Twilight of the Elites…book review

by Richard Subber | Apr 14, 2024 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality

the American crisis…

Book review:

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

by Christopher Hayes

New York: Crown Publishers, 2012

292 pages

Twilight of the Elites is a frightening assessment of our culture, our government—our civitas.

“We are in the midst of a broad and devastating crisis of authority” (p. 13). You bet we are—and Hayes was writing before Trump was even a speck in your eye.

Americans embrace the American Dream, the Horatio Alger thing, that is, meritocracy: the acceptance and endorsement of the goodness of the idea that we should help ourselves to prosper and be successful, and that those among us with the greatest talent and strength and ambition should enjoy greater prosperity and greater success. It is an article of faith among most Americans that the cream will rise to the top, and deservedly so. Honest hard work will and should be rewarded. One of Hayes’ definitions of a benign meritocracy is “the aristocracy of talent.”

An obvious characteristic of meritocracy, of course, is inequality. “It is precisely our collective embrace of inequality that has produced a cohort of socially distant, blinkered, and self-dealing elites. It is those same elites who have been responsible for the cascade of institutional failure that has produced the crisis of authority through which we are now living…the consistent theme that unites [these failures] is elite malfeasance and elite corruption” (pp. 22-23). This acceptance of the meritocracy mythology “allows everyone to imagine the possibility of deliverance [from unfavorable circumstances], to readily conjure the image of a lavish and wildly successful future” (p. 47).

Hayes points out, however, that “a deep recognition of the slow death of the meritocratic dream underlies the decline of trust in public institutions and the crisis of authority in which we are now mired. Since people cannot bring themselves to disbelieve in the central premise of the American dream, they focus their ire and skepticism instead on the broken institutions it has formed” (p. 63). There is ample attention to the dreadful failure of the media, among other institutions, to sustain our communal understanding and respect for facts and the truth.

A suggestion about one possible agent of positive change identifies a “radicalized upper middle class” that bridges the liberal-conservative division, and forces accountability on our institutions of government, justice, education and finance. Hayes imagines “a crisis…necessary upheaval and social transformation,” and acknowledges the obvious: those with power never want to give it up.

Twilight reminds us that the ultra-wealthy, ultra-powerful 1% will hang on to what they’ve got—and keep trying to get more—until their reality changes.

Hayes tells many truths about the devastation that wracks American culture and most Americans, because the myth of the American dream is enabling a tiny elite to amass wealth and power, and use both to corrupt our society.

Americans must accept the frightening hardships

of a sincere commitment to change things.

Let’s get started.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.

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