Part 10 (1/2)
With students on couches and chairs around him, Kissinger
took questions on all topics, telling the students, ”Feel free to
ask any question you want. There are no impolite questions.”
Later he had dinner with a second group of students,
where he gave a lecture.6
How do contemporary elites become elites? What are they taught? Who authorizes them? Or are they recognized rather than authorized-and by what process? are they quietly recruited and initiated like members of Skull and Bones, the secret society of Yale undergraduates, several of whom attained high political positions?
In earlier eras those questions had relatively straightforward answers. One became a member of an elite by heredity. In ancient Greek the word for aristocracy was aristokratia, or rule by the best (aristos). The a.s.sumption was that n.o.ble birth went along with ”natural” apt.i.tudes for military or political leaders.h.i.+p or high religious office. Actual skills were acquired through training and tutoring. Later Jefferson cited the term aristoi in extolling the value of a ”natural aristocracy” whose members achieved preeminence by ability alone-which a.s.sumed a society that welcomed talent regardless of wealth or birth. In the twenty-first-century United States, however, elite status rarely follows a Horatio Alger scenario where an individual of humble origins gains success by dint of hard work and ability, achieving status and fortune while becoming beholden to none.
Elitism might be defined as the political principle which a.s.sumes that the existence of unequal abilities is an irrefutable fact. That principle was fundamental to n.a.z.i and Fascist regimes; it is equally fundamental to inverted totalitarianism. The ”fact” of unequal abilities is not, however, accidental. Today in the United States there is a circular system whereby elites are produced and the inst.i.tutions producing them are confirmed as ”elite inst.i.tutions,” thereby attracting a fresh supply of promising material that further confirms the inst.i.tutions' special status. A small number of U.S. inst.i.tutions select, groom, train, and certify a small number of individuals as exceptionally talented and warranting privilege.7 ”Elite” private preparatory academies, colleges, and universities, including Bible colleges and theological seminaries, perform the function of identifying and producing, not just elites, but authorities.8 At elite inst.i.tutions, unlike community colleges and many public and private educational inst.i.tutions, the humanities and social sciences are featured prominently, whereby those subjects are designated as a badge of superiority distinguis.h.i.+ng their students from those at lesser schools emphasizing ”work skills.” The vocational education of elites is deferred to the highly compet.i.tive graduate and professional schools in law, medicine, business, the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, where not only qualified pract.i.tioners but ”leaders in their field” are produced. Although a few public universities, even an occasional public high school, make the cut, the high costs of elite inst.i.tutions convert attendance into an investment. The expectation is that there will be a ”return” in the form of a prestigious career.
Elitism functions as a self-sustaining enterprise. The key is to produce not only successful alumni but rich ones to feed the virtually insatiable appet.i.te of elite inst.i.tutions, where fund-raisers are as prolific as scholars and university financial officers are millionaires. While still in school those chosen as future elites are encouraged to ”network” with each other for later reference and a.s.sistance. Academia is also a privileged setting where the successful return as honored guests and lecturers. There they hobn.o.b with the eager wannabes and provide future ”contacts,” letters of recommendation, and resume entries.
Yet while academic inst.i.tutions are the main manufacturers of elites, there remains the post-postgraduate stage of maintaining and refining them, and utilizing their skills. Bright prospects are pa.s.sed along to think tanks, inst.i.tutes, and centers. There they learn the arts of developing ”policy proposals” and demolis.h.i.+ng the arguments of their enemies. Think tanks are not modeled after Plato's austere Academy; they are not environments where individuals are free to explore a problem, letting the chips fall where they may. Rather the tanks and centers function as ideological auxiliaries mobilized to promote the agendas favored by their sponsors. As an executive at one prominent think tank explained, ”We're not here as some kind of Ph.D. committee giving equal time. Our role is to provide conservative public policy makers with arguments to bolster our side.”9 There are also nonpartisan, mercenary ”centers” where ex-officials will sell a.n.a.lyses or proposals on a contractual basis. Flanking these are the foundations that support think tanks, supply grants to select recipients, and promote projects to their liking. Foundations subsidize a variety of causes ranging from liberal to reactionary. Liberal foundations give awards to designated geniuses, while the more extreme conservative foundations are aroused by the prospect of investigating the s.e.xual practices of liberal presidents.10 The reproduction of elites is an instance of the phenomenon of ”rationalization.” The existence of elites doesn't just happen; it is systematized, premeditated, refined to a practice a.s.suring that those who are selected as ”promising leaders.h.i.+p material” will prove to have the right stuff, thus validating the methods of selection and, in the process, perpetuating the system that has made them possible. It is said that at night, when elitists look at themselves in a mirror, they mutter, ”The system cannot be all bad . . .”
IV.
Elitism is perhaps most p.r.o.nounced in the areas of politics relating to international relations and foreign policy. This is not surprising because these are precisely the areas where, historically, partisans.h.i.+p has supposedly been taboo-except for bipartisans.h.i.+p. (”Politics stops at the water's edge.”) Historically, matters of diplomacy, foreign policy, war, and peace have been singled out as a special province to which both the opposition and the public are admitted only when it becomes politically awkward to bar them or expedient to admit them. Revealingly, foreign policy was once called the domain of ”statecraft” and was closely a.s.sociated with so-called arcanae imperii, state secrets, suggestive of a range of especially sensitive matters involving high risk, great dangers, and swift responses, and demanding superior intelligence, specialized knowledge, lengthy experience, and a relatively free hand. Thus, virtually by definition, foreign affairs were not only ”outside” politics but a domain of expertise where notions of democracy seemingly made no sense. Foreign affairs, like military affairs, were about power politics, unpredictable dangers-including threats to the very existence of the nation-complex strategies, and ”the” national interest, subjects about which average citizens lacked the experience and competence to judge. The models for the kind of experienced expertise qualified to deal with high matters of state were the ”wise men” a.s.sembled by President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and later by President Johnson for Vietnam strategies.11 Although the one was a near nuclear disaster (averted because in the end JFK followed his own judgment) and the other a clear disaster (plunged into because LBJ did follow his more hawkish advisers), neither resulted in discrediting the status of elitism or its claims. Two prominent neocons predicted that installing ”a decent and democratic government in Baghdad” would be ”a manageable task for the U.S.”12 As the second Iraq war proved, failure merely stiffens the resolve of elites and their defenders.
During the first Gulf War George I exulted that ”by G.o.d, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”13 The syndrome included not only popular resistance to an adventurous foreign policy and mounting criticism of ”the foreign policy elites,” but, equally important, widespread experiments in spontaneous ”teach-ins” where the pros and cons of foreign policy and military strategies were avidly discussed by ordinary citizens, students, and teachers. One of the reasons why ”the sixties” continues to be a favorite punching bag of neocons and neoliberals is that it represented a decade of prolonged popular political education unique in recent American history. The most frequent topics were racism, foreign policy, corporate power, higher education, and threats to ecology-each in one form or another a domain of elitism. Public universities, such as those at Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Madison, played a leading role in the organization of antiwar activities. That none of those inst.i.tutions was ruffled by antiwar agitation at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 testifies to the effective integration of universities into the corporate state.
V.
Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy,
the inescapable sine qua non. Governments produced by
elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible,
dominated by special interests, and incapable of
adopting policies demanded by the public good. These
qualities make such governments undesirable but they
do not make them undemocratic.
-Samuel P. Huntington14
It is striking that at the very moment in our nation's history when the most vital public questions revolve around foreign policy, the issue of elitism versus democracy should emerge and, equally significant, a.s.sume the form of a neoconservative-neoliberal attack upon democratic elections.
Of late, democratic elections in the United States have appeared clouded. They have not been marked, as elections in Weimar Germany were, by the violence of an extreme Communist Left and an extreme racist-nationalist n.a.z.i movement on the right. Nor have they been threatened, as was Italy's weak parliamentary system of the 1920s, by the repet.i.tion of a Fascist March on Rome-marches in the United States have been overwhelmingly aimed at defending democratic inst.i.tutions. Instead, electoral democracy was subverted in the 2000 election by Republican elites a.s.sisted by toadying conservative appointees on the Supreme Court; by a code of near silence on the part of the ma.s.s media; and by a supine opposition party. The opposition failed to alert the citizenry to the threat posed by the display of managed democracy in Florida and its less publicized equivalents elsewhere in the nation; instead Democrats blamed Ralph Nader. The events heartened the apologists for Superpower who have set about to discredit democratic elections, reducing their status from a first principle to a strategy and, in effect, justifying machinations (sic) that engineered a coronation rather than an election.
VI.
Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an
aristocracy within democratic ma.s.s society.