Carl Sagan died the year after this quote. With the greatest respect to him as a science communicator, he has not lived to see an entire generation of politics. When he died, the liberal capitalist post-historical consensus was in full swing. World leaders believed that all notions of identity and nationhood would gently fade away, to be replaced by a world of fungible, peaceful shoppers, administered by an all-knowing, all-loving class of technocratic managers.
The election of Trump (especially Trump 2.0) is a ground-up repudiation of this consensus by ordinary people, who have a completely different life experience to the managerial cosmopolitan class (of whom this website largely represents). Trump, and various other right-wing ascendants throughout the world, are a statement by the common people of the belief that a desire for identity, sovereignty and representation does not disappear the moment a McDonald's appears in their home country.
The (understandable!) lamentations of the academic class towards the current actions of the Trump administration have, to my mind, a deficit of self-reflection and theory of mind towards the people supporting these actions. For decades, the stage of "democracy" has been increasingly garnished with explicitly non-democratic embellishments. NGOs, panels of "experts", bureaucratic oversight, international "obligations" and so on.
This is the exact same situation that motivated the people of Britain to vote for Brexit 9 years ago. Michael Gove, while I have very little time for him as a politician, made a point in a news interview that was condemned for years, but that I think was an accurate capture of working-class sentiment in that time. The soundbite form was "Britain has had enough of experts". And he was exactly right.
For decades, academia has been part of an ongoing anti-democratic, elitist movement to effectively take control away from common people. Health matters are deferred to "listening to the experts", and ordinary people were made to feel as if they didn't deserve a say on if they should be allowed to leave their own homes in 2020-21. NGO-funded academic studies serve to tell normal people that despite their own experiences, mass immigration has been an unambiguous good in their lives, and they have no right to express otherwise. This idea of deference to unelected experts peaked when normal people started being told that it was not within their jurisdiction to define for themselves what the words "man" and "woman" mean -- these two words that are foundational to human civilisation and the language spoken in it were to become the domain of a sect of largely self-appointed modern-day clerics, who expected the public to believe that they were completely rational, objective, and blind to ideology.
This is what the conversation on "anti-intellectualism" very often misses, when being discussed by those in the intellectual classes. While criticising the "uneducated" masses for being so unenlightened, they fail to notice that they also have biases, incentives, and ideological motivations, and it is these that the public are pushing back against, not the noble pursuit of objective knowledge.
This is the kind of dishonest motte-and-bailey framing that is all too common in academia, that my post was trying to highlight. There are many aspects and fields of academia that are very obviously ideologically captured, whether that's "studies" in economics and sociology that are obvious attempts to reify the modern consensus of human beings as identical, fungible, latently-liberal economic units. Or it could be well-known physicists being taken to task about how their research on cosmological inflation contributes to the cause of diversity [0].
When such things are rightly levied in criticisms of academic ideological capture, the discussion reverts to the idea that the entire industry is nothing more than "studying things", as you put it, for knowledge and knowledge alone.
>A PhD student earning $40k a year is not, in any sense, part of the elite.
You could say the same thing about a private-rank soldier, or a party secretary. The relatively low wages of one particular person is incidental to the main issue of the overall power structure, and who it serves.
I just think “elite” has no meaning if you’re just using it as a synonym for “people I don’t like”.
“Elite” is traditionally a synonym for rich white men educated at Ivy League universities working comfortable, high-earning jobs. Those people still exist! Trump is one of them, as is George W Bush, and his father before him.
The contradictions in that definition and its examples indicates to me how outdated it is. Connecting "white men" and Ivy League universities, despite those institutions adopting an ideology explicitly designed to dispossess white men from institutional power. Connecting universities and Trump, despite the Trump administration occupying an opposing faction of power to academia (hence the articles bemoaning this being posted on HN). Connecting Trump to Bush despite Trump existing outside and against the Bush dynasty (to the point that the Democrats took Liz Cheney onboard in their campaign against Trump).
The better definition is simply that the elites of a nation are the ones that hold the most outsized political power, often the kind of intangible power that they are loathe to admit having. Trump is more or less attempting a small-scale revolution in America, being the replacement of one class of elites with another. What the prospective replacement class of elites looks like is harder to say than who they're attempting to replace.
> The election of Trump (especially Trump 2.0) is a ground-up repudiation of this consensus by ordinary people
Or maybe it's just a reaction to the "class of technocratic managers" becoming corrupt and dysfunctional, and attempting to control things that were far outside of the role that the "liberal capitalist post-historical consensus" had defined for them.
The election of Trump (especially Trump 2.0) is a ground-up repudiation of this consensus by ordinary people, who have a completely different life experience to the managerial cosmopolitan class (of whom this website largely represents). Trump, and various other right-wing ascendants throughout the world, are a statement by the common people of the belief that a desire for identity, sovereignty and representation does not disappear the moment a McDonald's appears in their home country.
The (understandable!) lamentations of the academic class towards the current actions of the Trump administration have, to my mind, a deficit of self-reflection and theory of mind towards the people supporting these actions. For decades, the stage of "democracy" has been increasingly garnished with explicitly non-democratic embellishments. NGOs, panels of "experts", bureaucratic oversight, international "obligations" and so on.
This is the exact same situation that motivated the people of Britain to vote for Brexit 9 years ago. Michael Gove, while I have very little time for him as a politician, made a point in a news interview that was condemned for years, but that I think was an accurate capture of working-class sentiment in that time. The soundbite form was "Britain has had enough of experts". And he was exactly right.
For decades, academia has been part of an ongoing anti-democratic, elitist movement to effectively take control away from common people. Health matters are deferred to "listening to the experts", and ordinary people were made to feel as if they didn't deserve a say on if they should be allowed to leave their own homes in 2020-21. NGO-funded academic studies serve to tell normal people that despite their own experiences, mass immigration has been an unambiguous good in their lives, and they have no right to express otherwise. This idea of deference to unelected experts peaked when normal people started being told that it was not within their jurisdiction to define for themselves what the words "man" and "woman" mean -- these two words that are foundational to human civilisation and the language spoken in it were to become the domain of a sect of largely self-appointed modern-day clerics, who expected the public to believe that they were completely rational, objective, and blind to ideology.
This is what the conversation on "anti-intellectualism" very often misses, when being discussed by those in the intellectual classes. While criticising the "uneducated" masses for being so unenlightened, they fail to notice that they also have biases, incentives, and ideological motivations, and it is these that the public are pushing back against, not the noble pursuit of objective knowledge.