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At https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/authority-blob-roundtable , read a debate with Michael Lind, Codevilla, a few more sensible folks, and a Lefty PoS (Gitlin), on US elites. From David Samuels' intro:

< Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, and Peter Thiel are not part of “the elite.” They are *nobility*, as measured by the immensity of their private corporate holdings, and mastery over technologies and logistics nodes that are key to the operation of advanced societies, and the activities of states....

... the professional-managerial servant-*retainer-optics* class, i.e., the elite.... are abysmally *ignorant*, even by the standards of ordinary university graduates in other countries. Proud of their ability to order Burmese food on their iPhones, they lack the ability to read or speak other languages or do basic math, let alone complex feats of physical engineering, which is how Americans once built things and got rich.

They *lack* any feel for the richness and flavor of the American idiom, an incapacity that *severs* them from their fellow citizens and from their own history, which they profess to abhor.

In their relations with each other, they communicate in stilted bureaucratese, laced with impenetrable acronyms that read like something generated by an old IBM punch-card machine....

Or maybe it’s that the Baby Boomers, who continue to control the lion’s share of the national wealth as they enter their dotage, were truly *the worst* generation, just as Robert Stone and Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe all warned us— selfish, conceited, *self-obsessed, ignorant*, lazy, fatally lacking in *foresight and humility*, and still *blaming* their parents.

Or maybe the real culprit is digital technology, which concentrated unimaginable *power and money*, in the hands of a small number of *autists*, who have sucked up all the power and wealth into the cloud-lands, while paying their lawyers and security gurus, and HR chiefs and chefs and art consultants, and Nancy *Pelosi and Mitch* McConnell to keep their wealth intact.... >

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