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CHRIS HAYES: If people have a lot of power, tremendous amount of power, more power than
they even realize they have… if you create that situation, you're creating the recipes
for cataclysm.
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So Twilight of the Elites is a book I wrote and it's about—it's about the crisis of
what I call the Crisis of Authority in American life.
And that's the experience for people, particularly my age, but for everyone in America of the
fail decade which is the first decade of the 21st century.
A lot of things went really wrong.
We saw a lot of tremendous institutional failure.
The story I tell about why we have come to this point and why we've had this cascade
of failures is a story about the American elite and specifically the way the elite are
formed through a set of institutions and an ideology we call the meritocracy.
Which is a very old American dream, right?
It just shows into to Tocqueville and Benjamin Franklin writes about it and Thomas Jefferson
writes about it which is this idea that in America, unshackled from the history of feudalism
you can rise as far as your talents would take you.
And the argument of the book is that meritocracy was tremendously appealing in many ways, and
kind of noble in certain ways, but also really badly corrupt and broken.
And that our shared affection for it and our shared—our consensus that it is the model—is
accelerating inequality, declining social mobility, and contravention of the very idea
of meritocracy and finally, and this relates back to the crisis of authority, is producing
a worse caliber of elites.
It's producing elite failure.
It's producing institutional disfunction.
And there's a whole bunch of different examples from the federal reserve's total removal from
the plight of homeowners who were being foreclosed on to the incredible alienation and distance
between the bishops who were running the Catholic church and the victims of priest sexual abuse.
I mean, in some ways, that's the iconic example.
There's a moment I relay in the book that was a real kind of epiphany moment for me
in writing the book which is—it's a conversation between a bishop, a priest, and the nephew
of that priest who had been a victim of that sexual abuse by the priest.
The bishop is trying to convince the victim not to press charges because the priest is
about to retire.
Basically the bishop says to the victim, just let it go and he's gonna be—he's gonna retire
and essentially go into the sunset anyway and the victim looks at the bishop and says
"Why do you feel sorry for him and not for me?"
And that moment, somehow when I read that in the New York Times article seemed like
it made it all clear.
This is the fundamental problem.
You have decision-makers who are so far removed from the effects of their decisions to make
good ones.
The more unequal American society gets, the more we hue to this rigid meritocratic vision—the
more we produce this smaller and smaller group of people who are more and more socially distant
and remote from the people who their decisions will affect and by nature—by definition—that
produces worse decision making and worse performing institutions.
We need people to be less socially distant from each other.
We need to provision public goods universally and have them universally participated in.
Y'know, there are institutions that work this way that are being undone as we speak.
Y'know, state university systems…
they've acted like a kind of amazing engine of this social mobility because they produce
this kind of egalitarian order.
But what are we doing?
We are stripping the funding for state universities, they're jacking up their tuitions.
As they jack up their tuitions of course they come to mimic more private universities which
have all these embedded inequalities and so American life has less and less of these kind
of broad public universal provision public goods and it's undoing the very thing we need
more of.
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I encountered a few amazing texts in writing the book and one of them is this book by Robert
Michels called political parties who's this German social theorist who's fascinating because
he was this lefty and he was a student of Max Vabers.
The biggest take away I had from Michels comes at the end of the book and it's something
that I keep with me and has become a kind of like almost guiding idea for the kind of
work I do, the way I think about working and politics, he gives this fable.
A peasant man with a small plot of land on his deathbed tells his two sons that he's
buried a treasure on the land and he dies.
And the two sons go out and they dig through the Earth to find the treasure.
And they never find the treasure, but in digging for the treasure, they aerate the soil and
they plow the fields and it produces a relative bounty for them.
Democracy is the treasure we may never find, but in laboring for it, we create bounty for
ourself in a democratic sense.
And I think that's a really beautiful parable.
There is no final static equilibrium of a just, humane, equitable process for society.
You don't get to some end of history.
You don't get to some endpoint where everything is fixed.
All you have is the constant plowing of the field, the constant searching, the constant
effort and I think it's a really important effort and that's really stuck with me from—I
encountered that text while writing the book and that lesson's really stuck with me.
Hi, I'm Chris Hayes.
You're watching THNKR.