine and Florida, a reported income of ten million dollars a year, and Washington roots so deep that the Mayflower Hotel honored his standing order for a bespoke, off-menu salad. (Iceberg, heavy on the bacon.) But Carlson framed his advantages as proof of credibility; he told an interviewer, “I’ve always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class.”
In declaring war on the upper class that made him, Carlson joined a long, volatile lineage of combatants against the élite. From the beginning, the United States has had a vexed relationship to distinctions of status—a by-product of what Trollope called our “fable of equality.” Americans tend to root for the adjective (“élite Navy SEALs”) and resent the noun (“the Georgetown élite”).
What’s different these days is that so many of the attacks come from inside the palace walls. Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, grew up comfortably (his father was a bank president), graduated from Stanford and from Yale Law School, taught at a British school for “gifted boys,” and met his wife when they both clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. But he ignores these credentials when he criticizes what he calls “the people at the top of our society.” As a religious conservative, he believes that his values leave him disadvantaged, writing in 2019, “Our cultural elites look down on the plain virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice.”
The Florida congressman Matt Gaetz—the son of a wealthy health-care entrepreneur who for years served as the head of the state senate—called his rival Kevin McCarthy “the most elite fund-raiser in the history of the Republican caucus.” This was instantly understood to be an insult.
Nobody in American public life has a more unsettled relationship to status than Donald Trump. For years, as he elbowed his way into Manhattan and Palm Beach, he touted the exclusivity of his golf courses (“the most elite in the country”) and hotels (“the city’s most elite property”), and he promoted Trump University with the message “I want you to become part of an elite wealth building team that works under my direction.”
None of his élite talk endeared him to what he called “the tastemakers,” who dismissed him as a boorish trespasser. Even after he turned his Mar-a-Lago estate into a private club, he still resented those who had sniffed at him, telling an interviewer, in a tone rarely employed after the age of twelve, “I have a better club than them.”
When Trump ran for President, he adopted the expected criticism of “media élites,” “political élites,” and “élites who only want to raise more money for global corporations.” But, after he took office, he didn’t seem to want to do away with the idea of an élite; he just wanted his own people to be on top.
But, if our élites are undesirable, what would a better élite look like? What, exactly, are élites for?
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, living as a wealthy recluse in Switzerland, was at work on some of the earliest statistical research into what we now call income inequality. By his count, twenty per cent of the population of Italy owned about eighty per cent of the land. . . .he adopted élite, a French word derived from the Latin eligere, which means “to choose.” Pareto intended it to be neither a pejorative nor a compliment; he believed that there were élite scholars, élite shoe shiners, and élite thieves. Under capitalism, they would tend to be plutocrats; under socialism, they would be bureaucrats.
His formulation suggests several varieties of élite influence. There is the cultural power wielded by scholars, think tanks, and talkers; the administrative power radiating from the White House and the politburo; the coercive power resident in the police and the military. . . . Looming over them is economic power, which has occupied a fluctuating position in the West—worshipped, except when it is scorned.
In ancient Athens, wealthy citizens supported choruses, schools, and temples, on pain of being sentenced to exile or death. From the late Middle Ages, philosophers proposed that, instead of banishing the rich, society should exploit their bounty. The Tuscan humanist Poggio Bracciolini argued, in “On Avarice,” that in times of public need the prosperous élite could be made to serve as a “private barn of money.”
This idea prevailed for centuries. During the American bank crisis of 1907, a group of tycoons that included John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan put up personal funds to bail out the financial markets. But that crisis also marked the end of an era: it spurred the creation of the Federal Reserve, which relieved the economic élite of an “onus they had carried since medieval times,” according to Guido Alfani, the author of “As Gods Among Men,” a new history of wealth in the West. Freed of that responsibility, the rich of the early twentieth century became both more entrenched and more extraneous, attracting criticism from regulators, muckrakers, and the growing ranks of organized labor. Alfani notes a pattern that unfolds “repeatedly and systematically across history”: when economic élites become ingrown, impenetrable, and “insensitive to the plight of the masses,” societies tend to become unstable.
The élites “accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike,” he wrote. Once ensconced, they rarely lost power, he warned; they simply swapped seats, moving among industry, academia, media, and public office.
A century after Pareto laid down the concept, he is rarely read, but Branko Milanovic, a former economist at the World Bank, believes that this is a mistake. In his book “Visions of Inequality,” a history of thinking on the distribution of wealth, Milanovic notes that Pareto’s era “strongly resembles current capitalist societies.” Pareto was writing at a time when vast, entrenched inequality in Europe and America fuelled calls for radical upheaval.
Even identifying who is eligible for the élite has grown more complicated. Conservatives venerate the building of wealth and political power but see themselves as persecuted by intellectuals and bureaucrats. DeSantis . . . . in a feat of rhetorical gerrymandering, he excludes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, arguing that, although Thomas occupies the “commanding heights of society,” he “rejects the group’s ideology, tastes, and attitudes.”
Thomas, for his part, focusses his ire on academia, lambasting “know-it-all elites” and declaring that he prefers “Walmart parking lots to the beaches”—though he evidently makes exceptions for certain beaches. Last year, ProPublica reported that for decades Thomas has taken undisclosed luxury vacations, paid for by the Republican donor Harlan Crow, including tropical sojourns on Crow’s superyacht and visits to the secretive California retreat Bohemian Grove, where Thomas befriended the Koch brothers.
Some of the combatants’ definitions of “élite” are almost perfectly opposed. . . . Amid the competing accusations, you may find yourself quietly wondering: Am I in the ruling class? For Americans, that tends to be a touchy question.
Fussell, undeterred, catalogued the markers of the upper class: frequent house guests (“implying as it does plenty of spare bedrooms to lodge them in and no anxiety about making them happy”); tardiness (“proles arrive punctually”); and, as in the case of the young Tucker Carlson, rumpled bow ties. (“If neatly tied, centered, and balanced, the effect is middle-class,” Fussell wrote.)
He ended the book with a system for evaluating the class valence of the goods on display in your house: “New Oriental rug or carpet: subtract 2 (each). Worn Oriental rug or carpet: add 5 (each).’’
Forty years after Fussell’s “Class,” its most striking feature is its prescience. Before we could see the full contours of our new Gilded Age, Fussell sensed that the middle class was “sinking,” pulled down by “unemployment, a static economy, and lowered productivity.” A generation whose parents had clambered out of the working class was amusing itself to distraction in a world of proliferating screens and cheap consumption—“prole drift,” Fussell called it. The class divide was widening once more, and the greatest gap was the one separating Americans who could protect themselves with money from those who could not.
In America’s case, history holds two examples with wildly different outcomes. In the early nineteenth century, old-line Southern élites, who profited from slavery and from exports of cotton, faced competition from Northern élites, who made their money in mining, railroads, and steel. They battled first in politics—some ran for office, others funded candidates—but the élites proliferated faster than politics could accommodate them. Between 1800 and 1850, the number of America’s millionaires soared from half a dozen to roughly a hundred. During the Civil War, the North’s tycoons prospered, the South’s went into decline, and the country suffered incalculable damage.
Half a century later, America was riven once more. In the nineteen-twenties, suspected anarchists bombed Wall Street, killing thirty people; coal miners in West Virginia mounted the largest insurrection since the Civil War. But this time American élites, some of whom feared a Bolshevik revolution, consented to reform—to allow, in effect, greater public reliance on those “private barns of money.” Under Franklin D. Roosevelt (Groton, Harvard), the U.S. raised taxes, took steps to protect unions, and established a minimum wage. The costs, Turchin writes, “were borne by the American ruling class.” . . . . Between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, a period that scholars call the Great Compression, economic inequality narrowed, except among Black Americans, who were largely excluded from those gains.
But by the nineteen-eighties the Great Compression was over. As the rich grew richer than ever, they sought to turn their money into political power; spending on politics soared. The 2016 Republican Presidential primary involved seventeen contestants, the largest field in modern history. Turchin calls it a “bizarre spectacle of an elite aspirant game reaching its logical culmination.” It was a lineup of former governors, sitting senators, a former C.E.O., a neurosurgeon, the offspring of political and real-estate dynasties—all competing to convince voters that they despised the élite. Their performances of solidarity with the masses would have impressed the Castros.
When Trump reached the White House, he ushered in allies with similar credentials: Wilbur Ross (Yale), Steven Mnuchin (Yale), Steve Bannon (Harvard Business), Mike Pompeo (Harvard Law), Jared Kushner (Harvard).
Using data to model scenarios for the future, he concludes, “At some point during the 2020s, the model predicts, instability becomes so high that it starts cutting down the elite numbers.” He likens the present time to the run-up to the Civil War. America could still relearn the lessons of the Great Compression—“one of the exceptional, hopeful cases”—and act to prevent a top-heavy society from toppling. When that has happened in history, “elites eventually became alarmed by incessant violence and disorder,” he writes. “And we are not there—yet.”
[I]nstead of continuing to exhaust the meaning of “the élite,” we would be better off targeting what we really resent—inequality, immobility, intolerance—and attacking the barriers that block the “circulation of élites.” Left undisturbed, the most powerful among us will take steps to stay in place, a pattern that sociologists call the “iron law of oligarchy.” Near the end of the Roman Empire, in the fourth century A.D., inequality had become so entrenched that a Roman senator could earn a hundred and twenty thousand pieces of gold a year, while a farmer earned five. The fall of Rome took five hundred years, but, as the distinguished historian Ramsay MacMullen wrote, it could be “compressed into three words: fewer have more.”
Democracy is meant to insure that the élite continue to circulate. But no democracy can function well if people are unwilling to lose power—if a generation of leaders, on both the right and the left, becomes so entrenched that it ages into gerontocracy; if one of two major parties denies the arithmetic of elections; if a cohort of the ruling class loses status that it once enjoyed and sets out to salvage it.
Which brings us back to Tucker Carlson. When he tells the story of America’s élites, he often scorns them as “mediocre” and “stupid.” But he frames his own failures—the strings pulled on his behalf, the rejected applications, the cancelled shows—as jaunty diversions on the path to success.
Together, these counter-élites conjure a pervasive conspiracy—of immigrants, experts, journalists, and the F.B.I. It’s a narrative of vengeful self-pity, a pining for the wonderful times gone by. Carlson’s old friends in the ruling class occasionally wonder how much of his shtick he really believes, and how much he simply grieves for having lost the game of musical chairs to faster, shrewder, more capable élites. The latter, at least, would make his desperation understandable: he is being replaced.
In the interest of disclosure, I grew up fairly privileged: summering at a home on a lake in the Adirondacks, season passes at a ski resort in the winter, a new car when I went away to college, and a college and law school education paid for in full by my parents. Nothing on the scale of the truly wealthy, but nothing to scoff at either. The difference is that I have never sought to maintain my own status at the expense of others and do not play the system to avoid paying income taxes like so many of the very wealthy.
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