The hollowing out

Elites used to live amongst us. Even a classic robber baron still built a factory. Now they do symbolic work and live in high castles and have no idea how people actually live.

A meritocracy selects for people that are mobile. It says talent should flow to wherever it’s rewarded best. Which means the talent from every small town and every working class family gets extracted and dropped into a handful of cities. Those are the people who would’ve played critical roles in their communities, providing leadership, civic investment, communal memory.

So you get a weird effect where those communities have their competence hollowed out and those cities become weird homogeneous cultures of credentialed people who have almost no experience of how most people live.

Then the physical secession took place. Private schools so their kids don’t mix with the rest. Private healthcare so they can skip our waiting rooms. Just people making reasonable decisions for themselves but you end up with an entire class of people that has opted out of American life but still makes decisions that govern it.

The old aristocratic contempt for lower classes is gone but what replaced it is worse. The old aristocrat at least had to look at the people he exploited. He saw them in his fields or in his factory, on the street, at church. He could be cruel but couldn’t claim ignorance. The new elite never even has to see them, they just develop an abstract sympathy from a distance. They care about poverty as a policy problem while never sharing a room with a poor person. And unlike the old aristocrat, who at least knew his position was inherited, the new elite believes they earned theirs. Which means the people left behind weren’t just unlucky, they must have deserved it.

The core framework comes from Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites, 1996.

It’s hard to overstate how strongly this framing matches what we’ve seen since it was written 30y ago, and all the second and third order effects that stem from it.

When the people with the most social capital, the most ability to advocate, the most knowledge of how systems work remove their kids from public schools, the schools don’t just lose their kids. They lose the parents. The PTA presence, the school board engagement, the political pressure that keeps funding and standards up. The entire institution degrades, which causes the next tier of people to leave, which degrades it further.

The same thing happens in the workforce, local government, churches, every aspect of what makes a community.

I’m one of the ones that got extracted. Left Hancock County at 19 for Austin, worked in venture capital. I’ve sat in rooms where people make decisions about communities they’ve never seen. I moved back. The hollowing out isn’t a theory. You can see it.