Everyone is talking about the Chris Hayes piece “Twilight of the Elites”. I agree it’s a must-read (and I try never to use that phrase):
In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment.
[….]For more than 35 years, Gallup has polled Americans about levels of trust in their institutions — Congress, banks, Big Business, public schools, etc. In 2008 nearly every single institution was at an all-time low. Banks were trusted by just 32% of the populace, down from more than 50% in 2004. Newspapers were down to 24%, from slightly below 40% at the start of the decade. And Congress was the least trusted institution of all, with only 12% of Americans expressing confidence in it.
The whole piece is worth reading.
But I wonder, since polling data only goes back 30 or 40 years at the most, how much this says about today’s supposed cynicism and how much it says about the gullibility of the post-war years. I don’t know what American railroad workers and dust bowl farmers really thought about early 20th century elites anymore than I know what European cathedral-builders really thought about the Catholic Church.
I also wonder if cynicism about today’s elites is caused by actual increases in elite corruption and incompetence or by technological changes that make the already existing corruption and incompetence more obvious. I’m willing to admit that today’s elites may be more nakedly careerist than the elites of yesteryear. But maybe that’s because yesteryear’s elites were more confident, that no hungry generations tread them down: Louis Mayer wasn’t worried about being bought and sold by a private equity firm, Walter Cronkite wasn’t afraid he’d be replaced by Luke Russert. For all I know, Walter Cronkite would have sucked up to the BIrchers if he’d he felt real ratings pressure.
Generally, when it comes to the powerful screwing over the masses, I doubt there is much new under the sun.
The book How the Other Half Lives revealed the horrible conditions 19th century immigrants lived in. It wasn’t that conditions had gotten worse, but that the new medium of photojournalism made it harder for the world to ignore. I tend to think the same thing is going on now with the internet.
Of course, Bobo would have us believe that this is bad, that “too much transparency” has made the peasants too aware of the failings of their social superiors. That’s why he’s a conservative and I’m a hippie.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
The peasants don’t complain much when the fridge is full and junior has his braces. Take those away and out come the pitchforks and lanterns. We have been here before, but not since WW2. And not with sides also ideologically lined up north and south since Lincoln’s day. Smaller pieces of pie plus regional discord makes for interesting times.
Ty Lookwell
“A large majority of Russians, on the other hand, as they have regularly made clear in opinion surveys taken during the past fifteen years, regret the end of the Soviet Union, not because they pine for “Communism” but because they lost a familiar state and secure way of life. No less important, they do not share the nearly unanimous Western view that the Soviet Union’s “collapse” was “inevitable” because of inherent fatal defects. They believe instead, and for good reason, that three “subjective” factors broke it up: the way Gorbachev carried out his political and economic reforms; a power struggle in which Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet state in order to get rid of its president, Gorbachev; and property-seizing Soviet bureaucratic elites, the nomenklatura, who were more interested in “privatizing” the state’s enormous wealth in 1991 than in defending it. ”
…
Soviet elites took much of the state’s enormous wealth, which for decades they had defined in law and ideology as the “property of all the people,” with no more regard for fair procedures or public opinion. To maintain their dominant position and enrich themselves, they wanted the most valuable state property distributed from above, without the participation of legislatures or any other representatives of society. They achieved that goal first by themselves, through “spontaneous nomenklatura privatization,” and then, after 1991, through Kremlin decrees issued by Yeltsin, who played, as a former top aide put it, “first fiddle in this historic divvying-up.” But as a result, privatization was also haunted from the beginning by, in the words of another Russian scholar, a “‘dual illegitimacy’–in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the population.”
Stephen Cohen
The Soviet Union, R.I.P? (The Nation)
Walker
90% income tax rates have a tendency of lessening the effects of corruption.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
This place is dead as Franco tonight.
Martin
@Walker: Yeah, I agree. Money has been at the root of almost all of the corruption – basically it’s the easiest path to get from not having something to having something, and the government, as much as the teapartiers would have us believe otherwise, provide relatively little friction on that path, either through taxation or investigation.
Linkmeister
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Br-a-a-a-i-n-s!
DougJ
@Ty Lookwell:
Thanks for this — interesting.
Martin
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Yeah, this is my first weekend free of a crushing work schedule. Of course, I’ve got a crushing honeydo list to replace it. Oh well. Got a nice bike ride in – legs are all rubbery. Maybe I’ll finally get down to my target weight after all. Getting old sucks.
Daniel
I have a theory about elites of the past versus today. Eugene Meyer, who bought The Washington Post and helped make it what it is today, did it in the name of public service. Now, since newspapers could be very profitable back then that may not have been entirely true but spending a lot of money in the name of the public was not a rare thing.
But you don’t hear that about elites today. Nobody is spending money and then saying they did it to serve the public. Today it’s all about personal gain.
Cat Lady
The whole past 30 years has been a classic mob bust-out scheme, with the Bush crime family leading the mob. We became The United Scatinos of America. We’ve all come to understand that to be welcomed into the elite, it demands lying, cheating and stealing, and to lie, cheat and steal means you need to prey on the rubes, which means the rubes need to be kept ignorant, fearful and distracted. It’s getting harder and harder for corrupt institutions to keep the lid on tight. Light has a way of penetrating.
Mark S.
@Ty Lookwell:
If it’s any consolation, Yeltsin’s big sell off allowed assholes like this to buy football teams.
Maybe I’m naive, but I really think elites used to less greedy and corrupt. For illustration, please see the first graph on this page. We are well on our way to becoming a banana republic.
PeakVT
I also wonder if cynicism about today’s elites is caused by actual increases in elite corruption and incompetence or by technological changes that make the already existing corruption and incompetence more obvious.
Respect for existing hierarchies of authority has been in decline for quite a while – centuries, arguably. But let’s not forget about the conservative campaign against the SCLM, and against all aspects of government except the military. I think that has as much to do with current cynicism as anything else.
trizzlor
There was a study not too long ago which showed that if a person is exposed to negative information about a candidate their opinion of the candidate decreases even after they later find out that information was false.
From that perspective, an abundance of information, weather true or false will generally result in lowered opinions. This is especially true given that media tends to focus on negatives anyway.
patroclus
I’m not sure if I trust anything that “elitist” Christopher Hayes says! I mean, I’ve met Chris Hayes, who writes for the Nation and seems pretty cool (and bums cigarettes off me), but who exactly is this “Christopher Hayes” for the proto-elite Time Magazine?? How much ill-gotten monies did the “elites” pay him for this analysis??
Is he going to go the same way as Joe Klein-Hoekstra now that he’s working for Time? Is he going to start condescendingly lecturing me as to how I should feel about the elite/downtrodden dichotomy and what this or that poll means?
This whole “use the name Christopher rather than Chris” thang sounds a lot like an elitist journalistic sell-out to me…
Slaney Black
Two words: Bush Administration. They did things Nixon and Reagan never even dreamed of. And not just big things like torture. Small things like coke and hookers at the Interior Department.
Things have gotten qualitatively worse – and the best barometer is real average weekly wages.
They’ve been flat since the early 70’s. A little blip upward in the 90’s and then oh guess what the President gets impeached.
My theory: back when the East Bloc was still around Western elites had to act like they gave a fuck so the rubes didn’t go commie. After the wall fell, the gloves came off.
Citizen_X
@Mark S.: Wow. And this struck me:
Now there are some countries at the low end–Pakistan and Iran–that probably have low numbers by virtue of not having as much of a capitalist class. But yeah, we’re headed for a Mexican-style country: corrupt, sheltered elites, with the google-eyed peasantry (in Taibbi’s apt words) helpfully kept in line up by fear of Gawd.
@Slaney Black: I think you’re on to something with your theory.
Svensker
@Citizen_X:
When I was a kid, bankers and CPAs were respectable folks who had dull jobs and made decent money. Now they are sexy folks who have fast-lane jobs and make awe-inspiring amounts of money. Not coincidentally, banks and accounting firms are no longer staid places of business, but creative places were the action is.
JBerardi
Hmm… reminds me of something I once read in
The Biblemy bible:“Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards.” – Bill James, The New Historical Baseball Abstract
DPirate
Things were MUCH MUCH worse in the past. If you don’t think so, then imagine yourself a farmer whose banker comes and a) rapes your daughter, b) steals your produce and c) impresses you into his army.
Just 60 or so years ago, he would come bulldoze your house.
It’s a form of exceptionalism, I think, to imagine that we’ve got it worse, when really things are much better across the board pretty much all over the world. Like grampa saying how he had to walk through 4 feet of snow to school uphill both ways.
Corruption is, of course, rampant; it always has been. From the teacher who gives out grades to whining students, to the checkout clerk who accepts your expired coupon, to the CEO who embezzles millions, it will not ever go away entirely, but we have much better safeguards against harm now than ever before.
WereBear
Organizations are built by humans, and evolve along with them. I’m sure the serfs were happy when they had a big castle to run into when the Mongols came sweeping over the hills.
Perhaps certain institutions don’t deserve our admiration any more. That’s actually a good thing; what would be stupid is pretending.
sdstarr
The wingnuts and the teabaggers have long complained about the “elites” or the “cultural elites.” What they mean are the people with advanced degrees, professors, scientists, artists and some politicians. These people have been discredited, and are losing their influence in today’s culture.
However, the real elites – people with massive wealth – are strengthening their position all the time. In fact, the “cultural elites” are being discredited because they foolishly got in the way of the money elites.
The article’s weakness is that it confuses what are two totally different forms of power: knowledge and money. Money will win.
Mark S.
@DPirate:
Yes, we do have it better than Braveheart.
For no reason? I don’t know if they still do a lot of bulldozing, but there still is foreclosure.
Look, a lot of things have gotten better, but most of this discussion has been about the last 50 years or so. My point is that inequality has been steadily getting worse in the last 40 years.
DougJ
@JBerardi:
Bill James is, and always has been, a genius.
Janet Strange
I really couldn’t process any of what he was trying to say after this because this part is such bullshit. Most of the people running things did not get there by being bright and industrious. This country is not a meritocracy. It aspires to be, and does better than some other places – and worse than some others. But there’s way too many people in power who are there for no other reason than that they picked the right parents and belonged to the right fraternity.
And it’s been my admittedly anecdotal experience that the folks who are in their positions because of family connections and entitlement are the most likely to be a) incompetent and b) corrupt.
This article is just another round of “don’t trust those smarty pants ‘elites.'”
Hayes’ column implies that being bright and industrious and succeeding in our meritocracy results in corruption and incompetence. Which is proven (he claims) by the fact that we have a lot of corruption and incompetence. Without any acknowledgement of how far from a true meritocracy we actually are in this country. It’s like a lead in to why we need to return to a system of aristocracy, cuz clearly this meritocracy thing isn’t working.
Sorry, I’ve been immersed in the Civil War lately and the main thing I took from it was that there was one part of the country who believed in aristocracy – and that it was just How Things Should Be that a few “superior by birth” people should kidnap other people and force them to work to support the aristocrats’ pleasant lifestyle – and another part who believed America should be a place where people succeeded or failed through their own effort.
Lately I tend to see everything in terms of aristocracy and whether people think that some people are born inherently superior and therefore entitled to privilege, or whether they think that “all men are created equal.” (As a female atheist, I’d have said it differently, but I agree wholeheartedly with what TJ was trying to say. Which is why I’m a liberal even though I’ve lived in the South all my life and have at least one ancestor that I know of who fought on the wrong side of that appalling war.)
mattH
FDR made government respectable. Much of the trust in it is from his programs.
Restrung
sorry seems to be the hardest word.
Jackie, don’t hold back. you’re right. Or you’re Janet.
The Raven
It’s a “dawning insight” sort of article. Observing that our rulers and leaders have become more and more corrupt over the past 30 years and that, with the W. Bush administration, this became common wisdom is rather like noticing that the water flowing downhill has filled the depression it was flowing into and has now overflowed. I’m glad that our MSM has noticed. But it’s not exactly news.
Public cynicism about rulers and leaders ebbs and flows. Partly it depends on the real virtues of our elites. But it also depends on endogenous factors analogous to the factors that lead to the fractal patterns of price variations.
Chuck Butcher
You could make a correlation between the top marginal tax rate the the rise of corruption and incompetence and the fall in “trust.” I know, Commie lefty shit…
Pangloss
Sinclair Lewis wrote “It Can’t Happen Here” in 1935, when there was a real question as to whether we would go the way of Germany/Italy via Huey Long and Father Coughlin.
The Fairness Doctrine was a wise bulwark against the indoctrination of the masses by a corporate media. At the time, the post-war ethos of ethics in journalism hadn’t taken root yet. The removal of the doctrine reverted the media to the yellow journalism business model.
4jkb4ia
I looked up how long Gallup has been asking how much people trust the government to do what is right, and that is since 1972–Watergate. You notice that the elections of 1974 and 1976 were about wanting to get new people in there so that you could trust the government again. “Black Jimmy Carter” is a joke, but some of the same dynamics were there in the 2008 election as well. You could not have had the liberal advances of the 1930s through 1960s if people did not trust the government more than they do now.
4jkb4ia
Then we find out that Congress had a Gallup 18% approval rating in September of 1992, when they were not getting anything done either. This should be a warning that distrust in elites can mean demagoguery although Hayes wasn’t so crude about it.
4jkb4ia
During the 1940s and 1950s, Gallup asked: “Do you think Congress is doing a good job or a poor job?” The current version of the question, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way that Congress is handling its job?”, came in in 1974.
DPirate
Well, inequality is different from corruption, I guess. Is the question whether USA is WAD or not? I think that it isn’t (for the people, by the people), yet I’m sure that it is (capitalism, public education)? Anyhow, I hope the future is less about repair than it is about replacement.
El Cid
There are actually sets of academic studies which have looked at things like the government’s interactions with people in the early 20th century, including during and just after the New Deal.
Peoples’ feelings that they trusted governing and corporate institutions weren’t just via opinion polling — many, many Americans were directly assisted and even saved by government intervention, not just from poverty, but from health difficulties and sanitation conditions, transportation problems, and they had also seen the same happen to their relatives, friends, coworkers, and neighbors.
It wasn’t just some illusion based on PR.
If you measure contacts people had with government agencies, for many, many people, particularly in the South, it was the first time any of them had had contact with government officials which weren’t simply repressive — sheriffs, tax collectors, and the like.
They saw inspectors coming to their plants and getting dangerous conditions removed. They saw mud roads being paved and reworked. They saw forces of employed persons attempting to control erosion. They saw electricity coming into areas normally dark or dependent on the variability of local power sources such as mill river wheels. They saw neighborhoods with fetid open human waste pits have septic systems installed and the insect and parasite riddled areas cleaned up. They got visits from public health workers and community health clinic doctors who may have treated their wounds and illnesses for the first time.
These were real things — and in many areas these things happened in areas where nothing like this had ever happened.
People didn’t imagine these things.
And this is why conservatives hated the New Deal, hated this use of our democracy to make ordinary peoples’ lives better, not shittier.
Chris Hayes
@Janet Strange:
You raise a good point and I realize, seeing that section quoted that my own skepticism about the “best and brightest” doesn’t quite come through. The essay was originally written at 2500 words and pared to 1200 so I think some of what I wanted to spell out was left on the cutting room floor. My main points are these
1) That our current “meritocracy” isn’t really functioning as a meritocracy at all because the mechanisms of circulation and accountability have been subverted by those in power.
2) The deeper social theory point, one which it takes at least a book to argue is that this is an *inevitable* outcome of the entire social model of a meritocracy, that is, it is bound over time to become corrupted and sclerotic, and that more of less we’re in the decadent, down sloping phase of the post 60’s meritocratic order.
Anyway, great thread here. Happy to see the piece sparking such thoughtful commentary.
Joel
I had some issues with the article. For one, Hayes is trying to tie a bunch of loose ends that don’t necessarily fit; distrust of elite institutions like congress, banking, and the catholic church stems from very public incidences of corruption or perceived corruption. Distrust of science comes from something entirely different. People just don’t appreciate that the facts about reality don’t necessarily reflect what they’d like reality to be; that holds true whether you’re a creationist, a bircher, a hippy, a writer for Slate, an antivaccine type, or some combination of the above.
I imagine that Galileo enjoyed a ~20% popularity rating in his time. And it was a corrupt elite institution – a crime family, really – that supported him.
Corner Stone
@Cat Lady:
Don’t have the time to flesh it out but shorthand – ISTM that in our recent history our “elites” went from those who were most brutal and ruthless ala Robber Baron phase, to a phase where our “elites” were actually very innovative, creative and intelligent (by most standards), to lately where if you want to make it to the elite level you have to be the most corrupt and without social mores, etc.
IOW, the lesson via Milken, Skilling, et al is to rob and steal from everyone until you get enough money to get away with it.
MikeBoyScout
As a expatriate Burgher, my fave from our CEO banker overlords was Richard Mellon’s testimony before the Senate back in the 20’s
“You could not run a coal company without machine guns”
Naturally.
drillfork
Hayes lost me when he lumped baseball in with Congress and Wall Street. The media’s sanctimonious faux outrage over baseball players on ‘roids never ceases to disgust me.
shep
So people are more pissed because the media – Now with Intertubes! – is better!?
I’m going to go all Occam’s Razor here and suggest it’s more likely elite failure (Hayes’s thesis) plus elite reward:
http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20060621/
People have an innate sense for when they are being f*cked without being kissed.
Annamal
I’d just like to step in and shill here for the BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares which currently has me thinking that the neocons have a much larger slice of the blame for the current mistrust of everyone in charge than I ever thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_nightmares