Be the elite you wish to see

The folly of populism and why we need to reconceptualize elitism

I have an odd relationship with elitism. I’ve been called an elitist, even by members of my own family. I’ve also felt aggrieved by elites.

Several years ago, I would’ve coiled into a defensive posture if someone called me an elitist. Today, I might flash a cheeky smile and say thank you. What changed? It isn’t because I’ve become grandiose and self-important. It’s because I am reconstructing what elitism means to me, while continuing to exorcize the ghosts of my own tribal populist stupidity. Put simply, I’d like to be on the side of solving problems rather than whining about them.

Elitism is a loaded term in American society. In some contexts it is positive. He is an elite athlete. In political and social contexts it is usually pejorative. Those snooty and out-of-touch elites!

Pushing back against a failed, corrupt elite was an animating narrative of the early Trump movement when I was a part of it. Beneath the MAGA hats and cringe slogans were palpable emotions, mostly frustration and dispossession. Supporters felt like the country they knew and loved had slipped away, that it had been subverted by elites. They felt that they had been lied to and abused by our political class, their futures forsaken for Middle Eastern wars based on lies and jobs exported for marginal profit.

Many of these grievances were legitimate, and I felt the heat of their fire in my belly too. Although I had plenty of intellectual justification for supporting Trump, grief was the emotional catalyst that propelled me. After my brother Spencer died in 2015, he became my stand-in for the forgotten man. Supporting Trump felt like honoring his memory. I wrote about this in my letter to myself in 2015. In those days, I believed the emotions fueling Trump could be channeled into productive policy-making and a constructive political force. This proved wrong.

Several years after the 2016 election, I wrote a paper for NATO exploring ways to strengthen the alliance amid a rise in populism across the 32 member countries. This gave me an excuse to study the academic literature on populism. I learned that “fighting a corrupt elite” is at the core of most definitions of populism.

With this in mind, I started noticing how blaming elites was used by MAGA and other populist movements to galvanize behavior without actually solving problems. I noticed the excess of victim rhetoric about the “deep state” and the like. Instead of identifying with this rhetoric, as I did a few years earlier, I starting viewing it as adolescent, like teenagers whining about their parents. Populism seemed to value grievance-mongering more than problem-solving. This is a loser mindset.

I also came to see the contradictions of my own position. I was an affluent, well-connected Stanford graduate living in a trendy neighborhood in Washington, DC. Complaining about elites with my similarly privileged intellectual compatriots was, on some level, an admission of our own failures. Looking back, it is fair to argue that our populism was, on some level, cover for elite competition felt along generational and ideological lines. We felt shut out by boomers on the one hand and by leftwing institutional capture, compounded by identity politics, on the other. It felt unfair. Waaaaah!

But it wasn’t all bitterness. As I write this, it occurs to me that the root of my populism was, in fact, a benevolent elitism. I viewed myself as using my privilege to champion working- and middle-class Middle Americans. I genuinely cared for them and still do. But herein was another contradiction: My populism drew from a closeted elitism, a caring but patronizing orientation. Ironically, this latent elitism is what saved me. It is what allowed me to say, Enough with the nonsense!

Reaching this point felt like the day when I told my brother Spencer, who was mentally ill, that I loved him but would no longer participate in his marijuana-enabled psychotic episodes. Loving him, I realized, was different from indulging him. Loving him sometimes meant saying no.

By Covid and the 2020 election, I was blackpilled on populism and Trump. The lack of guardrails and widespread mistrust created an environment where the crazies were in control, and I was done with indulging any of it. Anti-vax nonsense had a death count, and election lies had a jail count. The clown car of populist leadership was conning, indulging, and hurting the very people I wanted to help. These populist leaders were worse than the flawed elite they railed against. But it wasn’t like the people who followed them lacked any agency; my patience for their wackiness grew thin too.

Since breaking from the Trump movement, I have come to view populism as structurally and metaphysically flawed. Populism may work as a catalyst for change, but it is a disaster at governance. Whining is a feature, not a bug, of populism.

Today, I am reconceptualizing what elitism means to me, and I think it looks like leadership as well as excellence. Our society needs leadership. We need excellence. We need elites who lead people to a better place, not who tell people what they want to hear and exploit their patriotism and religious beliefs for power. The world is in a volatile place. We need leaders who solve real problems and bring adult energy to the challenges of our day. Leadership and excellence can take many forms and can exist in many domains. It doesn’t have to wear Gucci.

Nobility, properly understood, is not about being clubbable or affecting a high-end aesthetic. It is about being constructive. It is about solving real problems, not whining about Joe Biden, George Soros, and the deep state in a juvenile state of powerlessness. I understand that the American political establishment is flawed and unserious, but reforming it requires better, not worse, leaders. This bar has not yet been met.

The good news, and the bad news, is that no one is coming to save us. My message to those who see a flawed world and want to improve it, who have a lot to offer and yet feel disenfranchised, is to be the elite you wish to see. Stop viewing yourself as a victim, and step into the kind of leadership you want to see in the world. It’s ok to keep it small and in your corner of the world. Just start. Assume the authority, and if you struggle with that, let me give it to you now: You are authorized.

The baton is in our hands. We just have to take it. Be the elite you wish to see.