Michael Lewis on knowledge

In the arenas of human ambition, in Hollywood or Silicon Valley, or Washington or Wall Street, there's a knowingness about people.  They don't want to seem like they don't know.  They think that if they don't know, they're going to seem stupid.  And that leads to greater stupidity.

~ Michael Lewis, "Michael Lewis on what he learned by studying the elites," Brief But Spectacular, November 4, 2024

New York Times: anti-globalism = antisemitism

Debate rages over the extent to which the protests on the political left constitute coded or even direct attacks on Jews.  But far less attention has been paid to a trend on the right: For all of their rhetoric of the moment, increasingly through the Trump era many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots. 

The conspiracy theory taking on fresh currency is one that dates back hundreds of years and has perennially bubbled into view: that a shady cabal of wealthy Jews secretly controls events and institutions contrary to the national interest of whatever country it is operating in. 

The current formulation of the trope taps into the populist loathing of an elite “ruling class.”  “Globalists” or “globalist elites” are blamed for everything from Black Lives Matter to the influx of migrants across the southern border, often described as a plot to replace native-born Americans with foreigners who will vote for Democrats.  The favored personification of the globalist enemy is George Soros, the 93-year-old Hungarian American Jewish financier and Holocaust survivor who has spent billions in support of liberal causes and democratic institutions. 

This language is hardly new — Mr. Soros became a boogeyman of the American far right long before the ascendancy of Mr. Trump.  And the elected officials now invoking him or the globalists rarely, if ever, directly mention Jews or blame them outright.  Some of them may not immediately understand the antisemitic resonance of the meme, and in some cases its use may simply be reflexive political rhetoric.  But its rising ubiquity reflects the breaking down of old guardrails on all types of degrading speech, and the cross-pollination with the raw, sometimes hate-filled speech of the extreme right, in a party under the sway of the norm-defying former, and perhaps future, president. 

In a July 2023 email to supporters, the Trump campaign employed an image that bears striking resemblance to a Nazi-era cartoon of a hook-nosed puppet master manipulating world figures: Mr. Soros as puppet master, pulling the strings controlling President Biden. 

~ Karen Yourish, Danielle Ivory, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Alex Lemonides, "How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel," The New York Times, May 9, 2024

Barton Swaim: Democratic Party is "the educated party"

The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines.  The Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class.  The dispute is over suburban and minority voters.  The latter still plump mostly for Democrats, although the party’s social radicalism is pushing them toward the GOP.  Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican. 

That one party is the educated party—that its members see themselves, in some respects accurately, as more cultured and informed than their opponents—has generated an intellectual pathology that is obvious to everyone but themselves.  Adherents of the smart-people party have lost the capacity for self-criticism.  Which on its face makes sense.  If your views are by definition intelligent, those of your critics must be dumb.  Who needs self-reflection?

~ Barton Swaim, "Why the 'Smart' Party Never Learns," The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2022

Michael Rectenwald on the Davos confab

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos is perhaps the world’s most unpopular conference, and the WEF’s founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, one of the world’s most despised figures. Often compared to “Dr. Evil,” the character Mike Meyers played in the Austin Powers series, and routinely likened to a James Bond supervillain on the internet, Schwab is seen as a messianic megalomaniac leading a nefarious cabal of world leaders and corporate heads into a future dominated by a globalist elite. 

A Twitter poll by TruthBoost asks, “Does the World Economic Forum make the world a better place?” As of this writing, 98.4 percent of respondents said no.

What is it about this confab and its leaders that makes the WEF and its meetings so despised? After all, the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world,” or so says its slogan. As it turns out, most people don’t like having a group of unelected, self-appointed dictators issuing top-down decrees and recommending policies that restrict their freedom and infringe their rights.

~ Michael Rectenwald, "Davos Man Is at It Again: The 2022 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum," Mises.org, May 31, 2022

Doug Casey on the political elites

The people who frequent forums, such as the WEF, see themselves as a special class―the elite.  They all know each other, go to the same schools, and socialize at the same clubs.  They have high incomes, a lot of power and influence, and groom their kids to join the party. 

They’ve jelled into an informal ruling class.  Even while they mouth hypocritical platitudes about democracy, diversity, equity, and other PC nonsense, they, in fact, despise the common man.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they would really like to see―as people such as Ted Turner and Bill Gates have intimated―80% of the world’s population to just disappear.  That way, when they visit places such as Machu Picchu, St. Mark’s Square in Venice, and other fashionable places, they won’t be annoyed by the hoi polloi wandering around as if they were equals.  Enough money and power can get the elite to start thinking that way.  Not to mention that these people are mostly sociopaths, with a heavy admixture of real psychos.

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey on Implications of the “Great Reset” Agenda and What it Means for You," Doug Casey's International Man, January 14, 2022

Thomas Sowell on why the elites hate the free market

One of the problems with the market from the standpoint of those who think that they are the brightest, the best, and ought to be telling the rest of us groundlings what to do, is that the market allows ordinary people to go out there and make their own decisions.  And people who think they have the Truth and the Light don't want that; they want no part of that.  It's really what they hate most, I think, about a market system.

~ Thomas Sowell, "Interview with Thomas Sowell," Reason, December, 1980

David Gordon on elitism in America

Elite policy is at its worst in California, now under the near-total domination of the left wing of the Democratic Party...

Who are the ordinary Americans the elite disdains, and who are the elite?  The ordinary Americans are those whom Hillary Clinton called "deplorables," i.e., white males who value their family, their religion, and their property, including their guns...

The elite consists at its core of wealthy financiers and business interests allied with government.  It is buttressed by professionals who have attended top universities, especially those of the Ivy League.

~ David Gordon, "America at the Point of No Return," The Austrian, September-October 2020

Mark Hulbert on the Davos elites: asset bubble low on list of concerns

Among the top 10 global risks to business right now, “asset bubble” ranks 10th on the [Davos] elite’s list of concerns. That may or may not be an accurate assessment of where an asset bubble belongs in such a ranking. But what is noteworthy is a comparable ranking in the WEF’s Global Risks Report for 2009, published within weeks of the bottom of the 2007-09 bear market and global financial crisis. Back then, the No. 1 global risk was an “asset price collapse” — in terms of both likelihood and impact.

~ Mark Hulbert, "How the 1% at Davos make the same mistakes as we do about stocks and the economy," MarketWatch.com, January 10, 2020

William McKinley on war in the Phllippines

I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance and one night late it came to me this way. We could not leave (the Philippines) to themselves - they were unfit for self-government - and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was. There was nothing left for us to do but take them all and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them.

~ William McKinley

William McKinley
1922-1925

Irving Fisher on the role of the elites and need for scientific management

The world consists of two classes - the educated and the ignorant - and it is essential for progress that the former should be allowed to dominate the latter.  But once we admit that it is proper for the instructed classes to give tuition to the uninstructed, we begin to see an almost boundless vista for possible human betterment.

~ Irving Fisher, "Why has the Doctrine of Laissez Faire been Abandoned?," Science, 1907, p. 20



(Cited in "The Great Depression: Mises vs. Fisher" by Mark Thornton, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, p. 239, November 25, 2008

Kevin Duffy on the elitist bubble

The financial elites think the masses are ignorant rubes who show up late for every asset party.  Yet it is the elites who are most economically ignorant -- the ultimate bag holders this cycle.

~ Kevin Duffy

Thomas Sowell on the cause of great tragedies of history

Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.

~ Thomas Sowell

Paul Volcker on Harvard University and Great Society elitism

INTERVIEWER: You said Keynesianism was almost a religion at Harvard when you were there?

PAUL VOLCKER: They did have other people there, you know. John Williams was the other macroeconomist there, certainly financial-side, and he was a very skeptical practitioner. He didn't spend all his time professing, and he advised the Federal Reserve back in New York at great lengths. I can't say everybody was Keynesian, but the younger school certainly was. It was Paul Samuelson, Jim Tobin, and all of them had grown up in the Keynesian climate. I didn't know them all, but they were all circulating. They were the bright young stars of Harvard at the time.

INTERVIEWER: When did you begin to have doubts? How early did you begin to become skeptical about things?

PAUL VOLCKER: I was already skeptical. I guess I'm skeptical about everything. I've gotten worse in my old age, but I was a little bit turned off by the precision and certainty that these people attached to the doctrine. The analytic framework was very convincing, but this feeling they had, that they could press the right buttons and manage the economy pretty exactly, for some reason it turned me off. I was very skeptical that they were not overselling the precision of this theory and the precision [with] which they could run policy.

INTERVIEWER: Was that a gut instinct, or was that something you picked up?

PAUL VOLCKER: It must have been a gut instinct. I don't know why, but I was just a little bit turned off by the sense of certainty that they had.

INTERVIEWER: You actually talked about the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson, and you used the word "hubris" in that context. Would you say that that kind of attitude reached a peak?

PAUL VOLCKER: Yes,. There's no question in terms of its policy application that that approach reached its peak in the Kennedy-Johnson years, when in the Harvard years it was still intellectual concept. It really hadn't permeated fully the political decision-making [process]. It hadn't reached its apogee, which it certainly reached in the Kennedy-Johnson days, and they felt they'd solved the problem in the business cycle. They'd solved a problem with macroeconomics; it was time to turn to other microeconomic things, [and] it was time to turn to welfare questions, because they'd solved the problem. I'm not exaggerating very much when I say that. They had a very long period of economic advancement, and things were going pretty smoothly. Productivity was high, and unemployment was low.

~ Paul Volcker, Commanding Heights interview (PBS), September 26, 2000

Anonymous on elitism

A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him.

~ Anonymous

Mark Twain on elitists

When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

~ Mark Twain

Dan Rather on intellectuals

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

~ Dan Rather

Glenn Greenwald on elitism

Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.

~ Glenn Greenwald

CBS News president Richard Salant on the role of the mainstream media

Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.

~ CBS News president Richard Salant, 1961-64, 1966-79

Tech investor Marc Andressen is an elitist

Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you’re like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers. Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.

~Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist, New York Times interview, July 7, 2011

Mohamed El-Arian begs to be taxed more, argues income inequality is bad

Bill [Gross] and I – we do not consider ourselves elite. In fact, we’d like to be taxed more. I said this even before the Middle East started: It is not in the interest of any society for income inequality to keep on going up. It is in everybody’s interest to avoid the extremes.

~Mohamed El-Arian, CEO, PIMCO, Bloomberg Television interview, March 31, 2011