I miss my dad when I read a particularly interesting article, story, or essay and my immediate impulse, six years after his death, is still to send it to him so we can talk about it. This recent article by David Brooks was a real heart-breaker in that sense. It’s not that dad and I would have agreed with every point Brooks makes — or even with each other, across the board — but man, there’s a lot to talk about in this one.
The headline is: “The Sins of the Educated Class,” which is a bit misleading, because Brooks isn’t really talking about “the educated class” so much as “the upper class.” He’s not talking about folks who learned a trade, got a Master’s degree from a state school, or just like to read a lot — all of whom certainly qualify as “educated.” No, he’s talking about folks who went to Stanford, Princeton, Cornell, and similar institutions seemingly designed to endow the lucky few with a lifelong sense of superiority, entitlement, and wealth.
Despite the misleading title of his piece, Brooks makes the point that it’s not “the educated” that have made a mess of things, it’s those who have been educated at elite institutions. He cites research by Julien Berman who found that in 2000, there wasn’t much difference between the political leanings of student journalists at elite vs. non-elite schools. But by 2023, opinions at elite schools had veered off into holier-than-thou progressivism — “about two and a half times more progressive than they were in 2001.”
Most of the energy pushing progressive politics these days is coming from upper-class students at elite universities, which creates an interesting psychological conundrum. How can rich kids at insanely expensive schools claim to be politically progressive if progressivism is largely about being against privilege?
To take a practical example of how this progressive fervor is concentrated in schools with upper-class students, Brooks quotes a report in The Washington Monthly titled “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” The authors surveyed 1,421 public and private colleges and concluded that almost without exception, the protests are only occurring at schools where the vast majority of the students are upper-class: “Protest activity ... [has] taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuitions and fees are exorbitantly high.”
Brooks makes important points about the drift in progressive politics in the past hundred years or so. Until recent decades, progressive political movements have been fueled by working class anger at their exploitation by the elites: auto workers agitating for better conditions; farmers rebelling against banks eager to foreclose on unscrupulous loans and seize their land; undocumented immigrants treated like disposable machinery. Think The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle, Cesar Chavez.
But now, most of the energy pushing progressive politics is coming from upper-class students at elite universities, which creates an interesting psychological conundrum for them. How can rich kids at insanely expensive schools claim to be politically progressive if progressivism is largely about being against privilege? In Brooks’ words: “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.”
How to square that circle?
Brooks identifies three main responses to this conundrum:
Self-justifying radicalization. (To prove you really are progressive despite your obvious privilege, you need to scream louder, cancel more vehemently, make ever more unrealistic demands of “the man.”)
Radicalization as a result of “elite overproduction.” (When there are too many PhDs competing for scarce jobs, people are far more willing to say or do practically anything to gain advantage.)
“Inflammation of the discourse.” Brooks notes that, “the information age has produced a vast cohort of people … who live by trafficking in ideas. … [Such people value'] having the right beliefs, pioneering new beliefs, staying up-to-date on the latest beliefs, vanquishing the beliefs [they] have decided are the wrong beliefs.” He notes that the collapse of religion as an organizing structure makes things even worse: “In the absence of religious beliefs, these moral wars give people a genuine sense of meaning and purpose.”
I encourage you to read the article and let me know what you think in the comments below. (The link should get you through the pay wall.) It seems to me that Brooks is on the verge of calling for a revolution against people like him. That’s not something you’re going read in The New York Times every day!
Dad would’ve gotten a kick out of this one.
fOR DECADES i HAVE TOLD STUDENTS TURNED DOWN BY ELITE SCHOOLS THAT THIS MAY HAVE BEEN A BLESSING IN DISGUISE. THIS ARTICLE UNDERSCORES MY OPINION.
My notes on the david brook's article:
educated-class progressivism - is just liberal progressivism
working-class progressivism - is about class consciousness, changing who owns the means of production.
“This also explains, I think, the leftward drift of the haute bourgeoisie. As the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi puts it in his forthcoming book, “We Have Never Been Woke”: “After 2011, there were dramatic changes in how highly educated white liberals answered questions related to race and ethnicity. These shifts were not matched among non-liberal or non-Democrat whites, nor among nonwhites of any political or ideological persuasion. By 2020, highly educated white liberals tended to provide more ‘woke’ responses to racial questions than the average Black or Hispanic person.”
^This paragraph is what needs to be focused on. Liberal progressivism does everything in its power to avoid talking about class. The socialist class analysis is what will wake people up to the unjust economic structure of our society. They(liberals) will discuss race, trans rights, pronouns, birth control, more black CEOS, JK Rolling and a variety of niche issues (that I don’t deny are important but not as important as the class issue) but nothing that will radically change who owns the means of production or society for the betterment of all or nothing that will threaten the power of the capitalist class.
“A lot of us in the center left or the center right don’t want to live amid this much conformity.”
^this statement is hilarious to me when what is centrism but not wanting to see any kind of radical change happen in society. Centrism is just conforming to the status quo.
“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).”
^fully agree with this but if you have a pathetic left wing movement like you do in the states than even just bringing attention to an issue can get the ball rolling in hearts and minds of people who are not left-wing. So the protests at universities are good they must be working if you have those in power willing to deploy police to stop them. Those in power are willing to ban Tiktok cause thats where the young are learning about the Gaza. So those protests are effective. I’m not sure who it was who said it( I think it was the ADL leader) but the ideological war does matter. It matters because you won’t be able to deploy US troops in a conflict if the soldiers genuiely think they are bad guys or fighting a senseless war. Soldiers have refused to fight before and will desert if they think the fighting is stupid.
“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.”
^ronald reagan’s neoliberalism is more responsible for this than the so-called educated class. He stripped the american government of all its social programs and stopped making education free because of the vietnam war protests.
“Educated class” it feels like he’s just repurposing marxist analysis for his own liberal purposes.