I work in education and have to deal with TFA graduates from "elite" universities. Envy is not the word. Arrogance is what drives them, and the backlash is what drives the tea party.

I'm getting tired of my 15 years experience in education being overlooked by the elitely educated who's experience consists of a summer in classes.

As an ex-military guy, I understand what drives elite. I am not sure that all of these folks are elite. Except in their heads.

Another aspect is that access to Ivy-League schools is very much like a lottery -- acceptance is more and more tenuously related to achievement and more and more completely guarantees graduation. It is nearly impossible to flunk out of an Ivy-League school; in fact, it's difficult not to obtain an 'A' average (though perhaps things are different in real subjects like mathematics, physics, and engineering).

But do note that the elitist attitude is hardly confined to 'top' schools; anyone who gets a degree in a soft subject (English, history, sociology, chicano studies, gender studies, psychology, education, &c., &c., &c.) will have been indoctrinated with the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" view of their fellow citizens as victims of false consciousness who are incapable of deciding for themselves what is best for them.

It strikes me that the "elite" believe you are smart because you went to Harvard or Yale, while the meritocrats believe you went to Yale or Harvard because you are smart.

It seems like a Wizard of Oz view of the world. Recall, the Scarecrow never actually received a brain, he received dipoma.

As Applebaum points out, Clarence Thomas graduated from Yale Law. Yet Tea Party activists never decry Thomas’s elitism. At the same time, the left sniffs derisively that he got there by affirmative action. In other words, he ought to be grateful to have had his empty Scarecrow head bestowed with this honor.

George W. Bush must cause the greatest distress for all. A third generation national political figure, scion of East Coast wealth and a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, he was nevertheless derided as an idiot by the elite. Because, you see, he only got in under the old rules for "legacies," not the new rules for today's favored groups.

The reason some (like Applebaum, apparently) get so confused by criticisms of the elite, is that they are so completely caught up in their own credentialism fetish. It isn’t about the school you attended. Christine O’Donnell uses “Yale” as a figure of speech. David Brooks uses "University of Idaho" or "Community College" as evidence.

To the elites, you see, there are no figures of speech, and even if there were, Yale and Harvard could not possibly be “just words.”

Well… the one thing about which elites of both left and right agree is that their personal success was wholly dependent on merit and their elevation had absolutely nothing to do with mechanisms of nepotism, connections and the favor-bank.

The Left want an electorate that they can do the thinking for. They understand envy, that's why they resort to class warfare to herd voters their way. Obviously they consider themselves elite. They really can't come to terms with the fact that so many think Eureka College trumps Harvard and Yale!

BTW, "lawyer-social engineers-journalist-activists"
–– climate scientists.

It's not the existence of the elite but the manner of their selection that drives me and many people crazy. By the time you are 35 or 40 no one cares what college you went to, it's what you've achieved since then that matters. I'm sure we've all worked with or known Ivy League grads who were less than impressive and state school grads who were stellar. To me, getting into Harvard proves that the person was, at age 17, a bright grind who was good at bureaucracy and a little lucky. But there are lots of bright, hard-working people. Being a good student and clever with paperwork as an adolescent does not entitle one to a lifetime of coasting and bragging (like Two-Fer on 30 Rock).

And Ivy League people tend to know that their education as such is not inherently better than others'. The chief argument for attending those schools in the network, who you know not what you know (hardly a meritocratic idea). Thus Obama hires almost exclusively Ivy Leaguers, not out of merit but out of bias, out of preference for his own and what he knows, out of brand loyalty, out of blindness to the other areas of America which could contribute. This is what pushes my buttons - the compulsion to select people for high government positions from a very narrow slice of America. And then the arrogance to feel that this is deserved.

This is not about the nature of each and every person who ever attended an elite institution. It is about a culture of overweening, entitled authority promoted primarily by many of the permanent stewards of those institutions.

I am one of many Ivy League alumni who cheer the unmasking and repudiation of leftist arrogance as manifested recently by Obama, Reid, and Pelosi -- and for decades preponderantly by the faculties and administrations of many educational institutions, elite and otherwise.

Thank you for fisking Applebaum, Jonah.

There is nothing in life that I really care about that I cannot enjoy at my very modest income (dining at the French Laundry being the perhaps the one exception). Accordingly, I have long felt myself utterly devoid of class envy and delight everyday in my simple, pleasant life.

But, in recent years, a certain bitter resentment with a class dimension has crept in for two reasons:

(1) I realized that there is no positive correlation between an elite education and values like honor and integrity, which one might expect would be refined by a first-class engagement with the so-called liberal arts. In fact, I have come to believe that the ambition and swagger and grandiosity that come with high intellectual achievement (speaking here only of the soft "disciplines") foster hypocrisy, hubris, and dishonesty. I never, ever believe the "scientific" conclusions of academics when they contradict my commonsense experience. As an economist friend once told me -- in characterizing social science -- "We torture the data until it confesses."

(2) I have become intensely resentful of the strong tendency of the governing schemes of liberal elites to reduce the day-to-day experience of middle-class life to the equivalent of what we used to artlessly call "the lower classes."

Two illustrations: Liberal elites have destroyed the public school systems, which many people of modest income cannot escape. But, of course, they send their own kids to Sidwell Friends, etc. A second illustration is what is happening with public housing, which is that the elites have abandoned their big projects and are forcing the welfare class into middle-class neighborhoods. I live in a lovely, modest townhome community. Some units inevitably become rentals. The government's Section 8 housing program moves chronic welfare recipients out of the projects and into my formerly neat, safe neighborhood. Section 8 housing vouchers are large and sufficient for a fully, middle-class rental. What modest homeowner wants that on the otherside of his bedroom wall?

Medical care, of course, is heading in the same direction. Most of us are likely to wind up receiving our care in mass, clinic-style facilities that are very bureaucratic and ultimately controlled by the government. But the elites will buy themselves out of the system. Only if you are seriously wealthy will you receive your care in a an environment that is not like the DMV.

Yea, I got a little of the anti-elite, class envy thing going on now...if anyone wants to call it that.

So Applebaum's thesis is that it would be good for the really smart folks (as measured by intelligence tests) to rule the world and that attending Ivy League or similar "elite" schools means your really smart. So we should be ruled by Hannibal Lecter and John Kerry?

Lecter wasn't Ivy League but he did go to "elite" schools: Institut De Medicine St Marie, Paris, France (M.D.) and Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland (Psychiatry Residency Training) and we know he is really smart and he must be good because he is a doctor!

Ms Applebaum should take note:

British Officer: "You call yourself a patriot, a loyal subject to the crown?"
Hawkeye: "I don't call myself subject to much at all."