"Elitism"

 The photo was taken in the summer of 1951, with me on the far left. My youngest two brothers were yet to be born. We are in the backyard, sitting on a rock on which is mounted a granite carving of mother and child, which my father had sculpted ten years earlier. We are holding examples of my parent’s artwork.

 

I included the photo, as this essay incorporates a little of my personal (and unique) non-elitist upbringing.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Elitism”

October 29, 2025

 

“When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.”

                                                                                                Mark Twain (1835-1910)

                                                                                                A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889

 

The word “elite” has roots in both Latin and Old French, meaning to choose. As an adjective it meant “elected,” or “chosen.” While the word appeared briefly in Middle English (1100-1500AD), it only reappeared in the mid-19^th Century, meaning a “choice or select body.” The word is not in Webster’s 1828 dictionary. Wikipedia defines the word: “A small group of powerful or wealthy people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group.” Nevertheless, when used today to describe the politically and financially powerful, the word is often used as a pejorative. 

 

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Just as cream floats to the top of an unhomogenized bottle of milk, the brightest and most talented, left untethered, will rise to the top of society. That is nature’s way. It is when position and power are used to enhance and protect one’s privileged status that corruption ensues. 

 

For most of our Country’s history, elites who ran our financial and industrial businesses, who educated our young at prestigious universities and who governed our Country were drawn from east coast, WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) families – those who were wealthy, educated and civic-minded. They embodied the concept of “noblesse oblige,” but they protected their position through discrimination in education, in business opportunities, and in their social lives. However, time caught up to them. Their wealth, singular education, and political influence began to wane following the Depression and World War II. Like today’s elites, they had little in common with the average American. In a recent issue of The Spectator, Madeline Grant wrote of how WASPs are now in their twilight years, as “meritocracy and modernity” have edged them out. Ms. Grant, in my opinion, is late with her analysis, as I believe this transition has been underway for eighty years. While our nation was better off when merit replaced privilege, today it feels like the same game, but with different players. 

 

I had a seat to this transition. My parents were born into wealth and privilege – my mother’s family in New Haven and my father’s in a Boston suburb. They grew up in large houses with servants, separate summer residences and had traveled abroad. My maternal grandfather, however, fell victim to the Swedish financial swindler Ivar Krueger in 1932, the same year my father left Harvard, after four years but without a degree. A budding sculptor and artist, he had no interest in following his father into the world of finance. My parents met five years later while studying sculpture in Gloucester, Massachusetts and were married in 1938.

 

They raised nine children in an early 19^th Century farm house owned by his parents in circumstances quite different from their upbringings. There was a woodstove in the kitchen for cooking and heating and another in the dining room for heat, along with a fireplace in the living room. A coal furnace furnished hot water and an oil burner in the stairwell provided some heat to the upstairs. Horses were a vestige of their prior lives, but goats and chickens provided milk and eggs. When visiting grandparents, I saw the other side. 

 

When a vacuum develops, as it did with WASPS fading from halls of political power, nature requires it be filled. Washington’s progressive politicians, bureaucrats, along with their Wall Street friends, Hollywood’s hypocrites, and union leaders were ready. In 1962, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988, which gave the right of collective bargaining to federal employees. Today, two unions represent 930,000 federal employees, or about 15% of total U.S. union membership. In 1960, the average federal employee made about 15% less than a private sector employee in a similar job. Today, the average salary for a college-educated federal employee is higher than his private sector equivalent, and with better benefits. It is unsurprising that three of the five wealthiest counties in the United States are in the Virginia suburbs: Loudon, Falls Church and Fairfax.

 

Everything in Washington has become grander and more expensive, as a new class of “progressive” elites assumed the mantle. They wanted bigger government. The cost to win a seat in the U.S. Senate has risen by 50 to 100 times over sixty years. While accurate statistics are not available, I am informed by AI that “Congress,” in 1960, “was generally more representative of the country’s economic makeup” than it is now. Today, the median net worth of members of Congress exceeds $1 million. Again, and again according to AI, a 2022 analysis found “97 lawmakers [out of 535 members of Congress] or their families traded stocks in industries that could be affected by their committee memberships between 2019 and 2012.” Both major political parties are guilty. Using inside information for personal gain is one area where there appears to be consensus among Party leaders. As well, and fueling charges of elitism, about 17% of Congress have Ivy League degrees, while the comparable number for the U.S. is roughly 0.3%. Turnover in Congress has declined, as re-districting has limited interparty competition. One-Party states have become more common. For example, in New England where about one third of voters are registered Republicans, there are no Republicans in the House of Representatives and only one Republican Senator, Susan Collins of Maine. 

 

It is my belief that we are in the early stages of the diminishing influence of identity politics and the progressive elites who have dominated our schools, big businesses, and government for the last twenty-five years. Today’s Democrats are reminiscent of postbellum Republicans in their maintaining and continuing positions of privilege and political power. In admissions to the country’s oldest and finest universities, progressives replaced meritocracy with a preference for race, diversity and inclusion. (WASPs had shown a preference for their own kind.) In the classroom, they denigrated conservative opinions. They forewent a belief in a universal Judeo-Christian morality and advanced the concept of moral relativism. In Washington they favored politically palatable industries, and they used lawfare to disparage the democratically elected President Trump throughout his first term.

 

Whether Mr. Trump represents the peak of moral relativism and the end of progressive elitism, I don’t know, but my sense is that we are at a turning point. Regardless, in time progressive elitists will, like their WASP predecessors, be relegated to the dust bins of history. But whoever replaces them they, too, will eventually fall into the same trap, for human nature is unchanging. They will use their influence to maintain their positions, bring along their allies and political preferences, and they will foil and delay change. Creative destruction – when driven by merit and where change leads to improvement – is positive, not just in the world of business, but in personal and political lives. When that next batch of elites becomes pervasive, forego accountability, and when they feel irreplaceable – that they are deserving of their unearned positions – it will be time for still another change.

 

If I am correct that the current ephemeral elitism of identity-fixated progressives, hastened by what looks to be the election of the Socialist and anti-Semite Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s next mayor, is being propelled, gradually, out of the ring, we may well be in for a few years of relief. One can hope.

"The 1960s - For Me"

 

The photo is of my wife and me on April 11, 1964.

 

In his forward to his 1977 collection of essays, The Essays of E.B. White, Mr. white wrote: “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest...Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”

 

Truer words I have rarely read, and the attached is exhibit ‘A.’

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“The 1960s – For Me”

October 22, 2025

 

“The sixties produced an archaic mind-set that is

great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”

                                                                                                                Walter Isaacson (1952-)

                                                                                                                Steve Jobs, 2011

 

The third decade of one’s life is, perhaps, the most transformative. One’s first decade is composed of blissful childhood. During one’s second decade, one moves from childhood to adulthood through the challenging teenage years. By one’s third decade, parenting has (mostly) been done; it is the time when one rises (or falls) as an individual, an adult. 

 

For those born in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the 1960s were our time, just as the 2020s are for our grandchildren. It was a chaotic time, one that followed the perceived gentler and more conformist 1950s. 

 

The ‘60s began on a note of hope, with the election of John F. Kennedy as President, the first born in the 20^th Century. Then things fell apart: His assassination in November 1963 was followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King in April 1968 and two months later of Robert F. Kennedy. As well, civil rights advocates Malcolm X, Medgar Evans and James Chaney, among several others, were killed. It was the decade in which Vietnam divided the country and gave birth to the anti-war movement. That movement led to the 1968 tumultuous Democratic Convention in Chicago and two years later to the Kent State shooting. It was the decade when the Beatles first appeared, when Abbie Hoffman formed the Youth International Party (YIP). It saw the rise of the sexual revolution, with Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinham. And the decade ended on mixed notes – with Woodstock, a four-day rock concert attended by an estimated half a million drugged-up, narcissistic young people. And then, in July 1969, we watched with patriotic pride Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon. 

 

For me, that decade was metamorphic. Born in January 1941, I was twenty in 1961 – an unfocused student who had dropped out of college. I spent the summer of 1961 working in a Canadian nickel mine and then as a lab technician for a metallurgical company outside of Boston.

 

The next ten years changed me. On New Years Eve of 1961 I met Caroline, and my life improved. We were married two years later, and two of our three children were born, one in 1966 and the second in 1968. However, Caroline lost her one remaining grandparent in 1965 and her father in 1969. I lost my three remaining grandparents in 1961, 1963 and 1969, and my father died in 1968. I finished college, completed my military obligation, began a real job. I changed careers in 1967, beginning forty-eight years as a stock broker. 

 

There is no grand design to life. Preparation, diligence and hard work are positive traits, but life is largely serendipitous. In 1960, I could not have predicted how things would change for me, any more than I could foresee how the country would change. There was death, but there was also life. With Caroline as my wife and new-born children, while I mourn the deaths, I look back on the 1960s with fondness.

"The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

                                                                   

                                                            Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

October 15, 2025

 

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence

is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

                                                                                                                F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

                                                                                                                The Crack-Up, 1945

                                                                                                                collection of essays, published posthumously

 

While the good, the bad, and the ugly seems to me an apt metaphor for Donald Trump, most people would find the title too broad, too encompassing. Either he is loved or he is hated. To his fans, he is, to use his own words, the “Greatest President Ever.” To his opponents, he is an incarnation of Hitler. He is certainly not a Nazi, as his opponents have termed him, and he was not “chosen by God” to lead the United States, as his ardent supporters have said. Hyperbole, so common among todays’ politicians and commentators, is a consequence, at least in part, of the hatred that divides our nation. 

 

I see the good in Mr. Trump in his condemnation of ‘woke’ policies that have corrupted politics, schools, universities, and social organizations – manifested in identity politics, where merit is sidelined by an emphasis on race and/or sex, and where gender is not a biological term. I see it in his signing of the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” that made the 2017 tax cuts permanent. I see it in effectively closing the southern border, so that illegal migration into the U.S. has slowed to a trickle. I see it in his combatting inner-city crime, where victims – as well as perpetrators – are overwhelmingly people of color. I see the good in Mr. Trump in his abiding support for Israel, at a time when anti-Semitism has spread throughout much of the West. And I see it in the unprecedented peace that his plan for Gaza may possibly bring to the Middle East. I see it in his straight talk with our European allies who risk economic and social collapse, with their falling demographics, increased welfarism, an over-emphasis on “green” energy, declining defense spending, excessive regulation, wokeism, and high taxes. While he is what we used to call a motor-mouth, I see good in his availability to the press. And I see the good in some of his cabinet picks, like Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent and Doug Burghum. 

 

I see the bad in Mr. Trump in his support for tariffs, which have raised prices for U.S. consumers, and in his call for lower interest rates, which stroke speculation, discourage savers, and hurt the U.S. Dollar. I see the bad in his attempt to get the Federal Reserve to bow to his demands, and in his refusal to reach out to those who oppose his politics. I see the bad in his failure to increase legal immigration, to acknowledge that the United States is, and always has been, a nation of immigrants. I see the bad in Mr. Trump in his abandonment of conservative principles that call for smaller government, rule of law, less regulation, increased competition, to be accountable, and to encourage greater individual freedom. While I see the good in Mr. Trump’s singling out universities that foster censorship and which have disemboweled conservativism, I see the bad in him demanding adherence to his rules. And I see the bad in some of his cabinet picks, including his Vice President J.D. Vance, but also in Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi and Robert Kennedy, Jr. (Vance has been a particular disappointment, so different from the decent and respectable advocate for personal responsibility depicted in his autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, which I read in 2016.) 

 

I see the ugly in his financial self-dealing, including his support for cryptocurrencies and meme coins. I see ugliness in his ego and in his butchering of the English language, and in his proclivity to create chaos when harmony and mutual respect are needed.  I particularly see the ugly in his retribution, in using lawfare to go after those who for eight years used lawfare against him. Mr. Trump has doubled down on one of today’s ugliest political tactics. I recognize that Mr. Trump is nemesis to the entire Democrat establishment, and he sees himself as justified in retribution. But two wrongs do not make a right. On October 7 at Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Charlie Kirk, Vivek Ramaswamy spoke of turning the other cheek: “Their brutal tactics should never cause us to change who we are...when we lower ourselves to play according to their rules, when we concede the idea that might makes right, that we settle our disputes with force rather than debate, then we lose the very thing we were fighting for, and that is our identity as Americans.” Amen.

 

Nevertheless, with all his flaws (or at least as I see them), I voted for Mr. Trump three times and, given his opponents, I am glad I did. He is unique among Presidents I have witnessed, and there is much he has done that I support. However, one would be hard-pressed to explain his political philosophy, apart from the fact he is transactional. Keeping one’s opponents off-base may be a good negotiating tactic, but it can wreak havoc among allies and in financial markets. He brings out the extremism in all of us – he is loved and hated in equal measure.

 

It will not be until two or three decades after his death before an unbiased biography will be written, one which will explain the Trump phenomenon. Sadly, those my age will never see it.