Reviews for The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

The average rating for The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-17 00:00:00 Amy Moye It is symptomatic of my own political leanings, I suspect, that I started losing interest in this a little after the half-way mark and then could barely take a note from the book for the whole of the third part. To me, this book loses its way and stops being about elites (in revolt or not) in the last section of the book. This is a pity, as I think the start was particularly interesting. This was written in 1995 - in fact, the copy I read from my university library had a 'due date' sheet on the front cover - which is nice, since I now know it was borrowed 16 times prior to 1998 - something I rarely get to see about books I read from the library. Now, 1995 is a significantly long time ago, even if it does seem like yesterday, and yet a lot of what is said here could have, in fact, been written yesterday. It only occurred to me, right at the end, that what might have been meant by 'elites' - given this is an American book - might not be I would normally mean by elites. You know, in the US 'elite' often means someone with a bit more than a grade school education who doesn't watch Fox News… There are places here where the notion of 'cultural elites' gets something of a run - again, not my favourite bits of the book. The main thrust of the start of the book is that the growing inequality in our society is producing such a disconnection between those who rule and those who are ruled that they might as well live on separate planets. Not just that, but because wealth equates to power and since there just isn't anywhere when the very wealthy get to speak to most of the rest of us, the notion that 'democracy' should be pursued or encouraged or supported is something the elites are increasingly less likely to feel even makes sense. This book, being American, focuses on what I feel are particularly American obsessions, particularly American views of themselves - and these views don't always translate elsewhere as easily as Americans imagine they should. Nevertheless, growing inequality is an international phenomenon and it is having many of the same impacts across the globe as it is in the US. I've been reading a lot of Bauman - and while both writers are concerned with many of the same themes, for instance, the increasing commodification of all aspects of society, how this is destroying personal relationships, how it undermines community and replaces that with shopping malls, how the public is being replaced by the commercial and so on - I feel this book perhaps 'personalises' these issues a little too much - which I guess is my understanding of the last part of the book and its obsessions with finding spiritual pathways in a post-Enlightenment world and where the cultural elite feel that 'religious experience' is only for those too uneducated to know better. As someone who too easily falls into exactly this trap, I would have liked this part to have been more illuminating - but unfortunately, I don't feel I got anything from it at all. I'm prepared to admit this may have been my fault. I think I'm going to let this guy speak for himself - so here are some quotes: In the first half of the nineteenth century most people who gave any thought to the matter assumed that democracy had to rest on a broad distribution of property. They understood that extremes of wealth and poverty would be fatal to the democratic experiment. p7 Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of / depending on the state pp7-8 Self-governing communities, not individuals, are the basic units of democratic society p8 It is the decline of these communities, more than anything else, that calls the future of democracy into question p8 Democracy requires a vigorous exchange of ideas and opinions. Ideas, like property, need to be distributed as widely as possible. p10 'Diversity' - a slogan that looks attractive on the face of it - has come to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean. In practice, diversity turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion. The physical segregation of the population in self-enclosed, racially homogeneous enclaves has its counterpart in the balkanization of opinion. p17 Washington becomes a parody of Tinseltown; executives take to the airwaves, creating overnight the semblance of political movements; movie stars become political pundits, even presidents; reality and the simulation of reality become more and more difficult to distinguish p38 A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains. Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional and managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rest on intelligence alone p39 Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites; if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognise so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead. Their lack of gratitude disqualifies meritocratic elites from the burden of leadership, and in any case, they are less interested in leadership than in escaping the common lot'the very definition of meritocratic success p41 In Europe referenda on unification have revealed a deep and widening gap between the political classes and the more humble members of society, who fear that the European Economic Community will be dominated by bureaucrats and technicians devoid of any feelings of national identity or allegiance p46 The decline of nations is closely linked, in turn, to the global decline of the middle class p48 What the left makes of such failings is exemplified by Michael Lerner's argument to the effect that 'self-blaming' is the most important obstacle to working-class militancy. 'Workers come to feel that the problems they face are their own failures to adjust to the given reality'. p54 By giving the school system exclusive control over education, Mann's reforms encourage a division of cultural labor that would weaken the people's capacity to educate themselves. The teaching function would be concentrated in a class of professional specialists, whereas it ought to be diffused throughout the whole community. An educational establishment was just as dangerous as a priestly or military establishment. Its advocates had forgotten that children were best 'educated in the streets, by the influence of their associates, … by the passions and affections they see manifested, the conversations to which they listen, and above all by the general pursuits, habits, and moral tone of the community' p66 Before the Civil War it was generally agreed, across a broad spectrum of political opinion, that democracy had no future in a nation of hirelings p81 The hope that rising expectations would lead men and women to invest their ambitions in their offspring was destined to be disappointed in the long run. The more closely capitalism came to be identified with immediate gratification and planned obsolescence, the more relentlessly it wore away the moral foundations of family life. The rising divorce rate, already a source of alarm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, seemed to reflect a growing impatience with the constraints imposed by long-term responsibilities and commitments p95 Americans have a 'split personality, which in turns emphasizes individual liberty and the importance of community' (quoting E J Dionne Why Americans Hate Politics) p113 Needless to say, the elites that set the tone of American politics, even when they disagree about everything else, have a common stake in suppressing a politics of class p114 Our approach to eating and drinking is less and less mixed with ritual and ceremony. It has become strictly functional: We eat and drink on the run. Our fast-paced habits leave neither rime nor'more important'places for good talk, even in cities the whole point of which, it might be argued, is to promote it p118 As neighbourhood hangouts give way to suburban shopping malls, or, on the other hand, to private cocktail parties, the essential political art of conversation is replaced by shoptalk or personal gossip. Increasingly, conversation literally has no place in American society. In its absence, how'or, better, where'can political habits be acquired and polished? p123 What New York needs, Sleeper argues, is a politics that / will emphasize class division instead of racial ones, addressing the 'real problem, which is poverty, and the real need, which is jobs' p139-140 The bureaucratization of education has the opposite effect, undermining the teacher's autonomy, substituting the judgment of administrators for that of the teacher, and incidentally discouraging people with a gift for teaching from entering the profession at all p159 The social effects of the communications revolution, we are told, will include an insatiable demand for trained personnel, an upgrading of the skills required for employment, and an enlightened public capable of following the issues of the day and the making of informed judgments about civic affairs. Instead we find college graduates working in jobs for which they are vastly overqualified. The demand for menial labor outstrips the demand for skilled specialists p161 Since the public no longer participates in debates on national issues, it has no reason to inform itself about civic affairs p162 What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information p162 Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product p163 It is significant, as Carey points out, that Dewey's analysis of communication stressed the ear rather than the eye. 'Conversation', Dewey wrote, 'has a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech … The connections of the ear with vital and outgoing thought and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator' p172 Unless information is generated by sustained public debate, most of it will be irrelevant at best, misleading and manipulative at worst p174 Economic stratification means that a liberal education (such as it is) has become the prerogative of the rich, together with a small number of students recruited from select minorities. The great majority of college students, relegated to institutions that have given up even the pretence of a liberal education, study business, accounting, physical education, public relations, and other practical subjects p177 At best, the exposure to 'otherness' turns out to be a one-way street. The children of privilege are urged'even required'to learn something about 'marginalized, suppressed interests, situations, traditions,' but blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities are exempted from exposure to 'otherness' in the work of 'Western white males.' An insidious double standard, masking as tolerance, denies those minorities the fruits of the victory they struggled so long to achieve: access to the world's culture. The underlying message that they are incapable of appreciating or entering into that culture comes through just as clearly in the new academic 'pluralism' as in the old intolerance and exclusion; more clearly, indeed, since exclusion rested on fear more than contempt. Thus slaveowners feared that access to the best of Euro-American culture would encourage a taste for freedom p185 One of the effects of corporate or bureaucratic control is to drive critical thinkers out of the social sciences into the humanities, where they can indulge a taste for 'theory' without the rigorous discipline of empirical social observation. 'Theory' is no substitute for social criticism, the one form of intellectual activity that would seriously threaten the status quo and the one form that has no academic cachet at all p193 If Rieff is correct in his contention that culture rests on a willingness to forbid, a 'remissive' culture like our own cannot be expected to survive indefinitely. Sooner or later our remissive elites will have to rediscover the principle of limitation p223 Socialists and aesthetes shared a common enemy, the bourgeois philistine, and the unremitting onslaught against bourgeois culture was far more lasting in its effects… p233 The educated classes, unable to escape the burden of sophistication, might envy the classes that continued to unthinkingly to observe traditional faiths in the twentieth century, not yet having been exposed to the wintry blasts of modern critical thinking p339 The deepest variety of religious faith (the 'twice-born type', as he (James) calls it) always, in every age, arises out of a background of despair p243

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-23 00:00:00 Bart De Ceulaer This book was written right at the end of Lasch's life and it reads like it: he pulls no punches in telling the chattering classes what he thinks about them and the cultural trends they are presiding over. It is surprising this was published two decades ago since the criticisms are not only still applicable it did not seem to have made any difference for Lasch to have pointed them out so long ago. Elites of all types effectively live in their own world; the original American ideal of an educated public at all levels actively involved in debate and able to argue their interests has been replaced by a highly-credentialed cognitive elite lording it over uneducated plebeians. The latter are viewed with patronizing contempt, and indeed they periodically seem to confirm their low status by expressing themselves politically in a way that reflects their lack of education. The gap has gotten bigger politically, although in the years since Lasch wrote this the cultural playing field has been at least partly levelled by the internet. One thing social media has shown us is that people truly do love to debate and are hungry for knowledge at all levels of society. His analysis of hte attempt to replace religion with a mixture of art (broadly defined) and psychoanalysis is also apt. Almost all social problems are now talked about as though the solutions are primarily therapeutic, the recent interest in self-help books for white people about racism seeming to be a prime example. The therapeutic state really becomes stronger with every iteration. I don't know if Lasch identified as a conservative but this certainly came across as a conservative critique of contemporary culture. Lasch stood strongly against relativism in knowledge and lamented what he saw as the dissolution of the intellectual and moral bases of society; accusing contemporary forms of liberalism of living off the moral capital of the systems it replaced. As a whole the book was an entertaining and at times eloquent polemic but the crux of it should be more or less familiar to anyone following the subject broadly.