Another aspect of Bryce Covert’s incontinence on the subject of the racial and sexual breakdown of the boards of directors of publicly traded corporations: It is a very good example of one of the things that most bothers me about American public discourse — that the elite-dominated policy debate inevitably ends up being dominated by the concerns of elites. For Ms. Covert, a Brooklyn-dwelling product of Brown who has written for the New York Times and was previously employed by the Financial Times Group, the question of how one goes about getting named to a seat on the board of a major corporation is probably an interesting one. But the question of diversity on corporate boards is not about looking after the interests of women or members of minority groups as such; for the typical American woman or the typical black or Latino American (or the typical white American dude) the possibility of a marginal advantage or disadvantage when being considered for a spot on the board of Google or Goldman Sachs is about 3,448,229 on the list of life concerns. But it is a live issue for the extraordinarily small subset of people of whatever demographic profile who are seriously in the running for those kinds of positions.

Similarly, we’ll go on and on about the admissions standards at Harvard or UT law, or about whether the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is statistically representative of the country’s racial and sexual makeup, as though that meant a flying flip in north Philadelphia, south Chicago, or eastern Kentucky, or to anybody who is not either in the top 20 percent of income-earners or on his way there. This is why you’ll see soi–disant progressives railing against SUVs but not international air travel, sending their kids to Sidwell Friends while ruthlessly axing school-choice scholarships for poor black kids on the other side of town. Read anything Jillian has written on high-living union bosses and you’ll see that the Left still cares about class warfare, but has simply switched its class allegiance as its ranks have grown rich.