This post is focused on an excerpt from a recent essay by Walter Russell Mead, which appeared in online magazine Tablet.  Here’s a link to the original.

To me, it captures something important about the presidential election — the way in which the contest turned out to be a referendum on the character of America’s institutional leaders.  And the verdict, by a small but decisive margin, was thumbs down.  

I’ve been writing a lot of pieces here (and posting essays by others) about the leadership problem, which I’ve seen as the result of the new American meritocracy — in which we select the leaders of major institutions, not according to popular support or personal accomplishment, but instead according to the snootiness of their academic diplomas.  It’s not just that the only route to leadership is elite universities; it’s also that this is the primary way to gain social respect.  No matter how important your work is for the well-being of society, you don’t get respect if you don’t have a degree.  And not only are you disrespected; you’re largely invisible to your leaders.

As we’ve increasingly found in the last few elections, the most striking differences between Republican and Democratic voters now is the ownership of a college diploma.  Republicans have become the party of the non-college-going working class and Democrats become the party of the college-educated elite.  In many ways, Trump has ridden to power twice as the populist champion who promises to stick it to the Ivy Leaguers.  As David Brooks put it in the title of his first column after the election, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”

In the essay excerpt below, Mead sees a parallel between American leadership today and the French aristocracy under Louis XIV.  Louis plucked the nobles from their fiefs in the countryside, where they were living among their subjects, and corralled them into the palace of Versailles, where he could keep an eye on them and they would be cut off from their people.  Places like Harvard and Stanford, Michigan and Berkeley, do the same thing in the current day, gathering elites together, cosseting them, channeling them into positions of institutional influence, and separating them from the people whom they are supposed to serve.

He’s talking about academics like me.  I’m not sure when was the last time that I interacted with a non-college person who wasn’t a server or flight attendant or clerk or Uber driver.  People like us live in coastal metropoles among people like ourselves and never need to connect with our fellow citizens as equals.  No wonder we lost the election.  We were asking for it.

The Versailles Problem

Walter Russell Mead

One way to describe America’s leadership problem is to say that our leadership class has become too French. In 1682, Louis XIV moved his court and government to Versailles and began to compel the French aristocracy to take up residence in the palace. One hundred seven years later, in October 1789, his descendant and successor Louis XVI was escorted back to Paris by an angry mob. The aristocrats fled in disorder; ultimately many, like their king, would ascend the scaffold to the guillotine. In the view of many historians, the palace of Versailles was not only the crowning glory of the French monarchy. It played a significant role in its fall.

Once ensconced in the palace, the French aristocracy were, as Louis intended, cut off from their independent sources of power in the countryside. Instead of living on their estates, surrounded by the peasants and townspeople who made up most of the population, France’s natural leaders became wrapped up in the culture and life of an exclusive society that revolved around the king. From inside the bubble around Versailles, they lost touch with public opinion, and grew distant from the families and connections who, in the past, had supported their families and their power. They were more interested in squeezing the last drop of revenue out of their country estates to support the lavish expenses needed to cut an impressive figure at court than in representing local interests before the king.

Like the denizens of the Capital District in the Hunger Games movies, the nobles in Versailles embraced one extravagant fashion after another. They lost themselves in quests for power, for pleasure, or simply for distraction. One intellectual fad after another captured their attention. Enjoying the least natural, the least authentic lifestyles that planet Earth had ever known, Marie Antoinette and her ladies in waiting dressed as simple milkmaids and pretended to be innocent peasant girls.

Marie Antoinette and her ladies have their counterparts today in the enclaves of privilege around the United States. They would be perfectly at home making land acknowledgments, growing heirloom vegetable varieties, and drinking fair-trade coffee cut with “milk” made from organically grown oats. Brooklyn trustafarians embracing carefully curated simplicity and celebrating the virtues of “indigeneity” are as likely to be mercilessly mocked by posterity as poor Marie Antoinette and her coterie.

Immersion in the Versailles bubble ultimately cost the French aristocrats everything they had. First, they lost their roots, then they lost their wits, and last they lost their heads. Those inside the bubble lost their ancestors’ ability to understand the nation in which they lived. The culture and the sentiments of the majority grew increasingly incomprehensible to them, even as the ideas among which they habitually moved became unrecognizable to outsiders. France’s old leadership elite failed to understand the rising tide of peasant discontent. It failed to understand how the urban middle and professional classes were turning against the regime. And, when the denizens of Versailles finally began to see the peril rising around them, they were unable to cope with the storm.

In America, too many of our society’s natural leaders have lost both their roots and wits. Let us hope we do not go on to the head-losing stage of the process.

No Sun King commands the migration, but America’s elites have been losing touch with their fellow citizens for more than 50 years. Each generation is further away from a real knowledge of the rest of the country, more caught up in an inward-facing bubble of elite culture and jargon, and less capable of either discerning what the country needs or of persuading their fellow citizens to take the steps their favored policies require.

Physically, the affluent suburbs in which the upper-middle classes live are increasingly segregated by income and class. So are the public and private schools that serve them. After the 2020 election, a Brookings Institute report found that the 520 counties Joe Biden carried accounted for 71% of America’s economic output, while the 2,564 counties carried by President Trump were responsible for only 29% of the country’s GDP.

Economically, the income and wealth gaps between the upper middle class and the rest of society have become chasms. 2021 Census data show a median household wealth of $8,460 in ones where no one has graduated from high school, and $55,030 in households with a high school diploma but no college. Households where the highest level of educational attainment was a graduate or professional degree had a median wealth of $555,900.

Increasingly, the children of the upper-middle and upper classes attend school together, travel abroad together, engage in sports together, and socialize together. The world of the upper-middle and upper classes is all they know, and as is only natural, their parents use all the financial resources and social capital they can command to give their children the greatest possible chance to remain in Versailles.

For most aspiring members of the American elite, the path to success lies in mastering the codes of Versailles, rather than demonstrating the ability to work effectively with people on the outside. The forces that, in past generations, opposed this tendency have lost much of their power. In mid-20th-century America, for example, having a good war record was something an ambitious young striver wanted. That generally involved serving as a combat officer leading a small group of nonelite fighters. This required the ability to win the trust of one’s comrades and forge deep bonds with “ordinary” enlisted men, bonds that often endured for decades after the war. Managing a factory effectively often meant dealing with unions and shop stewards.

Today those qualifications mean much less for earnest young professionals striving for the heights. It is more important to be able to navigate the shifting expectations of one’s fellow professionals than to have working-class friends from your military years. The general decline in working-class power means that success in the executive ranks depends less on one’s ability to build trust and confidence with workers outside the bubble. And even the entertainment industry, which once built blockbusters on catering to popular tastes and upholding popular values, has grown more distant from its customers’ preferences, and seeks to instruct rather than entertain.

The main difference between the French aristocrats at Versailles and the American upper-middle class today is one of scale. Only a few thousand nobles were in Versailles at any one time. Tens of millions of Americans live in the bubble of the upper-middle class, and with more than 22 million American millionaires, roughly 50 million to 60 million Americans live in households with a net worth of more than a million dollars. Mass affluence is a good thing, and a social system that enables so much accumulation by so many people cannot, by any historical measure, be called a failure. But mass affluence can intensify the Versailles problem. The elite bubble in which many successful Americans live, move, and have their being is larger, richer, more attractive, and more encompassing than anything the French nobles knew.

The deracination of the American elite means that each new elite generation has less intuitive and emotional connection with their fellow citizens outside the bubble, and is therefore less able to understand, much less to lead the society around them. At the same time, those outside the bubble become progressively less able to operate effectively in the world of power and elite institutions. Bridging that gap is traditionally the responsibility of educational and cultural institutions, but those institutions are less and less capable of fulfilling that role.