Who Will Be The Next Elite?

By NICHOLAS LEMANN

Elites are strange creatures. Every society has one--at least one--that members and nonmembers alike are intensely aware of. But only rarely is an elite a formal entity, with stated membership criteria and a list of who belongs. Studying elites is thus an inexact science.

Still, the direction in which the American elite is changing right now seems quite clear. We are somewhere in the course of the greatest capitalist boom in our history. One result is that capitalists will make up our country's next elite. The credential you will have to present to enter that virtual room in which candidates for office are chosen, educational institutions run, foreign alliances forged and social arrangements set will not be family background or educational achievement. It will be having started a successful business and made a lot of money at it.

You can already feel this happening, with the force of a riptide. The self-made American rich are as celebrated, as respected, even as loved as they have ever been in our history and maybe the history of any other country. They smile at us from magazine covers and give us their opinions on television. Their charitable foundations, growing enormously, are taking government's place as the national laboratory for public projects and social innovation. Never mind the Microsoft antitrust suit. The literally murderous personal rage against rich people that was so much a feature of American life at the outset of the 20th century is today almost nowhere to be found.

The American elite 25 years from now won't charge an admission price exactly; still, business success will be its way of assuring itself that an applicant has what it takes to become a member. Those who haven't hit it big as entrepreneurs will somehow seem to have talents that are merely peripheral. The qualities that the elite respects will be a kind of aggressive and even ruthless energy and imagination. Superpromising young people will set themselves on a course to become David Geffen, not Dean Acheson.

When this happens, it will bring us full circle. A century ago, this country had a capitalist elite personified by such business titans as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Then we spent the whole 20th century trying to replace it with other kinds of elites--two of them, to be specific. Now we're headed right back where we started.

During the first half of the century, the American elite was a distinct, quasi-hereditary group whose members were all men, all white and almost all Protestant (quite often Episcopalian). They lived mainly along the Eastern Seaboard. They had gone to Ivy League colleges, and often, before that, to boarding schools in New England. They belonged to the same clubs, lived in the same suburbs and vacationed at the same resorts. They dressed, spoke and looked a certain way. They were of English or Scotch-Irish stock. Exemplified by Henry Stimson, who served as both Secretary of State and Secretary of War, they were publicity-averse men who were more powerful than famous. A sociologist who was very much a born-in member of this class, E. Digby Baltzell, bestowed two resonant names on its members: white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (Wasps) and the Protestant establishment. In historic terms, they were the gentlemanly replacements, in the American pilot's cabin, for the robber barons who emerged during the capitalist boom after the Civil War.

Near the end of his life, Baltzell observed that the Protestant establishment had been displaced as the national elite by a different group, which he called the "SAT meritocracy"--people selected from a much broader, more national, more diverse pool on the basis of the familiar college-admissions test and then sent on to the same colleges and the same influential institutions the Wasps had previously dominated. Today the President is a lower-middle-class Southern Baptist from Arkansas, the Secretary of State is a Czech immigrant, and the CEO of TIME's parent company is Jewish, but all three went to highly selective private colleges in the East. The change goes beyond mere anecdote. The overall tenor of elite institutions such as law firms, investment banks and university faculties has changed, becoming distinctly brainier, less social, more diverse in background.

This late-20th century American elite wasn't born; it was made. During the middle decades of the century, a group of influential university educators and foundation executives led by James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, undertook to unseat the Wasp elite, using the new multiple-choice college-admissions tests as an important tool. In some ways this project has turned out to be a remarkably successful bit of social engineering. The top universities still use heredity as a factor in admissions, but on the whole they have shifted from the raccoon-coat, football-weekend paradigm of the old days, in which the premier human attribute was a hard-to-define quality called "character," to a different value system, in which being smart is first on the list of virtues and a humble background is a badge of honor.

What will cause this elite to fade in the next two or three decades is that the rest of the country doesn't seem to accept these people as our "natural aristocracy," to use a phrase of Thomas Jefferson's much loved by Conant. Their generally liberal politics don't set the tone for the country. They are the object of populist resentment more than of admiration; they're the "cultural elite" that politicians like to use as a foil. Oddly enough, the members of the old Wasp elite, though their high positions weren't as hard-earned, didn't get the country nearly as steamed up as the current elite has.

It will be wildly ironic if the end result of the attempt to replace the Wasp elite with a new one of philosopher-kings is, instead, a return of the plutocracy that was upended by the Wasps a century ago. Many of the best-known Wasp grandees (like Averell Harriman) spent their life trying to undo what their plutocrat fathers had done. The creators of the succeeding admissions-test elite wanted to take decision-making power about who got to the top away from the marketplace and give it to the schools. If the country has decided it would be neat to be led by its billionaires, that would represent the failure of two elaborate, well-intentioned and long-running efforts, together taking up almost 100 years, to oust them and create an alternative elite.

The lesson is that we've gone about the project of creating an American elite in the wrong order. The first step should be to generate a real national agreement about what form we want the country to take. After we've settled that, we should pick an elite that has the inclination and the ability to do what we want done. Generate an elite first--without a definite project for it to accomplish--and you will wind up with a class of leaders without followers.

Nicholas Lemann, a staff writer at the New Yorker, is author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy