David Brooks On The Failure Of The Elites

David Brooks, a somewhat dimwitted apologist for the status quo, has suddenly decided the status quo doesn't work. I signed up for a free trial subscription to the Atlantic so I could reach his latest piece, How the Ivy League Broke America, behind a paywall. If you don't want to do this, he summarizes it in this YouTube interview:

Let's recall that in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, he was all for the elites. The bobos were bourgeois bohemians, whom he defines as postwar Jews beginning with the baby boom generation, who benefited from the advent of the SATs, attributed to Harvard's President James B Conant, which caused elite schools to drop their Jewish quotas and admit high-achieving Jews in greater numbers. Brooks, who got into Chicago, cited his own example as part of this positive outcome. He found the students at Princeton, which he visited as part of the book project, admirable in that they scheduled their days in 15-minute increments to maximize their opportunities. This was meritocracy. In fact, it was paradise.

But something has gone sour:

In short, under the leadership of our current meritocratic class, trust in institutions has plummeted to the point where, three times since 2016, a large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump.

What happened?

Conant’s reforms should have led to an American golden age. The old WASP aristocracy had been dethroned. A more just society was being built. . . . Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford measured America’s economic growth per person from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that up to two-fifths of America’s increased prosperity during that time can be explained by better identification and allocation of talent.

But the voters don't seem to agree, and we have Donald Trump. Brooks's prescription for how we fix this is long and muddled, but it seems to boil down to somehow reforming the SATs:

If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we’re sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.

The idea seems to be we just aren't identifying the right people to send to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

In 1910, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands wrote a book in which he said: “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities—energy.” What you assess is what you end up selecting for and producing. We should want to create a meritocracy that selects for energy and initiative as much as for brainpower. After all, what’s really at the core of a person? Is your IQ the most important thing about you? No. I would submit that it’s your desires—what you are interested in, what you love. We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul.

But this is nothing but gaseous verbiage. Brooks's main proposal seems to be to tweak the elite-school model in some vague way so that their prestige can continue -- although it's worth noting that even among Trump's recent nominees, J D Vance went to Yale Law, Pete Hegseth has degrees from Harvard and Princeton, and Scott Bessent went to Yale. One thing Brooks doesn't seem to consider is Mike Rowe's point, that unprestigious, often blue-collar work can be rewarding on one hand and profitable on the other, no elite-school degree needed.

As I've gotten older, I've come to recognize that, although I went through the elite-school admissions rat race -- and Brooks isn't really advocating eliminating this at all, just sorta kinda rethinking just what type of extracurriculars the admssions office should be weighting -- and I graduated from one of them, I wound up working in fields that didn't even exist when I was in college, IT technical writing, computer security, disaster recovery, contingency planning, and system engineering. Most of my colleagues in those fields didn't even have four-year degrees from any institution.

At the same time, lookng back on my experience as an Ivy undergraduate, I keep being surprised at how many of my schoolmates came from the traditional Ivy demographic -- many were legacies, and of those who weren't, many others nevertheless came from generational WASPy wealth, attended prestigious private secondary schools, and went on to predictable WASPy careers, one roommate to the State Department, another to a white-shoe law firm.

The fact is that the proportions of each entering Ivy class reserved for major donors, legacies, and other favored groups continue to be a closely guarded secret. I'm convinced it's much larger than most people assume. Frankly, the image Brooks keeps trying to project of an Ivy meritocracy based on the SATs has never been much more than a fantasy -- and it's worth wondering how much of that fantasy stems from Brooks's need to feed his own self-regard.