A Note on Scope
This essay does not argue that elite institutions are corrupt. Corruption is the wrong frame. The frame is sociological. American elites operate inside a system in which formal rules are universal and operational rules are stratified by status. The same statutes, codes, and norms apply to everyone on paper. The lived experience of the rules differs by an order of magnitude depending on where you stand in the credential hierarchy, the institutional hierarchy, and the political hierarchy. The elites who design and run these systems do not experience their own arrangements as exemptions. They experience them as appropriate context. The ordinary American does not get context. He gets the rule.
The essay also does not argue that elites are bad people. The men and women who occupy elite positions are no more flawed than anyone else. Most behave honorably within the formation that produced them. The problem is the formation itself, and what the formation prevents its members from seeing. The pattern this essay describes is older than the people inside it. It will outlast them. The point of the essay is not to assign blame but to name what is happening, in language that the people who are not on the inside can use to describe what they have been seeing for forty years.
The essay proceeds in three parts. First, the ten most prominent categories of elite exemption, with named examples in each. Second, the ordinary American experience of the same domains, paired with the elite cases for direct comparison. Third, the additional injury that comes from elite hectoring, the way the people enjoying the exemptions spend their days lecturing the people living under the rules.
Part One: Ten Categories of Elite Exemption
One: The Anti-Nepotism Waiver in Elite Academia
The formal rule across American universities and across the federal workforce is that no employee may supervise, hire, or recommend the hiring of a relative. The federal anti-nepotism statute, 5 U.S.C. § 3110, makes this a criminal matter for federal employees. State universities, including the entire University of California system, maintain parallel rules. Private universities have their own versions. The rules exist because preferential hiring of relatives is a paradigm case of unfair labor practice and conflict of interest.
The rules apply with full force to staff. A facilities manager at a state university cannot bring his wife in to do administrative work. The rules apply to junior faculty. An assistant professor whose spouse is finishing a dissertation cannot get the spouse hired as an adjunct in his own department. The rules apply to graduate students. A PhD candidate married to another graduate student cannot serve as the other’s teaching assistant.
The rules apply differently to deans and chaired professors.
Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of UC Berkeley School of Law. Catherine Fisk holds the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professorship at UC Berkeley School of Law. They are married. They moved as a unit from USC to Duke in 2004, from Duke to UC Irvine in 2008, from UC Irvine to Berkeley in 2017. Each move required the receiving institution to grant an anti-nepotism waiver. Each institution granted it. The standard accommodation routes Fisk’s personnel decisions through the provost rather than through the dean. Chemerinsky recuses himself from her file. The recusal preserves the form. Everyone in the building knows the form is a form.
Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power at Harvard. Sunstein left the University of Chicago Law School in 2008 to follow Power to Harvard, where she was at the Kennedy School. Power received a joint Harvard Law School and Kennedy School appointment in 2017 after returning from her UN ambassadorship. They co-teach. Sunstein had previously been partnered with Martha Nussbaum at Chicago.
Bruce Ackerman and Susan Rose-Ackerman at Yale Law have held parallel chaired professorships since 1987. They co-author. They co-teach. They explicitly decided early in their marriage never to maintain a commuter relationship and used joint hires to avoid one across moves through Penn, Yale, Columbia, and back to Yale. Bruce holds the Sterling Professorship.
Robert Post and Reva Siegel at Yale Law. Post served as dean from 2009 to 2017 while married to Siegel, the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law. They co-author. They co-teach the most influential constitutional theory framework of the past quarter century, developed inside the marriage.
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are both Yale Law professors. Chua holds the John M. Duff, Jr. Professorship. Rubenfeld holds the Robert R. Slaughter Professorship. Both wrote popular bestsellers in the 2010s. The Slate piece called them “the closest thing Yale Law has to a celebrity power couple.” Both were the subject of Title IX investigations and disciplinary actions in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Rubenfeld was suspended from teaching for two years in 2020 after a Yale investigation found he had sexually harassed students. Chua was caught up in the dinner-party controversy of 2021. The pair is still on the Yale Law faculty as of last reporting.
Richard Revesz and Vicki Been at NYU. Revesz served as dean of NYU Law from 2002 to 2013 while married to Been, who is the Boxer Family Professor at NYU Law and served as New York City Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development in the de Blasio administration. The pattern matches the Chemerinsky-Fisk arrangement: dean and chaired professor at the same elite school, with the institution accommodating the marriage through the standard waiver structure.
Joan Krause and Richard Saver at the University of North Carolina, both health-law professors.
Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried (parents of Sam Bankman-Fried) at Stanford Law have been on the faculty together since the late 1980s. They never legally married. They have stated publicly that the reason was their objection to legal marriage being unavailable to gay couples. The two-body solution at Stanford accommodated the partnership the same way it would have accommodated a marriage.
Every elite American law school has at least one resident pair operating inside this arrangement. Yale has three long-running pairs. Harvard has Sunstein and Power and historical pairs. Stanford has Bankman and Fried for nearly four decades. Berkeley has Chemerinsky and Fisk. Chicago had Sunstein and Nussbaum until 2008. Columbia, NYU, Penn, Northwestern, Michigan, Virginia each have their own. The pattern repeats with mechanical regularity.
The waiver is not limited to law schools. The same arrangement runs across elite medical schools, elite business schools, elite humanities departments. The aggregate effect is a credentialed elite class in which marriage to another credentialed elite is the norm, and in which institutional accommodation of the marriage is the recruiting tool that keeps the class together at the top of the hierarchy.
The same anti-nepotism rule that gets waived for a Berkeley Law dean is enforced against the secretary in the dean’s office whose sister applies for an opening as a research assistant. The secretary is told no. The dean and his wife are welcomed.
Two: Congressional Stock Trading
The formal rule is that material non-public information cannot be used for personal financial gain. The Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutes ordinary insider trading aggressively. Martha Stewart served five months in federal prison for conduct involving roughly $45,000 in avoided losses on a personal stock sale that she had received a tip about from her broker.
Members of Congress, their spouses, and their senior staff routinely trade individual stocks in companies whose regulation they are actively shaping. The STOCK Act of 2012 required disclosure but did not prohibit the trading. Studies of congressional trading returns since the 1990s, including the well-known work by Alan Ziobrowski and his coauthors, have found that members of Congress outperform the market by a significant margin. The 2020 trades by Senators Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, James Inhofe, and Dianne Feinstein in the days following classified Senate Intelligence Committee briefings on COVID-19 became a public scandal. Burr was the chair of the Intelligence Committee. None of the four was charged with insider trading. Burr resigned the chairmanship. The others stayed in office.
Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi has run a stock and options trading operation for decades during her tenure as Speaker. The trades are public. The returns have been remarkable. The conduct is legal under current rules. The same conduct by an ordinary corporate executive or an ordinary private investor with comparable access to non-public information would draw an SEC investigation within weeks.
The asymmetry is the point. The rule against using non-public information for financial advantage is enforced against ordinary actors with the full weight of federal law. The same rule, when applied to legislators with vastly more access to market-moving non-public information, is enforced through disclosure forms and trust in self-regulation.
Three: COVID-Era Public Health Restrictions
The formal rule during 2020 and 2021 was that everyone followed the lockdown orders, the mask mandates, the gathering limits, the indoor capacity restrictions, and the travel restrictions. Small businesses that violated capacity rules were fined and shut down. Religious congregations that gathered for services were prosecuted. Funerals were limited to ten attendees. Children were kept home from school. Hospital patients died alone because their families could not visit them. The rules were enforced with police presence, license suspension, and in some jurisdictions criminal charges.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California attended a birthday dinner at the French Laundry restaurant in Yountville on November 6, 2020, indoors, unmasked, with people from multiple households, in violation of the public health orders his administration was enforcing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was filmed inside a closed San Francisco hair salon getting a blowout in August 2020 in violation of the city’s salon-closure order. Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago was filmed celebrating with a large unmasked crowd in the streets after the November 2020 election while her city was under restrictions she was enforcing. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco attended the French Laundry dinner the night after Newsom did. Mayor Steve Adler of Austin filmed a video urging Austinites to stay home while he was on a private jet to a wedding in Cabo San Lucas. Senator Dianne Feinstein flew to and from California during the period when ordinary Californians were ordered not to travel.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator who appeared on television urging Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving 2020, traveled to a vacation property with three generations of her family that same weekend. Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients while arranging private testing for his family members at a time when ordinary New Yorkers waited days or weeks for tests.
The pattern is consistent. The officials writing and enforcing the rules treated the rules as guidance for the public and as inapplicable to themselves. The American public could not get a haircut. The Speaker of the House got one. The American public could not visit grandchildren. The governors hosted indoor dinner parties. The American public could not bury their dead with more than ten mourners. The mayors held campaign celebrations.
Four: Climate Sermons and the Private Jet
The formal moral teaching from the climate-concerned elite class is that ordinary Americans must reduce their carbon footprint, drive electric vehicles, replace their gas stoves, fly less, eat less meat, accept higher energy prices, and embrace lifestyle reductions to save the planet.
The same elite class arrives at the World Economic Forum in Davos every January aboard a fleet of approximately 1,500 private jets. The Conference of the Parties climate summits, COP26 in Glasgow, COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, COP28 in Dubai, attract similar fleets. John Kerry, the Biden administration’s climate envoy, took private jets to multiple climate-related events and defended the practice on the ground that his work was important. Bill Gates, who has written a book urging carbon reduction, owns four private jets. Leonardo DiCaprio, an outspoken climate advocate, has been photographed across two decades on rented superyachts and private jets. Al Gore’s Tennessee mansion was reported in 2007 to use roughly twenty times the electricity of an average American home, and a 2017 follow-up found his consumption had risen.
The carbon footprint of the elite climate class is estimated at multiple orders of magnitude above the American average. The lifestyle prescriptions the same class urges on ordinary Americans, in op-eds, at conferences, in legislation, would, if followed, produce a fraction of the reduction that a single Davos attendee could achieve by taking a commercial flight instead of a private one. None of the elite climate advocates have proposed binding restrictions on their own behavior. The proposed restrictions all run downstream toward the ordinary household.
Five: The Tax Code as a Class Filter
The formal rule is that everyone pays taxes under the same Internal Revenue Code. The wage earner has his payroll taxes withheld at source, has limited ability to defer income, has narrow access to deductions, and gets audited at rates that are higher per income dollar at the bottom of the distribution than at the top. The IRS has acknowledged that audit rates on Earned Income Tax Credit recipients are higher than audit rates on millionaires.
The wealthy operate in a different tax universe. The carried interest loophole lets private equity and hedge fund managers pay capital gains rates on what is functionally compensation income. The buy-borrow-die strategy lets billionaires hold appreciating assets indefinitely, borrow against them tax-free, and pass them to heirs at stepped-up basis, defeating capital gains entirely. Charitable foundations let high-net-worth individuals park assets in tax-advantaged structures that pay family members salaries to administer them. Offshore structures, complex partnerships, and trust arrangements reduce effective tax rates for the wealthy below what middle-class wage earners pay. The 2021 ProPublica analysis of leaked IRS records showed that several of the wealthiest Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, and George Soros, paid effective federal income tax rates in single digits or zero in multiple years.
This is not illegal. It is the law. The law allows the structures. The law also produces the outcome that ordinary Americans pay closer to statutory rates while the people who write op-eds urging higher taxes on the rich often pay vastly less than they advocate. Warren Buffett’s famous observation that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary is the canonical statement. Buffett has not used the years since to restructure his own affairs to pay the higher rate. He has continued to advocate for it as a public policy that would apply to others while continuing his own arrangement.
Six: Insider Trading and Securities Enforcement
The formal rule is that insider trading is illegal, that material non-public information cannot be traded on, that fiduciary duties require disclosure, and that the SEC enforces these rules against all market participants.
The operational reality is a tiered enforcement system. Small operators caught in pump-and-dump schemes face quick prosecution. Mid-level corporate insiders face moderate enforcement. Major institutional actors face negotiated settlements that are paid as a cost of doing business and rarely involve admission of wrongdoing or criminal liability for individuals. The 2008 financial crisis produced approximately one criminal prosecution of a senior banker. The trillion-dollar wave of misconduct that produced the crisis resulted in fines that were absorbed by shareholders rather than admissions of personal liability by the executives who caused it.
The Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, settled the federal opioid case for billions of dollars without any individual member of the family facing criminal charges, and with the family’s personal wealth preserved through a bankruptcy structure that the Supreme Court eventually rejected only in 2024. The ordinary opioid dealer at the bottom of the distribution chain faces decades of mandatory minimum sentencing.
Seven: Criminal Justice and the Two Defendants
The formal rule is equal protection under the law. The same statutes apply to the same conduct. Due process is universal.
The operational reality differs by an order of magnitude depending on the resources of the defendant. The elite defendant retains top-tier counsel, often from firms with personal relationships to the prosecutors. Negotiations begin before charges are filed. Reputational management begins before the public knows of the investigation. Charging decisions consider the political costs of prosecuting a prominent person. Plea agreements reflect the leverage that comes from the threat of an extended trial that the prosecutor’s office is not staffed to handle.
The ordinary defendant gets an overburdened public defender, often meeting his attorney for the first time minutes before his first court appearance. Plea pressure is intense. The defendant is held in pretrial detention if he cannot post bail, losing his job, his housing, and his family stability before he has been convicted of anything. Roughly ninety-five percent of state criminal cases end in plea bargains under conditions that bear little resemblance to the adversarial process described in the textbooks.
The elite defendant in a comparable case has the time and resources to litigate. The ordinary defendant has the choice between a quick plea to something he may not have done and a long detention awaiting trial on charges that may eventually be reduced or dismissed. The same statute produces the elite plea deal and the ordinary plea deal. The two outcomes are not comparable.
The Jeffrey Epstein non-prosecution agreement of 2008, negotiated by federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta with Epstein’s defense team led by Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz, is the textbook case. Epstein was credibly accused by dozens of underage victims of sex trafficking. The agreement let him plead to two state prostitution counts, serve thirteen months in a county facility with twelve-hour daily work-release privileges, and avoid federal charges entirely. Acosta later became Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration. The ordinary defendant facing comparable allegations would have served decades in federal prison. Epstein walked free until 2019, when the Miami Herald’s reporting forced a new prosecution.
Eight: Zoning, Permits, and Variances
The formal rule is that everyone needs permits, follows zoning codes, and meets the specifications of the local building authority.
The operational reality is that large developers negotiate variances, secure zoning changes, obtain expedited review, and access community benefits agreement structures that bend the rules in their favor. Small operators face the rule as written. The homeowner who builds an unpermitted shed in his backyard faces fines and forced removal. The developer who builds a thirty-story tower exceeding the zoning envelope by a third gets it approved through a process that involves campaign contributions, community engagement consultants, and a city council vote following an environmental review the developer’s attorneys designed.
The local restaurant owner who fails an inspection over a single violation may lose his license. The major chain restaurant negotiates a corrective action plan and pays a fine. The independent landlord who fails to file a rental certification on time faces displacement of his entire income stream. The institutional landlord with thousands of units has a compliance department that manages such matters as routine.
Nine: Title IX and University Discipline
The formal rule is that universities follow standardized procedures for investigating misconduct, that due process applies to all parties, that decisions are made on a preponderance of the evidence with consistent application across cases.
The operational reality is that high-profile faculty and high-value donors trigger layered review processes managed by general counsel and external law firms. Cases are slowed. Settlements are negotiated. Public statements are crafted. Quiet exits are arranged. The accused star professor leaves with a payout and a non-disclosure agreement. The student in a comparable case is processed through an expedited procedure that takes weeks rather than years and produces a discipline record that follows him for life.
The pattern repeats across institutions. The Harvey Weinstein matter at the Weinstein Company, the Larry Nassar matter at Michigan State, the various Title IX cases involving high-profile faculty at elite universities all show the same architecture. The institution’s first instinct is to protect the asset. The asset is protected through process that the ordinary case does not receive. When the ordinary case is the one against the asset, by a complainant without comparable institutional standing, the asset wins. The complainant is told to be patient with the process. The process is the loss.
Ten: Admissions, Legacy, and the Credentialed Pipeline
The formal rule is meritocratic selection. Elite university admissions are described to the public as the careful evaluation of each applicant on his or her own record.
The operational reality is that legacy preferences, donor preferences, athletic preferences for sports the applicant’s parents play, dean’s-interest lists, and direct development office influence put roughly thirty percent of seats at the most selective universities into a separate pipeline that has nothing to do with the formal merit criteria the public sees. The Harvard admissions data revealed in the 2018 lawsuit Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard showed that the acceptance rate for legacy applicants was roughly five times the rate for non-legacies, and that the dean’s interest list and the development office list had even higher acceptance rates.
The 2019 Varsity Blues scandal, in which dozens of wealthy parents paid Rick Singer to fraudulently secure admission for their children through fake athletic credentials and bribed test administrators, exposed only the most flagrant edge of the pattern. The structural pattern continues. The connected family knows how to navigate the admissions process. The first-generation applicant from a public high school does not. The connected family’s child gets in. The first-generation applicant gets the rejection letter and is told the competition was tough this year.
The same pattern repeats in graduate school admissions, in clerkship hiring for federal judges, in associate hiring at top law firms, in editor selection at top journals, in faculty hiring at top universities. At each step, the credentialed family’s network advantage compounds the previous step’s advantage. The ordinary family’s child, no matter how talented, has to navigate an unmapped terrain that the credentialed family’s child finds already mapped, signposted, and narrated by parents and family friends who have walked it before.
Part Two: The Two Lives Compared
The contrast is sharp at every point of contact between the citizen and the institution.
The credentialed elite professional and his credentialed elite spouse face the anti-nepotism rule as a procedural step to clear, with HR staff to draft the recusal memo and a provost to sign the waiver. The ordinary couple where one spouse works in HR at a hospital and the other applies for an opening in another department of the same hospital faces an automatic disqualification, no waiver process, no review. The ordinary couple absorbs the loss. The elite couple gets the package.
The senator and her trader husband face the Stock Act as a quarterly disclosure form. The ordinary investor faces the SEC’s surveillance algorithms, which flag unusual trading patterns and trigger investigations that can result in personal financial ruin and federal prison. Martha Stewart’s prosecution involved less avoided loss than a single congressional trade announcement might shift in a regulated company on a single day.
The governor of a major state hosts an indoor dinner during a lockdown his administration is enforcing. The small restaurant owner whose tenth anniversary celebration violated the same lockdown order watched his restaurant close permanently while the governor’s restaurant of choice survived through wealthy clientele and pandemic-era flexibility unavailable to the small owner.
The climate envoy takes the private jet to the climate summit. The ordinary commuter is told the future of his car depends on adopting an electric vehicle that costs more than his annual income, charging it on a grid the climate envoy’s policies have made more expensive, with batteries mined under labor conditions the same envoy denounces in other contexts.
The billionaire pays an effective tax rate in single digits through legal structures his lawyers designed and his accountants execute. The wage earner pays close to the statutory rate through automatic withholding before he sees the paycheck. The wealthy man writes op-eds urging higher taxes on the rich. The wage earner reads them on his phone during his lunch break.
The major bank settles a billion-dollar fraud case with no individual prosecutions, paid out of shareholder funds. The ordinary borrower who misrepresents his income on a small mortgage application faces fraud prosecution that can result in federal prison.
The elite defendant retains the white-shoe law firm. The investigation moves slowly. The negotiation produces a deferred prosecution agreement. The reputation survives. The ordinary defendant meets his public defender minutes before arraignment, takes the plea offered, accepts the conviction that will follow him for life, and serves the sentence.
The major developer secures the variance, the zoning change, the expedited approval. The homeowner who paints his house the wrong color receives the citation and the threatened lien.
The star professor’s misconduct case is handled by external counsel and ends in a quiet exit with a confidential settlement. The student’s misconduct case is handled by an undertrained administrator and ends in a permanent disciplinary record.
The legacy applicant with the family name and the dean’s-interest list designation gets the Yale acceptance. The high-school valedictorian from rural Ohio with no connections gets the Yale rejection.
The pattern is not occasional. The pattern is the normal operation of the system. The pattern is what the system is. The formal rules describe the system the public is told it lives in. The operational rules describe the system the public actually lives in. The two systems are not the same system.
The ordinary American is not stupid. He has been observing the pattern for forty years. He has watched the contradiction widen since the 2008 financial crisis, when the trillion-dollar bailout went to the institutions that caused the crisis while the homeowners who lost their houses got nothing. He watched it widen during COVID, when the rules that closed his church and bankrupted his cousin’s diner did not apply to the people writing them. He watches it widen every time a major political figure escapes consequences for conduct that would land an ordinary citizen in a county jail. He is not deceived. He has been told for two generations that the country is a system of laws, not of men. He has lived the discovery that this is not so.
The legitimacy crisis of American institutions is not a propaganda problem. It is a perception of accurate facts. The institutions have lost legitimacy because the institutions have stopped applying their own stated principles to themselves. The propaganda the institutions issue in defense of their legitimacy lands on ears that have heard too much of the same propaganda for too long while watching the contradiction unfold. The cure for the legitimacy crisis is not better propaganda. The cure is the institutions starting to apply the rules they teach.
Part Three: The Lecture from the Buffered Tower
The exemption is bad enough on its own. The exemption combined with the lecture is what ignites the resentment.
The men and women who occupy the exempted positions do not stay quiet about how the rest of the country should live. They publish books, write op-eds, deliver keynote addresses, host podcasts, run nonprofits, fund political campaigns, sit on commissions, advise presidents, teach the next generation. The output of the credentialed class is steady moral instruction directed at the country it does not share rules with.
The constitutional law professor at Berkeley whose marriage required an institutional waiver writes a book accusing the opposing political coalition of selectively applying procedural rules. The Supreme Court justice whose family runs a private wealth-management arrangement writes opinions on the importance of judicial integrity. The Congress members who trade individual stocks vote in favor of laws restricting the financial freedom of ordinary Americans for their own protection. The climate envoy on the private jet warns ordinary commuters that their lifestyle is selfish. The university president whose institution maintains legacy preferences gives a commencement address on diversity and merit. The talk-show host whose show is built on outrage at the moral failures of the right runs a personal life that would, in any decade before this one, have been the subject of his own outrage.
The pattern is universal across the elite class. It is not an ideological matter. Conservative elites do it. Progressive elites do it. Religious elites do it. Secular elites do it. Corporate elites do it. Academic elites do it. Each tribe has its own moral vocabulary. Each tribe directs its vocabulary downward at the people outside the tribe who do not have the resources to protect themselves from the application of the rules the tribe writes.
The shape of the lecture is consistent. The lecturer describes a value, a norm, a principle, a virtue. The lecturer urges the audience to adopt the value, follow the norm, observe the principle, practice the virtue. The lecturer then describes what is at stake if the audience fails. The audience is told, often with great moral force, that the future of democracy or the planet or the family or the church or the marketplace depends on the audience getting it right.
The audience looks at the lecturer and sees the gap. The lecturer is not getting it right. The lecturer is the one whose conduct most flagrantly violates the value being preached. The audience is being asked to accept a sacrifice the lecturer is not making. The audience is being asked to tolerate a restriction the lecturer is exempt from. The audience is being asked to reduce its lifestyle while the lecturer maintains his.
The audience’s reaction to this is not envy. The audience’s reaction is the reasonable epistemic response to a visible contradiction. If the lecturer’s own conduct does not reflect the urgency of the message, the message cannot be that urgent. If the lecturer is not willing to pay the cost he is asking the audience to pay, the cost cannot be necessary. If the rules are real for the audience and aspirational for the lecturer, the rules are not really rules. They are an instrument of class discipline.
This perception is correct. The audience is reading the situation accurately. The lecturer is the one operating under self-deception, because the formation that produced the lecturer makes the contradiction invisible from inside. The lecturer experiences the gap between his life and his teaching as appropriate context. He is, after all, more important than the audience. His work matters more. His time is more valuable. His carbon footprint produces civilization-saving outcomes that the audience’s footprint does not. His marriage is to another credentialed academic and produces benefits to the institution that the audience’s marriage to a non-credentialed spouse does not. His tax structure reflects his sophistication. His access to the SEC reflects his career-long contributions to regulatory thinking. His escape from the COVID rules reflects the public’s interest in his continued availability.
Each justification is locally plausible. Each justification is socially convenient. Each justification preserves the coalition that produced the justifier. From inside the formation, the gap does not look like a gap. It looks like reasonable accommodation of complex realities. From outside the formation, the gap looks like exactly what it is. A class of people exempting themselves from rules they enforce on others, and lecturing the others on the importance of obedience to the rules the lecturers do not follow.
This is what Stephen Turner has called convenient belief. Beliefs become convenient when they serve the coalition holding them and when their holders are not in a position to test them against costs they are unwilling to pay. The convenient belief inside the elite class is that the elite class’s own arrangements are reasonable accommodations to scarcity, complexity, and competition. The same class would not accept this analysis if it were presented as a defense of any other class’s privileged arrangements. When applied to itself, the analysis feels obviously correct. When applied to anyone else, the analysis feels like a defense of corruption.
This is also Alliance Theory in its hardest form. Moral vocabularies do work for the coalitions that hold them. The elite class’s moral vocabulary, all the words about democracy and procedure and norms and rule of law and accountability and transparency and institutional legitimacy and expertise, does the work of legitimating the elite class’s arrangement to itself and disciplining the people outside the arrangement who notice the contradictions. The vocabulary is sincere on the part of those who use it. The vocabulary is also, simultaneously, a coalition-maintenance technology. Both descriptions are correct.
The injury to the ordinary American is the combination. It is not enough that the ordinary American lives under rules the elite class does not. The elite class compounds the situation by lecturing the ordinary American at length, in books and op-eds and keynote speeches and podcast episodes and commencement addresses and Sunday morning television panels and confirmation hearings and Senate floor speeches and federal court opinions, on the importance of obedience to the rules. The lecture is delivered from the position the lecturer has secured by exempting himself from the rules. The ordinary American is asked to sit still and accept the moral instruction of a class that demonstrates, by its own conduct, that it does not believe what it is teaching.
This is the configuration that erodes legitimacy. It is not only the substantive unfairness. It is the ostentatious moralism that accompanies the unfairness. The Catholic Church’s pre-Reformation problem was not only the bishops’ wealth and the indulgences. It was the bishops’ wealth and the indulgences combined with the bishops’ continued instruction of the peasants on humility, charity, and the renunciation of worldly goods. The American legal academy’s problem is not only the spousal-hire arrangements and the named chairs. It is the spousal-hire arrangements and the named chairs combined with the arrangements’ beneficiaries continuing to publish books and give lectures on procedural fairness and the rule of law. The American political class’s problem is not only the insider trading and the COVID exemptions and the family arrangements that turn public office into private wealth. It is all of that combined with the political class’s continued lecturing of the public on civic virtue.
The pattern is older than the United States. Roman senators denounced luxury while accumulating it. French aristocrats denounced corruption while practicing it. English bishops denounced lust while keeping mistresses. The Soviet nomenklatura denounced bourgeois privilege while shopping at the special stores. The pattern is what an elite class does when its position becomes too comfortable to defend without moral cover. The moral cover is the lecture. The lecture is delivered at the people who pay the costs the elite class is unwilling to pay. The pattern is eventually noticed. The eventual noticing produces movements that the elite class describes as populist or extremist or threats to democracy. The descriptions are not always wrong. The movements are not always healthy. The conditions that produce the movements are produced by the pattern the movements are reacting against.
What ends the pattern is not internal reform. The internal reformers are the people whose careers depend on the pattern’s continuation. They will not dismantle what produced them. The pattern ends when external pressure makes it more costly to maintain than to change. The external pressure comes from people outside the credentialed elite who develop the language to describe what they have been observing, who organize politically around the description, who win elections, win cultural battles, win institutional struggles, force the credentialed elite to operate under closer scrutiny, force the procedures the credentialed elite teaches the public to apply to the credentialed elite as well.
This work is hard, slow, and often ugly. The credentialed elite resists at every step. The credentialed elite has the resources to define every challenge as illegitimate, every challenger as unqualified, every populist movement as a threat to civilization. The credentialed elite controls the universities, the major media organizations, the federal courts in significant part, the senior bureaucracy, the prestige cultural institutions, the major foundations, the elite legal profession, the elite medical profession, the elite financial profession. The credentialed elite has enormous resources to wage the defense.
The defense cannot win indefinitely. The contradictions are too visible. The information environment is too distributed. The ordinary American has too many ways to compare what he is told with what he sees. The lecture from the buffered tower no longer reaches an audience that believes the lecturer. The lecture has become noise, in many cases counterproductive noise, producing the opposite of the response the lecturer intends.
The thoughtful members of the credentialed elite, the ones who have noticed what their class is doing, face a hard choice. They can continue to participate in the arrangement and the lecturing, knowing that participation produces the situation they are observing. They can defect from the lecturing and try to live under the rules they are urging on others, which would require many of them to dismantle the arrangements that produced their careers. They can try to write the analysis honestly, knowing that an honest analysis from inside will cost them standing in the credentialed class. Most do none of these things. Most continue the lecturing while making private accommodations with the contradiction. A few defect. The defectors usually pay a price in standing inside the class but gain authority outside it. The eventual movement of the system depends on whether the defectors accumulate enough numbers to change the conversation.
What the ordinary American can do is name what he is seeing. The naming is the precondition of the political work. The naming has to be done in language that does not depend on the credentialed elite’s vocabulary, since the elite vocabulary is built to make the contradictions invisible. The naming has to be done in language that ordinary Americans can recognize as describing their experience accurately. The naming has to be done with enough specificity that it cannot be dismissed as vague resentment. The naming has to point to the actual mechanisms, the actual examples, the actual contrasts between what the elite class teaches and how the elite class lives.
This essay is one piece of that naming. The ten categories above are ten places where the contradictions are too visible to ignore. Each category has dozens or hundreds of named examples that any reader can verify with thirty minutes of searching. Each category compounds with the others into the larger structure that ordinary Americans have been observing without language for decades.
The structure has a name. The name is two-tier citizenship. The American republic was founded on the proposition that all citizens stood equal before the law. The contemporary American republic operates on the proposition that the credentialed class stands above the law that applies to everyone else. The first proposition is the rhetoric. The second proposition is the practice. The gap between the rhetoric and the practice is the legitimacy crisis. The legitimacy crisis is real. The crisis was produced by the elite class through its own conduct, including its conduct of lecturing the public on values the elite class does not itself observe.
Thomas Jefferson, who was no stranger to elite contradictions, wrote in 1787 that a little rebellion now and then was a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. He was writing about Shays’s Rebellion. He was writing from a position of significant elite privilege, including the privilege of holding human beings as property while writing about liberty. The contradictions of Jefferson’s class produced the eventual rebellion against them, the long arc of which produced the United States we now have.
The contradictions of our credentialed class will produce their own rebellion, in time. The rebellion will be ugly. The rebellion will be inarticulate at first. The rebellion will be denounced as illegitimate by the credentialed class, and the denunciation will sometimes be accurate. The rebellion will eventually find its voice, as such movements do, and the voice will articulate what the credentialed class has been refusing to articulate for two generations. The articulation will be that the rules apply to everyone or to no one, that procedure is a sham if it bends for the powerful, that lectures from the buffered tower are not moral instruction but coalition discipline, that the country cannot survive indefinitely on the contradiction the credentialed class has built.
The peasants noticed the bishops. The Frenchmen noticed the aristocrats. The Russians noticed the commissars. The Americans are noticing the credentialed class. The noticing will not stay quiet forever. The credentialed class can prepare for the eventual reckoning by reforming itself in time, applying its own principles to itself, dismantling the arrangements that produce the contradictions, accepting the costs it has been imposing on others. Or it can continue what it has been doing and let the reckoning come at the time and in the form that the rebellion eventually chooses.
The wager is the credentialed class’s to make. The history of similar classes in similar configurations is not encouraging. The classes that survive are the ones that reform under their own initiative. The classes that fall are the ones that wait for the rebellion. The American credentialed class is currently waiting. The waiting will produce what the waiting always produces.
The naming of the pattern is the first step. The reform is the second. The first is happening. The second has not begun.
