/lit/ - Literature

Dumping my saved covers and screenshots

Anyone here read David Lebedoff? I picked up The New Elite on a whim. It's about how a new "elite" class distinct from older elites emerged by the 1970s in America, defined by its identification of itself as an "educated elite," sort of a moral vanguard above the dumb majority.

He says a lot of older elite types often saw themselves as local aristocrats or in family traditions, but what defines the new elite is that they are deracinated and see themselves primarily as members of their class. So exceptional people and geniuses tend not to be members of the new elite, despite having the same professional and academic jobs, because they see themselves as superior individuals. The point of the new elite is that its members see themselves as superior by virtue of being part of a superior class, the "educated," which deserves to rule.

He's basically describing what we now call coastal elites I think. He also describes how the infiltration of this class in democratic procedures, because it assumes that it has the right to rule and that democracy is simply the means to that rule, and how this has eroded (already by 1980) the majority's sense that political institutions "work" or are comprehensible for the average joe.

He also describes how this feeling of disconnection with the political machinery, caused by the new elite turning that machinery into its own thing, causes the actual majority in society to store up "accumulated protest" and unleash it in seemingly arbitrary displays of disdain for the new elite. Made me think of Trump.

Anyone know where to place Lebedoff politically? He reminds me a bit of James Burnam, or maybe Paul Piccone or Christopher Lasch. But he has no wiki page.