Elite universities are dominated by very progressive students who are very privileged, educationally, culturally and often economically, writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. They see themselves as enemies of privilege, allies of the oppressed. They define virtue as "being anti-elite." But they are the elite or on their way to full membership.
Plagued with guilt and beset by cognitive dissonance, they have to keep moving leftward to prove they're "standing up to the man," he writes.
By 2020, highly educated white liberals had become more "woke" on racial questions than blacks and Hispanics, writes sociologist Musa al-Gharbi in his forthcoming book, We Have Never Been Woke, which Brooks strongly recommends.
Progressives live in bubbles where their ideas are never questioned, writes Brooks. "At Harvard, 82 percent of progressives say that all or almost all of their close friends share their political beliefs."
Adding to the social stress is "elite overproduction," he theorizes. Universities are graduating too many would-be world-changers -- or rulers -- for the jobs available. Elite college grads do very well in finance, consulting and tech, but those who expected careers as journalists, academics, cultural leaders or "activists" are struggling to pay the bills.
People are forming "their political views around their own sense of personal grievance and alienation," writes Brooks.
Culture war battles help unhappy progressives and their populist enemies ... feel engaged, purposeful and good about themselves, but ... these battles are often more about performative self-validation than they are about practical policies that might serve the common good.
Brooks wants people in the educated class to engage with others "across ideology and class." Most important, he writes is to "dismantle the arrangements that enable people in our class to pass down our educational privileges to our children, generation after generation, while locking out most everyone else."
He envisions changing college admissions criteria and opening up more pathways "so that more people would find it easier to climb the social ladder even if they didn’t get into a selective college at age 18." It's a hard ask.
"Chuck your privilege," writes William Deresiewicz, the author of Excellent Sheep, on Persuasion. Don't just "check" the fact that you're "male or white or straight or cis or neurotypical or nondisabled." (He thinks students can't change those things, but all but race are now mutable.)
The most important form of privilege is money, he argues.
Don't let your parents pay for college or support you through an internship or subsidize you through your twenties. Give away your trust fund.
Renounce your status. "Forsake all those connections that you’ve made, or might make in the future, through your parents or your parents’ friends or your classmates or your alumni network. You can stop dropping the name of your goddamn school."
You'd have to start at a less prestigious university or even a community college, take on debt and scrape by for years, he concedes.
The hardest thing would be raising your children without the educational and social privilege with which you were raised. No dance classes, computer camp, math tutor or tennis coach. No private school if the local public school goes downhill.
"I’m from a comfortable family, and I sure as hell didn’t do" any of these things, writes Deresiewicz. "But if you aren’t going to do them, then at least have the decency to cut the crap about other people’s 'privilege,' which is just a way of distracting yourself from your own. You’re all privileged, you golden youth. Be grateful. Be humble. Be real."