Eliane Glaser - Elitism: A Progressive Defence

I ll say it up front: I am a member of the liberal, metropolitan elite. I live in north London, I work in the media, Im a writer and God forbid I teach at a university. I dont actually feel very elite, riding around on a second-hand bicycle, a member of the journalistic precariat, on a shoestring lectureship. Dont get me wrong: I live a very comfortable life. But something peculiar has happened over the past few years. Never mind that eight people, all men, now own as much wealth as half the worlds population. Never mind that CEOs earn 300 times the salary of the average worker. From newspaper commentary, intelligent magazines, TV talk shows, radio phone-ins and social media comes the same message, loud and clear: that it is people like me who are now the masters of the universe. viii Experts, professionals and those who work in the arts, publishing, culture or the media have become public enemy number one.

Those in the firing line know this is happening. They whisper about it in workplace corridors, or in the privacy of their own homes. But they darent say it in public. Why? Because compared to the more serious losers in all this, the gig-economy bikers for Deliveroo or Uber, care workers paid less than the minimum wage, or shelf-stackers on zero-hours contracts, they are doing all right. But this is a trap. Playing off those on the lowest incomes against the overstretched intelligentsia has paid off brilliantly for the burgeoning financial and managerial classes.

This book puts its head above the parapet to call this outrage out. It is an alibi book for all those doing their best and slogging away to keep us safe, to fight for our rights, to question assumptions and to create brilliant and beautiful works of art. This book is not only for doctors, lawyers, scientists, thinkers, publishers, journalists and artists of every variety, but for all those who appreciate what they do. Which is an awful lot of people. ix The coronavirus crisis has shown us how much we rely not only on those who save our lives but also on those who make life worth living.

Anti-elitism is a familiar truism to anyone tuned in to media and public discussion over the past five years. Phrases like liberal elite are bandied about in press commentary without us really knowing what they mean or if they even refer to anything real. They are bogey words that prevent us from diagnosing and therefore strategising an escape from our political and cultural quagmire. The constant reiteration just amplifies rather than analyses the problem.

This book will take a step back and attempt to cut through the endless, self-referential commentary by placing it in vital historical perspective. Ill show why our embattled elites should be not embarrassed but proud and angry. The real economic elites have pulled off a grand deceit. They are diverting public anger away from the obscene profiteering of billionaires, banks and global corporations and turning it onto cultural and educational high standards.

As I will argue, the populist right and the powerful x interests they serve are deploying cultural populism as their primary strategy; but what is less often remarked upon is that this is being enabled by a terrified left, quixotically pursuing the wrong solutions. Progressives are letting the real economic elites get away with it in fact, they are aiding and abetting them by accepting the false frames of the culture wars. Cultural and educational organisations, and the agencies that fund them, are prioritising a modish agenda of democratisation, outreach and user engagement, and the resulting emphasis on symbolic representation functions as a proxy for real structural and economic equality. Liberals no longer have the confidence to advocate for excellence and legitimate critical and political authority: the liberal elite slur is just as common in broadsheet commentary and left-of-centre political speeches as it is on far-right social media. It is true that in many cases, wealth and social privilege does correlate with political office, higher education and cultural production and consumption. But as I will show, it doesnt have to be that way.

This surrender to cultural populism is resulting in the concentration of power and wealth at the top of xi the social hierarchy and a race to the bottom when it comes to artistic and educational quality: a society starkly divided economically with a culture that is increasingly undistinguished and undifferentiated. Culture and expression are being levelled; power and money are not. While the real elites are let off the hook, our arts and education are diminished, becoming bland and apologetic. When we have destroyed all sources of reputable knowledge we will call that equality, while real inequality remains conveniently out of the picture. Vast disparities of wealth and power thus escape scrutiny, while everything that gives life value and meaning has to fight for its very existence.

The anti-elitism that we see everywhere around us is presented as a new development, as ordinary people finally having their say, but it is in fact part of a long anti-intellectual tradition stretching back through Nazi Germany to nineteenth-century America. In the course of this short book Ill pick apart our societys kneejerk confounding of education and culture on one hand and social and economic privilege on the other. Only by doing so can we start to defend good elitism. We have xii given up attempting to define what constitutes truth and beauty, dismissing both as necessarily posh. Yet from the eighteenth century onwards, a series of thinkers and writers set out to do precisely that.

I will point to another largely forgotten historical tradition, running through the writings of William Morris and nineteenth-century workers education initiatives, and on into twentieth-century avant-garde art, media and architecture. This alternative tradition envisaged the most challenging ideas and the highest culture as fully legible to the least prosperous people. By reviving its principles, we can begin to imagine a fairer future in both senses of the word: a future society that values both equality and aesthetics. Its time for a progressive defence of elitism.