If you can't keep ambitious, talented men and women out of good schools and good jobs, you can at least derail their careers and remind them that the govern ment owns their lives. You can expropriate the years they'd spend in the library or the lab, at the gym or the school newspaper. You can make them tote a gun or clean bedpans instead of staying up late arguing politics or fooling with computers. Or equal contempt. Equality, not dignity, is the point.
Elites are nothing new.
The one that has this crop of social critics so agitated is simply much larger, much more open, and much more diverse than the old ones. And, sure, public debate might be improved if The New Republic occasionally hired someone who went to a state university or whose parents worked in textile mills. Murray and Herrnstein's worry about encap sulated worlds is as true of the worlds of Harvard graduate Mickey Kaus and Harvard dropout Bill Gates as it is of The New Republic 's offices and the local Jiffy Lube. We can only know so much about other people's lives.