God Save Bechtel

I'll grant that "elites" come in different shapes and sizes. At times, liberal university professors - the bogeyman elite for the right - do form an "elite" when they become detached from the world they profess to provide intellectual tools for changing. There's nothing wrong with devoting one's life to the study of Kant or ancient Greek thought or Proust. It's not my choice, having moved from straight philosophy to more public policy oriented matters while continuing to write some philosophy. When any of us, however, seek to change the world or work on "the problems of men" [sic] - as Marx and Dewey both insisted - and take a rarefied view of what that world looks like, then we risk being "elites." In this sense, elitism is not only detachment from those real problems, while we're jetting around the world in the meantime going to conferences and so on. The elitism is when we speak a language only an educated few understand and wonder why the "splaybrained masses" don't respond to our sterling ideas, continuing to speak out as if we held positions of authority regarding the daily matters of everybody.

Another sort of elitism which is not defined necessarily in terms of right-left politics is the kind I see in DC. Wealthy and elite-educated members of international society who purport to be doing the gruntwork for good in the world. I'm thinking of many - perhaps the majority - of those who work at places like the World Bank, IMF, the embassies, the thinktanks, and the talking-head pseudo-intellectual journalists. Sometimes education, skill, and talent are centered on wealth and one's own sense of being an elite. Much of the work done by such institutions is even more detached from the problems they ostensibly solve than that of the academic elite. What's worse is that these are institutions created in the name of problem-solving, not individual-enrichment. Universities, on the other hand, exist to develop thought and ideas.

Then there's the elite that forms the power nucleus in the US and its influence abroad, and includes many from across the political spectrum but has proliferated with the current administration. Here's a taste of this world:

The [British] government has been secretly awarding honours to senior figures in the US military and foreign businessmen with lucrative public sector contracts. The Observer has obtained a Foreign Office list detailing all non-British citizens who have been awarded honours since 2003 - the first time the complete three-year dossier has been released.

It has emerged that Riley Bechtel, billionaire boss of the US-based Bechtel Corporation, which has won big transport and nuclear contracts in Britain and made a fortune from the Iraq war, was secretly awarded a CBE in 2003.

In the end, if elitism is a problem, this is where it truly resides. The honors themselves are not the issue. The issue is the nucleus of power itself in which a small and closed circle of friends of friends write themselves into history as elite leaders without any constraints by the realities of their actions. It's the creation of a different world altogether. What use is an honor, for example, if it's not to be made public? Such honors are only honors when recognized as such. But this is precisely the jig. Society beyond the small and closed circle is a faceless struggling mass. The only society that matters is that within the circle. But these are people who make hugely consequential decisions and engage in actions that affect millions of people. Unconstrained by reality and unaccountable to any public, these are the true elitists.

Quotidian DC society is filled with those who can ride coattails to some small extent and have a little sip of power and wealth. Academics pale in comparison, for any power they have comes in terms of changing people's minds one by one, and we academics know that that is relatively rare.