Twilight of the Elites - America After Meritocracy

Zusatztext 42466558 Informationen zum Autor Chris Hayes Klappentext A powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy. Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another - from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball - imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters. How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it. Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary, and deep historical understanding, Twilight of the Elites describes how the society we have come to inhabit - utterly forgiving at the top and relentlessly punitive at the bottom - produces leaders who are out of touch with the people they have been trusted to govern. Hayes argues that the public's failure to trust the federal government, corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but our day-to-day lives. Upending well-worn ideological and partisan categories, Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times. Twilight of the Elites is the defining work of social criticism for the post-bailout age.Chapter 1 The Naked Emperors Now see the sad fruits your faults produced, Feel the blows you have yourselves induced. -- Racine America feels broken. Over the last decade, a nation accustomed to greatness and progress has had to reconcile itself to an economy that seems to be lurching backward. From 1999 to 2010, median household income in real dollars fell by 7 percent. More Americans are downwardly mobile than at any time in recent memory. In poll after poll, overwhelming majorities of Americans say the country is “on the wrong track.” And optimism that today’s young people will have a better life than their parents is at the lowest level since pollsters started asking that question in the early 1980s. It is possible that by the time this book is in your hands, these trends will have reversed themselves. But given the arc of the past decade and the institutional dysfunction that underlies our current extended crisis, even a welcome bout of economic growth won’t undo the deep unease that now grips the nation. The effects of our great disillusionment are typically measured within the cramped confines of the news cycle: how they impact the President’s approval rating, which political party they benefit and which they hurt. Most of us come to see the nation’s problems either as the result of the policies favored by those who occupy the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, or as an outgrowth of political dysfunction: of gridlock, “bickering,” and the increasing polarization among both the electorate and the representatives it elects. But the core experience of the last decade isn’t just political dysfunction. It’s something much deeper and more existentially disruptive: the near total failure of each pillar institution of our society. The financial crisis and the grinding, prolonged economic immiseration it has precipitated are just the most recent instances of elite failure, the latest in an uninterrupted cascade of corruption and incompetence. If that sounds excessively bleak, take a moment to consider America’s trajectory ...

Product details

• Authors: Chris Hayes, Christopher Hayes
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.06.2013
• EAN: 9780307720467
• ISBN: 978-0-307-72046-7
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 201 mm x 17 mm
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education