Readers of the NY Times got a surprise when they turned to the Opinion Page today; David Brooks regular column appears to have been mysteriously replaced by an over the top parody of Brooks usual 'thoughtful conservative' musings. The parody is a response to Chris Hayes Twilight of the Elites, in which Hayes contends that people elevated to elite status by meritocracy have ended up as an over class ultimately through their grasp on power rather than ability; selection based on the inequality of merit (the Best & Brightest paradigm) leads to the entrenchment of inequality.
The answer from the pseudo-Brooks is to turn to traditional inequality - a return to traditional American governance by a largely hereditary aristocracy of White Anglo Saxon Protestant men.
Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service.
See, the problem with an elite of meritocrats is simple: they lack the sense of noblesse oblige traditional WASP culture inculcates in its class.
The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.
What today's elite lacks is the rigorous core values that makes traditional WASP culture so effective.
...today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.
The declining fortunes of print journalism are becoming only too painfully obvious when a columnist in a premier paper can be plausibly punked as openly advocating a return to racism, sexism, anti-semitism, and an elite aristocracy as the solution to America's problems. There's just a little too much "truthiness" on display to credibly believe even Brooks would go so far as to conclude:
The difference between the Hayes view and mine is a bit like the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. He wants to upend the social order. I want to keep the current social order, but I want to give it a different ethos and institutions that are more consistent with its existing ideals.
Tight-lipped editors at the Times would neither confirm nor deny that the paper's editorial space had been highjacked, and refused to comment at all on assertions they had not noticed anything amiss till it was called to their attention.. David Brooks was unavailable for comment, reportedly haven taken refuge in a safe house in the Hamptons to regenerate the self-amused sang froid so often on display on NPR, PBS, and the Sunday morning news programs.
A spokesman at The Onion when asked to comment on the Friday 13th hacking of the Times said ruefully "This is the problem with our business model. It's becoming increasingly difficult to do satire and parody when the boundaries keep getting shifted. When you have a sitting senator saying truly patriotic Americans do everything possible to avoid paying taxes, a state political party adopts a platform calling for the banning of teaching critical thinking in its schools, and a state governor conflates providing healthcare for millions with the gestapo and death camps, we have very little space left to work in. As Mark Twain observed, it's no wonder truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense."
Oddly enough, Paul Krugman had inadvertently provided a powerful rebuttal against the return to aristocratic elites in his blog several days earlier.