Elitism, Oligarchy and Democracy

This is from a dailykos blogger/contributor 0n 10/20/08

One of the things that always amazed and bothered me was that the overwhelming majority of people who rose to the top of and were most successful at the schools that I attended and companies that I worked for were themselves the children of powerful and successful parents. Not that they necessarily lacked it, but they didn’t get to where they were merely on merit. And I’m not just talking favoratism, although there was surely much of that, but also the inherited and absorbed wisdom, smarts, experience, sophistication, etc., that they got from their parents and their friends and relatives. They entered the world with huge advantages, which I don’t begrudge them, but which most people simply do not have, making it much, much harder for them to succeed in a world which such people tend to dominate.

Our society used to be much better at leveling the playing field to the extent possible, in the form of a great public education system, and with companies offering great post-education professional “grooming” in the post-WWII years to fill vast new numbers of job openings that couldn’t possibly be filled by the children of the well-off alone. This is no longer the case. Public schools are awful for the most part (I was lucky enough to attend an excellent one), and companies tend to hire for specific slots, and grooming is more and more a thing of the past, as privileged graduates of top schools get tracked to the top, and everyone else gets shoved into a vast assembly line where you’re basically interchangeable and easy to replace, in a dead-end job. It’s still possible for someone of limited means to rise to the top, but much harder than it used to be.

Obama, of course, is the exception, but one that proves the rule, as he’s clearly an exceptional person who would have succeeded anywhere. But these days, if you’re not already from a privileged background, or exceptionally smart and ambitious, it’s very hard to gain entry into the upper levels of the professional world. Which makes one wonder just how many talented people are stuck somewhere, unable to realize their potential and maximally contribute to society, because society is no longer interested in making it easier for them to do this. It’s like we’re all driving on the highway, with a privileged few on the express lane and moving fast, and the rest of us stuck in the local lane, moving slow, and unable to move into the express lane.

If Dems can get us back to a move level playing field, they will not only help millions, and society, but themselves as well, as they’ll be winning over a generation or two of loyal voters (which the GOP knows, and is part of the reason why they worked so hard to make government fail, because successful government invariably leads to left-wing dominance). This has to happen. The inbred nth-generation offspring of the country’s rich and powerful elites are unfit to lead the country, and a massive change of leadership is called for. And a new generation of leaders has to be groomed for it.