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Republican millionaires with Ivy League degrees have somehow convinced people they’re fighting the ‘elites’
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Republican millionaires with Ivy League degrees have somehow convinced people they’re fighting the ‘elites’
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Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell recently posted some thoughts on the subject of high school sports, of all things. High schools do a good job at elevating elite athletes, he wrote, to the detriment of students of more average ability, or who lack parents who could afford to pay for soccer or baseball camps starting at age six.
Gladwell, who is a lifelong, serious runner — and can run a mile at age 55 nearly as fast as I did when I was 15 and winning races on the track team — came up with a law he named after himself: In any sporting endeavor, elite achievement comes at the cost of mass participation.
We can easily expand Gladwell’s Law to the whole of society. Don’t many of us view life in America as a dispiriting continuation of the ruthless, often shallow competitions of high school? And our thinking about how we relate to so-called elites can be complicated by our culturally driven feelings of envy and shame.
At least arguably, America’s national sport is not played with a ball. It’s electoral politics, which has always had elements of ruthless competition but used to be a lot more “sporting” than it is now. At its best, politics is about knowledge, hard work, compromise, mutual respect and some acknowledgment of shared goals, even alongside vigorous disagreement. None of those qualities are evident in the churlish zero-sum game that the Republican Party, with its backs against the demographic wall, has played in recent years.
This sea-change goes back at least as far as 1994, when Newt Gingrich invited Rush Limbaugh to train the incoming Republican House majority on how best to despise your political opponents and push disinformation and conspiracy theories. It was either un-American or, sadly, quintessentially American at the time, and has since metastasized into the right’s embrace of false narratives, ever-wilder conspiracy theories, and authoritarianism — which is epitomized by a certain orange-hued former president, but certainly not limited to him.
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