Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

By Chris Hayes

A powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy.

Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another –  from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.

How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.

Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary, and deep historical understanding, Twilight of the Elites describes how the society we have come to inhabit – utterly forgiving at the top and relentlessly punitive at the bottom – produces leaders who are out of touch with the people they have been trusted to govern. Hayes argues that the public's failure to trust the federal government, corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but our day-to-day lives.

Upending well-worn ideological and partisan categories, Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times. Twilight of the Elites is the defining work of social criticism for the post-bailout age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crown
• Release date: Jun 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307720474

Book preview

Chapter 1

THE NAKED EMPERORS

Now see the sad fruits your faults produced,

Feel the blows you have yourselves induced.

— RACINE

A MERICA FEELS BROKEN .

Over the last decade, a nation accustomed to greatness and progress has had to reconcile itself to an economy that seems to be lurching backward. From 1999 to 2010, median household income in real dollars fell by 7 percent.¹ More Americans are downwardly mobile than at any time in recent memory. In poll after poll, overwhelming majorities of Americans say the country is on the wrong track. And optimism that today’s young people will have a better life than their parents is at the lowest level since pollsters started asking that question in the early 1980s.²

It is possible that by the time this book is in your hands, these trends will have reversed themselves. But given the arc of the past decade and the institutional dysfunction that underlies our current extended crisis, even a welcome bout of economic growth won’t undo the deep unease that now grips the nation.

The effects of our great disillusionment are typically measured within the cramped confines of the news cycle: how they impact the President’s approval rating, which political party they benefit and which they hurt. Most of us come to see the nation’s problems either as the result of the policies favored by those who occupy the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, or as an outgrowth of political dysfunction: of gridlock, bickering, and the increasing polarization among both the electorate and the representatives it elects.

But the core experience of the last decade isn’t just political dysfunction. It’s something much deeper and more existentially disruptive: the near total failure of each pillar institution of our society. The financial crisis and the grinding, prolonged economic immiseration it has precipitated are just the most recent instances of elite failure, the latest in an uninterrupted cascade of corruption and incompetence.

If that sounds excessively bleak, take a moment to consider America’s trajectory over the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The Supreme Court—an institution that embodies an ideal of pure, dispassionate, elite cogitation—handed the presidency to the favored choice of a slim, five-person majority in a ruling whose legal logic was so tortured the court itself announced it could not be used as precedent. Then the American security apparatus, the largest in the world, failed to prevent nineteen men with knives and box cutters from pulling off the greatest mass murder in U.S. history. That single act inaugurated the longest period of war we have ever known.

Just a few months later Enron and Arthur Andersen imploded, done in by a termitic infestation of deceit that gnawed through their very foundations. At the time, Enron was the largest corporate bankruptcy in the history of the nation, since eclipsed, of course, by the carnage of the financial crisis. What was once the hottest company in America was revealed to be an elaborate fraud, aided and abetted by one of the most trusted accounting firms in the entire world.

And just as Enron was beginning to be sold off for scraps in bankruptcy court, and President Bush’s close personal connection to the company’s CEO, Ken Lay, was making headlines, the Iraq disaster began.

Iraq would cost the lives of almost 4,500 Americans and 100,000-plus Iraqis, and $800 billion, burned like oil fires in the desert.³ The steady stream of grisly images out of the Middle East was only interrupted, in 2005, by the shocking spectacle of a major American city drowning while the nation watched, helpless.

As the decade of war dragged on, the housing bubble began to pop, ultimately bringing about the worst financial panic in eighty years. In the wake of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, it seemed possible that the U.S. financial system as a whole would cease to operate: a financial blackout that would render paychecks, credit cards, and ATMs useless.

In those frenzied days, I watched Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury secretary Hank Paulson defend their three-page proposal for a Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in front of a packed and rowdy Senate hearing room. When pressed on the details by members of the Senate Banking Committee, Bernanke and Paulson were squirrelly. They couldn’t seem to explain how and why they’d arrived at the number they had (one Treasury staffer would tell a reporter it was plucked more or less at random because they needed a really big number).⁴

Watching them, I couldn’t shake a feeling in the pit of my stomach that either these men had no idea what they were talking about or they were intentionally obfuscating because they did not want their true purpose known. These were the guys in charge, the ones tasked with rescuing the entire global financial system, and nothing about their vague and contradictory answers to simple questions projected competence or good faith.

Washington managed to pass the bailout for the financial sector, and while Wall Street would soon return to glory, wealth, and profitability, the rest of us would come to learn in gruesome detail all the ways in which the source of its prosperity had, in fact, been the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of human civilization.

The cumulative effect of these scandals and failures is an inescapable national mood of exhaustion, frustration, and betrayal. At the polls, we see it in the restless, serial discontent that defines the current political moment. The last three elections, beginning in 2006, have operated as sequential backlashes. In 2006 and 2008, Democrats were able to point to the horrifyingly inept response to Katrina, the bloody, costly quagmire in Iraq, and, finally, the teetering and collapsing economy. In 2010, Republicans could point to the worst unemployment rate in nearly thirty years—and long-term unemployment rates that rivaled those of the Great Depression—and present themselves as the solution.⁵

Surveying the results of the 2010 midterms on election night, Tom Brokaw alluded to the collapse of trust in institutions in the wake of a war based on lies and a financial bubble that went bust. Almost nothing is going the way that most people have been told that it will. And every time they’re told in Washington that they have it figured out, it turns out not to be true.⁶

At a press conference the day after Democrats faced a shellacking in the 2010 midterm elections, Barack Obama recounted the story of meeting a voter who asked him if there was hope of returning to a healthy legislative process, so as I strap on the boots again tomorrow, I know that you guys got it under control? It’s hard to have faith in that right now.⁷

And who could blame him? From the American intelligence apparatus to financial regulators, government failures make up one of the most dispiriting throughlines of the crisis decade.

As citizens of the world’s richest country, we expend little energy worrying about the millions of vital yet mundane functions our government undertakes. Roads are built, sewer systems maintained, mail delivered. We aren’t preoccupied by the thought that skyscrapers will come crashing down because of unenforced building codes; we don’t fret that our nuclear arsenal will fall into the wrong hands, or dread that the tax collector will hit us up for a bribe.

It is precisely because of our expectation of routine competence that government failure is so destabilizing.

We’ve created this situation where we’ve created so much mistrust in government, Ivor van Heerden told me one night in a seafood restaurant in the coastal town of Houma, Louisiana.⁸ For years van Heerden was deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, which issued a series of dire warnings about the insufficiencies of the levee system in the run-up to Katrina. After the storm, van Heerden was fired by LSU, because, he suspects, he was so outspoken in his criticism of the Army Corps of Engineers.

You have these politicians that are selling this mistrust, he said in reference to the ceaseless rhetoric from conservatives about government’s inevitable incompetence. And the federal government sure as hell hasn’t helped.

And yet the private sector has fared no better: from the popping of the tech bubble, to Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing, to the Big Three automakers, to Lehman Brothers, subprime, credit default swaps, and Bernie Madoff, the overwhelming story of the private sector in the last decade has been perverse incentives, blinkered groupthink, deception, fraud, opacity, and disaster. So comprehensive and destructive are these failures that even those ideologically disposed to view big business in the best light have had to confront them. I’ve always defended corporations, a Utah Tea Party organizer named Susan Southwick told me.  ‘Of course they wouldn’t do anything they knew was harming people; you guys are crazy.’ But maybe I’m the crazy one who didn’t see it.⁹

The dysfunction revealed by the crisis decade extends even past the government and the Fortune 500. The Catholic Church was exposed for its systematic policy of protecting serial child rapists and enabling them to victimize children. Penn State University was forced to fire its beloved football coach—and the university president—after it was revealed that much of the school’s sports and administrative hierarchy had looked the other way while former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly raped and abused young boys on its own property. Even baseball, the national pastime, came to be viewed as little more than a corrupt racket, as each week brought a new revelation of a star who was taking performance-enhancing drugs while owners, players, and union leadership colluded in a cover-up. I’m 31, an Iraq war veteran, a Penn State graduate, a Catholic, a native of State College, acquaintance of Sandusky’s, and a product of his Second Mile foundation, wrote Thomas Day, days after the Penn State scandal broke. And I have fully lost faith in the leadership of my parents’ generation.¹⁰

The foundation of our shared life as Americans—where we worship, where we deposit our paychecks, the teams we root for, the people who do our business in Washington—seems to be cracking before our very eyes. In our idle panicked moments, we count down the seconds until it gives out.

In the course of writing this book, I spoke to hundreds of Americans from all over the country, from Detroit to New Orleans, Washington to Wall Street. I traveled to those places where institutional failure was most acute, and spoke with those lonely prophets who’d seen the failures coming, those affected most directly by their fallout, and those with their hands on the wheel when things went disastrously off course. No one I talked to has escaped the fail decade with their previous faith intact. Sandy Rosenthal, a New Orleans housewife radicalized by the failure of the levees during Katrina, founded Levees.org in order to hold the Army Corps of Engineers to account, and she described her own disillusionment in a way that’s stuck with me: We saw how quickly the whole thing can fall apart. We saw how quickly the whole thing can literally crumble.¹¹

The sense of living on a razor’s edge is, not surprisingly, most palpable in those areas of the country where economic loss is most acute. On a freezing cold January night in 2008, I accompanied the John Edwards campaign bus on a manic, thirty-six-hour tour of New Hampshire, and in the wee hours of the morning on primary day we stopped in the small former mill town of Berlin, New Hampshire. Murray Rogers, the president of the local steelworkers union and himself a laid-off millworker, was one of those who came out to greet the campaign bus as it rolled into the Berlin fire station at 2 A.M. When I asked him why he was there, he told me it was because he felt like no one in government cared about the fate of the millworkers of New Hampshire … with the exception of Edwards. When his mill had closed, he’d written to all the Democratic primary candidates. Edwards, he said, offered to come and help us; he wrote a letter to the CEO because of the poor severance package they gave us. None of the others even offered to come.¹² When news of Edwards’s appalling personal behavior hit the papers, I immediately thought of Murray Rogers. Who would be Rogers’s champion now?

In Detroit, the national capital of institutional collapse, the feeling of betrayal and alienation suffuses public life. Just drive around, a local activist named Abayomi Azikiwe told me in 2010. It’s just block after block after block of abandoned homes, abandoned commercial structures.¹³ Officially unemployment was about 28 percent, he said, but the real figure was closer to 50 percent.¹⁴ This is ground zero in terms of the economic crisis in this country. They say the stimulus package saved or created about two million jobs. We really don’t see it. As hard hit as Detroit is, it’s also probably the region of the country (with the exception of the tip of Lower Manhattan) that has most directly benefited from federal government intervention in the wake of the crash. In many ways the bailout of the automakers was a stunning success, but like so many of the Obama administration’s successes, it is one only understood counterfactually: things could be much worse. But if this is what success looks like, what hope do the rest of us have?

I can’t remember when I last heard someone genuinely optimistic about the future of this country, former poet laureate Charles Simic wrote in the spring of 2011. I know that when I get together with friends, we make a conscious effort to change the subject from the state of the country and talk about grandchildren, reminisce about the past and the movies we’ve seen, though we can’t manage it for very long. We end up disheartening and demoralizing each other and saying goodnight, embarrassed and annoyed with ourselves, as if being upset about what is being done to us is not a subject fit for polite society.¹⁵

That emotional disquiet plays in different registers on the right and the left, but across the ideological divide you find a deep sense of alienation, anger, and betrayal directed at the elites who run the country. I’m an agent for angst, one Tea Party organizer told me, and the whole Tea Party movement is an agent for angst.¹⁶ The progressive blogger Heather Parton, who goes by the screen name Digby, has dubbed the denizens of the Beltway who arrogate to themselves the role of telling Americans what to think the Village, and it was Village mentality, a toxic combination of petty obsessions with status and access to power, that in her view produced the disaster in Iraq and the financial crisis that followed. In Parton’s telling, the Village is a permanent D.C. ruling class who has managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth.¹⁷

It’s not just the activist base of the left and the right who have recognized the widespread elite failure; more and more individual elites have broken ranks to acknowledge their own responsibility. Rob Johnson is a good example of this new kind of class traitor. With a résumé that boasts a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton and years at the infamous Soros Quantum fund, Johnson has a uniquely intimate perspective on American elite failure: For years, the right has worshipped markets and now they have reason to be skeptical, he told me. Meanwhile, the left has romanticized government and now they have reason to be skeptical. So what you’ve got now is a society that is demoralized because they have nothing to believe in.¹⁸

Go all the way back to Sumerian civilization, Bill Clinton instructed a crowd of global jet-setters at the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, and you’ll see that every successful civilization builds institutions that work, that lift people up and reward people for their greatness. Then, if you look at every one of those civilizations, all those institutions that benefited people get long in the tooth. They get creaky. The people ruling them become more interested in holding on to power than the purpose they were designed for. That’s where we are now in the public and private sector.¹⁹

The Davos crowd seemed unmoved by this rare dose of honesty. But then, the mood of Davos that year was a strange mix of cluelessness, self-importance, and repressed shame. Hours after Clinton gave that speech, a European economist who had spent the last three decades consulting with a major American investment bank admitted to me that he, too, had lost faith in his own profession, and in the competence of the global ruling elite gulping down cocktails at the bar on all sides of us. In retrospect we were all illiterate! I include myself in that. Larry Summers and Bob Rubin thought they were intellectual masters of the universe. Alan Greenspan, too. But the emperor had no clothes!²⁰

In the early 1970s, Vietnam and Watergate provoked such national paroxysms of self-doubt and distrust that both Gallup and the General Social Survey began asking Americans how much trust they had in their major institutions—big business, public schools, the Supreme Court, and about a dozen others.

Writing in the New York Times on April 8, 1970, James Reston observed: Behind all the questions of politics, ideologies and personalities … lies the larger issue of public confidence and trust in the institutions of the nation.… That trust does not exist now. The authority of the Government, of the church, of the university, and even of the family is under challenge all over the Republic, and men of all ages, stations and persuasions agree that this crisis of confidence is one of the most important and dangerous problems of the age.²¹

But what was viewed at the time as a nadir of public trust turns out to have been its high-water mark. By 2007—even before the financial crash—both Gallup and the General Social Survey showed public trust in nearly every single major institution at or near an all-time low.²² Twelve of sixteen institutions measured by Gallup recorded their all-time low in public confidence in the aughts, while seven were at their all-time high in the seventies. Those institutions that have lost the most trust are also the most central to the nation’s functioning: banks, major companies, the press, and, perhaps most troublingly, Congress.

According to Gallup, Congress is the least trusted institution in the country: just 12 percent of respondents expressed a great deal of trust in it. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who studies campaign finance and congressional corruption, notes that the British Crown was almost certainly more widely trusted in the colonies at the time of the revolution.²³ Approval ratings of Congress lag behind Paris Hilton and the United States going communist.

A 2010 Pew survey revealed that trust in government in general was at the lowest level since Pew started measuring it in 1978. But while anti-government sentiment has its own ideological and partisan basis, Pew noted, the public also expresses discontent with many of the country’s other major institutions. The ratings for Congress were just as low as they were for large corporations (25% positive) and banks and other financial institutions (22%). And the marks were only slightly more positive for the national news media (31%), labor unions (32%), and the entertainment industry (33%).²⁴

The least trusting are those who came of age in the aughts. A 2010 study conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics asked more than three thousand millennials whether they thought various institutions did the right thing all the time, most of the time, some of the time, or never. Of the military, the Supreme Court, the President, the United Nations, the federal government, Congress, traditional media, cable news, and Wall Street executives, only one—the U.S. military—was believed to do the right thing all or most of the time by a majority of respondents.²⁵

You can construct a whole host of theories to explain this evaporation of trust. One of the most common, particularly popular with those who find themselves the target of distrust and anger, is that the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the frenetic intensity of the Internet eat away at people’s faith by sensationalizing mistakes and insinuating nefarious motives.

Former Republican senator Bob Bennett, who was ousted by the Tea Party over his support of TARP, made precisely this case to me in explaining his own plight: The moral for that story is: if people will read responsible publications and commentators … and they have a sense of respect for institutions and those of us who labor in those institutions, then we’re OK. But if you get all of your information from the blogs, then you’re just angry because we’re lying to you.²⁶

There is no question that we have access to more information than ever before. The deluge of twenty-four-hour cable news and the Internet can obscure as much as it clarifies, and the explosion of prying electronic eyes in camera phones and Internet gossip sites means that every failing, every misstep, no matter how small or human or pathetic, can be and often is reported and obsessed over. In another era, we probably would never have seen Anthony Weiner’s crotch shot, and—let’s be honest—the republic isn’t any better off for us having had that privilege.

A natural consequence of the proliferation of news sources is a more balkanized political landscape. CBS’s Walter Cronkite would speak to nearly 20 million people every night during his heyday, an audience larger than all three network evening newscasts combined in 2010. As the audience has dispersed, distrust in the media has skyrocketed. In 1979, newspapers were one of the most trusted institutions in America, with ratings over 50 percent; today they’re one of the least. The same goes for TV news.²⁷

Declining trust in the mainstream media isn’t helped by the simple fact that it hasn’t performed particularly well during the past ten years. By and large the media managed to miss the two most consequential stories of the decade—the manipulation of intelligence that led to the Iraq War, and the growth of the housing bubble and associated financial chicanery that would ultimately cause the crash.

But after surveying the wreckage of the fail decade, it takes some willful delusion to blame the media or an ungrateful public for our predicament. We do not trust our institutions because they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. The drumbeat of institutional failure echoes among the populace as skepticism. And given both the scope and the depth of this distrust, it’s clear that we’re in the midst of something far grander and more perilous than just a crisis of government or a crisis of capitalism. We are in the midst of a broad and devastating crisis of authority.

WHEN YOU bring your car to your mechanic because it’s making a worrisome noise, you trust that he’s knowledgeable enough to figure out what’s wrong and scrupulous enough not to rip you off. On all things auto-related, your mechanic is an authority. In public life, our pillar institutions and the elites who run them play the mechanic’s role. They are charged with the task of diagnosing and fixing problems in governance, the market, and society. And what we want from authorities, whether they are mechanics, money managers, or senators, is that they be competent—smart, informed, able—and that they not use their authority to pursue a hidden agenda or personal gain.

We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade. Elite failure and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society. It structures and constrains the very process by which we gather facts, form opinions, and execute self-governance. It connects the Iraq War and the financial crisis, the Tea Party and MoveOn, the despair of laid-off autoworkers in Detroit to the foreclosed homeowners in Las Vegas and the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans: nothing seems to work. All the smart people fucked up, and no one seems willing to take responsibility.

The key both to Barack Obama’s political success and to his political setbacks lies in his ability to connect to our core sense of betrayal and his inability to deliver us from it. Obama’s 2008 campaign promised that he would take the voter’s hand and lead her out of the bewildering forest of confusion and darkness into the light of a new, hopeful era. And he was uniquely positioned to make this case, both because of his biography—a testament to American institutions at their meritocratic best—and because of his record.

Obama only had a fighting chance at the nomination because of the credibility bestowed by his appearance at a 2002 rally opposing the invasion of Iraq, where he referred to the impending invasion as a dumb war. When all the smart people got it wrong, including his many rivals for the nomination, he got it right. He, alone among the leading contenders, was able to see that the emperor had no clothes. Hillary Clinton and her husband came to symbolize the Establishment, and Barack Obama was there to dislodge it. He invoked, time and time again, the great social movements in American history that

Reviews for Twilight of the Elites

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A bit of a rant, seeping with sad helplessness.

[sethwilpan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Meritocracy is a self-destructing paradigm. Once people earn their way to the top, they tilt the playing field in their favor, which creates a more or less entrenched elite class. The social distance between the elite and the rest renders the elite unable to govern effectively. The solution is to enforce equalization, the main tool for which is taxation. The top 20% of the populace is becoming increasingly discontent as power becomes concentrated in an ever smaller (.001%) elite, and in their disaffection they will power a new movement for equality. This latter idea comports with the idea I've been harboring for several years of a revolt of the middle managers.

The writing is intelligent and engaging, animated by anecdotal examples that illustrate Hayes' well constructed thesis. My 3 stars is a reflection of the depth and breadth of the argument, not of the writing. It was necessary for Hayes to spend the time he did to make his argument, but I think a thumbnail would have been sufficient for me to grasp it. I'd like to see him engage that disaffected top 20% to see how willing they are to move toward equality.

[liscarey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

America from our beginnings as a nation has always inclined toward what we now call meritocracy--the idea that talent rather than birth should be the major determinant of gets the jobs and positions that make society, business, and government run. It's an inarguable idea; no one wants their surgeon to be selected on the basis wealth and connections, or by the superficial "fairness" of a lottery. That would be foolish. And since the word was invented, and the formal tools started to develop, in the early part of the last century, the USA, more than any other major country, has fully committed to an utterly uncompromising version of meritocracy.

The result hasn't been heaven on Earth. It's been, after initial success, the ever-increasing and ever more disastrous failure of our elites and our institutions. Why? Because aggressive meritocracy, with ever-increasing emphasis on high-stakes selective testing, highly selective "best" schools, and all the rest, pitched as equality of opportunity, without any commitment to some rough equality of outcome, ultimately kills equality of opportunity--and it cripples the ability of our carefully selected meritocratic elites to actually to the excellent job we assume they will do, or ought to be doing.

Some of the reasons were obvious to me even when I was in high school. I love standardized tests. They're fun. I "test well." Those test scores got me some excellent choices in colleges.

And I knew kids just as smart as I was, in any practical sense, who froze when confronted with a standardized test. They did not "test well."

The implications of the still relatively new test prep industry were less apparent to me. My classmates and I were mostly lower middle and working class. Stuff was going on in the high schools of the leafy suburbs that we knew not of. In the decades since, it's gotten more extreme, and the notion that kids from ordinary, working class families, much less working poor families, have an equal shot at a quality or prestigious higher education is little more than a bad joke. This book was published in 2012; it's now 2019, and the latest higher ed scandal is not another round of the same old stuff, but wealthy and connected families getting their kids into the "best" schools, not with the usual institutional bribery with buildings and resources that might benefit every student, but frank bribery of coaches and sports directors. "Athletic scholarships" get privileged kids in who can't make those test scores or play those sports at an elite level or, sometimes, at all, and some less privileged kid who could is displaced.

But Hayes to a great extent looks at the highest-end consequences--a financial crisis that nearly crashed the global economy, because the relentless focus on "meritocracy" and rejection of any concern for outcomes meant the decision-makers at the top have no idea what's going on in the real economy, where most people live, work, and struggle to earn enough to pay their bills. The great gulf of social distance means bankers have no idea how lending policies affect neighborhood stability and the long-term stability of banking; political leaders have no idea how decisions about war and peace really play out either on the ground, or in the lives of the soldiers and their families. Political leaders of both major parties, mostly without military experience in the current leadership generations, are much more inclined to believe military action is a good idea than military veterans and elites who, since 2001 especially, have seen a lot of combat.

I've thought, for a long time, contrary to my generation and my overall political views, that ending the draft was a terrible mistake. It creates the "social distance" Hayes talks a lot about in this book, with most civilians knowing nothing of the reality of military life, and career military knowing very few civilians well who aren't themselves members of military families. There's a loss of mutual understanding and communication, and I think it's very dangerous in the long run.

I also remember listening to Alan Greenspan on tv, saying it was "foolish" for potential home buyers not to "take advantage of the "creative" financing inventions to buy more home than they needed or to use equity in their homes to finance other things. And I was screaming at the tv that he had no excuse to be that stupid and oblivious to how dangerous was the behavior he was recommending. But who listens to librarians about banking? No one.

Hayes gives a much calmer, more comprehensive, analytical presentation of the history, the facts, and the consequences, whereas I still have a lot of rage on the subject. Go read his book, and I'll end my comments here.

Even seven years later, this is still a book you should read or listen to. Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

[larryerick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really liked this book, but not for it's beginning, which read like a highly academic proposal for a research grant. Nor did I like the ending. Not for the same reason, but because it was clear the author was neither as confident in his statements, as he was in the rest of the book. However, the vast middle of the book was outstanding. Hayes introduced me to new ideas and new perspectives on the complexities of our society and our politics on which I am already fairly well read. Anyone who doesn't spend more time reading (intentionally or otherwise) about the Paris Hiltons of the world than they do the Grover Norquists, should read this book. He sees light at the end of the tunnel of America's great political divide. Light that doesn't involve violence and hatred.

[altonmann · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Twilight of Elites by Christopher Hayes cleverly redefines "elites" & reclaims a term long ago hijacked by right. He may be the Moyers of his generation. So stop reading your newspapers, turn off the TV & read this excellent book.

This is the best book about the "fail decade" of the 00s. It's original, lucidly written and amazingly ranges from Iraq war, steroids in baseball, Catholic pederasts, Katrina, housing bubble - all with original insights - and I've read plenty of books on most of those topics. My bookshelf titled "our Current Dark Age" lists these books, and many are first rate. This book is special however. Don't miss it.

[dantarlin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was already a fan of Chris Hayes due to his work on MSNBC, so I fully expected to like this book, and I did. He is describing how the "meritocratic elite" that has run things in the US for so long is breaking down in its ability to make good decisions, and how the public at large has grown disillusioned with their ability to do so. The examples he keeps returning to include our political leaders, the Catholic Church (and its response to the sexual abuse scandal), and Wall Street in light of the banking crisis of 2007-09.

The book was written in 2012, but it holds up very well five years later, especially in light of Donald Trump's election- which is really all about the Rabble rising up and displacing the elites, first in the Republican party and then in the country as a whole.

The sad reality at the center of the book is that what we think of as purely meritocratic processes, starting with the example of the exclusive public school in New York for the gifted that Hayes attended, has become a rigged game- yes, anyone who tests high enough can go to the school, but wealthy and privileged families are the ones who can afford the test prep required to get to the top of the heap. Similar gaming occurs in every sector, and the US has consequently become a place with high inequality and low social mobility.

I totally agree with the diagnosis of the problem. I was less excited about the end- prescription for fixing this problem seems vague and unlikely. But a great read, not hard to get through.

[askelmore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Best for: People looking for some insight how the U.S. got where it is, and some ideas for what we need to do to change that.

In a nutshell: The inequality in this country is harming us, and the powerful (in Government, in Business, in Banking) are so focused on the idea of meritocracy that they can’t see that it isn’t working.

Line that sticks with me: “In reality our meritocracy has failed not because it’s too meritocratic, but because in practice, it isn’t very meritocratic at all.” (p53)

Why I chose it: I finally read the back cover and realized that the topic is something that interests me greatly.

Review: This well-paced, well-researched, easy to read book is yet another one that I wish I’d read as part of a book club. I want to talk about the things I just read, and get other perspectives! Which I think is a pretty strong endorsement.

Mr. Hayes (of MSNBC fame - also his twitter feed @chrislhayes is a nice mix of news and incredulity at the news) divides the 240 pages of his book into seven meaty chapters that fly by. He starts by providing the reasonable premise that the U.S. likes to think of itself as a meritocracy - that anyone can get ahead if they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Never mind institutional challenges (don’t worry, he gets to those); those who get to the top are there because they deserve it.

He then goes on to explain how this mythical notion, if it every actually was true, is certainly no longer true. Using such great examples as steroid use in baseball, the banking collapse (and bailout), and the Iraq war, Mr. Hayes provides a thoughtful commentary on how our systems are not operating in a way that allows people to get what they deserve; they instead are functioning in such a way that they foster even more inequality as time goes on. He provides some interesting reasons for why it is getting worse, such as the fact that the elites of any field are out of touch with the rest of us, and that when we set ‘being the best’ as the ultimate goal, we also set ourselves up for people to cheat their way to the top.

I found two parts of the book especially compelling: the first is early one, when Mr. Hayes uses his high school alma mater (Hunter College High School) to demonstrate how something that is ostensibly 100% merit-based has become quite inequitable. The other is his ability to remind the reader that people have different descriptions of the elite — the Left see the Elite as the power-hungry corporate CEOs and Wall Street Banks; the Right see the Elite as Hollywood, academics, and fancy intellectuals — but that ultimately what matters is that the elite don’t seem to care for or represent the rest of us.

Mr. Hayes doesn’t leave us without hope; he offers up examples like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as different ways the people have gotten together to fight back against those in power. The entire last section is full of different ideas, although none so concrete that I feel I can point to what I need to do next. That said, I think a lot of what we’ve seen in reaction to the 45th U.S. President fits in line with his suggestions.

I’m leaving out other important things, such as his fascinating discussion of insurrectionists versus institutionalists is fascinating, but hopefully you get the point. What’s so disconcerting is that this book was published five years ago, and yet the downward spiral continues. I wish this book weren’t so relevant, and that it was more history book than current events, but alas, here we are.

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a great analysis of the failures of meritocracy, a system that seems impossible to criticize. Hayes shows how a meritocracy does not really allow for all people to rise by their own efforts but rather that those at the top use the system, as all other systems, to protect their own position, promote advancements for their friends and family and ignore the needs of those lower down. From the financial system to education to health care and even baseball emphasis on a meritocracy is shown to promote cheating in order to rise in the system and a sense of entitlement that leads to a distance from and lack of care about those further down the system. This attitude in the long run can lead to a collapse of the whole system. If only we could come up with a solution, but I guess pointing out the problem is a first step

[ohernaes · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Meritocracy created insulated, partly corrupt, elites in a wide variety of institutions, elites that are out of thouch with and reach of the rest of society. There may be something to it. Ok.

[nostalgebraist · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good, brief, easy-to-read survey of the ways in which the pathologies of our current elite have helped produce the various disasters of the past decade (financial, military, etc.)

Hayes' big idea is that an overzealous, ideological application of the idea of "meritocracy" is responsible for all this. Meritocracy -- using supposedly objective criteria to pick out the best people and then giving them the reins of power -- isn't a bad idea, exactly, but (says Hayes) it has flaws and failure-modes that that we haven't sufficiently accounted for. It can encourage risky and irresponsible behavior by rewarding those who luck out and benefit greatly in the short term from the risks they take, since they're indistinguishable (in the short term) from those who are simply "good enough" to achieve such results consistently. (This is what happened in the competitive, intensely "meritocratic" internal culture of Enron.) It can create a hugely unequal playing field, despite its pretenses of neutrality, by creating explicit standards that can be carefully gamed by those with time and money on their hands. (Hayes gives the example of his high school, which viewed itself as egalitarian because its only admission criterion was a single, difficult test. But, unsurprisingly, many of the school's students were the products of expensive private tutors who taught to the test.) And even if meritocracy succeeds in singling out the most competent people, it can produce "social distance" between those people from the masses they are responsible to, making them less able to empathize with those people or understand why they behave the way they do.

If there's a flaw in this book, it's the broadness and vagueness of the central claim. Hayes is loose enough with his definition of "meritocracy," and ecumenical enough in his consideration of its flaws, that he's able to tie a huge range of seemingly disparate facts and anecdotes to his theme. For instance, the different types of meritocractic failures he talks about seem, to me, to be quite different beasts. In some cases -- the Enron example, for instance -- it seems like he's complaining that so-called meritocratic systems actually aren't meritocratic enough, that they reward short-term performance when long-term performance is what really matters (i.e., is the relevant definition of "merit"). At other times, it's not clear whether the problem is with meritocracy per se or just with the basic positive feedback loop of power -- the fact that having more power makes it easier to get even more. It's certainly true that having money and power makes it easier to collect credentials that in turn lead to even more money and power, but is that a problem with meritocratic credentialing, or just part of the way power works?

Hayes ends his book with a plea for redistributive taxation. He points out that most Americans already support a much less unequal distribution of wealth (and in fact fail to appreciate just how unequal the current distribution is), and claims that with less inequality, the people at the top would be less out of touch. The book is clearest and strongest when it's pushing this conventionally leftist line of reasoning: too much money and power has concentrated in the hands of too few, that's bad news, and it can be fixed with redistributive policy. Hayes is on shakier ground when he blames that this concentration on meritocracy -- not because the basic idea isn't promising, but because Hayes' version of it is too vague, too under-specified, too Malcolm Gladwell-esque in its ability to absorb every cool anecdote Hayes wants to tell. (But then, given the culture of modern nonfiction publishing, I can't blame Hayes for choosing to focus on such an edgy, counter-intuitive, Gladwellian big idea.)

[jcbrunner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In a decent political environment, Chris Hayes would be a center-right social democrat. In the United States, he is considered a flaming liberal, at least in the terms his employer, General Electric's MSNBC, still deems acceptable. The strangeness of "Twilight of the Elites" is that Hayes fully stays within the reigning paradigm. He is no iconoclast; he more or less wants to restore and fiddle a bit at the margin of the system. Restoring the legitimacy of the elite is his goal.

The flaw of the book is Hayes' deep belief in meritocracy, a reign the Greeks didn't know about. They called it aristocracy, the rule of the best which quickly degenerates into an oligarchy. It is certainly true that the US society contains large pockets of meritocratic potential. A winner-takes-all society allows for the rise of talented individuals. If one looks a bit closer, however, one sees that these examples, such as Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, have been successively groomed in highly exclusionary institutions. Hayes' himself went to New York City's Hunter College High School whose criterion of admission is an aptitude test, open to all. In practice, high income parents spend large amounts of money to teach the test to their children. Schooling in the United States still works under a "separate but equal" frame. As Elizabeth Warren has shown in The Two-Income Trap, a lot of the real estate mania is driven by parents' jockeying for access to the right school for their kids. Everybody knows that an early educational misstep is hard to correct in America's meritocracy. Compared to European universities, the size of the classes of America's Ivies is extremely limited. Harvard University for instance admits 2100 students per year. America's elites are sealed off quite early in their life. Hayes is correct in mentioning that meritocratic criteria play a large role in the selection process, but so does nepotism.

Hayes realizes that the the "Iron Law of Meritocracy" predicts and the current US shows that "over time, a society will grow both more unequal and less mobile". "It would reflexively protect its worst members, it would operate with a wide gulf between performance and reward, and would be shot through with corruption, rule-breaking, and self-dealing as those on top pursued the outsize rewards promised for superstars." A meritocracy can only work if a level playing field exists and rules are enforced. The US, unfortunately, lives in a Friedmanesque flat world of cheaters and crooks.

The failure of the media (CNN in its death spiral comes to mind) to provide accurate information is one of Hayes' explanations: "Americans simply don’t trust the various forms of scientific and elite authority through which information about the threat of climate change is transmitted. And this is the crux of the problem. As unreliable as elite authority has been over the past decade, we can’t fix what needs fixing without it."

"Money, political power, platform, and network power may be distinct conceptually, they are tightly correlated in practice." This nexus or cabal increasingly lives apart from the rest of the population, in gated communities, separating the haves from the have-nots South America-style. What software developers call the "eat your own dog food" to test your product, Lincoln called "government of the people, by the people and for the people". The separation cuts the feedback loop, shown by Hayes recalling elite reaction to church abuses, Katrina, Bush's and Obama's unequally shared burdens of war and the botched rescue of the US financial system.

In his concluding chapter, Hayes rightfully acknowledges that post-WWII USA knew how to create a better society (rampant racism apart). Higher taxes, public education and accountable media are the key to restore fairness. Hayes' appeal for the masses to break their chains (an expression he doesn't use), to re-claw power from the 1 percent is weak. A weakness shared by all US reformists such as Lessig, Reich, Warren, Krugman, Maddow, Greenwald. The US still is in the Erasmus of Rotterdam/Benjamin Franklin of the 1760s stage of reformation where clear-sighted elites see the failing system but are unwilling to push for fundamental change.There will be a long dark time before dawn.