The Battle of the Elites
By: Troy Camplin
Tags: Politics, Trump, Obama, Biden, Social Change

The Battle of the Elites

Barack Obama had a chance to prevent all of this. His election was a surprise to the entrenched elites. He was of a different generation than the established elites. He could have put into place a large number of new people, replacing the old elites with a new set, which would have reduced the chances — or at least the intensity — of the inter-elite battles going on right now. Instead, he selected one of the most entrenched elites of them all — Joe Biden — as his Vice President, and it didn’t really improve much from there with people like Hillary Clinton being selected for his cabinet.

This set up the election of Trump. Yes, Trump was an elite of the same generation as those Obama’s election was intended to overthrow. Yes, Trump was an elite with connections in both the Republican and especially the Democratic parties (the Trumps were very close to the Clintons, though the political theater we saw 4 years ago led us all to falsely believe otherwise). But, Trump was on the outside in regards to having direct political power. Being wealthy, he could influence those with power, but in the end he recognized that there is a huge difference between influencing those with power and having that power. Because he was a political outsider, the populace considered him to be part of the challenge to the establishment. Of course, he really wasn’t, but the man knew how to play the game.

And now we have elected the ultimate insider, the ultimate entrenched elite to the Presidency. And he’s filling his cabinet with nothing but the oldest, most entrenched insider elites imaginable. This is anything but a recipe for tackling the issue of inter-elite war in our country. The battle of the elites, which is typically in a Cold War, is going to warm up dramatically over the next several years.

50 years ago, there was a new generation chomping at the bit to get political power. The Baby Boomers were seeking to overthrow the institutions around them and set themselves up for taking political power from the WWII generation. In the end, they did just that, transforming our institutions well before they took over the most symbolic image of power we have in the United States — the Presidency — in 1992. But let’s be honest, they took over everything else well before then.

Today, we have more than a single generation who feel disenfranchised when it comes to wielding power and controlling our institutions. The Baby Boomers have held onto everything with alligator jaws. From Generation X to the Millenials, not a single generation has managed to take over our major institutions outside the creation of tech companies. Part of the reason is that the Boomers won’t retire, won’t give up the reigns of power, won’t surrender rule over our institutions. This has created an ever-more-dangerous situation because now you have not just a single generation thinking they should now be in charge, but upwards to three generations who believe this. And those three generations are battling not just the Boomers, but each other.

The COVID pandemic is, if anything, exacerbating these problems. Or, perhaps more accurately, exposing the corruption in many of our institutions.

Our public school system is corrupt beyond repair and so overwhelmed by testing and bureaucratic bloat that students learn little to nothing. For many parents, this was almost entirely unknown — but with virtual learning, what has been going on in the classrooms is now quite literally exposed to parents. I have three school-aged children, and I have encountered teachers who literally didn’t understand the classwork they had assigned and couldn’t explain to their students what to do. I have seen math assignments that require about twenty more steps than were necessary, and were unnecessarily confusing. I have seen Bloom’s taxonomy misused and abused and warped beyond recognition to create assignments entirely inappropriate for elementary school-aged children. And so has everyone else. There will be long-term consequences to this because until now few parents truly understood what was going on in the classrooms.

We are seeing more and more universities collapsing even as more and more students go online. Part of the problem is that universities were designed to be places where people could do scientific research and engage in scholarship, and students were supposed to come act as apprentices to the professors. Now, however, universities have turned into job-training centers — and they’re not doing a good job of that because that’s not what they were designed to do. The more people who come to universities to get job training, the more academic work gets crowded out. Yet, the academics rightly insist on their relevance in academia, and as a result create “required” classes that actually teach very little to people who absolutely do not want to be there. A case in point is composition classes, which were created for this situation — because smaller and smaller percentages of students in college can write even a coherent sentence — and continue to fail to teach writing because you cannot teach writing to people who don’t read and don’t want to learn how to write.

This alienation taking place in our universities is a consequence of this disconnect, and this disconnect was created by the belief — promulgated by Boomers — that everyone should go to college because college was the only worthy thing anyone could do. The result is not just the overproduction of elites (lawyers especially, who are all potential politicians, but also the very wealthy and the very educated — those with graduate degrees), but more widespread contempt for those who, for whatever reason, don’t have a college degree or are working jobs that don’t require a college degree.

Now, imagine a situation in which people who have been told to hold jobs that don’t require a college degree in contempt are being held by people with college degrees because there aren’t enough jobs out there that require college degrees. That’s the situation we are in. You can probably imagine why people in these situations aren’t too keen on the social and economic situation. Worse, at college, they were told that capitalism is to blame and that a more powerful government will solve all problems. And it’s likely that some of these people — the over-educated and under-employed — are so disgusted, so resentful that they simply want to see the entire system burn.

In many ways, we are seeing a revolution against the Boomers and the institutional changes they made during the last revolutionary period, between the late 60s and 1980, peaking in 1970. Left-wing, neo-Marxist Boomers took over the universities and many of our institutions, from government to media to the arts and even businesses, and have tenatiously held onto them while transforming them.

The problem is that our schools they have transformed have created worse and worse educational outcomes while alienating students and forcing them under increasingly draconian testing regimes — while drastically increasing spending and, as a consequence, school bureaucracies. The result is overworked teachers and students, with teachers increasingly on psychological medications and students increasingly on medications and committing suicide, and teachers being blamed for sytemic and bureaucratic problems.

The Boomers have also continued to promulgate all kinds of “crises” that have acted as excuses for them to seize more and more power. In the 1970s, it was the “population bomb” and the threat of global starvation — which not only never materialized, but clearly went in the opposite direction. Now, it is global warming — which does at least have some empirical evidence for its existence this time, but which cannot possibly justify the draconian measures too many on the left propose.

The Boomers also created various “Wars” on things. There was the War on Poverty — which created more poverty. There was the War on Drugs — which created more drugs being sold and used, and resulted in more crimes of other kinds. Then there was the War on Terror — which created more terrorism. These various “Wars” have had such obvious opposite results that there are people now joking that if we wanted kids to actually learn, the government should declare a War on Education. But in all seriousness, this war mentality is the problem. This war mentality has resulted in treating everything as a crisis — justifying massive deficit spending by the Federal government — and in the militarization of the police. All of this is because the socialists realized during WWI and WWII that being on a war footing — keeping a country in crisis — would allow them to justify any number of movements toward socialism, and the people would accept them. It doesn’t matter that many of these “wars” were created by conservatives (the first “war,” the War on Poverty, being a notable exception), as the left have used and perpetuated them, too. Biden is known to be an avid drug warrior, and Kamala Harris spent her career supporting the police and keeping innocent people in prison.

The selection of Biden by the Democrats and his subsequent election is a doubling down on every single one of these past failures — as well as a clear act of defiance by the Boomers against the rest of us. They will not go gentle into that good night — no, they will not give up their power so easily. And people are beginning to realize that. Things are, in the end, not going to turn out well for our society. They may rage against the dying of their light, but that refusal will make the world burn.