Our Elite is No Elite At All

American Greatness ^ | 2/6/22 | Victor Davis Hanson

[AT7Saluki]

In the 21st century, other elite criteria seem to count as much as the old markers of lineage, money, and location. “Certification,” defined as degrees from the “right” undergraduate and graduate schools, is essential for an elite resumé.

Such brands have little to do with education per se or aggregate knowledge acquired. (It is not clear that an Ivy League student would do better on the same SAT, taken upon graduation as earlier, upon admittance). Are our best generals those with Yale degrees, and our best CEOs those with Stanford MBAs? And are Harvard Law Review editors—think Barack Obama, the boss of Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, James Comey, and John Brennan—our top legal and ethical minds?

The point of certification is that it is the cattle brand to open networking doorways and empower even banal arguments from authority. A Harvard MBA or a Princeton BA is not difficult to obtain. But getting into such places in the first place to obtain such a certification most certainly was hard. And whether it was in the past a matter of being white, rich, and well connected, or in the present being non-white, female, and well-connected, the key is joining an elite club—not justifying one’s membership in it by current and future demonstrable excellence.

Another route to being an elite is found in some sort of political, media, academic, sports, or entertainment celebrity—the Robert De Niros or LeBron Jameses of the world. We are not sure how all these celebrated people became elites, only that some exercise influence and win adherents through their ubiquity—and notoriety. A Don Lemon or Jeffrey Epstein is not an elite by virtue of proven achievement or innate talent, much less character. But they sort of became mysteriously famous for being famous (or infamous).

[AT7Saluki]

"Elite": yet another word that has lost its true meaning.

[Red Badger]

Our ‘elite’ are effete.....................

[Wallace T.]

If the current ruling class can entirely defeat and repress conservatives and traditional Americans, they will be toppled, like the French or Russian aristocracy, by either a homegrown Robespierre or Lenin coming out of Antifa/BLM or a foreign power. probably China or a Chinese-Russian-Muslim combine.

[Old Yeller]

Delusions of grandeur. When they’re dead, they’ll be worm food like the rest of us.

[Seruzawa]

The people we see put forward as “elites” are in fact amongst the worst people in our society. Stupidity, arrogance, bigotry and incompetence are their more obvious traits. God only knows what perversions they get up to in private. Well, in some cases, like Toobin, we unfortunately do get to know.

[MtnClimber]

Our elite are scumbags.

[Chode]

no no no, not Elite, Elitists...

[Antoninus]

When the ruling class of a society becomes almost universally immoral, they lose any claim to leadership or elite status. That's about where we are right now.

And sadly, this country was not supposed to have a "ruling class" at all. Those who became public servants were supposed to desire to go back to the farm or the family business as soon as they were no longer needed.

[blueunicorn6]

Our elites watch Citizen Kane and think that “Rosebud” was just a sled.

[ßuddaßudd]

who assigns that status? the msm?
l o l

[seowulf]

Elite has always meant inbred powdered princes with no intellectual curiosity.

If they didn’t have access to money other people better than they earned, they couldn’t even feed themselves.

[Karoo]

Perfect.

[maddog55]

Egotistical
Liberal
Idiotic
Tyrannical
Extremist

[VanShuyten]

Another excellent article by VDH, this one being a compendium of the lies, incompetence, and inanities of the “elites”.

[BatGuano]

But then what happens after the Toppling? It has not been good for the Russians or the French...

[sauropod]

.

[Wallace T.]

We may get lucky, as this society is so decadent that it would be harder for a Robespierre or Lenin to arise out of the poorly educated, often drug addled and unhealthy youth that belong to Antifa. Trotsky escaped from exile via a deer-pulled sleigh through the frozen tundra of Siberia in February. Lenin was a hunter, an ice skater, a mountain climber, and a long distance cyclist. They may have been urban leftist intellectuals, but they were also pretty hardy men.

More possibly, China, Russia, and Iran will pull a tripartite attack on Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel, respectively. Communist gains in the Western Hemisphere will give the Sino-Russian alliance bases to harass the United States in its own back yard. J.R. Nyquist has an interesting view about a long term Communist strategy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt0uoSmij_0&t=327s