In Defense of Cultural Elites

My address to Yale

On Tuesday, I was invited to speak to the Yale Political Union, where I debated the resolution “Reject Our Cultural Elites.” I argued, against journalist and commentator Emily Jashinsky, in the negative, offering a defense of so-called cultural elites. My focus, in particular, was on institutions like the university and the media, and I argued in favor of reforming and enhancing high culture. My side, in a vote of the Union, did not win. However, I was pleased with how my prepared remarks came together and I wanted to share them with you. I want to thank Naomi Kanakia, Daniel Oppenheimer, and Sohrab Amari for helping me to brainstorm some of these arguments. And thank you to Ted Gioia for bringing the terms “macroculture” and “microculture” to my attention.

Should we, in fact, reject our cultural elites? This is one of the more pressing questions of our volatile political moment. My id—my inner, nastier Ross Barkan—says yes, absolutely. I could stand here for an hour or more and barrage you with furious facts on the failures of our so-called elites over the last thirty years. In much of my working life, as an author and essayist, that is what I do. To this day, I fancy myself something of an outsider, even if I’ve accrued a CV laden with prestige publications you might revere or perhaps revile. I am, by definition, an elite now—the terms Emily and I have settled on is the most successful 5 percent in a given profession in that much-maligned professional managerial class—and I suppose the Brooklyn boy inside of me will always feel a bit of conflict about that. And as someone who agrees that elites have failed, again and again, whether it was leading us into Iraq or to a financial crash or disillusioning Americans just enough that they’d turn to a former reality television star not once but twice for salvation, I can understand the overriding desire to reject or obliterate them altogether. I think often about the state of our elite, institutional culture right now—what I’ve termed the macroculture—and I see little but failure, impotence, and stagnation.

The elite book publishers, many of them now unwieldy international conglomerates, no longer produce risk-taking, innovative literature. Hollywood is awash in superhero sequels and IP slop. The era of prestige TV is over, a relic of the 2000s and 2010s. Music producers and record labels have little interest in hunting out great new acts or revolutionizing sound itself; they’d rather gorge themselves on legacy brands and let algorithms decide, passively, what we might listen to. Universities and educational institutions, meanwhile, have grown fat with bureaucratic bloat, operating as de facto for-profit enterprises to pacify their donors and fluff their administrators. Tuition rises and the product falls. Media itself continues to contract, a victim of economic forces out of its control and its own self-satisfaction. I’ve made a passable living highlighting the hypocrisies and failures of legacy media; the pandemic alone offered a master class in shoddy reporting and punditry, beginning with the absurd notion that a person should be shamed for wondering whether gain-of-function research in a Wuhan laboratory was a plausible origin for a virus that killed many millions of people. Distrust in virtually all institutions, absent perhaps the military, has reached historic highs, and Americans do have a point. What have the cultural elites done for them? Whether it’s the media organizations, the book publishers, the universities, or Hollywood, they sniff quite a bit of rot. The American people, I do believe, have a strong sense of smell. I trust them.

But I do find it ironic, as a person of the left, that it is a conservative now taking up the cause of rejection. It is ironic that those calling for the destruction of our cultural elites parrot the most radical elements of the far left, those who seek to immolate the Western canon and our traditional cultural institutions. I do not believe in defunding and abolishing—I am not that sort of leftist. I believe, rather, in creation—as all artists and intellectuals should. And we’ve reached a crucial moment in our American experiment, with a rising tide of philistinism on each side that has not been witnessed in modern times. The left wants to rip Socrates and Shakespeare from the classroom. The right wants to burn down the classroom altogether. In the White House is a president who is, quite frankly, incapable of reading a book. It’s not clear his predecessor, fading in a fog of senility, did much reading, writing, or contemplating either. At one time, a candidate for president like Robert F. Kennedy (not the guy who’s our Health and Human Services Secretary) could quote, from memory, Aeschylus. No longer. Let us, then, reform our cultural elites. Let’s save them. Because if we do not, we are staring down an intellectually and spiritually barren future—one of greater rancor and terrifying ignorance.

Before I speak on culture itself, allow me a word on the managerial elites—that college-educated PMC, who have been the target of much ire in the Trump years. Many on the right would like to see the managerial elites annihilated. That is Trump and Musk’s project now, through DOGE. It seems only cutting and slashing will do. Yet the fallacy of this view is that it offers little but negation and it is darkly ahistorical. Who invented the internet itself, after all, but college-educated, PMC elites at the Department of Defense? Who sent men to the moon but the college graduates of NASA? The elites brought tremendous destruction too—Oppenheimer and his atomic insights come to mind—but there is no twentieth century, as we know it, without the postwar managerial class, the men and women who studied their craft in well-funded universities and went on to eradicate many infectious diseases and dream up semiconductor chips. The alternative is weaker, dumber, and poorer government. The alternative is the university that no longer has a research function, that is the site of little more than intellectual torpor and eventual devolution.

When we speak of cultural elites, we first speak of institutions, not just individuals. Throughout history, these elites have had several functions when it comes to the culture itself. Three are primary: creation, support, and reification. Creation is the most straightforward. Genius comes from every class and socioeconomic background. Our most brilliant poets, philosophers, painters, novelists, and musicians have been born to poverty and wealth alike. Tolstoy hailed from Russian nobility. Virginia Woolf was the child of a famed historian. James Baldwin knew only precarity in his youth. For our purposes here, the class strata that cultural elites hail from—either an elite is born there or ascends there through some combination of great talent, hustle, and luck—is not as relevant. Support—either through the patronage system or the funneling of resources into institutions like universities, publishing houses, and media organs—is more essential, if not the entire story. For talent to ascend, particularly in the modern age, an elite institution of some kind has almost always been essential. The Toronto Star offers Ernest Hemingway a living as a journalist, and then Scribner’s, one of the great American publishers, releases The Son Also Rises, bringing this young man to the attention of millions of people. Scribner’s, several years earlier, had already minted another star, an ambitious, love-struck Princeton student named F. Scott Fitzgerald. Carson McCullers vaulted from rural poverty to literary stardom at age twenty-three, when another prestigious and elite publisher, Houghton Mifflin, decided to release The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. No twentieth century artistic success story can be really told without elite institutions—capital, expertise, and the connections that came with them.

Let’s consider the canon for a moment. What makes a canon? Why does it matter? It is, in some sense, our collective cultural consciousness. It’s Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Austen and [George] Eliot. It’s Post-Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. It’s the Decameron and the Mahābhārata. It’s The Godfather and The Sopranos, too. Let’s mull one particular institution of the cultural elite that has come in for a particular drubbing of late: the university. To reject our cultural elites is, in every sense, to reject higher education. And with the rise of a digital DIY culture—YouTube, Substack, Reddit, and Wiki pages offer every conceivable shred of information— what purpose can it serve? I, as a Substacker, certainly understand there is much to be gained by liberating yourself from certain strictures. But let’s answer in this manner: how does anyone who advocates for the rejection and destruction of our cultural elites imagine the living knowledge of the canon will be passed on without the university? Do we really not need Shakespeare scholars who have done the valuable and exhausting work of contextualizing the Bard’s work? Do we not need anthologies like the Norton Shakespeare, which the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt (a Yale graduate, by the way) assembled, to present that work to the public? Do we not need classes to teach students about Shakespeare and to train teachers to assign Shakespeare in school? Do we not need libraries to preserve books and ensure they don’t get scrubbed from existence when they fall completely out of print? And do we not need highly-trained scholars devoted to reading centuries-old texts and maintaining a thread of knowledge, so we can trace our understanding of how ideas have evolved over time? Who, exactly, will do that painstaking and meticulous work if it’s not performed by cultural institutions—by those top five percent? And if we no longer have functioning institutions devoted to the study of the arts and humanities—if we defund and delegitimize them entirely—will our children really believe us when we say these things are important? When the Renaissance humanists came to the forefront with their scathing critiques of the ancient universities, they didn’t dissolve the universities and they didn’t reject them. They penetrated them and introduced secular learning. Over the centuries, those universities served to preserve the work of the people who had once critiqued them. Do people who want our cultural elites wholly gone not think their own work ought to be preserved and immortalized someday? And who will do it, if not the universities? Consider Allan Bloom, champion of the Great Books education, or Leo Strauss, who performed groundbreaking scholarship on Aristotle and Plato. They prospered within universities, and their work is still taught in universities. Without universities, would anyone know who they were? Probably not. They would be lost to history, and lost to us. If conservatives feel universities, today, are irremediably progressive, there is no way to know what the future holds. Eventually, we will all die, and if we are exceedingly lucky, our ideas will be carried in old books and archives. Wouldn’t Emily, who’s led an impressive career, want to have functioning libraries where someone might someday rediscover her ideas, just as a young student might come to Edmund Burke in an Oxford University Press classics edition of his work?

Again and again, we see that our cultural inheritance—the very thing that fires our humanity—derives from elite individuals and institutions. Without the university, I cannot shout out the name Herman Melville or Moby-Dick and have dozens of heads nod along. Some of you might even be Melville appreciators or budding scholars of the 19^th century titan. If so, you may even know that, thirty years after his death, few in America had heard of Melville. He was fated, it seemed, to obscurity. His return to prominence was not, as we’d like to think, the product of a decentralized, grassroots movement of Melville readers who willed his literature into the public square again. Instead, it was a story of a poet and scholar, Carl Van Doren, at a culturally elite institution, Columbia University, who urged on another English instructor, Raymond Weaver, at the same university to research Melville anew. Van Doren had published a book called The American Novel that reignited interest in Melville, and it was Weaver who issued a 16-volume complete set of Melville’s books that brought him back into print. Melville’s reputation, in essence, is the story of an American university flexing its muscle to create a story about American literature. It worked.

The question that must be answered is what comes after the cultural elites. If, indeed, the universities are diminished, along with the publishing houses, movie studios, and newsrooms, what does culture look like? Or our politics? It is, perhaps, the difference between William F. Buckley’s Firing Line—erudite, lengthy discussions with the leading political and literary intellectuals of their time—and the Joe Rogan Experience. But I don’t come here to slag Rogan—he has an important role to play. As do the many YouTubers and Substackers—ironically, many of the most successful in those mediums do belong to the cultural elite, and tend to be those who cut their teeth with formal institutions—who are helping to enliven what I’ve called the microculture, that decentralized digital boomtown. We need all of that. And we need our elites too, because there’s a healthy interplay between macro and micro, mainstream and alternative. The counterculture of the 1960s spurred on a desiccating Hollywood to innovate, leading to the gems of New Hollywood and the rise of young auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman. Corporatized rock gave us indie rock, and hip hop and rap arose to knock back a smug pop landscape. We didn’t lament it too much when Biggie and Tupac became so-called cultural elites, rapping to millions of people on major labels like Interscope and Atlantic. Rather, we celebrated a new sound that had reached the very peak of the culture.

A final word on my own tribe, the media. I’ve witnessed mainstream media myopia up close. I’ve seen prestige journalists fail again and again at apprehending the pain Americans feel. I understand the urge to reject and destroy it all. But consider we are already on that path. In the last 20 years, the United States has lost 3,300 newspapers—more than a third of all newspapers in the country. News organizations in small cities and rural areas have vanished altogether. As wonderful as the information options are today—I would not give up my internet connection or my access to YouTube—they cannot adequately replace news institutions, which paid human beings living wages to show up at city council meetings, investigate public corruption, or simply tell locals what was happening in their own communities. The collapse of these newspapers has damaged our culture, too. There are few full-time art and literary critics remaining, and coverage of the arts—music, literature, film, and painting—has withered. A critical establishment can spur on greatness: even the behemoths, like Philip Roth, were in constant conversation with their literary critics. My fear is that, with each passing year, we move further and further away from that kind of world and careen towards another—one where ignorance is held up as a virtue and cultural arson is commonplace. We must fix our institutions and make them as great as they deserve to be; we must reject the nihilistic urge to eviscerate systems and structures that produced and preserved all the culture we still hold dear. Because that is the choice: reform or destruction. An ailing individual needs a hospital bed, not a bullet to the brain. Without any cultural elite—the universities, the media organs, the book publishers, and so forth—we will not only be bereft of the resources to empower the next generation of scholars, artists, and journalists, but we’ll likely be faced with the end of progress itself: the microculture will have nothing to be in tension with, no elite to strive towards or rebel against. There is a reason, as the mainstream itself has stagnated, we feel so nostalgia-trapped, so deprived of originality in sound, literature, philosophy, and thought. The elites are not well. But I am here today to tell you not only that they can be saved, but that they must. The alternative is a yawning digital abyss, the information ever faultier, the ideas flimsy and retrograde. And if these elites vanish, who will preserve us? Who will tell the future generations how we once lived and thought, what we believed? How will they prepare, absent elite institutions, for the maelstroms they might confront? Let us hope—yes, let us hope—that there is greatness left for them, too.