Miss France 2025: Quelle nouvelle confiscation de la volonté populaire ? (Racism of the credentialed class: what naturalization of social differences when under the pressure of feminists and against the popular will… beauty pageants turn into IQ contests (2025)

Car on donnera à celui qui a; mais à celui qui n’a pas on ôtera même ce qu’il a. Jésus (Matthieu 13: 12)

Bernard de Chartres avait l’habitude de dire que nous sommes comme des nains sur les épaules de géants, afin que nous puissions voir plus qu’eux et les choses plus éloignées, pas en vertu d’une netteté de la vue de notre part, ou d’une distinction physique, mais parce que nous sommes portés haut et soulevé vers le haut par leur taille gigantesque. John de Salisbury (1159)

Si j’ai vu plus loin que les autres, c’est parce que j’ai été porté par des épaules de géants. Isaac Newton (1676)

Il y a autant de racismes qu’il y a de groupes qui ont besoin de se justifier d’exister comme ils existent, ce qui constitue la fonction invariante des racismes. Il me semble très important de porter l’analyse sur les formes du racisme qui sont sans doute les plus subtiles, les plus méconnaissables, donc les plus rarement dénoncées, peut-être parce que les dénonciateurs ordinaires du racisme possèdent certaines des propriétés qui inclinent à cette forme de racisme. Je pense au racisme de l’intelligence. (…) Ce racisme est propre à une classe dominante dont la reproduction dépend, pour une part, de la transmission du capital culturel, capital hérité qui a pour propriété d’être un capital incorporé, donc apparemment naturel, inné. Le racisme de l’intelligence est ce par quoi les dominants visent à produire une «théodicée de leur propre privilège», comme dit Weber, c’est-à-dire une justification de l’ordre social qu’ils dominent. (…) Tout racisme est un essentialisme et le racisme de l’intelligence est la forme de sociodicée caractéristique d’une classe dominante dont le pouvoir repose en partie sur la possession de titres qui, comme les titres scolaires, sont censés être des garanties d’intelligence et qui ont pris la place, dans beaucoup de sociétés, et pour l’accès même aux positions de pouvoir économique, des titres anciens comme les titres de propriété et les titres de noblesse. Pierre Bourdieu

Dans le débat sur la parité (…) on risque de remplacer des hommes bourgeois par des femmes encore plus bourgeoises. Si du moins on se dispense de faire ce qu’il faudrait pour que cela change vraiment : par exemple, un travail systématique, notamment à l’école, pour doter les femmes des instruments d’accès à la parole publique, aux postes d’autorité. Sinon, on aura les mêmes dirigeants politiques, avec seulement une différence de genre. Bourdieu

L’idéologie du goût naturel tire (…) son efficacité de ce qu’elle ‘naturalise’ des différences réelles, convertissant en différences de nature des différences dans les modes d’acquisition de la culture et reconnaissant comme seul légitime le rapport à la culture (…) qui porte le moins les traces visibles de sa genèse. Bourdieu

Les corps auraient toutes les chances de recevoir un prix strictement proportionné à la position de leurs possesseurs dans la structure de la distribution des autres propriétés fondamentales si l’autonomie de la logique de l’hérédité biologique par rapport à la logique de l’hérédité sociale n’accordait parfois aux plus démunis sous tous les autres rapports les propriétés corporelles les plus rares, par exemple la beauté (que l’on dit parfois «fatale» parce qu’elle menace l’ordre établi) et si, à l’inverse, les accidents de la biologie ne privaient parfois les «grands» des attributs corporels de leur position comme la grande taille ou la beauté. Bourdieu

Pendant toutes les années du mitterrandisme, nous n’avons jamais été face à une menace fasciste, donc tout antifascisme n’était que du théâtre. Nous avons été face à un parti, le Front National, qui était un parti d’extrême droite, un parti populiste aussi, à sa façon, mais nous n’avons jamais été dans une situation de menace fasciste, et même pas face à un parti fasciste. D’abord le procès en fascisme à l’égard de Nicolas Sarkozy est à la fois absurde et scandaleux. Je suis profondément attaché à l’identité nationale et je crois même ressentir et savoir ce qu’elle est, en tout cas pour moi. L’identité nationale, c’est notre bien commun, c’est une langue, c’est une histoire, c’est une mémoire, ce qui n’est pas exactement la même chose, c’est une culture, c’est-à-dire une littérature, des arts, la philo, les philosophies. Et puis, c’est une organisation politique avec ses principes et ses lois. Quand on vit en France, j’ajouterai : l’identité nationale, c’est aussi un art de vivre, peut-être, que cette identité nationale. Je crois profondément que les nations existent, existent encore, et en France, ce qui est frappant, c’est que nous sommes à la fois attachés à la multiplicité des expressions qui font notre nation, et à la singularité de notre propre nation. Et donc ce que je me dis, c’est que s’il y a aujourd’hui une crise de l’identité, crise de l’identité à travers notamment des institutions qui l’exprimaient, la représentaient, c’est peut-être parce qu’il y a une crise de la tradition, une crise de la transmission. Il faut que nous rappelions les éléments essentiels de notre identité nationale parce que si nous doutons de notre identité nationale, nous aurons évidemment beaucoup plus de mal à intégrer. Lionel Jospin (France Culture, 29.09.07)

La très ancienne « causalité diabolique » mise au jour par Léon Poliakov fait retour. Celui-ci s’opère dans un contexte de déstructuration idéologique et de crise économique, sociale et politique. À l’heure de la désaffiliation sociale, de l’usure des grandes idéologies, de la société des individus et des micro-groupes d’appartenance, il est difficile de désigner dans le combat politique un collectif (capitalisme, bourgeoisie, impérialisme…) contre lequel mobiliser. Par exemple, aujourd’hui dans la gauche française la principale force qu’est la France insoumise parle davantage d’« oligarchie » et de « peuple » que de capitalisme et de classes sociales. La logique du bouc émissaire a envahi tout l’espace public. (…) La gauche, qui a eu pendant des décennies des adversaires collectifs au travers desquels elle tentait d’expliquer qu’il fallait changer de système et de structures, a peu à peu quitté ce terrain pour se réfugier dans une diabolisation de l’adversaire de droite considéré comme une essence immuable porteuse d’un mal intrinsèque. La «vérité» de la droite serait dans son extrême qui est censé concentrer tous les attributs de la droite : l’inégalité, le rejet de l’autre, l’autoritarisme, la tradition… (…) Très souvent la droite est ainsi diabolisée par nombre de forces de gauche en étant réduite à cet extrême. Nous ne sommes souvent pas très loin de la reductio ad Hitlerum que Léo Strauss dénonçait au début des années 1950 (…) Aujourd’hui, la simple mention, par exemple, de la notion de « grand remplacement » par Valérie Pécresse  a suffi à l’identifier, pour nombre d’observateurs, au discours de la droite la plus extrême. (…) On peut avoir l’impression que plus la gauche et la macronie pâtissent d’un déficit d’idéologies de référence plus elles n’hésitent pas à manier la diabolisation de l’adversaire de droite pour retrouver une raison d’être. (…) L’antifascisme apparaît dans les années 1920 comme mouvement de mobilisation contre les régimes fascistes qui s’implantent en Europe. Très vite, il est instrumentalisé par le communisme moscoutaire afin de mettre sur pied des alliances politiques qui escamotent la question du totalitarisme. Cela sera particulièrement sensible dans les stratégies de Front populaire mises en place dans les années 1930. (…) Le plus étrange est que cette posture antifasciste perdurera après 1945 et jusqu’à nos jours alors que le fascisme a presque totalement disparu. C’est l’antifascisme sans fascisme qui peu à peu se propagera à l’ensemble de l’intelligentsia de gauche et même au-delà. La gauche confine ainsi tout ce qui lui est étranger dans le camp du mal et met en branle une machine de guerre idéologique qui dissimule la dimension meurtrière du communisme réel et exempte la gauche de toute dérive totalitaire. D’autre part, en s’auto-légitimant par un positionnement du côté de la « morale », la gauche masque ses faiblesses, contradictions et indigences idéologiques et rejette toute forme d’opposition de droite dans le camp de l’enfer et de la damnation. C’est ainsi que le gaullisme fut qualifié, en 1958 et dans les années qui suivirent, de « fascisme », par le Parti communiste français et de « coup d’État permanent » par François Mitterrand. De manière étonnante, le déclin régulier du communisme, l’effondrement de l’Union soviétique et le désarroi des idéologies de gauche face à l’exercice prolongé du pouvoir et aux défis de la globalisation, n’ont pas entraîné – tout au contraire – un déclin de la référence au diable fasciste. Alors que le fascisme réel disparaissait presque totalement de la surface du globe et que l’entrepreneur communiste en fascismes imaginaires connaissait presque le même sort, cet élément fort de la culture communiste traditionnelle faisait de la résistance. Comme le laisse entendre Pierre-André Taguieff, si la gauche ne fait plus rêver, elle parvient cependant toujours à provoquer des frayeurs. « L’ennemi absolu est le même, sous ses divers noms : “fascisme” ou “néo-fascisme”, “nationalisme”, “extrême droite” (et ses quasi-synonymes : “droite radicale”, “ultra-droite”), avec ses attributs supposés (xénophobie, islamophobie, homophobie, europhobie, racisme). C’est contre lui, qui incarne la “fausse” France, ou la véritable “anti-France”, qu’il faut engager une “guerre” sans merci. Ce sont là des déclarations de guerre qui, pour être verbales et médiatiques, n’en entretiennent pas moins un climat de guerre civile, qui transforme la société française tout entière en une immense “cage aux phobes”, chaque groupe ou chaque camp s’autorisant à dénoncer tel ou tel autre comme coupable de “phobies” détestables. Cet antifascisme devient ainsi «une doctrine de haine doublée d’un permis de haïr avec bonne conscience». (…) Tous ces entrepreneurs en dénonciation d’un retour avoué ou non des idées d’extrême droite et du nationalisme considèrent qu’un fascisme rampant est à l’œuvre et qu’il est nécessaire de ressusciter des alliances sur le modèle de l’anti-fascisme traditionnel qui agrège des acteurs hétérogènes : gauche, extrême gauche, activistes musulmans et autres compagnons de route… Se met en place un anti-fascisme imaginaire qui a le triple avantage de travestir la dimension meurtrière du communisme, de cacher les divergences profondes entre les diverses gauches et de combler le vide idéologique d’une gauche en quête de projets. Cet antifascisme imaginaire joue sur l’imaginaire rémanent de l’antifascisme de la gauche dans les années 1930 et 1940 et il contribue à stigmatiser fortement ceux qui en sont les cibles. Cet antifascisme anachronique permet également d’éviter le débat puisque le « camp du Bien » ne peut donner la parole au « camp du Mal ». (…) Cette manipulation n’a cessé depuis lors de prendre de l’ampleur. Un des premiers axes de l’extension a été la récupération de la thématique antifasciste par une partie du mouvement antiraciste et du féminisme. Les héritiers du communisme, les mouvances de l’extrême gauche et une partie du mouvement altermondialiste et anticapitaliste ont été très actifs dans ce processus de recyclage de l’antifascisme utilisé à toutes les sauces : de la dénonciation de toutes les politiques de la droite surtout lorsqu’elles se portent sur le terrain de l’immigration ou du maintien de l’ordre en passant par les dérives « fascistes » de Manuel Valls ou d’Emmanuel Macron. L’antifascisme est ainsi devenu un simple instrument de diabolisation de l’adversaire transformé en ennemi à abattre. (…) Plus le brouillard idéologique semble s’épaissir, la gauche s’affaiblir, les grands projets s’évanouir, plus ce vieux reste issu des grands affrontements idéologiques des années 1930 et 1940 refait surface comme instrument de diabolisation et devient une machine à intégrer l’antiracisme, l’antinationalisme, l’anticolonialisme, l’anti-impérialisme, l’antisionisme et même un culte abstrait de la démocratie. (…) Bien au-delà du vieux clivage gauche-droite, ces nouveaux clivages tentent à s’imposer et recyclent des éléments constitutifs des affrontements les plus dramatiques d’antan où l’antifascisme était censé rassembler toutes les familles de la gauche et au-delà afin de marginaliser un adversaire devenu un ennemi à abattre. Pascal Perrineau (La logique du bouc-émissaire en politique, 2022)

Le Rassemblement National a perdu dimanche un siège de député lors de l’élection législative partielle dans la première circonscription des Ardennes, remportée par le candidat sans étiquette et ancien député Renaissance Lionel Vuibert, qui a bénéficié d’un barrage républicain. Lionel Vuibert, qui avait été élu député de la majorité présidentielle en 2022 puis battu cet été par le jeune candidat Rassemblement national (RN) Flavien Termet, a été élu dimanche de justesse au second tour, avec 50,89% des voix, contre 49,11% pour son opposant du RN Jordan Duflot. Le Figaro

La justice n’en a pas totalement fini avec François Bayrou, nommé ce vendredi Premier ministrepar le Président de la République, en remplacement de Michel Barnier. Le 5 février, le tribunal correctionnel de Paris avait relaxé le président du Modem, 73 ans, dans l’affaire des assistants parlementaires européens, «au bénéfice du doute». Estimant qu’il était coupable de faits portant «atteinte aux valeurs de probité et d’exemplarité qu’il promeut», le parquet avait requis contre lui trente mois d’emprisonnement avec sursis, 70 000 euros d’amende et trois ans d’inéligibilité avec sursis, pour complicité, par instigation, de détournement de fonds publics européens. Le tribunal ne l’avait donc pas suivi. (…) Le haut-commissaire au Plan, proche du président de la République, était soupçonné d’avoir été le «décideur principal»d’un«système frauduleux» ayant consisté, entre 2005 et 2017, à utiliser des fonds européens pour rémunérer des assistants parlementaires qui travaillaient, en réalité, pour les organisations centristes en France. (…) Le 8 février, soit quelques jours après les trois relaxes, dont celle de Bayrou, le parquet avait néanmoins fait appel. (…) A ce jour, la date de ce nouveau procès n’a pas encore été fixée. Libération

L’idée est née au cours d’une conversation entre les membres de l’équipe, qui se demandaient pourquoi certaines idées, comme le fait de s’accrocher à certains idéaux de beauté et à certaines attentes sociales, étaient encore si répandues. Ils ont remarqué que de plus en plus de jeunes s’opposent à ces normes, mais qu’il existe peu de plateformes qui les incitent réellement à aller plus loin et à trouver leur propre voie. (…) Et s’il existait un endroit où les jeunes pouvaient s’exprimer, partager leurs histoires et être inspirés par d’autres qui sortent eux aussi des sentiers battus ? Une plateforme qui ne se contente pas de suivre les tendances, mais qui lance elle-même un mouvement. Niet Meer van Deze Tijd (Plus de ce temps)

Je trouve évidemment très bien de mettre en avant des success story féminines, mais je ne peux que regretter la suppression de ce concours national. Dans un monde qui manque parfois de lumière et de magie, les concours de beauté offrent une parenthèse enchantée, un moment pour célébrer la beauté, la fraicheur et un certain optimisme. Supprimer ce concours c’est renoncer à une tradition qui permet de rassemble, de rêver et de célébrer le beau sous toutes ses formes. Non, ces élections ne sont pas réductrices, mais bien au contraire elles mettent aussi en avant la personnalité, les valeurs et la capacité des candidates à inspirer. Sylvie Tellier

Les concours de beauté sont un moyen pour les personnes qui vivent dans un quartier pauvre d’imaginer qu’elles peuvent progresser, car c’est un moyen d’ascension sociale. C’est un moyen d’obtenir des bourses, d’attirer l’attention, et c’est l’une des rares choses que l’on peut voir comme un symbole populaire. Quand je vivais dans une sorte de quartier ouvrier de Toledo, le concours Miss TV de la chaîne de télévision K-Part, quelque chose comme ça, était annoncé. J’ai décidé d’essayer de participer au concours, même si je n’avais pas l’âge requis. Je pense que j’avais 16 ans et la limite était de 18 ans. J’ai donc menti sur mon âge. Ce n’était pas une expérience terrible. C’était une expérience surréaliste. Il fallait se mettre en maillot de bain, marcher et se tenir debout sur un tonneau de bière. J’ai fait trois ou quatre sortes de danses différentes. De l’espagnol, du russe et Dieu sait quoi. Je pensais que j’aurais de l’argent pour l’université. Et ça avait l’air glamour. Au lycée, j’avais l’impression que c’était un moyen de sortir d’une vie pas terrible dans un quartier plutôt pauvre. Gloria Steinem

Mon nom fait partie de mon identité et il n’a rien à voir avec ma nationalité. Sabah Aïb

Miss Martinique Angélique Angarni-Filopon a été élue Miss France 2025, samedi soir, au Futuroscope de Poitiers. Les téléspectateurs de TF1 n’avaient pourtant pas voté en majorité pour la candidate de la Martinique. Ils préféraient une autre miss. (…) La reine de beauté est élue par 50 % des voix du jury et 50 % des voix des téléspectateurs. L’addition des suffrages a permis d’élire Miss Martinique. (…) En regardant les votes de plus près, on s’aperçoit que Miss Martinique était la préférée du jury 100 % féminin présidé par Marie-José Pérec. Mais elle n’était pas la candidate préférée des téléspectateurs. Les votes par téléphone et par SMS avaient placé en tête Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais Sabah Aïb. Elle était suivie de Miss Martinique à la seconde place, Miss Guadeloupe 3e, Miss Corse 4e et Miss Côte-d’Azur 5e. Le jury avait, de son côté, placé Miss Martinique en tête, suivie de Miss Corse 2e, Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais 3e, Miss Guadeloupe 4e et Miss Côte-d’Azur à la 5e place. Au final, Miss Martinique a obtenu 5 points du jury et 4 des téléspectateurs – soit 9 points – alors que Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais bénéficiait de 5 points du public et 3 points du jury, ce qui fait un total de 8 points. À 34 ans, Miss Martinique devient la candidate la plus âgée de l’histoire de Miss France, grâce aux modifications des critères d’âge il y a 2 ans. Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais Sabah Aïb est la première dauphine, la Miss Corse Stella Vangioni seconde dauphine. La Dépêche

La marque la plus forte au monde n’est ni Apple, ni Mercedes-Benz, ni Coca-Cola. Les marques les plus fortes sont celles du MIT, d’Oxford et de Stanford. Les universitaires et les administrateurs des grandes universités ont décidé, au cours des 30 dernières années, que nous n’étions plus des fonctionnaires, mais des produits de luxe. Scott Galloway (New York University)

Quand des militants appellent à des émeutes en réponse à des allégations douteuses de racisme, nous constatons que les gens de gauche (du moins dans notre étude la plus récente) sont plus susceptibles de sous-estimer les conséquences dommageables. Une majorité de progressistes pensent que les émeutes anti-police de George Floyd ont causé moins de 10 millions de dollars de dégâts matériels. En réalité, les émeutes de Floyd ont causé environ 2 milliards de dollars de dégâts matériels selon les déclarations d’assurance. Centre de recherche sceptique

Perception : Un grand nombre d’hommes noirs non armés sont abattus par des policiers aux États-Unis. Réalité : 11 hommes noirs non armés ont été abattus par la police en 2021. BLM était fondé sur de fausses prémisses. Quiconque continue à les soutenir est au mieux mal informé et au pire ment pour des raisons sociales ou politiques. Centre de recherche sceptique

Joe Biden fait son entrée dans notre classement à la 14e place, ce qui le place dans le premier tiers des présidents américains. Trump, quant à lui, conserve la position qu’il occupait il y a six ans : bon dernier, talonnant des chefs d’État historiquement calamiteux tels que James Buchanan et Andrew Johnson… Les partisans de la présidence Biden disposent d’arguments solides dans leur arsenal, mais sa position élevée dans le top 15 suggère un puissant facteur anti-Trump à l’œuvre. Jusqu’à présent, le bilan de Biden ne comprend pas les victoires militaires ou l’expansion institutionnelle qui ont généralement conduit à des classements plus élevés, et un scandale familial tel que celui impliquant son fils Hunter diminue normalement le classement d’un président…. La plus grande réussite de Joe Biden pourrait être d’avoir sauvé la présidence de Trump, d’avoir repris un style plus traditionnel de leadership présidentiel et de s’être préparé à empêcher son prédécesseur d’occuper le poste cet automne. La position de Trump au bas de notre classement le place non seulement derrière Buchanan et Johnson, mais aussi derrière des fiascos complets comme Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding et William Henry Harrison, qui est mort 31 jours seulement après son entrée en fonction. (…) Les universitaires penchent à gauche, il est vrai, mais (…) les Américains qui votent pour le prochain président (…) se trouvent dans la position historiquement rare de savoir comment les deux candidats se sont comportés dans leur fonction. Il reste à voir s’ils prendront en compte l’engagement de chaque président envers les normes du leadership présidentiel et s’ils en viendront à les évaluer aussi différemment que nos experts. LA Times (18 février 2024)

Au printemps, le keffieh se portera en étendard : en version classique noir et blanc, en bleu indigo ou de toutes les couleurs… Magazine féminin

Aujourd’hui, (…) le keffieh chic fait fureur. (…) Étudiants radicaux, célébrités, papas lecteurs du Guardian en route pour un macchiato : tout le monde a un keffieh drapé sur les épaules. Le keffieh est devenu l’uniforme des personnes politiquement éclairées, le must-have des personnes socialement conscientes. (…) Même les méga-riches s’y mettent : Balenciaga a déjà fabriqué un keffieh haut de gamme qui vous coûtera 3 000 livres sterling. Mais il n’y a pas de prix pour les signes de vertu. (…) L’apitoiement sur la Palestine, et par extension la haine d’Israël, est devenu un «élément essentiel d’une série de points de vue défendus par les progressistes qui déterminent la teneur d’une grande partie de notre culture» (…) C’est devenu la «croyance de luxe» du jour, le moyen de mesurer la valeur sociale d’une personne. (…) Pratiquement tous les stands de Camden Market en vendent. Il était bel et bien devenu une «marchandise de l’esthétique de la résistance», pour reprendre les termes du professeur de médias Robert G. White. Bientôt, les défilés de mode s’enchaînent. Après le «glamour paysan» et le «style clodo», voici maintenant le «combat urbain avec une touche moyen-orientale», écrivait le critique de mode Charlie Porter en 2001, lorsque le keffieh est redevenu un incontournable. Le créateur de mode belge Raf Simons a fait défiler des mannequins masculins vêtus de keffiehs et de «minces tuyaux d’évacuation noirs et d’encombrants manteaux de surplus de l’armée» – un ‘symbole enflammé’, s’est extasiée la presse de mode. Il a figuré dans les défilés de Galliano, Balenciaga et Louis Vuitton. David Beckham, Colin Farrell et Mary-Kate Olsen ont pris l’habitude de le porter. Urban Outfitters les a stockés (avant de les retirer à la suite de plaintes). Même Carrie Bradshaw dans Sex and the City a porté un «bustier keffieh» à un moment donné. Du couvre-chef des pirates de l’air au chiquissime haut de la célibataire la plus connue de la culture occidentale, tel a été le curieux parcours de cet ancien élément vestimentaire des Bédouins. Aujourd’hui, le keffieh est de retour. Depuis le pogrom du Hamas du 7 octobre, le « combat urbain avec une touche de Moyen-Orient » est redevenu le look à la mode dans les cercles socialement conscients. Vous déclarez vos pronoms, vous vous agenouillez et vous portez un keffieh. (…) Pour beaucoup d’entre nous, l’« appropriation culturelle » a toujours été une idée grincheuse et illibérale. Il s’agissait d’un contrôle par les élites des choix culturels et vestimentaires des gens. Dans le pire des cas, elle était dangereusement clivante sur le plan racial, avec sa consigne impérieuse de «rester dans notre couloir racial» et de ne jamais s’intéresser à la mode et aux idées des groupes ethniques supposés moins privilégiés que les nôtres. (…) Il est clair que l’establishment culturel a fait un calcul. Il a décidé que, dans le cas du keffieh, le port de ce vêtement permettait d’accumuler plus de points de statut que le contrôle de son port. Le fait que ceux qui portent le keffieh aient totalement échappé à l’accusation d’appropriation culturelle confirme à quel point ce vêtement est utile à la classe militante, à quel point il est devenu central dans leurs démonstrations quotidiennes de droiture. Le fait que nous vivions à une époque de folie telle que les femmes blanches puissent être réprimandées pour avoir porté des créoles et les homosexuels pour avoir dit «Yass», alors que les armées de jeunes bourgeois portant des coiffures bédouines bénéficient d’un laissez-passer, témoigne de la nature sacrée du keffieh dans les cercles vertueux. Quel est le rôle sacré de ce vêtement dans la vie des élites ? Son rôle premier est de signifier la vertu. C’est un raccourci vestimentaire de la rectitude éthique. Il indique à vos compagnons de voyage dans l’univers des croyances de luxe que vous aussi, vous méprisez Israël et avez de la compassion pour la Palestine – un credo tout à fait nécessaire pour accéder à l’establishment culturel du 21e siècle. Porter le keffieh en public, ou poster en ligne des photos de vous envelopper dans un keffieh, est fondamentalement une déclaration de votre aptitude morale à la haute société politique. (…) Le fait que les adeptes du keffieh puissent être étonnamment ignorants de l’arriération et de la barbarie du Hamas, qu’ils puissent porter un symbole palestinien tout en étant totalement ignorants des réalités actuelles de la vie en Palestine, confirme que ce vêtement est davantage un symbole de sentiment que de connaissance. (…) Le fait que la préoccupation pour la Palestine soit devenue une marchandise et passe avant tous les autres maux du monde – y compris les maux infligés aux serfs qui fabriquent les keffiehs que portent les riches – montre à quel point les croyances de luxe, un terme inventé par l’auteur Rob Henderson, sont devenues importantes pour les nouvelles élites. Comme l’explique Matthew Goodwin, alors que l’ «ancienne élite» tirait son sens du statut social des «manifestations physiques de la richesse, telles que les beaux vêtements, les bijoux, les voyages à l’étranger, les serviteurs, les voitures privées et les grandes propriétés», la nouvelle élite tend à se distinguer des masses «sans statut» en se concentrant «beaucoup plus sur la projection de son “capital culturel” que sur son “capital économique”. La prospérité étant «répartie beaucoup plus largement dans la société» que par le passé, «l’étalage ostentatoire des richesses a beaucoup moins d’importance». Au contraire, selon Goodwin, «pour la nouvelle élite sophistiquée, financièrement sûre, vivant en ville et ayant fait des études universitaires», un certain nombre de «croyances à la mode sont devenues le nouveau signifiant du statut social». Et la principale d’entre elles, encore plus après les pogroms, est la pitié pour la Palestine, combinée à la phobie d’Israël. Le keffieh est devenu l’expression matérielle de cette croyance de luxe. C’est ainsi que le couvre-chef des paysans du désert est devenu le principal moyen par lequel les riches d’Occident démontrent leur capital moral et leur statut social. (…) le keffieh [est] devenu un moyen de distinction morale, un élément de l’arsenal culturel qui permet aux moralistes de luxe de «se distinguer des masses de ‘bas statut’ » (…) pour dire : «Je me soucie de la Palestine et mon statut est donc plus élevé que le vôtre». Ainsi, le culte du keffieh est une autre forme de «radical chic», pour reprendre le terme créé par Tom Wolfe dans son essai percutant de 1970 (…) La victimisation par procuration des élites à travers le drame palestinien est un jeu dangereux. Il semble désormais indéniable que plus les puissances culturelles de l’Occident sont avides de représentations de la détresse palestinienne et les collectionnent, plus les idéologues du Hamas seront disposés à fournir de telles représentations [et à] prolonger la guerre et [les] souffrances (…) Résultat des courses ? Des manifestants portant des keffiehs qui disent aux Juifs de New York de «retourner en Pologne». Des militants en keffiehs criant dans le métro de New York : «Levez la main si vous êtes sioniste». Des Britanniques en keffiehs défilant aux côtés d’islamistes radicaux qui appellent de leurs vœux de nouveaux pogroms contre l’État juif. Les conséquences du 7 octobre nous rappellent douloureusement que les binaires moraux faciles de la politique identitaire sont bien plus susceptibles de ressusciter le racisme que de le combattre. Brendan O’Neill

Il y a dix ans, alors que j’étais étudiant à Yale, je me suis rendu compte que mes camarades avaient vécu une réalité sociale totalement différente de la mienne. J’avais grandi dans la pauvreté, produit biracial d’un dysfonctionnement familial, d’un placement en famille d’accueil et du service militaire. Soudain installé dans l’opulence d’une université d’élite – plus d’étudiants de Yale sont issus de familles appartenant au 1 % des revenus les plus élevés que de familles appartenant au 60 % des revenus les plus bas – (…) j’ai souvent trouvé chez mes camarades de classe ce que j’appelle des « croyances de luxe » – des idées et des opinions qui confèrent un statut à la classe supérieure mais qui infligent souvent des coûts réels aux classes les plus modestes. Par exemple, une camarade de classe m’a dit que « la monogamie est un peu dépassée et qu’elle n’est pas bonne pour la société ». Je lui ai demandé quel était son milieu d’origine et si elle avait l’intention de se marier. Elle m’a répondu qu’elle venait d’un foyer aisé, stable et biparental, comme la plupart de nos camarades de classe. Elle a ajouté que, oui, elle prévoyait personnellement de se marier de manière monogame, mais a rapidement insisté sur le fait que les familles traditionnelles sont démodées et que la société devrait « évoluer » au-delà d’elles. La promotion par ma camarade de classe d’un idéal (« la monogamie est dépassée ») alors qu’elle en vit un autre (« j’ai l’intention de me marier ») était reprise par d’autres étudiants de différentes manières. Certains me parlaient par exemple de l’admiration qu’ils avaient pour l’armée, ou du fait que les écoles professionnelles étaient tout aussi respectables que l’université, ou encore que l’université n’était pas nécessaire pour réussir. Mais lorsque je leur demandais s’ils encourageraient leurs propres enfants à s’engager ou à devenir plombier ou électricien plutôt que de s’inscrire à l’université, ils hésitaient ou changeaient de sujet. Autrefois, les gens affichaient leur appartenance à la classe supérieure par des biens matériels tels que l’habillement et les loisirs. Comme l’a fait remarquer l’économiste et sociologue Thorstein Veblen dans son ouvrage de 1899 intitulé « The Theory of the Leisure Class », les symboles de statut doivent être difficiles à obtenir et coûteux à acheter. À l’époque de Veblen, les gens affichaient leur statut en portant des vêtements délicats et contraignants, tels que des hauts-de-forme et des robes de soirée, ou en s’adonnant à des activités qui prenaient du temps, comme le golf ou la chasse à courre. Selon Veblen, la valeur de ces biens et de ces activités résidait dans le fait même qu’ils étaient si chers et si coûteux que seuls les riches pouvaient se les offrir. Aujourd’hui, alors que les produits de luxe sont plus que jamais accessibles aux gens ordinaires, l’élite a besoin d’autres moyens pour faire connaître sa position sociale. Cela explique pourquoi tant de gens dissocient désormais la classe sociale des biens matériels et l’associent à des croyances. Prenons l’exemple du vocabulaire. L’Américain typique de la classe ouvrière ne pourrait pas vous dire ce que signifie « hétéronormatif » ou « cisgenre ». Lorsque quelqu’un utilise l’expression « appropriation culturelle », ce qu’il dit en réalité, c’est « j’ai été éduqué dans une grande université ». Seules les personnes aisées peuvent se permettre d’apprendre un vocabulaire étrange. Les gens ordinaires ont de vrais problèmes à régler. Quand mes camarades de classe à Yale parlaient d’abolir la police ou de décriminaliser les drogues, ils semblaient ne pas être conscients des coûts qui en découlent parce qu’ils en étaient largement isolés. En réfléchissant à mes propres expériences avec l’alcool, si les drogues avaient été légales et facilement accessibles lorsque j’avais 15 ans, vous ne seriez pas en train de lire ceci. Ma mère biologique a succombé à la toxicomanie peu après ma naissance. Je ne l’ai pas revue depuis mon enfance. Tous les parents de mes frères et sœurs adoptifs étaient toxicomanes ou souffraient de troubles mentaux, souvent déclenchés par la consommation de drogues. Un étudiant fortuné d’une université d’élite peut s’essayer à la cocaïne et s’en sortir. Un enfant issu d’un foyer dysfonctionnel avec des parents absents est plus susceptible de se laisser aller à l’autodestruction après avoir consommé sa première dose de méthamphétamine. Cela explique peut-être pourquoi une enquête menée en 2019 par l’Institut Cato a révélé que plus de 60 % des Américains ayant au moins une licence étaient favorables à la légalisation des drogues, alors que moins de la moitié des Américains sans diplôme universitaire pensaient que c’était une bonne idée. Les drogues peuvent être un passe-temps récréatif pour les riches, mais pour les pauvres, elles sont souvent une porte d’entrée vers d’autres souffrances. De même, une enquête Yahoo News/YouGov réalisée en 2020 a révélé que les Américains les plus riches étaient les plus favorables à la suppression des fonds alloués à la police, tandis que les Américains les plus pauvres étaient les moins favorables à cette idée. Il faut savoir que, par rapport aux Américains qui gagnent plus de 50 000 dollars par an, les Américains les plus pauvres sont trois fois plus susceptibles d’être victimes de vols, d’agressions aggravées et d’agressions sexuelles, selon les statistiques fédérales. Pourtant, ce sont les personnes aisées qui réclament l’abolition des forces de l’ordre. Peut-être que la classe des croyances de luxe est tout simplement ignorante des réalités de la criminalité. Ce qui me touche le plus, c’est la croyance de luxe selon laquelle la famille n’est pas importante ou que les enfants ont les mêmes chances de s’épanouir dans toutes les structures familiales. En 1960, le pourcentage d’enfants américains vivant avec leurs deux parents biologiques était identique pour les familles aisées et les familles de la classe ouvrière : 95 %. En 2005, 85 % des familles aisées étaient encore intactes, mais ce chiffre était tombé à 30 % pour les familles de la classe ouvrière. Comme l’a déclaré Robert Putnam, politologue à Harvard, lors d’une audition au Sénat en 2017 : « Les enfants riches et les enfants pauvres grandissent désormais dans des Amériques séparées ». En 2006, plus de la moitié des adultes américains sans diplôme universitaire estimaient qu’il était « très important » que les couples avec enfants soient mariés, selon Gallup. En 2020, ce chiffre est tombé à 31 %. Parmi les diplômés de l’enseignement supérieur interrogés par Gallup, seuls 25 % pensaient que les couples devraient être mariés avant d’avoir des enfants. Cependant, leurs pratiques contredisent leurs convictions de luxe: La plupart des diplômés américains qui ont des enfants sont mariés. Malgré leur comportement, les personnes aisées sont les plus susceptibles de dire que le mariage n’est pas important. (…) Pour éviter la misère, je crois que nous devons admettre que certaines actions et certains choix, y compris la monoparentalité, la toxicomanie et la criminalité, sont en fait indésirables en soi et n’ont pas simplement besoin d’être normalisés. En effet, il est cruel de valider des décisions qui causent du tort. Et c’est un véritable luxe que d’ignorer ces conséquences. Rob Henderson

Les «croyances de luxe» (…) sont des idées et des opinions qui confèrent un statut à la classe supérieure à très peu de frais, tout en infligeant souvent des coûts aux classes inférieures. (…) [comme par exemple] les magnats de la technologie, un autre groupe aisé, qui encouragent les gens à utiliser leurs appareils addictifs tout en appliquant des règles rigides à la maison concernant l’utilisation de la technologie. Par exemple, Steve Jobs interdisait à ses enfants d’utiliser des iPads. Les parents de la Silicon Valley demanderaient à leurs nounous de surveiller de près l’utilisation que font leurs enfants de leurs smartphones. Il ne faut pas se laisser griser par son propre approvisionnement, j’imagine. De nombreuses personnes fortunées promeuvent aujourd’hui des modes de vie préjudiciables aux moins fortunés. En même temps, ils ne sont pas seulement à l’abri des retombées, ils en profitent souvent. Autrefois, les gens affichaient leur appartenance à la classe supérieure par leurs accessoires matériels. Mais aujourd’hui, les produits de luxe sont plus accessibles qu’auparavant. C’est un problème pour les personnes fortunées, qui veulent toujours afficher leur position sociale élevée. Mais ils ont trouvé une solution intelligente. Les riches ont dissocié le statut social des biens et l’ont rattaché aux croyances. (…) La célèbre « classe de loisirs » de Thorstein Veblen s’est transformée en « classe de croyances de luxe ». À l’époque de Veblen, les gens affichaient leur statut en portant des vêtements délicats et contraignants tels que smoking, haut-de-forme et robe de soirée, ou en s’adonnant à des activités chronophages telles que le golf ou la chasse à courre. Veblen a suggéré que les riches affichent ces symboles non pas parce qu’ils sont utiles, mais parce qu’ils sont si chers ou si coûteux que seuls les riches peuvent se les permettre, ce qui explique qu’ils soient des indicateurs de statut élevé. (…) De même, les étudiants dépensent-ils 250 000 dollars dans les prestigieuses universités américaines pour l’éducation ? Peut-être. Mais ils le font aussi pour le logo. (…) les universités de haut niveau sont également cruciales pour l’entrée dans la classe des croyances de luxe. Prenons l’exemple du vocabulaire. L’Américain typique de la classe ouvrière ne pourrait pas vous dire ce que signifie « hétéro-normatif » ou « cisgenre ». (…) Lorsque quelqu’un utilise l’expression « appropriation culturelle », ce qu’il dit en réalité, c’est « j’ai été éduqué dans une grande université ». Seules les personnes aisées peuvent se permettre d’apprendre un vocabulaire étrange, car les gens ordinaires ont de vrais problèmes à régler. Le privilège blanc est la croyance de luxe que j’ai mis le plus de temps à comprendre, parce que j’ai grandi avec beaucoup de Blancs pauvres. Les diplômés blancs aisés semblent être les plus enthousiastes à propos de l’idée du privilège blanc, alors qu’ils sont les moins susceptibles d’encourir des coûts pour promouvoir cette croyance. Au contraire, ils améliorent leur statut social en parlant de leurs privilèges. Quand des mesures seront prises pour lutter contre le privilège blanc, ce n’est pas les diplômés de Yale qui seront lésés. Ce sont les Blancs pauvres qui en feront les frais. La classe supérieure promeut l’abolition de la police, la dépénalisation des drogues ou le privilège blanc parce que cela fait progresser son statut social. La logique s’apparente à la consommation ostentatoire (…) Proposer des mesures qui vous coûteront moins cher à vous, membre de la classe supérieure, qu’elles ne me coûteraient à moi, remplit la même fonction. Plaider en faveur de la promiscuité sexuelle, de l’expérimentation de la drogue ou de l’abolition de la police sont de bons moyens d’afficher votre appartenance à l’élite car, grâce à vos revenus et à vos relations sociales, ils vous coûteront moins cher qu’à moi. Un étudiant fortuné d’une université d’élite peut expérimenter la cocaïne et, selon toute vraisemblance, s’en sortir. Un enfant issu d’un foyer dysfonctionnel avec des parents absents prendra souvent sa première dose de méthamphétamine pour s’autodétruire. (…) Pendant le reste de l’année et jusqu’en 2021, le nombre de meurtres a grimpé en flèche dans tous les États-Unis en raison des politiques de définancement, des départs à la retraite anticipés ou des démissions, et des services de police qui peinent à recruter de nouveaux membres après que la classe aisée a cultivé un climat de dégoût à l’égard des forces de l’ordre. Il faut savoir que, par rapport aux Américains qui gagnent plus de 75 000 dollars par an, les Américains les plus pauvres ont sept fois plus de chances d’être victimes d’un vol, sept fois plus de chances d’être victimes d’une agression grave et 20 fois plus de chances d’être victimes d’une agression sexuelle. Et pourtant, de nombreuses personnes aisées appellent à l’abolition des forces de l’ordre. Ce qui me touche le plus, c’est la croyance de luxe selon laquelle la famille n’est pas importante ou que les enfants ont les mêmes chances de s’épanouir dans toutes les structures familiales. (…) Grandir avec deux parents est désormais inhabituel dans la classe ouvrière, tandis que les familles biparentales sont normales et de plus en plus courantes dans la classe moyenne supérieure ». Les plus aisés, en particulier dans les années 1960, ont défendu la liberté sexuelle. Des normes sexuelles plus souples ont été adoptées par le reste de la société. La classe supérieure, cependant, avait encore des familles intactes. En général, ils ont fait des expériences à l’université, puis se sont installés. Les familles des classes inférieures ont, elles, récolté la désagrégation, qui se poursuit encore aujourd’hui. Rob Henderson

Sandel ressuscite les travaux du sociologue anglais Michael Young, qui, dans les années 1950, avait inventé le terme de méritocratie, même si la description du processus de dilution progressive de la société de classe dans l’égalitarisme libéral avait déjà été faite par Tocqueville. Young soulignait les effets pervers de cette méritocratie montante, où les enfants d’ouvriers pourraient enfin se mesurer aux descendants de la classe dominante. Ce triomphe avait un prix: «l’hubris des vainqueurs et l’humiliation des perdants». Car celui qui n’y arrive pas ne peut plus le reprocher au système de classe; il doit désormais l’imputer à son manque de talent et d’enthousiasme. Young, souligne Sandel, semblait presque regretter le temps où la société était divisée en classes sociales étanches, chacun acceptant sa place et n’imaginant pas pour lui-même un autre avenir que celui qui lui était assigné par la force des choses. Le basculement d’un principe aristocratique au principe méritocratique allait inévitablement fomenter une discorde sociale qui se terminerait en guerre civile. Young la prévoyait pour 2033. Les «gilets jaunes» de 2018 lui ont donné raison un peu plus tôt. En effet, l’Amérique et l’Europe semblent au bord de l’implosion à cause de cette cassure entre les gagnants de la compétition mondiale et les autres. Dans l’Amérique des années Clinton et Obama, le diplôme est peu à peu devenu le seul passeport pour assurer la mobilité promise par les pères de la démocratie américaine. Il fut un temps, il est vrai, où la réussite ne passait pas nécessairement par le diplôme. On célébrait le salarié autodidacte devenu patron. La mesure de l’énergie, du talent et de l’initiative n’étaient pas qu’académiques. Quelle est la vraie valeur du mérite ? Si je rate, si je perds, est-ce parce que je le mérite ? En fait, deux phénomènes se juxtaposent. Le premier est l’effet puissant d’érosion des vents de la mondialisation sur les équilibres sociaux des économies occidentales, qu’on croyait granitiques et éternels. Personne ne s’attendait à une ascension aussi rapide de la Chine ; les élites, mais aussi les syndicats, ont sous-estimé la rapidité de la transformation. Sandel regrette que la seule réponse à cet immense défi ait été d’«envoyer les nouvelles générations à l’université, en leur affirmant que ce serait le seul moyen de garantir leur réussite face aux concurrents du monde entier». Il existe, en effet, tous les autres métiers, manuels et de services, qui méritent une tout autre considération. Le deuxième débat est religieux et philosophique, mais tout aussi passionnant, et Sandel l’aborde de manière claire et exhaustive. Il s’agit de la personnalisation du mérite et de ses conséquences sur le refus d’en partager les fruits par l’impôt ou par d’autres biais – rappelons que les capitalistes américains des années 1910, comme Carnegie, donnèrent jusqu’aux deux tiers de leurs fortunes. Cette éthique du mérite est pourtant au cœur du capitalisme et de ses succès. «Cela n’empêche pas de reconnaître tout ce que le capitalisme a accompli, mais, depuis quarante ans, nos attitudes envers le succès ont changé, et cela pose à terme la question de l’avenir de nos démocraties». Il faut donc changer l’idée que nous nous faisons de nos mérites personnels. Quelle est la vraie valeur du mérite? Si je rate, si je perds, est-ce parce que je le mérite? Quand Job pleure ses fils, ce n’est pas parce qu’il a mal agi, bien au contraire, mais parce que Dieu en a décidé ainsi. Dieu ou la Nature, comme disait Spinoza, se fiche des mérites de chacun. Cette conviction antiméritocratique a infusé le protestantisme de Luther et de Calvin. Et, malgré cela, l’idée que nous méritons nos succès nous habite. Après les théologiens, de nombreux économistes ont démontré la relation aléatoire entre le succès et le talent, et Sandel nous en parle très bien. L’une des excellentes surprises de ce livre est de faire dialoguer l’ultralibéral Friedrich Hayek et le social-démocrate John Rawls. Ils sont au moins d’accord pour ramener l’idée de mérite à sa juste place. Plus modeste. Charles Jaigu

En réalité, les voies légales d’entrée à l’université favorisent aussi les plus riches, puisque deux tiers des étudiants de l’Ivy League (groupe des huit universités privées du nord-est des États-Unis les plus prestigieuses du pays, NDLR) viennent de familles très aisées. Plus votre famille est riche, plus il y a de chances que vous obteniez de bons résultats aux examens d’entrée. En cela, la discrimination positive n’est qu’une solution tronquée, qui aide les étudiants issus de minorités raciales et ethniques défavorisées, mais ne prend pas en compte les autres. Et, de ce fait, les étudiants issus de familles pauvres ou issus de la classe ouvrière ont un gros désavantage et sont sous-représentés dans les universités. [Cette obsession pour le diplôme] s’est déployée au cours des quatre dernières décennies, et cela a à voir avec deux tendances de la mondialisation néolibérale. Celle-ci a creusé les inégalités. Mais elle a également enclenché un changement d’attitude envers le succès, avec un fossé plus profond entre les soi-disant gagnants et les perdants. Et ce parce que les gagnants de la mondialisation en sont venus à croire que leur succès était le leur, à la mesure de leur mérite et de leur réussite éducative. Ils ont fini par penser que les perdants le sont parce qu’ils ont échoué à acquérir l’instruction nécessaire pour s’épanouir dans l’économie mondialisée. À mesure que les inégalités se sont creusées, l’avantage économique à avoir un diplôme s’est amplifié. Les avantages de revenu des diplômés sur les non-diplômés se sont accentués en même temps qu’ont été gonflés l’estime sociale et le prestige associés au fait d’être diplômé plutôt que d’exercer un métier qui ne nécessite pas d’études. L’enseignement supérieur est devenu le gardien, l’arbitre du succès dans une société méritocratique axée sur le marché. Cela a contribué à l’intensification de la compétition pour l’admission dans les universités d’élite hautement sélectives. (…) Ceux qui sont au sommet ont toujours trouvé un moyen de croire qu’ils méritaient leur place et que ceux qui sont en bas la méritaient aussi. C’est une tendance universelle. Mais, à la différence de notre société méritocratique, dans les sociétés aristocratiques ou de caste, cette histoire était moins crédible, car, si le sort d’une personne était déterminé par l’accident de sa naissance, alors tout le monde savait au fond que c’était une question de chance. Que ce succès et cette richesse n’étaient ni mérités ni gagnés. La société américaine prétend être supérieure aux sociétés aristocratiques précisément parce que les gens ne sont pas «coincés» dans leur classe d’origine. Les opportunités sont ouvertes. Les gens sont libres de travailler dur pour exercer leurs talents. Et donc, contrairement aux sociétés aristocratiques, ceux qui réussissent méritent leur succès. Et ils développent une forme d’ingratitude envers la société. Vous connaissez l’expression française «noblesse oblige»… Eh bien, tout cela a disparu: la nouvelle élite ne se sent plus aucun devoir, contrairement à l’aristocratie, car elle croit ne devoir son succès qu’à elle-même. (…) La croyance selon laquelle l’ardeur au travail amènera au succès et à la capacité de s’élever persiste. Selon un sondage récent réalisé au niveau international, quand on demande si travailler dur est important pour réussir dans la vie, 73 % des Américains disent oui, pour 25 % seulement des Français. Mais, paradoxalement, la mobilité sociale est légèrement supérieure en France qu’aux États-Unis. Comparés à de nombreux pays européens, et notamment les pays du Nord, les États-Unis ont moins de mobilité sociale, mais plus de croyance que cette mobilité sociale est possible. Si vous naissez dans une famille pauvre, la probabilité de devenir riche étant adulte est de seulement 1 sur 10 ou 12. Et ce hiatus entre le mythe et la réalité conduit à un immense ressentiment et une grande frustration. (…) Les démocrates, de Bill Clinton à Barack Obama, en passant par Hillary Clinton, ont mis l’accent sur l’augmentation de la mobilité ascendante grâce à l’enseignement supérieur. Tout leur message était: si vous voulez être compétitif et gagner dans l’économie mondiale, allez à l’université. Ce que vous gagnerez, disaient-ils, dépendra de ce que vous apprenez. Mais ils ne se sont pas rendu compte que ce conseil apparemment inspirant était une insulte implicite à ceux qui ne sont pas diplômés. La «diplomanie» est la dernière discrimination acceptable. Les élites éduquées dénoncent le racisme, le sexisme, mais sont sans complexes quand il s’agit de critiquer les moins éduqués. Si vous n’êtes pas allé à l’université et si vous avez des difficultés économiques, votre échec est de votre faute. Cette manière de traiter les inégalités par la mobilité ascendante individuelle à travers l’enseignement supérieur a eu pour effet d’aliéner les personnes sans diplôme universitaire. Et cela a créé du ressentiment contre les élites bien qualifiées et bien éduquées. Aux États-Unis, deux tiers de la population n’a pas de «bachelor». En Europe aussi. Donc c’est une erreur d’avoir créé une économie qui affirme que la condition nécessaire d’un travail digne et d’une vie décente est un diplôme universitaire que la plupart des gens n’ont pas. Cette hubris méritocratique a créé une immense frustration envers les élites qualifiées qu’ont exploitée des gens comme Trump. C’est une des raisons pour lesquelles les classes populaires ont abandonné les partis de gauche, qui étaient les partis de travailleurs mais sont devenus les partis des diplômés. Les partis de droite populiste ont récupéré cet électorat non diplômé. C’était le clivage le plus frappant lors des dernières élections américaines. Deux tiers des hommes blancs sans diplôme ont voté pour Trump. (…) La valorisation des personnes bien qualifiées et bien éduquées a conduit à un nouveau tournant dans le discours public. On n’évalue plus les politiques publiques en termes de gauche ou de droite, de juste ou d’injuste, de promotion de l’égalité et de lutte contre les inégalités, mais en termes technocratiques apparemment neutres, «intelligent» («smart» NDLR) contre «stupide». Cela est lié au jargon de l’ère numérique, car maintenant nous parlons de téléphones intelligents (smartphones), de bombes intelligentes, de thermostats intelligents, et même de grille-pain intelligents. De même, «intelligent» est devenu une rhétorique de gouvernement. Obama par exemple, en technocrate invétéré, ne cessait d’employer ce mot pour qualifier ses politiques: il parlait de «diplomatie intelligente» de «régulation intelligentes» d’ «investissements intelligents» de «politique commerciale intelligente» etc… C’est un exemple de la façon dont la méritocratie et la technocratie s’associent dans le discours public. Cela renforce également l’idée que les experts plutôt que les citoyens devraient décider de la politique en démocratie parce que décider de la politique est une question d’intelligence plutôt que de bien ou de mal ou juste contre injuste. (…) Nous préférons généralement des gens bien éduqués pour gouverner. Mais ce qui rend quelqu’un capable de gouverner, ce n’est pas seulement l’expertise technocratique. C’est aussi une identification à tous les membres de la société. Et parfois, être trop instruit peut vous couper du réel. Il y a un livre très célèbre sur les conseillers politiques de Kennedy qui ont conduit les États-Unis dans le fiasco de la guerre du Vietnam et qui s’appelait TheBest and Brightest («les meilleurs et les plus brillants»), un titre ironique puisqu’il montrait que la débâcle du Vietnam avait été conduite par les esprits les plus brillants, les technocrates les plus qualifiés qui aient jamais été rassemblés à Washington. Et ça a continué pendant quarante ans. Notamment pendant la crise financière de 2008 où l’élite a renfloué les banques et sauvé Wall Street tout en faisant très peu pour les gens ordinaires qui avaient perdu leurs maisons et leurs emplois. Les experts et les technocrates, pour la plupart économistes ont assuré que la mondialisation néolibérale, le prétendu consensus de Washington allait accroitre le PIB et que certes, il y aurait des gagnants et des perdants, mais que les gains des gagnants couvriraient les pertes des perdants. Mais cela a créé des inégalités de plus en plus profondes, une stagnation des salaires, la dérégulation de la finance et les délocalisations de l’industrie, tout cela a conduit à un immense ressentiment qui a pavé la voie à Donald Trump. Et c’est ainsi que l’expertise technocratique de l’ère méritocratique a mal tourné. Pendant cette pandémie, nous avons vu ce ressentiment à l’égard des experts se diriger envers les spécialistes de la santé publique, ceux qui nous disent que nous devons porter des masques et que nous devons nous éloigner socialement et que nous devons nous faire vacciner. La conséquence de l’ère méritocratique, c’est que l’expertise est désormais hautement politisée. De sorte que Trump et ses partisans étaient contre le port de masques et dans certains cas, très sceptiques quant au vaccin. La défiance envers les experts est devenu un problème politique. (…) Le contraire de la méritocratie n’est pas l’aristocratie, c’est la démocratie. Et j’entends par là une notion civique de démocratie plus forte que celle que nous avons actuellement. Nous devons changer le projet politique, en nous concentrant moins sur le souci d’équiper les gens pour une compétition méritocratique et davantage sur le renouvellement de la dignité du travail. Rendre la vie meilleure pour la majorité des gens qui n’ont pas de diplôme. Par exemple, nous investissons énormément d’argent dans l’enseignement supérieur, mais nous négligeons la formation professionnelle et technique. Nous devons redonner de la dignité et du prestige à des formes de travail qui ne nécessite pas d’être très qualifié. Je pense qu’il faut aller au-delà du credo libéral sur l’égalité des opportunités et travailler à l’égalité des conditions, qui n’est pas l’égalité de résultats qui bien sûr est utopique. Il faut créer au sein de la société civile des institutions mixtes, des espaces publics et des lieux communs (écoles, bibliothèques, parcs, centres de santé, évènements sportifs et culturels) qui rassemblent des personnes de différents milieux sociaux. Car le problème de notre société méritocratique divisée entre gagnants et perdants, c’est que ceux qui sont riches et ceux qui ont des moyens modestes sont de plus en plus séparés dans la vie sociale. Ils vivent, consomment et se divertissent dans des lieux différents, envoient leurs enfants dans des écoles différentes. Or, si la démocratie n’exige pas une égalité parfaite, elle exige que des personnes d’horizons différents se rencontrent, se heurtent au cours de leur vie quotidienne, car c’est ainsi que nous apprenons à négocier et à vivre avec nos les différences et c’est ainsi que nous prenons soin du bien commun. Michael Sandel

Attention: un racisme peut en cacher un autre !

Au lendemain d’une élection de Miss France …

Qui a vu la confiscation du vote des téléspectateurs …

Par un jury bien décidé pour étrenner, avant l’éventuelle suppression du concours, son nouveau règlement sur l’âge …

A faire élire la candidate la plus âgée de l’histoire de Miss France …

A la place de l’élue populaire qui aurait pu aussi être la première Miss France d’origine maghrébine …

Et ce six mois après des législatives …

Qui ont vu la confiscation de plus de dix millions de voix …

Comme l’exclusion de tout gouvernement et de toute commission parlementaire du premier parti de France …

Avant peut-être demain l’inégilibilité de sa candidate …

Pour les mêmes raisons pour lesquelles n’est toujours pas pleinement acquitté …

L’homme que vient de choisir le président pour diriger le gouvernement …

Comment ne pas voir …

La confirmation de cette dérive caractéristique des sociétés méritocratiques …

Que pointent nombre de sociologues ou philosophes comme Pierre Bourdieu ou Michael Sandel …

Alors que sous la pression des féministes et des progressistes…

Les concours de beauté et les compétitions politiques se transforment en concours de QI ou de bienpensance idéologique …

A savoir au nom du mérite scolaire d’une nouvelle classe d’agents surdiplômés …

De plus en plus hors sol et coupés du monde …

Mais aussi largement ignorants et protégés des coûts et conséquences …

De leur extrémistes mais moralement valorisantes «croyances de luxe» sur la drogue, le mariage, la criminalité, la politique, le soi-disant «privilège blanc» ou, avec le keffyeh de rigueur, l’antisémitisme …

Un véritable racisme de l’intelligence et une naturalisation des différences sociales …

De la part d’une nouvelle élite diplômée qui s’arroge dorénavant tous les pouvoirs ?

Miss France 2025 : les téléspectateurs n’ont pas voté en majorité pour Miss Martinique, qui était leur candidate préférée ?
La Dépêche
Jean-Marie Louis
15/12/2024

Miss Martinique Angélique Angarni-Filopon a été élue Miss France 2025, samedi soir, au Futuroscope de Poitiers. Les téléspectateurs de TF1 n’avaient pourtant pas voté en majorité pour la candidate de la Martinique. Ils préféraient une autre miss.

Le règlement de Miss France est inchangé depuis des années. La reine de beauté est élue par 50% des voix du jury et 50% des voix des téléspectateurs. L’addition des suffrages a permis d’élire Miss Martinique. Angélique Angarni-Filopon est notre nouvelle Miss France pour l’année qui vient.

En regardant les votes de plus près, on s’aperçoit que Miss Martinique était la préférée du jury 100 % féminin présidé par Marie-José Pérec. Mais elle n’était pas la candidate préférée des téléspectateurs. Les votes par téléphone et par SMS avaient placé en tête Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais Sabah Aïb. Elle était suivie de Miss Martinique à la seconde place, Miss Guadeloupe 3e, Miss Corse 4e et Miss Côte-d’Azur 5e.

Le jury avait, de son côté, placé Miss Martinique en tête, suivie de Miss Corse 2e, Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais 3e, Miss Guadeloupe 4e et Miss Côte-d’Azur à la 5e place.

Au final, Miss Martinique a obtenu 5 points du jury et 4 des téléspectateurs – soit 9 points – alors que Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais bénéficiait de 5 points du public et 3 points du jury, ce qui fait un total de 8 points.

À 34 ans, Miss Martinique devient la candidate la plus âgée de l’histoire de Miss France, grâce aux modifications des critères d’âge il y a 2 ans. Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais Sabah Aïb est la première dauphine, la Miss Corse Stella Vangioni seconde dauphine.

Voir aussi:

Sylvie Tellier dépitée par l’arrêt de Miss Pays-Bas : «Supprimer ce concours, c’est…»

Télé 7 jours

14 décembre 2024

Quelques heures après l’annonce, par le comité de Miss Pays-Bas, de l’arrêt du concours de beauté et de son remplacement par une étonnante initiative, Sylvie Tellier a pris la parole sur les réseaux sociaux.

Michael Sandel: «L’élite diplômée croit mériter son succès et ne se sent désormais aucun devoir»
Eugénie Bastié
Le Figaro
10 mai 2021

Selon Michael Sandel, l’élite diplômée développerait une forme d’ingratitude envers la société. Elle mépriserait les «perdants», qui, en retour, nourriraient un grand ressentiment. Clairefond

GRAND ENTRETIEN – Dans La tyrannie du mérite, traduit en français chez Albin Michel, le professeur renommé de philosophie politique à l’Université de Harvard analyse l’obsession du diplôme depuis quarante ans dans nos démocraties.

‘Luxury Beliefs’ That Only the Privileged Can Afford
At Yale, I saw that extreme views on drugs, marriage and crime served as status symbols.
Rob Henderson
WSJ
Feb. 9, 2024

In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale a decade ago, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university—more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%—I found myself thinking a lot about class divides and social hierarchies.

I’d thought that by entering a place like Yale, we were being given a privilege as well as a duty to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, I often found among my fellow students what I call “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class but often inflict real costs on the lower classes. For example, a classmate told me “monogamy is kind of outdated and not good for society. I asked her what her background was and if she planned to marry. She said she came from an affluent, stable, two-parent home – just like most of our classmates. She added that, yes, she personally planned to have a monogamous marriage, but quickly insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accouterments. As the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen famously observed in his 1899 book “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” status symbols must be difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing, such as top hats and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities, such as golf or beagling. The value of these goods and activities, argued Veblen, was in the very fact that they were so pricey and wasteful that only the wealthy could afford them.

Today, when luxury goods are more accessible to ordinary people than ever before, the elite need other ways to broadcast their social position. This helps explain why so many are now decoupling class from material goods and attaching it to beliefs.
Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top college.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary. Ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

When my classmates at Yale talked about abolishing the police or decriminalizing drugs, they seemed unaware of the attending costs because they were largely insulated from them. Reflecting on my own experiences with alcohol, if drugs had been legal and easily accessible when I was 15, you wouldn’t be reading this. My birth mother succumbed to drug addiction soon after I was born. I haven’t seen her since I was a child. All my foster siblings’ parents were addicts or had a mental health condition, often triggered by drug use.

A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will probably be just fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents is more likely to ride that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This may explain why a 2019 survey conducted by the Cato Institute found that more than 60% of Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree were in favor of legalizing drugs, while less than half of Americans without a college degree thought it was a good idea. Drugs may be a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain.

Similarly, a 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest Americans reported the lowest support. Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $50,000 a year, the poorest Americans are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to federal statistics. Yet it’s affluent people who are calling to abolish law enforcement. Perhaps the luxury belief class is simply ignorant of the realities of crime.

Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95%. By 2005, 85% of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30%. As the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam stated at a 2017 Senate hearing: “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas.”

In 2006, more than half of American adults without a college degree believed it was “very important” that couples with children should be married, according to Gallup. Fast-forward to 2020, and this number had plummeted to 31%. Among college graduates polled by Gallup, only 25% thought couples should be married before having kids. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: Most American college graduates who have children are married. Despite their behavior, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant. Their message has spread.

I noticed that many Yale students selectively concealed their opinions or facts about their lives. More than one quietly confessed to me that they were pretending to be poorer than they really were, because they didn’t want the stigma of being thought rich. Why would this stigma exist at a rich university full of rich students? It’s a class thing. For the upper class, indicating your social position by speaking about money is vulgar. Sharing your educational credentials is a classier shorthand, but broadcasting your seemingly altruistic and socially conscientious luxury beliefs is the best of all.

It is harder for wealthy people to claim the mantle of victimhood, which, among the affluent, is often a key ingredient of righteousness. Researchers at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University recently found evidence of a “virtuous victim” effect, in which victims are seen as more moral than nonvictims who behave in exactly the same way: If people think you have suffered, they will be more likely to excuse your behavior. Perhaps this is why prestigious universities encourage students to nurture their grievances. The peculiar effect is that many of the most advantaged people are the most adept at conveying their disadvantages.

Occasionally, I raised these critiques with fellow students or graduates of elite colleges. Sometimes they would reply by asking, “Well, aren’t you part of this group now?” implying that my appraisals were hollow because I moved within the same milieu. But they wouldn’t have listened to me back when I was a lowly enlisted man in the military or when I was washing dishes for minimum wage. If you ridicule the upper class as an outsider, they’ll ignore you. The requirements for the upper class to take you seriously—credentials, wealth, power—are also the grounds to brand you a hypocrite for daring to judge.

But negative social judgments often serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness. To avoid misery, I believe we have to admit that certain actions and choices, including single parenthood, substance abuse and crime, are actually in and of themselves undesirable and not simply in need of normalization. Indeed, it’s cruel to validate decisions that inflict harm. And it’s a true luxury to be ignorant of these consequences.

Rob Henderson is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” which will be published on Feb. 20 by Gallery Books.

Voir enfin:

How the luxury beliefs of an educated elite erode society
Whether attacking marriage, calling out white privilege or seeking to defund the police, the university class espouse ideas that confer status on them at little cost. But it’s the least privileged who suffer the effects
Rob Henderson
The Times
February 23 2024

Born in Los Angeles into what many would consider the American lower class, I entered the foster system aged three after my drug-addicted birth mother, originally from Seoul, was unable to care for me. Over the next five years, I moved through seven different foster homes. I grew up without knowing my father, only discovering his Hispanic heritage, with roots in Mexico and Spain, through a genetic test last year.

When I was seven, I was adopted by a working-class family and subsequently settled in a dusty town called Red Bluff, California, in one of the poorest counties in the state. My adoptive parents divorced shortly thereafter, and my adolescence was marked by substance abuse, violence, family tragedy and financial catastrophe. I fled as soon as I could at 17, enlisting in the US air force right after high school. Eventually, after several missteps, I managed to gain admission to one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

I came to Yale to major in psychology, but my curiosity soon overflowed the boundaries of my degree. In my attempt to understand class distinctions, I spent a lot of time thinking and reading about class divides and social hierarchies, and compared what I’d learnt with my experiences on campus. Gradually, I developed the concept of “luxury beliefs”, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

The upper class includes (but is not necessarily limited to) anyone who attends or graduates from an elite university and has at least one parent who is a university graduate. Research has found that parental educational attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. Compared with parental income, parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle, tastes and opinions.

It is a vexed question whether first-generation graduates can truly enter the upper class. Paul Fussell, the social critic and author of Class, wrote that manners, tastes, opinions and conversational style are just as important for upper-class membership as money or credentials, and that to fulfil these requirements, you have to be immersed in affluence from birth. Likewise, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu stated that a “triadic structure” of schooling, language and taste was necessary to be accepted among the upper class. Bourdieu described the mastery of this triad as “ease”. When you grow up in a social class, you come to embody it. You represent its tastes and values so deeply that you exhibit ease within it.

People with parents who are university graduates are often better equipped to gain and maintain status — they tend to be more adept at navigating organisations, smoothly interacting with colleagues and positioning themselves for advancement. Consistent with this, in 2021 the Pew Research Center found that among US households headed by a graduate, the median wealth of those who had a parent with at least a bachelor’s degree was nearly $100,000 greater than those who don’t have college-educated parents.

This bonus of being a “continuing-generation” (as opposed to a “first-generation”) college graduate has been termed the “parent premium”. I don’t have the parent premium. For extended periods of my youth, I had the opposite. It’s impossible to say that every individual in a particular class or category has the exact same features across the board. Still, graduates of elite universities generally occupy the top quintile of income, often wield outsized social influence and are disproportionately likely to hold luxury beliefs that undermine social mobility.

For example, a former classmate at Yale told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her about her background and if she planned to marry. She was raised in a stable two-parent family, just like the vast majority of our classmates. And she planned on getting married herself. But she insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.

Later, I would connect my observations to stories I read about tech tycoons, another affluent group, who encourage people to use addictive devices while simultaneously enforcing rigid rules at home about technology use. For example, Steve Jobs prohibited his children from using iPads. Parents in Silicon Valley reportedly tell their nannies to closely monitor how much their children use their smartphones. Don’t get high on your own supply, I guess. Many affluent people now promote lifestyles that are harmful to the less fortunate. Meanwhile, they are not only insulated from the fallout; they often profit from it.

In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more accessible than before. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.

Human beings become more preoccupied with social status once our physical needs are met. Research has shown that sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is more important for wellbeing than socioeconomic status. Furthermore, studies have described how negative social judgment is associated with a spike in cortisol (a hormone linked to stress) that is three times higher than in non-social stressful situations. We feel pressure to build and maintain social status, and fear losing it.

It seems reasonable to think that the most downtrodden might be most interested in obtaining status and money, but this is not the case. Denizens of prestigious institutions are even more interested than others in prestige and wealth. For many of them, that drive is how they reached their lofty positions in the first place. They persistently look for new ways to move upward and avoid moving downward.

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim understood this when he wrote: “The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs”. And research supports this. A psychology study in 2020 revealed that “Upper-class individuals cared more about status and valued it more highly than working-class individuals … Furthermore, compared with lower-status individuals, high-status individuals were more likely to engage in behaviour aimed at protecting or enhancing their status.” Plainly, high-status people desire status more than anyone else does.

You might think that, for example, rich students at elite universities would be happy because their parents are in the top 1 per cent of income earners, and that statistically they will soon join their parents in this elite guild. But remember, they’re surrounded by other members of the 1 per cent. For many elite university students, their social circle consists of baby millionaires, which often instils a sense of insecurity and an anxiety to preserve and maintain their positions against such rarefied competitors.

Thorstein Veblen’s famous “leisure class” has evolved into the “luxury belief class”. Veblen, an economist and sociologist, compiled his observations about social class in his classic 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. A key idea is that because we can’t be certain of the financial standing of other people, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste money on goods and leisure. This explains why status symbols are so often difficult to obtain and costly to purchase.

In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing such as tuxedos, top hats and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities like golf or beagling. Veblen suggested that the wealthy flaunt these symbols not because they are useful but because they are so pricey or wasteful that only the wealthy can afford them, which is why they are high-status indicators.

During my first year at Yale in 2015, it was common to see students at Ivy League colleges wearing Canada Goose jackets. Is it necessary to spend $900 to stay warm in New England? No. But kids weren’t spending their parents’ money just for the warmth. They were spending the equivalent of the typical American’s weekly income ($865) for the logo. Likewise, are students spending $250,000 at prestigious American universities for the education? Maybe. But they are also spending it for the logo.

As the New York University professor Scott Galloway said in an interview in 2020: “The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford. Academics and administrators at the top universities have decided over the last 30 years that we’re no longer public servants; we’re luxury goods.”

This is not to say that elite colleges don’t educate their students, or that Canada Goose jackets don’t keep their wearers warm. But top universities are also crucial for induction into the luxury belief class. Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. But if you visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will eagerly explain them to you. When someone uses the phrase cultural appropriation, what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top college”. Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary, because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around a lot of poor white people. Affluent white college graduates seem to be the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. When policies are implemented to combat white privilege, it won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.

The upper class promotes abolishing the police or decriminalising drugs or white privilege because it advances their social standing. The logic is akin to conspicuous consumption: if you’re a student who has a large subsidy from your parents and I do not, you can afford to waste $900 and I can’t, so wearing a Canada Goose jacket is a good way of advertising your superior wealth and status. Proposing policies that will cost you as a member of the upper class less than they would cost me serves the same function. Advocating for sexual promiscuity, drug experimentation or abolishing the police are good ways of advertising your membership of the elite because, thanks to your wealth and social connections, they will cost you less than me.

A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will, in all likelihood, be fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents will often take that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This is perhaps why a 2019 survey found that less than half of Americans without a college degree want to legalise drugs, but more than 60 per cent of Americans with a bachelor’s degree or higher are in favour of drug legalisation.

Similarly, a 2020 survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest reported the lowest support. Throughout the remainder of that year and into 2021, murder rates throughout the US soared as a result of defunding policies, officers retiring early or quitting, and police departments struggling to recruit new members after the luxury belief class cultivated an environment of loathing toward law enforcement.

Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year, the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of robbery, seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault and 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault. And yet many affluent people are calling to abolish law enforcement.

Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families — 95 per cent. By 2005, 85 per cent of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30 per cent. The Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam said at a 2017 Senate hearing: “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas … Growing up with two parents is now unusual in the working class, while two-parent families are normal and becoming more common among the upper middle class.”

Affluent people, particularly in the 1960s, championed sexual freedom. Loose sexual norms caught on for the rest of society. The upper class, though, still had intact families. Generally speaking, they experimented in college and then settled down. The families of the lower classes fell apart.

This deterioration is still happening. In 2006, more than half of American adults without a university degree believed it was “very important” that couples with children should be married. Fast-forward to 2020, and this number has plummeted to 31 per cent. Among university graduates, only 25 per cent think couples should be married before having kids. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: the vast majority of American university graduates who have children are married. And yet, despite their behaviour suggesting otherwise, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant.

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson is published by Forum

Voir enfin:

We asked 10-year-olds about the election. Here’s what we learned
Analysis by Kerry Rubin, Chuck Hadad, Victoria Fleischer and Zachary B. Wolf
CNN
September 26, 2024

It is jarring to hear American kids talk about politics and see the country’s often angry political debate filtered through young people.

When a child is asked for one word to describe former President Donald Trump and comes up with “pure evil,” it suggests a level of division that might surprise the average American.

Researchers found that Democrat-supporting kids drove polarization in a new study for CNN, and the children were more likely to say they wouldn’t be friends with someone who supports Trump. Kids in red states, on the other hand, were more likely to repeat misinformation.

The findings are the result of more than 40 hours of interviews commissioned by CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” to talk politics with 80 elementary schoolers in Arizona, a 2024 battleground state; New Jersey, a blue state; and Texas, a red state.

With their parents’ OK, researchers got the kids’ unfiltered thoughts about the presidential candidates and the election.

CNN is not identifying the students or the schools visited, and this is not a representative public opinion poll, but rather a set of interviews designed to gauge polarization in children.

The questions about the presidential candidates included prompts asking which one would keep them safer, which is more honest and which is more likely to do bad things.

The interviews were first conducted in the spring, when President Joe Biden was running for reelection and the kids were in fourth grade. Most of the same children took part in follow-up interviews in the fall in New Jersey and Texas, after Vice President Kamala Harris had stepped in to be the Democratic nominee and the kids had started fifth grade.

Most of the children in the fall interviews, nearly two-thirds, supported Harris. There was an even split in Texas, a major improvement for Democrats in the red state compared with when Biden was in the race. Nationwide polls of likely voters suggest a much tighter race for the White House and a lead for Trump in Texas.

Democrat-leaning kids drove polarization

In September, according to an analysis prepared by Landrum, when kids were asked how much they liked Harris or Trump on a five-point scale, the Democrat-leaning and blue-state kids were more likely to say they really liked Harris and really disliked Trump. Republican-leaning and red-state kids liked Trump but were neutral or even positive about Harris.

When Landrum asked for one word to describe a candidate, the results for Trump ranged from positive – such as from one kid in May: “Go America!” – to extremely negative. There were criticisms of Harris too. “Liar” was one child’s one word to describe her.

More negative feelings about Trump among Democrat-leaning kids

In May, when the race was between Biden and Trump, kids were asked to select an emoji that corresponded with their feelings about a candidate. Only a quarter of the Trump-leaning kids selected an emoji signifying that Biden makes them feel nervous or worried, but more than half of the Biden-leaning kids selected that emoji when asked about Trump. That imbalance grew when interviews were repeated in September and the kids were asked about Trump and Harris.

Iyengar was surprised by this overall finding of the study.

“Among adults, the usual result is that Republicans are the more hostile toward Democrats than vice versa,” he said. “It suggests something about the cast of characters in this race, i.e., Kamala Harris is relatively unknown and therefore people do not have … a lot of extreme views, either positive or negative, towards her.”

Trump, on the other hand, “is an established trigger,” Iyengar said, and blue-state kids “have assimilated what their parents are telling them, and they’re pretty hostile to him.”

There were also many positive responses, such as the girl who selected the happy emoji for Biden because the president supports women’s rights and said, “And I’m a woman.”

“So I think, even though Trump has done bad stuff, he still deserves to run for president,” the boy said.

That same boy, in September, also expressed the difficulty of choosing between Harris and Trump when, presented with photos of the two candidates, he was asked which is more likely to do bad things.

“Convicted felon against a liar,” he said. “Who do I pick?” He ultimately decided that Trump, the convicted felon, is more likely to do bad things but it’s OK for a felon to be president.

Kids think the country is ready for a woman of color to be president

Even a majority of kids who support Trump agreed Harris would be a “sort of” good president. The red-state kids were more supportive of Harris in September than they were of Biden in May.

Most kids – about two-thirds, including a majority in the red state – said it would be a good thing to have a woman as president, although a few worried that other people might not support a woman.

There was only one kid, a girl in Texas, who said she didn’t think a woman should be president. “Girls are a little bit dramatic sometimes,” she said in response to a question about which candidate is more selfish, and also noted that “only boys have been president before, and that they would be more stronger.” But that was an outlier response.

Most kids in the study, more than 80% overall, in both the red and blue states said the country is ready for its president to be a woman of color.

“It would be good for us to have a black woman as president for the first time in history, but my vote’s kind of still on Trump,” said one girl.

Would you go to a Trump or Harris supporter’s house?

In both May and September, Landrum showed kids pictures of two houses, one with a Trump sign and one with a Biden or Harris sign, and asked if they or their parents would be comfortable visiting. Most, Landrum notes, were open to visiting the house associated with either political party. But she adds that a higher percentage of Democrat-leaning kids – a third of them in September – were unwilling to visit the homes of children whose families support Trump. Few of the Trump-leaning kids said they would be unwilling to visit a Democrat-backing house.

One kid in May whose family supports Biden said he imagined there would be an argument if they all visited a Trump house. “Maybe like a food fight or something,” he guessed.

Another boy went in a different direction with food analogies, arguing that people who like pizza can hang out with people who like burgers. “You can still be friends.”

A girl came to the same conclusion, but with a different comparison: “I like Taylor Swift, and they like Olivia Rodrigo, but we’re still friends,” she said.

A Taylor Swift effect

In September, Landrum asked if Swift’s endorsement of Harris would have an impact on the election, and nearly all of the New Jersey kids said it would, compared with a little more than half of the Texas kids.

“The Swifties will follow her lead,” said one boy.

But when she broke the responses down by gender, Landrum found that more than 90% of the male participants thought Swift would impact the election compared with less than two-thirds of females.

Trump’s legal problems, Biden’s age

Questions about Biden’s age and fitness ultimately drove him from the presidential race. In the May interviews, most kids did not specifically cite age as a reason to oppose either candidate. About a third mentioned age in other contexts, and most of these suggested that being “old” was a weakness.

A boy in Texas was convinced Biden had dementia.

“He might not say he does, but he’s forgetting a lot of stuff,” the boy said in May.

Trump-leaning participants did not see his legal issues as reasons to not support him. The majority of those who brought up Trump’s legal problems were from the blue state, although the May interviews were conducted shortly after his conviction in a New York courtroom of falsifying business records. Interviews in Arizona and Texas were conducted earlier.

“I wouldn’t like someone who like committed crimes to be my president. I wouldn’t feel that safe,” said a girl in New Jersey.

A larger portion, more than half, did not seem to know why Trump faced legal issues, either in the New York case or in the other three cases where he is accused of trying to overthrow the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents.

Plenty of misinformation

Multiple children repeated falsehoods about the candidates, and most of them were aimed at Trump, according to Landrum, although she found that more of the kids in the red state said something that could be viewed as misinformation. In September, she asked the kids in a follow-up question where they had heard a particular claim, and it frequently came from their parents.

One positive piece of misinformation geared at Trump is that he gives much of his wealth to the US military, something that is not true.

A blue-state kid was frustrated that Trump has supported people who spread misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccines, including that they could make metal stick to a person’s body, which is false. And there’s no evidence that Trump supported anyone who made that claim.

Another girl said she had heard of Harris that “some people say that she believes in another God.” Harris is Baptist, and her husband is Jewish.

The researchers found that for both blue-state and red-state kids, their parents/family and TV news were top information sources, but red-states kids also relied heavily on YouTube and TikTok.

More of the red-state kids had smartphones, whereas more of the blue-state kids had tablets.

Misinformation can come from anywhere, as one kid showed when he described the presidential debate between Trump and Harris.

“Probably the million-dollar thing Trump said was, ‘The illegal immigrants are coming to eat our pets,’” he said, repeating a false statement that Trump made about Haitian immigrants.

Read the full summary of this project, “Kids on Politics,” from its author

There were many surreal aspects of my experience at Yale, including the opportunity to learn from high-profile professors. I took a course on Shakespeare taught by the late Harold Bloom, who has been described as “the most renowned, and arguably the most passionate, literary critic and Shakespeare scholar in America.” When I told him about my life, the 87-year-old professor gently replied, “You were forged in a fire.” I also met the psychology professor Albert Bandura—who at the time was 91 years old and died in 2021—to chat about a book he had recently written. I was surprised at how late in life many professors worked—some well into their eighties and even nineties. This was a notable difference from the aging adults I knew in my adoptive hometown of Red Bluff, Northern California, who typically looked forward to retirement and preferred not to work longer than they had to, unless it was out of financial necessity.

Before my first classes were scheduled to begin, I was sitting in the courtyard of my residential college when a young woman asked for help lifting some boxes into her dorm room. She introduced herself and told me she was a senior. I explained that this was my first semester.

“What do you think of Yale so far?” she asked.

I was embarrassed to answer. “I keep waiting for them to tell me it was a mistake that they let me in,” I said, carrying boxes up the stairs as she guided me. “Walking around, it feels like I’m dreaming.”

“That’s such a great feeling,” she replied wistfully. “Enjoy it.”

We entered her room, and I set the boxes down. She opened the larger box and pulled out a large case of pills.

The medication rattled as she set it on her desk.

“Nice stash. Anything for sale?” I joked.

“Yeah, the Adderall is.” She didn’t appear to be joking.

I thought back to my first day in high school, when my neighbor offered to sell me drugs. Now here I was at this fancy college, and this senior was offering to sell drugs, too. Later, I’d observe rampant drug and alcohol use on campus. This was at odds with the widespread belief, which I held at the time, that poverty was the primary reason for substance abuse.

I came to understand that along with the fact that they were generally bright and hardworking, my peers on campus had experienced a totally different social reality than me and had grown up around people just like them.

In my first semester, I tried to get into a specific course titled “The Concept of the Problem Child.” I read the course description:

Differing visions of good and bad, typical and atypical, children. Reasons why some children are seen as deviant and others as normal. Implications for public policy, medical practice, family dynamics, schooling, and the criminal justice and protective care systems. Sources include public health data, early childhood curricula, and depictions of problem children in literature and popular culture.

Given my background in the foster care system, I hoped to take this course. But it was capped, meaning only a limited number of students could join. Because around one hundred students had applied, many of them seniors, I was wait-listed. No big deal, I thought. I’ll take it next time. I wrote an email to the instructor, Erika Christakis, thanking her for offering the course, and stated that I looked forward to applying again in the future.

I would soon learn this was the last time she would ever offer this course at Yale.

Walking through Old Campus—the oldest part of Yale—I found a flier indicating that NYU professor Jonathan Haidt was visiting campus to give a talk. I’d recently read his bestselling book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. I figured Professor Haidt would speak about moral psychology, the theme of his book. But instead, on the day of the talk, Haidt discussed the purpose of a university. He urged the audience to consider whether the aim of higher education is to protect students or to equip them with the ability to seek truth, and he was clearly in favor of the latter.

I thought this was a strange presentation. I sat there utterly perplexed. Why was he talking about this?

I simply didn’t have the requisite background knowledge to understand. This new social environment was so unfamiliar to me that I hadn’t realized there was a contentious national debate going on about the very nature of higher education.

Soon, the message of Haidt’s talk would become painfully clear. Just as my feelings of being a total outsider had begun to subside, they would suddenly resurface.

Two weeks later, I was sitting on a bench in front of Sterling Memorial Library, reading an email on my laptop by Erika Christakis, the instructor who taught the Concept of the Problem Child course.

“I’m confused, honestly,” I said to the student next to me. “I have no idea why people are upset about this.”

He sighed. “I knew that email would be controversial as soon as I read it,” he said.

The university administration had recently circulated a campus-wide email to students asking them to be sensitive about what Halloween costumes they wear. The idea was that costumes that implied that other cultures or interests were unserious or played into stereotypes might cause discomfort or harm to other students. In response, Erika Christakis wrote an email to the students within her residential college. In her email, she questioned whether the administration should interfere with students’ lives—she defended freedom of expression and urged students to handle disagreements about costumes on their own. The social climate immediately changed. Hundreds of students marched throughout campus. They called for apologies from the university and insisted Christakis and her husband, who was also a professor and who defended her, be fired, among other demands.

Because I was older, sometimes students would crack jokes to me about the movie 21 Jump Street, about two 25-year-old cops who go undercover to pose as students at a high school. Throughout the movie, the protagonists make subtle errors indicating a miniature generation gap. At no point did these jokes feel more apt than when I saw those students marching around campus, demanding the two professors be fired. I felt like they were speaking a language I didn’t know.

Even the students who didn’t agree that Erika’s email was wrong knew why others thought it was wrong, but I was mystified. I would ask outraged classmates to explain what had been done wrong, hoping to understand.

A student from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had attended Phillips Exeter Academy (an expensive private boarding school), explained that I was too privileged to understand the pain these professors had caused. At first, I was stunned. But later, I came to understand the intellectual acrobatics necessary to say something like this. The student who called me “privileged” likely meant that due to my background as a biracial Asian Latino heterosexual cisgender (that is, I “present” as the sex I was “assigned” at birth) male, this means that I have led a privileged life. However, I also learned that many inhabitants of elite universities assign a great deal of importance to “lived experience.” This means that your unique personal hardships serve as important credentials to expound on social ills and suggest remedies.

These two ideas appeared to be contradictory.

Which is more relevant to identity, one’s discernible characteristics (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on) or what they actually went through in their lives? I asked two students this question. One replied that this question was dangerous to ask. The other said that one’s discernible characteristics determine what experiences they have in their lives. This means that if you belong to a “privileged” group, then you must have had a privileged life. I dropped the conversation there.

I was fascinated by this new social reality and avoided discussing my life when contentious discussions erupted. I really wanted to understand what these students thought without risking them being weirded out by someone in their midst who they might have acknowledged as having had a tougher life than them, and who disagreed that words in an email could actually inflict “pain.”

That was the language many students used. Danger and harm and pain. Words like trauma meant something different for them.

The student protests became a national story. Erika Christakis and her husband, Nicholas, were ridiculed and reviled, with little public support from students, faculty, or the administration.

Privately, many people—perhaps most—were supportive, but they were fearful of openly expressing this. Erika was asked by some of the protesters to announce when she was going into the dining hall so that students wouldn’t be triggered. She stepped down from her teaching position at the university, although her husband remained. After those incomprehensible events, I would gaze at the beautiful architecture throughout the university and think about a line I’d read from F. Scott Fitzgerald, describing Gatsby’s forever altered relationship with the green light across the bay: “His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”

I watched students claim that investment banks were emblematic of capitalist oppression, and then discovered that they’d attended recruitment sessions for Goldman Sachs. Gradually, I came to believe that many of these students were broadcasting the belief that such firms were evil in order to undercut their rivals. If they managed to convince you that a certain occupation is corrupt and thus to be avoided, then that was one less competitor they had in their quest to be hired.

But they didn’t see themselves this way. They viewed themselves as morally righteous and were surprisingly myopic about the virtuous image they held of themselves.

In December, shortly after the Yale-Harvard football game, one of my peers explained to the rest of the class that she’d seen a group of Harvard students at a New Haven restaurant leave a huge mess at their table.

“I hope the restaurant staff knew those people were from Harvard, not Yale!” said another student.

“I doubt they care,” I replied, thinking of my days as a busboy. “They just saw a bunch of spoiled students. Harvard, Yale, it doesn’t matter. The mess is the same.”

Another time, I was on a social media page where Ivy League students and graduates shared stories about their schools. Someone had posted a story about Yeonmi Park, a North Korean refugee who had graduated from Columbia University. Park described her alarm about how the monolithic culture at her Ivy League school reminded her of her home country. The top-rated comment, the one with the most “like” and “love” reactions: “She should have stayed in North Korea.” They couldn’t bear the criticism and posted endless mean-spirited comments mocking Park, with some saying she should “go back to Pyongyang.”

Ordinarily, the people who visited this webpage would have considered the statement that a refugee should have stayed where she came from to be reprehensible (and it is). But in this instance it was lauded because Park’s comments undermined these people’s view of themselves as morally righteous. Many students and graduates of top universities are terrified of being seen as what they really are. We don’t leave messes for other people to clean up, it’s those other elite students from that other school. We’re not xenophobic, it’s those unenlightened people who didn’t go to a fancy college. We haven’t cultivated an ideologically rigid environment—go back to where you came from.

Rob Henderson is a writer and author of Rob Henderson’s Newsletter. His book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, was released this week.

From TROUBLED: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson. Copyright © 2024 by Rob Henderson. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Our investigation suggests it is

The Economist

Jun 11th 2024

“The New York Timesis pure propaganda,” tweeted Elon Musk, a tech mogul, in March. Mr Musk was responding not to the newspaper’s coverage of his companies or of Donald Trump, but rather to the newspaper’s latest bestseller list. “Troubled”, a book by Rob Henderson, a social critic, about the hypocrisy of America’s elite, had been excluded from the hardcover non-fiction list despite selling 3,765 copies in its first week. According to data from Circana Bookscan, a firm that claims to track 85% of print book sales in America, “Troubled” outperformed the books that ranked in the fourth and fifth slots that week. Many saw the omission as a sign of political bias.

Such criticism is not wholly new. The New York Times, which has kept a tally of bestsellers since 1931, came under fire in 1983, when William Peter Blatty, author of “The Exorcist”, sued the paper for omitting his book “Legion” from the fiction bestseller list. (His case was eventually dismissed.) And last year James Patterson, who has had nearly 290 New York Times bestsellers, complained that the paper was “cooking the books” when a non-fiction title of his did not make the cut. Like Coca-Cola, the New York Times guards its proprietary formula; exactly which retailers report sales, how they are weighted and which sales are screened out is shrouded in mystery.

Whenever the New York Times snubs a prominent conservative book it rekindles a debate about whether the newspaper discriminates against right-wing authors. Alleged victims include Ted Cruz, a Republican senator, who wrote “A Time for Truth” in 2015 and Clay Travis, a radio host, who published “American Playbook” in 2023. “It’s bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustrating,” says Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary under George W. Bush. Mr Fleischer’s book, “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias”, did not make the list in 2022 despite healthy sales.

Some may be tempted to cast aside such complaints as sour grapes, a popular delicacy in both publishing and politics. But a study by The Economistsuggests that accusations of bias against conservative books may have merit.

To determine whether such claims are fact or fiction, The Economistcompiled 12 years’ worth of Bookscan data from Publishers Weekly and identified books by 12 publishers that describe themselves as politically to the right of centre. These include Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins that specialises in “conservative non-fiction”, and Regnery Publishing, which bills itself as America’s “leading publisher of conservative books”.

To test for this possibility, we matched our data set with data from ISBNdb.com, a book database. This archive contains a “subject” field for around 40% of the books, enabling us to categorise them as political if their subjects included words like “politics” or “president”. To classify whether the remaining books are political, we trained a machine-learning algorithm based on their titles, authors, publishers and, when available, the New York Times’s descriptive blurbs. We then repeated our tests for bias on this smaller set of political books and found the estimated effect to be even greater than in the full sample.

The New York Times did not dispute or confirm our analysis on the record but says: “The political views of authors or their publishers have absolutely no bearing on our rankings and are not a factor in how books are ranked on the lists.” They add that “There are a number of organisations with bestseller lists, each with different methodologies, so it is normal to see different rankings on each.”

What explains conservative books’ potential disadvantage? Politics is the most common refrain. “The New York Times has a view of an acceptable kind of conservative,” says Michael Knowles, a right-wing commentator. His book “Speechless” (2021) sold 17,587 copies in its first week, ranking at the top of the Publishers Weeklylist, and sold strongly for several more weeks. But it never appeared on the New York Times list. Mr Knowles, whose book argues that conservatives should actively suppress the speech of their opponents, believes this is because his views are unacceptable to the Grey Lady’s staff.

But there are also differences in the way conservative publishers sell their books. Many of the conservative books that do make the New York Times list may rank much lower than their sales would suggest because of supposed “bulk buying”, purchases that the paper determines are made by institutions or groups, rather than by individual readers. Titles thought to include bulk buys are marked with a “dagger” symbol and can have their rank adjusted. According to the newspaper, “Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, if and when they are included, are at the discretion of the New York Timesbestseller list desk editors based on standards…that encompass proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations.”

Treating bulk buys differently is meant to make the list harder to game by billionaires, bosses and politicians who want their tomes to top the list and can afford to buy up copies. Though there have been reports in the past of conservative groups attempting to manipulate the list through bulk purchases, our data suggest that use of the dagger is remarkably lopsided: 53% of books from conservative publishers are marked with a dagger, versus just 10% of other books.

Indeed, bulk sales do not appear to explain the bias that we observe in our data. We separated political New York Times bestsellers into one group flagged with a dagger and another without it and found that, in both groups, books from conservative imprints were ranked lower on average than those from other publishers with similar sales.

A final plausible explanation for the bias faced by conservative authors is the way the New York Times bestseller list is compiled. Rather than weighting all sales equally, some publishing veterans believe that the paper may place greater weight on sales at independent bricks-and-mortar bookstores than online retailers. Independent bookstores, which select titles to order and display, may not stock or give prominence to books by conservatives; online everything is available, and right-wing books fly off virtual shelves.

The New York Times list has emerged as a battle in a broader culture war over American publishing. After January 6th 2021 Simon & Schuster cancelled the publication of a book by Josh Hawley, a Republican senator who offered a fist pump of apparent support for the protesters before theyransacked the Capitol. Publishers also got flak for signing former members of the Trump administration. There is a “baked-in, systemic bias” in corporate publishing houses against conservatives, says an executive who works at one of the major ones.

The fairness of the New York Timeslist is not merely a question of politics. Bestseller status helps an author sell more books, generate speaking fees and negotiate better contracts for future book deals. As other newspapers have done away with their lists and bookstores have closed in recent decades, the New York Times list is even more important. It is supposed to function as a reflection of what the public is reading—and influences what consumers may want to.

A more transparent list would also be more useful. If Alex Jones, a controversial far-right conspiracy theorist, was indeed the second-place bestselling author in America—as Bookscan says he was in August 2022, with a title that was omitted from the New York Times list—people should probably know that. His enduring popularity says a lot about the country and its readers, who are not willing to close the book on him. ■

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Culture| Do as I say, not as I do

A new book rebukes the “luxury beliefs” of America’s upper class

“Troubled” is both a memoir and an analysis of the muddled thinking on college campuses

Photograph: AP

Mar 21st 2024

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class. By Rob Henderson. Gallery Books; 336 pages; $28.99. Swift Press; 290 pages; £16.99

WHILE APPLYING to Yale University (pictured) in 2014, Rob Henderson visited New Haven for the first time. He stayed with a friend of a friend, whose cat was called Learned Claw (an obscure, pretentious allusion to an American judge of the mid-20th century who went by the name of Learned Hand). Mr Henderson did not get the reference. When he arrived at Yale more cultural mysteries awaited. Everyone raved about “The West Wing”, a television show he had never watched, and “Hamilton”, a musical he could not afford to see.

More Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%. Mr Henderson was among the less-affluent minority. He had been removed from his drug-addicted mother when he was three years old and lived with nine different foster families before his eighth birthday. Scared, insecure and angry, he soon began to drink, take drugs and get into fights.

At the age of 17, as his peers started going to prison, he signed up to the armed forces on a whim. Mr Henderson thrived in the structured, disciplined system and spent seven years in the US Air Force. It became clear he was highly intelligent, so he was encouraged to apply to college through the GIBill. (He has recently finished a doctorate at Cambridge University.)

“Troubled” is the compelling story of his chaotic childhood, his time at Yale and what it all made him think about divisions in America. As a result of his experience, Mr Henderson has coined the concept of “luxury beliefs”, which he describes as “a set of beliefs that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while inflicting costs upon the lower classes”.

In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class either by doing things “like golf or beagling” that no working person would have time to do, or through their material accoutrements. But today, leisure time and luxury goods are more accessible to everyone, so it has become harder for the elites to separate themselves from the hoi polloi. Their solution? “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”

Mr Henderson gives the example of support for defunding the police. The idea gained traction in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and has been championed by many affluent people. However, it is an unpopular policy among poor people—exactly those who the well-meaning college kids say they are trying to help—and leads to higher homicide rates.

“Troubled” is more than a fascinating memoir, as it analyses the controversial belief systems that have gripped American universities. But it does so without being an angry culture-war screed. Mr Henderson makes no statement of political affiliation. Lots of what he writes is simply common sense. It is what much of middle America believes.

Mr Henderson exposes the stupidity of what now passes for orthodoxy, such as the way the luxury-belief class claims that the unhappiness associated with substance abuse or obesity, for instance, “primarily stems from the negative social judgments they elicit, rather than the behaviours and choices themselves”. The well-off “validate and affirm the behaviours, decisions, and attitudes of marginalised and deprived kids” in a way “that they would never accept for themselves or their own children”. One classmate argues that monogamyis “outdated” but admits that she was raised by two parents and intends to have a monogamous marriage herself.

Youngsters today are fond of talking about “lived experience”: the idea that an individual enjoys authority on particular subjects owing to their identity, history and perspective. Mr Henderson’s background gives him the legitimacy to raise his concerns, but that does not mean his peers are paying attention. When he tries to speak with his Yale classmates, no one wants to listen. Readers, however, will be rapt. ■

Published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”

Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters
Nicholas Kristof
NYT
Aug. 31, 2024

Some of the best advice Democrats have received recently came from Bill Clinton in his speech at the Democratic National Convention.
First, he warned against hubris: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.” That’s something that any Clinton understands in his — or her — gut.
Second, related and even more important, he cautioned against demeaning voters who don’t share liberal values.

“I urge you to meet people where they are,” said Clinton, who knows something about winning votes outside of solid blue states. “I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect — just the way you’d like them to treat you.”

That’s critical counsel because too often since 2016, the liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone at all sympathetic to Donald Trump as a racist and bigot. This has been politically foolish, for it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re disparaging.
It has also seemed to me morally offensive, particularly when well-educated and successful elites are scorning disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially and in many cases are dying young. They deserve empathy, not insults.

By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him.

Since I live in a rural area, many of my old friends are Trump supporters. One, a good and generous woman, backs Trump because she feels betrayed by the Democratic and Republican political establishments, and she has a point. When factories closed and good union jobs left the area, she ended up homeless and addicted; four members of her extended family killed themselves and she once put a gun to her own head. So when a demagogue like Trump speaks to her pain and promises to bring factories back, of course her heart leaps.

Then her resolve strengthens when she hears liberals mock her faith — it was an evangelical church that helped her overcome homelessness — or deride her as “deplorable.”
Then there’s the woman who cut my hair: She had a daughter who was overcome with addiction, so she quit the shop to care for a grandson. Her successor cutting my hair lost her husband to an overdose and is struggling to help a son who is addicted. She isn’t much interested in politics and didn’t watch any of the Democratic convention; she said she distrusts Trump and sees him as a bully, but she is mad at Democrats because food prices are too high.

“I’m not sure how I’ll vote,” she told me, “or if I’ll vote.” She’s a good, hardworking person who would benefit from a Democratic victory, and Democrats should fight for her — not savage her for political thought crimes.
Working-class Americans have a right to feel betrayed. After almost 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks, we started two wars and allocated trillions of dollars to the response. But every three or four days we lose as many Americans to drugs, alcohol and suicide as died in the Sept. 11 attacks, yet the national response has been pathetically weak. The social fabric in many blue-collar communities has unraveled, and people are angry and frustrated.

Since the Obama presidency, Democrats have increasingly become the party of the educated, and the upshot has often been a whiff of condescension toward working-class voters, especially toward voters of faith. And in a country where 74 percentof Americans report a belief in God, according to Gallup, and only 38 percentover the age of 25 have a four-year college degree, condescension is a losing strategy.

Michael Sandel, the eminent Harvard philosopher, condemns the scorn for people with less education as “the last acceptable prejudice” in America. He’s right: Elites sometimes indulge in open disdain for working-class voters that they would never acknowledge about other groups.

I worry about Democrats neglecting their proud heritage since at least the time of Franklin Roosevelt of standing up for working-class Americans. Maybe it’s time for more educated liberals to reread F.D.R.’s famous “Forgotten Man” speech of 1932, hailing “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
We liberals today are attuned to identity and thus to racial and gender disadvantages, while often seemingly oblivious to class disadvantage — even though recent research by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty underscores that race is playing a smaller role in opportunity gaps while class gaps are yawning wider.

You can’t have a serious conversation about inequality today without discussing race. But you also can’t have a serious conversation about poverty or opportunity without considering class (and for many people of color, race and class disadvantages overlap).
Kamala Harris seems to get this. She chose as her running mate a man who can reach working-class voters with his words as well as his policies. And she can present herself as the candidate who worked at McDonald’swhile her opponent was exploiting his inheritance — and renters.

I wasn’t planning to write this column, but then I approvingly tweetedClinton’s comment about not demeaning those we disagree with. Plenty of readers replied hotly: But they deserve to be demeaned!

Sure, it’s satisfying to hurl invective. But calling people “Nazis” probably won’t win over undecided voters any more than when Trump supporters deride “libtards” or the “Biden crime family.”

Whatever our politics, Trump brings out the worst in all of us. He nurtures hate on his side that we mirror.

So let’s take a deep breath, summon F.D.R.’s empathy for the forgotten man, follow Clinton’s advice — and, for the sake of winning elections as well as of civility, remember that the best way to get others to listen to us is to first listen to them.

Voir aussi:

Hillary Clinton: To err is human, to empathize is superhuman
Is there any way to drain the fever swamps so we can stand together on firmer, higher ground?
Hillary Rodham Clinton
The Washington Post
September 25, 2024

Hillary Rodham Clinton was the Democratic nominee for president in 2016 and served as U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. This column was adapted from her newly published book, “Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty.”

Like anyone who is trying to understand how normal people get drawn into a life of hate and violence, I went for a canoe ride.

Shannon Foley is a former white supremacist who now works to deprogram and rehabilitate people leaving hate groups. Shannon took my daughter, Chelsea, and me canoeing near her home in Athens, Ga. It wasn’t lost on me as we paddled along that we weren’t far from the site of the last documented mass lynching in America, Moore’s Ford Bridge, where a mob of 20 armed White men shot and killed two Black couples in 1946. One of the women killed was seven months pregnant. To this day, no one has been held accountable for their murders.

Back in the 1990s, from the time she was 15 until she was 20, Shannon was active in the violent white-supremacy movement. She attended Ku Klux Klan rallies, tagged public property with swastikas, assaulted people of color, tear-gassed an LGBTQ+ nightclub and underwent paramilitary training to prepare for the race war her neo-Nazi leaders promised was imminent. Her comrades were white supremacists like the fanatics who years later carried torches through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and like many of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Then, remarkably, she managed to get herself out and change her life. Now, Shannon helps people escape violent extremism. She’s seen how the dangerous, hateful movement has metastasized. The rise of social media allowed white-power leaders to more easily reach and radicalize thousands of recruits. Hate-fueled memes and videos circulate online, evading detection in the dark corners of the internet with coded hashtags and innuendo. Things only got worse when Donald Trump publicly and proudly fanned the flames of racial resentment from the campaign trail and then the White House, emboldening white supremacists to emerge from the shadows.

I saw firsthand how fast conspiracy theories could spread and radicalization could take hold. During the 2016 campaign, a shocking number of people became convinced that I am a murderer, a terrorist sympathizer and the evil mastermind behind a child-sex-abuse ring. Alex Jones, the right-wing talk show host, posted a video about “all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.”

This was not the first time I was the subject of wild conspiracy theories or partisan rage that veered into mania. In the 1990s, supermarket tabloids used to splash headlines such as “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby” across their front pages. I was even burned in effigy by a crowd in Kentucky furious that I had proposed taxing cigarettes to help fund universal health care for all Americans. The president of the Kentucky Association of Tobacco Supporters chanted “Burn, baby, burn” as he poured gasoline on a scarecrow in a dress labeled “i’m hillary.” By 2016, I fully expected to play a starring role in the fever dreams of extremists at the margins of American politics.

But something had changed. The margins infected the mainstream. Social media gave conspiracy theories far wider reach than ever before. Fox News and other right-wing media outlets gave repeated outlandish lies “credibility.” And before Trump, we’d never had a presidential candidate — and then an actual president — who used the biggest bully pulpit in the world to be an actual bully and traffic in this kind of trash. The results were tragic but predictable.

In early December 2016, a 28-year-old man from North Carolina fired an assault rifle inside a pizza restaurant in D.C., because he had read online that it was the headquarters of my supposed child-sex ring. Thankfully, no one was harmed. But the pizzeria attack foreshadowed the violence to come: QAnon followers and militia members storming the Capitol on Jan. 6; mass shooters leaving behind manifestos riddled with misogyny, racism, antisemitism and other conspiracy theories promoted in far-right (and far-left) echo chambers.

Shannon is doing what she can to fight back. She rescues people she meets online, at white-supremacist rallies or through concerned loved ones. When she’s trying to deprogram white supremacists, her approach is not to try to change their politics but to help them address their trauma and move away from resorting to violence. “I’ve found you can’t argue people out of their deeply entrenched worldview. They just entrench further,” Shannon says. So she asks a lot of questions and patiently listens. What drew them to the white-power movement? How is it serving their life? Why are they afraid of leaving? What might their lives look like without hate? These connections can take a long time to develop, and even longer to lead to deradicalization. Disengagement, she says, is a process — not an event.

That’s how I found myself in a canoe with Shannon while Chelsea paddled next to us with a young woman named Samantha, who recently left the white-power movement with Shannon’s help. Samantha was introduced to white-supremacist groups by an abusive ex-boyfriend, an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, whom Samantha would later testify against. Samantha helped me better understand how people like her are recruited into and radicalized by white-supremacist groups. Most people, she acknowledged, are not initially comfortable with racial slurs or Nazi rhetoric, so recruiters lightheartedly introduce offensive humor to appear less violent than they really are. But the more time members spend online in alt-right chatrooms and channels, the more they get used to the ugliness of the ideology. When you stop being shocked, you start being radicalized.

It would have been so much easier for Shannon to have left this dark chapter in her life in the rearview mirror and never look back. It’s not like she has extra time on her hands: Shannon bartends 30 hours each week and cares for her eight children. But she feels a powerful responsibility to make amends for her past.

I wondered whether Shannon’s thoughtful, empathetic approach could offer lessons not just for rescuing radicalized individuals but also for healing our wounded country. What will it take to pull us out of the madness? Is there any way to drain the fever swamps so we can stand together on firmer, higher ground?I also marveled at the empathy Shannon managed to summon for even the most (yes, let’s say it) deplorable bigots. She has known the worst of the worst and still finds room in her heart for them as human beings, still believes it’s worth the effort, the emotional labor, to reach out to them.
I’ve struggled with this myself. In 2016, I famously described half of Trump’s supporters as “the basket of deplorables.” I was talking about the people who are drawn to his racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia — you name it. The people for whom his bigotry is a feature, not a bug. It was an unfortunate choice of words and bad politics, but it also got at an important truth. Just look at everything that has happened in the years since, from Charlottesville to Jan. 6. The masks have come off, and if anything, “deplorable” is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.

In 2022, an editor at a major American newspaper reached out to ask if I would write an op-ed reflecting on my “basket of deplorables” comment six years on. A gunman in Buffalo had just massacred Black shoppers at a supermarket, reportedly influenced by the racist “great replacement” theory, which had been promoted aggressively by Tucker Carlson on Fox News and embraced by many Republican leaders. The New York Times had published a meticulous investigation finding that, on more than 400 episodes of his top-rated cable news show, Carlson explicitly pushed the incendiary claim that immigrants and people of color are displacing Whites. The newspaper editor said that he and his colleagues spent a half-hour at their editorial meeting talking about this report, and “the notion that the most racist show on cable news is also the most popular stuck with a lot of us.” Several editors, he said, brought up my “deplorables” comment and “how prescient” I had been. Did I want to write an op-ed about it?

It was tempting. In 2016, I warned about the rising influence of the alt-right and the threat to democracy from a political movement that endorses violence and refuses to accept basic norms of decency and pluralism. I was largely mocked or dismissed by many in the mainstream media stuck in a “both sides” straitjacket. Now they finally wanted to listen, but they were still intent on exploring this threat primarily through the lens of a six-year-old political controversy. I found that approach emblematic of the media’s shortsightedness, and I declined the offer.

I do wish that back in 2016, people had heard the rest of my comments and not just the word “deplorables.” I also talked about the other half of Trump supporters, “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” And, I emphasized, “those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” That’s especially true because many are living with unresolved trauma in their lives.

Empathy for people you agree with is easy. Empathy for someone you deeply, passionately disagree with is hard but necessary. What Shannon does, feeling empathy for Nazis and Klansmen, is damn near superhuman. As a Christian, I aspire to this kind of radical empathy but often fall short. Talking about the “deplorables” in 2016, I said, “Some of those folks, they are irredeemable.” Part of me would still say this is objectively true. Just look at the lack of remorse from many of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who’ve been convicted of sedition and other crimes. But another part of me wants to believe something else. I’d like to believe there’s goodness in everyone and a chance at redemption, no matter how remote.

From “Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty” by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Copyright © 2024 by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

COMPLEMENT:

It provided a grim insight into the true nature of ‘Palestine solidarity’. It shone a light on why so many of our young chant, ‘In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians’. This is a new and unsettling form of activism. It is not 1960s-style solidarity with foreign struggles or even radical chic, that old politics as fashion. No, it is a coveting of suffering. The keffiyeh classes, it seems to me, crave the moral rush of oppression, the thrill of persecution. They pull on the garb of a beleaguered people in order to escape, however fleetingly, the pampered reality of their own lives. In order to taste that most prized of social assets in the woke era: victimhood. In draping the keffiyeh around their shoulders, they get to be someone else for a while. Someone less bourgeois, less white. Someone a little more exotic, a little more interesting. It’s less politics than therapy. They seek to wash away the ‘sin’ of their privilege through mimicking what they consider to be the least privileged people on Earth. That’s what the keffiyeh has become: the cloth with which the rich seek to scrub away their white guilt.

If the keffiyeh is the uniform of this Palestine politics of victimhood, then its currency is images of Palestinian suffering. Where yesteryear’s purveyors of radical chic revelled in images of revolting minorities, today’s followers of the cult of the keffiyeh savour images of Palestinian destitution. They trade in photos of Palestinian pain, meaning that social media has become ‘oversaturated with traumatic imagery’, as one writer describes it. Log on and you’ll be instantly exposed to a ‘kaleidoscopic view of human suffering without respite’. Not content with commodifying Palestinian attire, they commodify Palestinian trauma, too. They make a spectacle of Palestinian agony. Not to assist Palestinians in any meaningful way – how could it? – but rather to inflame their own satisfying feelings of collective moral revulsion.

Even requests from Palestinians to stop sharing horrific images from their wars have not been enough to slow this grim trade. A few years ago, Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr counselled Westerners against sharing ‘shocking content’ showing ‘shattered people’ in the Palestinian territories, on the basis that such ‘pictures of pain’ violate ‘the privacy and dignity of the subjects’ and can ‘create terror’ among Palestinians who might fear suffering the same fate. These images might ‘provide thrills’ to outside observers, and nurture ‘more “likes” and “shares”’ online, but they can be devastating to ‘public morale’ in the Palestinian territories, Jabr wrote. It was a fruitless plea. Imagery of Palestinian suffering is too valuable to the keffiyeh classes to be sacrificed to trifling concerns about Palestinian dignity. Your pain is ours now, just like your headwear.

The elites’ vicarious victimhood through the Palestine drama is a dangerous game. It seems undeniable now that the more the cultural powers of the West crave and collect depictions of Palestinian distress, the more the ideologues of Hamas will be willing to supply such depictions. Witness Yahya Sinwar’s insistence, in the summarising words of CNN, that the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ will likely ‘work in [Hamas’s] favour’. Sinwar, the then military leader of Hamas in Gaza, callously described the deaths of Palestinians as ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get the Israelis ‘right where we want them’.

Hamas clearly recognises that when the cultural establishments of global capitalism treat every image of Palestinian death as an indictment of Israeli evil, when the West’s activist class, media elites and online influencers hold up every picture of a broken Palestinian as proof of the Jewish State’s ‘uniquely murderous nature’, then it is in Hamas’s interests to prolong the war and allow more such suffering to occur. Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue. Hamas’s intransigence in the face of its far more powerful foe is a direct consequence of the keffiyeh classes’ commodification of Palestinian pain as a testament to both Israeli malfeasance and Western indifference.

The cult of victimhood’s greatest offence is to reduce everything to a simplistic clash between the oppressed and the oppressor, good and evil, light and dark. This movement requires not only victims it might ostentatiously empathise with, but also the opposite: victimisers, the monsters of persecution, who must be noisily raged at. As Professor Joshua Berman writes, the ‘Palestinian ideology of victimhood… constructs a struggle between a victim-hero in opposition to a scapegoat’. And this can lead to a ‘revelling in caricatured depictions of the oppressor’, he says. So where Palestinian radicals ‘traffic in classic hook-nose anti-Semitic tropes’, their Western supporters traffic in the insistence that the Jewish State is uniquely murderous, given to bloodletting, obsessed with murdering children, and so on. This is the thin line between pity and hate. Pity for Palestinians morphs with frightening ease into hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation, courtesy of the morally infantile narrative the cultural establishment has weaved around this most fraught of conflicts.

The end result? Protesters in keffiyehs telling Jews in New York City to ‘go back to Poland’. Activists in keffiyehs shouting on the New York subway: ‘Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.’ Britons in keffiyehs marching alongside radical Islamists who long for further pogroms against the Jewish State. The aftermath of 7 October is a painful reminder that the facile moral binaries of identity politics are far more likely to resuscitate racism than tackle it.

Voir enfin:

Opinion: We know how voters feel about Trump and Biden. But how do the experts rank their presidencies?

Wax figures of American presidents at Madame Tussauds in Washington. Scholars rated Trump even worse than Andrew Johnson, front row, right, William Henry Harrison and James Buchanan, back row, fourth and fifth from left, respectively.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus

The LA Times

Feb. 18, 2024

Presidents Day occurs at a crucial moment this year, with the presidency on the cusp of crisis as we inexorably shuffle toward a rematch between the incumbent and his predecessor. It’s the sort of contest we haven’t seen since the 19th century, and judging by public opinion of President Biden and former President Trump, most Americans would have preferred to keep it that way.

But the third installment of our Presidential Greatness Project, a poll of presidential experts released this weekend, shows that scholars don’t share American voters’ roughly equal distaste for both candidates.

Biden, in fact, makes his debut in our rankings at No. 14, putting him in the top third of American presidents. Trump, meanwhile, maintains the position he held six years ago: dead last, trailing such historically calamitous chief executives as James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. In that and other respects, Trump’s radical departure from political, institutional and legal norms has affected knowledgeable assessments not just of him but also of Biden and several other presidents.

The overall survey results reveal stability as well as change in the way scholars assess our nation’s most important and controversial political office. Great presidents have traditionally been viewed as those who presided over moments of national transformation, led the country through major crises and expanded the institution of the presidency. Military victories, economic growth, assassinations and scandals also affect expert assessments of presidential performance.

The presidents at the top of our rankings, and others like ours, reflect this. Hallowed leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George Washington consistently lead the list.

Our latest rankings also show that the experts’ assessments are driven not only by traditional notions of greatness but also by the evolving values of our time.

One example is the continuing decline in esteem for two important presidents, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. Their reputations have consistently suffered in recent years as modern politics lead scholars to assess their early 19th and 20th century presidencies ever more harshly, especially their unacceptable treatment of marginalized people.

More acutely, this survey has seen a pronounced partisan dynamic emerge, arguably in response to the Trump presidency and the Trumpification of presidential politics.

Proponents of the Biden presidency have strong arguments in their arsenal, but his high placement within the top 15 suggests a powerful anti-Trump factor at work. So far, Biden’s record does not include the military victories or institutional expansion that have typically driven higher rankings, and a family scandal such as the one involving his son Hunter normally diminishes a president’s ranking.

Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall.

Trump’s position at the bottom of our rankings, meanwhile, puts him behind not only Buchanan and Johnson but also such lowlights as Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who died a mere 31 days after taking office.

Trump’s impact goes well beyond his own ranking and Biden’s. Every contemporary Democratic president has moved up in the ranks — Barack Obama (No. 7), Bill Clinton (No. 12) and even Jimmy Carter (No. 22).

Yes, these presidents had great accomplishments such as expanding healthcare access and working to end conflict in the Middle East, and they have two Nobel Prizes among them. But given their shortcomings and failures, their rise seems to be less about reassessments of their administrations than it is a bonus for being neither Trump nor a member of his party.

Indeed, every modern Republican president has dropped in the survey, including the transformational Ronald Reagan (No. 16) and George H.W. Bush (No. 19), who led the nation’s last decisive military victory.

Academics do lean left, but that hasn’t changed since our previous surveys. What these results suggest is not just an added emphasis on a president’s political affiliation, but also the emergence of a president’s fealty to political and institutional norms as a criterion for what makes a president “great” to the scholars who study them.

As for the Americans casting a ballot for the next president, they are in the historically rare position of knowing how both candidates have performed in the job. Whether they will consider each president’s commitment to the norms of presidential leadership, and come to rate them as differently as our experts, remains to be seen.

Justin Vaughn is an associate professor of political science at Coastal Carolina University. Brandon Rottinghaus is a professor of political science at the University of Houston.

This entry was posted on dimanche 15 décembre 2024 at 1:15 and is filed under droits des femmes, mondialisation, société.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.