THEIR WAYS ARE STRANGE.

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Cracked contributor Jason Pargin looked at the casting and costuming conventions of dystopian fiction.  "[T]he bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes."  He didn't say "they talked funny."  That was for David Brooks to twig to, more recently.

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

That understanding has been around for a while, but Mr Brooks might have been the olive that opened the jar.

Mr Pargin saw the resentment of the allegedly Credentialed Experts back in the day.

And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.

Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.

How many times, dear reader, must I remind you that you deconstruct institutions at their peril?  That people don't have to take the scolding?  That poking the Normals might not be wise?

The foundation upon which America was undeniably built -- family, faith, and hard work -- had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse.

A week or so before Mr Brooks wrote his column, Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds was thinking about the same sort of failure of Our Progressive Betters.

There’s a lot of craziness in the air these days.

But for the most part it seems to be flowing from the top down, not bubbling up from the bottom.

It wasn’t farmers and factory workers who came up with the idiotic COVID responses — nor was it they who originated the more or less criminal idea of conducting “gain of function” research on making dangerous viruses more dangerous.

It wasn’t shopkeepers and bus drivers who thought the way to deal with burgeoning urban crime was to get rid of police and release criminals without bail.

It hasn’t been landscapers and auto mechanics championing the notion that a child in the single-digit age range can make a lifetime choice about his or her genitalia or maintaining that even criticizing that idea is itself a species of “violence.”

Ordinary Americans haven’t been claiming the way to promote free speech is to censor people or the way to end racism is to classify everyone by race and consequently treat them differently.

He anticipated one of Mr Brooks's arguments. Mr Reynolds writes,

At the same time, our ruling class has become less diverse and more prone to groupthink.

A century ago, the people running our government, our economy, our academy and our media were varied.

Now they’re all members of the same class, educated usually at the same elite institutions, incestuously intermarried and driven by class solidarity.

Mr Brooks sounds much the same.

The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

He precedes that paragraph with a passage on the way in which the privilegentsia got themselves deferred from the draft, and integrated the public schools of the big cities, which might have midwived much of the suburban sprawl and metropolitan segregation. He continues with the understanding that "smart" might be a make-the-cosmopolitans-feel-good euphemism for "properly credentialed."  And that deconstructing bourgeois norms was for the common room, not the great room of a well-to-do, intact family.

We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.

After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that.

But when the failures of the Established Ways of Doing Things become clear, the Cult of Expertise goes the way of any other cult.

Climate change, resource depletion, and failing ecosystems will likely lead to disruptions in availability of food and water. Supply chains will be imperiled and economies will shrink. Human migration will increase. Historically high levels of economic inequality will fuel more political polarization. Faced with so many deepening challenges, people will demand explanations and answers. With the existing authorities fixated on maintaining the status quo and therefore unable to offer sufficient relief, many people will look elsewhere for new ways of understanding and responding to burgeoning problems.

For the past few decades, the United States has been overproducing elites and elite aspirants (e.g., billionaires and holders of law degrees).  As Peter Turchin and his colleagues have shown, throughout history people with frustrated elite aspirations sometimes become religious, political, or ideological entrepreneurs, drawing followers from the increasingly disgruntled general populace. These anti-establishment leaders may seek authoritarian power by providing their followers with a sense of having special knowledge, and of being members of a vanguard of “chosen ones” who will return society to a lost golden age of virtue and plenty.

That's Common Dreams contributor Richard Heinberg, warning the canonical Common Dreams reader about the usual sorts of apocalyptic and reactionary cults; and yet, his cautions apply as well to the Cult of the Presidency or the Cult of Critical Studies.

At the core of cultic thinking is a social power dynamic between leader and followers. The leader provides an explanation of the world that resists critical examination. Belief in, or rejection of this explanation establishes an in-group and an out-group. Good and evil are then defined in terms of the interests of the in-group. Followers are encouraged to surrender their critical thinking abilities. Cult leaders typically show narcissistic personality traits, while followers may exhibit low self-esteem, or may just be motivated by a desire to belong to something larger than themselves.

What comes next? John Carter diagnoses.

At some point over the last generation, the ruling class shifted its emphasis from competence to ideological loyalty. Some degree of indoctrination was always a factor, of course, but until recently the idea was to take the smartest recruits you could find, and then make them loyal. That was the purpose of the Rhodes scholarships, for instance. It was widely understood that while you needed your leadership cadre to be team players, it was absolutely crucial that they also be good at what they do. In practice, that meant sacrificing a certain degree of unity of purpose, because smart, ruthless people also tend to be independent-minded and outspoken. Still, whatever amount of friction that was caused by the ruling class sometimes operating at cross-purposes with itself was more than compensated for by the competitive advantages of a truly meritorious elite.

It doesn’t work that way anymore. Now, entrance into the top schools depends far less on grades, which is to say far less on ability, and more far on ideological purity. The ruling class has prioritized loyalty above all else.

This shift in priorities compromises the educational system at a very basic level. Classroom instruction is now much less about teaching students how to think and how to do things, and far more concerned with ensuring they become appropriately enthusiastic about what they’re supposed to feel.

He calls it the "incompetocracy." Mr Brooks doesn't go that far, and yet, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.”  Yes, he's taking stick from fellow members of the Credentialed Establishment for telling tales out of school, some of whom are deploying the predictable snark and sarcasm rather than engaging in introspection.

And yet, it is time for people, including aspirants to national office, to point out that the Credentialed Establishment has passed all sell-by dates.  "We will declare our economic independence from the failed elites who orchestrated American decline and from the never-ending federal spending that has inflated prices and plunged our nation to the brink of insolvency."  Christopher Rufo, for instance, has had enough of the scolding.  "From the summer of 1968 through the summer of George Floyd, the common citizen has found himself continuously shamed, cowed, and degraded."

Will those citizens find common cause enough to turf out the Professional-Managerial Class types, or will disagreements over the most desired form of populism give the Credentialed Establishment sufficient succor to hang on?