Category: Education

The Atlantic Daily

The Ugly Elitism of the American Right

No one hates ordinary people like the Republicans and their media enablers do.

By Tom Nichols – March 9, 2023

Fox News will likely never face any real consequences for the biggest scandal in the history of American media. But will Republican voters finally understand who really looks down on them?

Loathing and Indifference

It’s time to talk about elitism.

Last month, I wrote that the revelations about Fox News in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit showed that Fox personalities, for all their populist bloviation, are actually titanic elitists. This is not the elitism of those who think they are smarter or more capable than others—I’ll get to that in a moment—but a new and gruesome elitism of the American right, a kind of hatred and disgust on the part of right-wing media and political leaders for the people they claim to love and defend. Greed and cynicism and moral poverty can explain only so much of what we’ve learned about Fox; what the Dominion filings show is a staggering, dehumanizing version of elitism among people who have made a living by presenting themselves as the only truth-tellers who can be trusted by ordinary Americans.

I am, to say the least, no stranger to the charge of elitism. When I wrote a book in 2018 titled The Death of Expertise, a study of how people have become so narcissistic and so addled by cable and the internet that they believe themselves to be smarter than doctors and diplomats, I was regularly tagged as an “elitist.” And the truth is: I am an elitist, insofar as I believe that some people are better at things than others.

But even beyond talent and ability, I do in fact firmly believe that some opinions, political views, personal actions, and life choices are better than others. As I wrote in my book at the time:

Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous.

If that makes me an elitist, so be it.

In this, elitism is the opposite of populism, whose adherents believe that virtue and competence reside in the common wisdom of a nebulous coalition called “the people.” This pernicious and romantic myth is often a danger to liberal democracies and constitutional orders that are founded, first and foremost, on the inherent rights of individuals rather than whatever raw majorities think is right at any given time.

The American right, however, now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.”They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics.

(As an aside, note that the insecure whining about being “looked down upon” is wildly asymmetrical: Trump voters have no trouble looking down on their opponents as traitors, perverts, and, as Donald Trump himself once put it, “human scum.” But they react to criticism with a kind of deep hurt, as if others must accommodate their emotional well-being. Many of these same people gleefully adopted “Fuck your feelings” as a rallying cry but never expected that it was a slogan that worked both ways.)

In 2016, I believed that good people were making a mistake. In 2023, I cannot dismiss their choices as mere mistakes. Instead, I accept and respect the human agency that has led Trump supporters to their current choices. Indeed, I insist on recognizing that agency: I have never agreed with the people who dismiss Trump voters as robotic simpletons who were mesmerized by Russian memes. I believe that today’s Trump supporters are people who are making a conscious, knowing, and morally flawed choice to continue supporting a sociopath and a party chock-full of seditionists.

I have argued with some of these people. Sometimes, I have mocked them. Mostly, I have refused to engage them. But whatever my feelings are about the abominable choices of Trump supporters, here is the one thing I have never done that Fox’s hosts did for years: I have never patronized any of the people I disagree with.

Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. Fox, and the Republican Party it serves, for years has relentlessly patronized its audience, cooing to viewers about how right they are not to trust anyone else, banging the desk about the corruption of American institutions, and shouting into the camera about how the liars and betrayers must pay.

Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.

You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and “critical race theory.” These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right.

Some years ago, I was at a meeting of one of the committees of the National Academy of Sciences. The conferees asked me how scientists—there were Nobel Laureates in the room—could defend the cause of knowledge. Stand your ground, I told them. Never hesitate to tell people they’re wrong. One panel member shook his head: “Tom, people don’t like to be condescended to.” I said, “I agree, but what they hate even more is to be patronized.”

I believed it then, but we’re now testing that hypothesis on a national scale. I hope I wasn’t wrong.

Related:

• Following your gut isn’t the right way to go.
• The real elitists are at Fox News.

The New York Times

The MAGA-fication of North Idaho College

Charles Homans – March 6, 2023

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — The February meeting of the North Idaho College board of trustees was, by recent standards, civilized.

There were no shoving matches or speeches from far-right podcasters. Nobody pulled the fire alarm. The parade of community members who, under the wary eye of campus security officers, took turns at the microphone mostly kept their voices below shouting volume, until an hour or so before midnight, when a woman cried “Shame on you!” and stormed out of the room.

Mostly, people seemed stunned that it had actually come to this.

For most of the past two years, the college’s governing board has been a volatile experiment in turning grievances into governance. Trustees backed by the county Republican Party hold a majority on the board. They have denounced liberal “indoctrination” by the college faculty and vowed to bring the school administration’s “deep state” to heel and “Make NIC Great Again.”

The injection of such sweeping political aims into the routine administration of a community college of 4,600 students, one better known locally for its technical training programs than the politics of its faculty, has devolved into a full-blown crisis. The school has faced lawsuits from two of the five presidents it has had since the start of the previous school year. A district court judge ordered one of those presidents reinstated Friday in a ruling that castigated the trustees for “steering NIC toward an iceberg.” The college has lost professors and staff and had its debt downgraded by Moody’s, which cited the school’s “significant governance and management dysfunction.”

The troubles culminated last month in a letter from the regional higher education commission, which warned that the 90-year-old college could be stripped of its accreditation if changes were not made in a matter of weeks — an effective threat of closure and a potential catastrophe for Coeur d’Alene, a town of 56,000 in the Idaho Panhandle. The college is the sixth-largest employer in Kootenai County and a source of skilled labor for much of the local economy.

“As a businessperson here, it’s heartbreaking to me to be standing on the brink of the loss of this institution,” said Eve Knudtsen, owner of a Chevrolet dealership in the neighboring town of Post Falls. Knudtsen, a Republican, attended NIC, as have both of her daughters, and she said one-third of the technicians hired by her dealership came out of the school.

“It’s pretty much a dystopian farce,” said Kathleen Miller Green, an assistant professor of child development who attended the nearly six-hour, capacity-crowd meeting at the school’s student union building Feb. 22. “It’s laughable if you don’t have to live it.”

Rick MacLennan, a former president of the college who was ousted by the trustees in 2021, describes the school as “a canary in the coal mine” — a warning of what awaits local institutions across the country as fiercely partisan and disruptive cultural battles spread into new corners of public life. He and other critics of the trustees see parallels with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to remake New College, a state-run liberal arts school in Sarasota, Florida, as a conservative bastion.

What’s different about North Idaho College, however, is that local voters have more directly driven the change — and the results have been less ideological overhaul than organizational chaos.

In Kootenai County, a magnet for conservative retirees from other states where Donald Trump won 70% of the vote in 2020, most public institutions and services are overseen by directly elected trustees. That means that Republican activists and voters, who increasingly see even once-benign institutional authorities as a threat to their values, are in a position to do something about it.

The clash over the college began in 2020 when, after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, the school’s diversity council issued a statement expressing support for social justice demonstrations, including Black Lives Matter protests. The statement caught the attention of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee.

That year, the committee began vetting and endorsing candidates for county board positions in what are technically nonpartisan elections. In the Coeur d’Alene Press, a committee precinct-person accused the school of supporting a “radical, racist and Marxist organization” and “guilting white male students,” and urged county residents to vote for two candidates endorsed by the committee “to balance the NIC Board” in the November election.

Brent Regan, the committee’s chair, argues the endorsements are no different from those of the local Rotary Club or newspaper.

“The mission of the Republican Party in Kootenai County is to try to find people who will run for office — any office, from sewer districts to school boards to trustee boards — who embrace the policies of the Republican Party as outlined in our platform,” Regan said.

In the matter of the college’s imperiled accreditation, he said, “We’re a convenient scapegoat.”

The committee’s college trustee candidates both won. They formed an informal majority on the five-member board with a like-minded incumbent trustee, Todd Banducci, who had clashed on occasion with other trustees and the school’s administrators and staff.

In an email to a conservative student, Banducci wrote that he was “battling the NIC ‘deep state’ on an almost daily basis,” and complained that “the liberal progressives are quite deeply entrenched.”

In a conversation after the election, Banducci chided MacLennan, then the college president, for his wife’s support for Hillary Rodham Clinton and told him that he would give him “marching orders,” according to MacLennan.

“My perspective was, you can’t do that,” MacLennan recalled. “It’s not going to work like that.”

In January, he wrote a letter to the trustees expressing his concern over what he described as a pattern of behavior by Banducci, who had been privately censured by the board the year before following a report that a college staff member had felt “threatened and intimidated” by him. (Banducci did not respond to a request for comment regarding the incident.) In March, local human rights organizations filed a complaint with the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, the accreditation body, arguing that Banducci’s conduct had “severely violated” several criteria for accreditation.

“They were in the process of dismantling the institution,” said Tony Stewart, secretary of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, which drafted the complaint.

Regan argued that Stewart’s organization, which formed in the 1980s to combat white supremacists who were active in Kootenai County, had strayed far from its mission.

“Were there human rights violations going on?” he said. “No.” He called the accreditation review a “political” process, “started by people who didn’t like the results of the election.”

Banducci’s bloc of trustees eventually fired MacLennan without cause, installing the school’s wrestling coach as interim president. A power struggle ensued, with the state education board at one point appointing several interim trustees who hired a new president. In the November 2022 election, candidates backed by the GOP committee once again claimed a majority and replaced him, too.

The turnover has been cited by the accreditation body, along with several votes of no confidence in the trustees from the college faculty and student government, as a source of its concern. Sonny Ramaswamy, the commission president, declined to discuss the accreditation review, citing discussions with the school.

In November, Greg McKenzie, the current board chair, dismissed the prospect of losing accreditation as “Fake News” in a letter to constituents.

But at the February meeting, as that loss suddenly seemed like a very real possibility, the trustees appeared somewhat chastened. McKenzie reminded the crowd that members of the accrediting commission were watching via livestream and asked attendees to help avoid the circuslike atmosphere of recent meetings.

In December, Vincent James Foxx, a far-right antisemitic podcaster who lives in Kootenai County, took the microphone to offer the bloc of trustees his “100% support.” That meeting was interrupted twice by fire alarms.

The threat of losing accreditation — which would leave the school ineligible for federal financial aid and students’ credits worthless if they transfer — has drawn local business leaders off the sidelines.

At the meeting, Greg Green, a telecom entrepreneur and philanthropist, vowed to fund challenges to the committee-backed bloc of trustees in the next election, in particular Banducci. “I had no clue how bad things were,” said Green, a Republican.

But the bloc has withstood one such challenge already. In November, the local chamber of commerce and a new political action committee called Friends of NIC endorsed a slate of rival candidates for three open trustee seats. But a Republican committee-backed candidate won one of the three races, enough to recapture a majority.

In interviews, students said the imminent threat of losing accreditation had caught the attention of a student body that had mostly tuned out the years of confusing power struggles.

“It’s really sad,” said Madeleine Morgan, a second-year English and chemistry double major from California. Morgan said she had come to Idaho from California hoping for more political diversity. “It’s not like I really disagreed with the ideas down there,” she said. “It’s just that I wanted a place where, conservative or liberal, you could speak your mind.”

Still, she found herself siding with the faculty. “They have families to feed and bills to pay,” she said. “They’re not the problem here. The trustees are.”