What Happened?

I wanted to comment about David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column before it disappeared into the memory hole. Most of the column is devoted to a lament over what has happened to our “educated elite” in recent years:

I went to an elite university and have taught at them. I find them wonderful in most ways and deeply screwed up in a few ways. But over the decades and especially recently, I’ve found the elite, educated-class progressivism a lot less attractive than the working-class progressivism of Frances Perkins that I read about when I was young. Like a lot of people, I’ve looked on with a kind of dismay as elite university dynamics have spread across national life and politics, making America worse in all sorts of ways. Let me try to be more specific about these dynamics.

The first is false consciousness. To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well educated and urban and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds.

This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it. Many of the curiosities of our culture flow as highly educated people try to resolve the contradiction between their identity as an enemy of privilege, and the fact that, at least educationally and culturally, and often economically, they are privileged.

But the one passage to which I wanted to draw attention was this:

I really can’t tell what al-Gharbi’s politics are — some mixture of positions from across the spectrum maybe. He does note that he is writing from the tradition of Black thinkers — stretching back to W.E.B. Du Bois — who argue that white liberals use social justice issues to build status and make themselves feel good while ultimately offering up “little more than symbolic gestures and platitudes to redress the material harms they decry (and often exacerbate).”

He observes that today’s educated-class activists are conveniently content to restrict their political action to the realm of symbols. In his telling, land acknowledgments — when people open public events by naming the Indigenous peoples who had their land stolen from them — are the quintessential progressive gesture.

It’s often non-Indigenous people signaling their virtue to other non-Indigenous people while doing little or nothing for the descendants of those who were actually displaced. Educated elites rename this or that school to erase the names of disfavored historical figures, but they don’t improve the education that goes on within them. Student activists stage messy protests on campus but don’t even see the custodial staff who will clean up afterward.

Al-Gharbi notes that Black people made most of their progress between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, before the rise of the educated class in the late 1960s, and that the educated class may have derailed that progress. He notes that gaps in wealth and homeownership between white and Black Americans have grown larger since 1968.

The emphasis is mine.

The question that passage raised for me is why? Some of the potential explanations that occurred to me were:

1. It’s not true.
2. On a percentage basis you make greater gains when you start from a lower basis. It’s that last gap that’s hard to fill (according to the Census Bureau the median income for black Americans is about 80% of the median income of white Americans).
3. Whatever its intentions the Great Society program was a flop. It had an adverse effect if any.
4. Black nationalism. When race became more important than making progress progress stopped.
5. The mass immigration from Latin American that began with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended black economic progress, reversed it even.
6. De-industrialization. Good paying jobs making things have been vanishing for 50 years. The low end service jobs we have been creating don’t produce economic progress (at least not in the United States).

It could be all of the above but I think the most important factors are the last two.

BTW the “elite overproduction” Mr. Brooks mentions is something I’ve been writing about here for the last 20 years. Example: according to the BLS there 58,500 jobs in journalism in the United States. Every year nearly 14,000 journalism majors are produced by our institutions of higher learning.