The Elites (with Evan Osnos)

Who are these “elites” that are running everything? And don’t we all aspire to be elite anyway?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And so he ended up creating his own version of
the elite in his mind. And this gets for me
at least one of the big takeaways in understanding what
we mean when we talk about elites is almost never
are the critics of the elite trying to get rid
of it. They're just trying to replace it and become it.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I served in
the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover
all around the world.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
created conspiracies.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
In our operations. We got people to believe things that
work true.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
news almost every day.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Will break them down for you to determine whether they
could be real or whether we're being manipulated.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Welcome to Mission Implausible. We're going to be speaking today
with Evan Asenos from The New Yorker, and what it
brings up is his level of expertise and talent makes
me question, Adam, did you really work for The New Yorker?
Like it's like the two different planets talking to Evan
Asenolsen and you.

Speaker 4 (01:10):
I couldn't agree more. Evan is, I will say, Evan
is like a reporter's reporter. He works his butt off.
He could definitely get away with working a lot less,
and then he's the full package, which is annoying. Really
nice guy.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
And I think we could speak to him about most anything.
But one of the things we spoke to him about
and we're going to be talking about is probably the
basis of so many conspiracy theories, the notion that there
is a person or a group that runs things, There
is an elite who is in charge of our lives
that we have no influence over. Personally, I would like

(01:47):
to be the person who's in charge.

Speaker 4 (01:50):
I would so not want to be the person in charge.
I feel like my whole life I want power with
no responsibility. So I guess that is the person in charge.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
I remember when I worked at CIA, if you came
in the back door, the main door for the new
part of CIA, to go from where you walked in
downstairs to the main lobby, there was a escalator, but
the escalator was only one person wide, And my thought
was if I was in charge, what I would do
is I would stand at the bottom of that escalator

(02:18):
and anyone who just stood on it all the way down,
I would fire them at the bottom of the because
you would get you were busy on your way to work,
and then some idiot would stand there and you couldn't
pass them. On this escalator. You have just to stand
and wait three floors down to like And I said, listen,
if you if you have so much time on your hands,
you can spend five minutes just going down this escalator

(02:40):
without just walking down the escalator, then you're out. So
that was my whole desire for power.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
And the thing about the elites is whatever their agenda is,
it's not our agenda, right, So that means that things
that are going wrong in the world, it's their fault.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
And if we wanted to be in power, I guess
we would have to then have an agenda. We're just
too lazy to an agenda.

Speaker 4 (03:02):
Exactly what would the agenda be. But that is the
essence of conspiracy. Right at the end of the day.
Almost every single one we're talking about is there's a
secret group of people with obscure intentions, incredible power omnipotent,
and we can't quite understand them, and there's no evidence
that exists that can either prove or disprove their existence.

(03:22):
But for some reason, we're going to believe they exist.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Our guest today is Evan Osnos, an author and a
staff writer at The New Yorker. He covers politics, foreign affairs,
and spent a long time living in and covering China.
He's written several books, including a book and a numerous
articles on Joe Biden, infect interviewing him many times. He's
also one of the regular hosts of my go to podcast,
The New Yorker's Political Scene. So today, among other things,

(03:48):
we want to speak with Evan about an article he
wrote for The New Yorker in January called Rules for
the Ruling Class, about how politics has become a game
of elites disparaging other elites. Evan, you're part of the
media elite, and apparently Jerry and I are part of
the deep state elite. So my first question is does
the term elite have a distinct meaning anymore or is

(04:08):
it just a handy weapon to rail against enemies? Because
if I'm a bureaucrat in the deep state, making what
one hundred thousand dollars a year. How do those wealthy
and real elite, powerful people get to come and attack us.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
I got onto this for almost exactly the question that
I think interests you, John, is this question of if
everybody is an elite, then who is left to be
doing the accusing. I mean, I'll give you a prime example,
Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri. This is not a partisan critique.
This is just an observation of reality that Josh Hawley

(04:41):
grew up the son of a bank president. He went
on to study at Stanford and then got his law
degree and met his wife while they were both clerking
for John Roberts, chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He's
now a sitting US Senator, But when he talks about
his political mission, he talks about going after elites, going after,

(05:01):
as he puts it, some of the most powerful people
in society, which left me honestly scratching my head, which is,
if he's not one of the most powerful people in society,
then who is.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yeah, the word elite is a weird one as well,
because it's like the silly putty of a word. Everybody
thinks it's really cool to be an elite Navy seal,
you know, or an elite diver, the elite Olympic team.
So everybody wants to be an elite, but that's not
something you want to be called in politics.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
I actually concluded that we love the adjective and we
hate the noun. So we love elite navy seals. But
if your child has made the elite swim team, you're
going to be telling everybody about it, including if you're
going out to hang out with fellow conspiratorial minded people
who worry about the elites. What do we mean when
we talk about elites. I've concluded that what we are

(05:51):
actually talking about is status. And when I say that
somebody is the elite, what I'm really saying is that
I think that they look down on me politically, culturally, morally, economically,
and that this really is about social rank and status
and everybody, even if you are Rupert Murdoch, there is

(06:14):
somebody who you look at and you say that person
looks down on me. Tucker Carlson wanted to be an
establishment elite. That's what he wanted. He desperately tried to remember.
He created a news organization that was intended to be
the conservative version of The New York Times. He had
joined the most establishment institutions he could. He had joined CNN,

(06:36):
he joined WMSNBC. He bombed out of those organizations.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
He tried to get into one other elite organization, and
to quote Vladimir Putin, he failed to get into the CIA.
I've just yes thrown it out there.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
I'm so glad you mentioned it, because when I was
assembling his biography of Aspiration, every single thing that he
was trying to do was to join the elite. You know,
he tried to get into elite universities and he was
not able to as he acknowledges. He eventually got into
college because his girlfriend's father was an alum from Trinity

(07:14):
College who put in a phone call and got him in. Then,
by Tucker Carlson's own description, he got a string of
d's there. He really didn't didn't do well, got rejected
from his application the CIA. So one after another he's
being rejected by organizations, and ultimately he does this self
reinvention and decides that in fact, it was his time

(07:36):
on the inside, his time sort of in the atmosphere
of the ruling class that gives him credibility and He
turns that into the core of his new mission, which
is to say, we have an incompetent ruling class. And
it is I, dear listener, who who knows this, because,
as he says, I grew up in and among them,

(07:56):
there's a scholar who calls them frustrated elite aspirants fea
for the purposes of this conversation, but there it's a
really important cohort all the way back through history.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Doesn't Donald Trump play that as well? Didn't he want
to be part of the New York elite and is
upset that he wasn't treated that way. The things you
just said about Tucker Carlson could be said about Donald
Trump as well.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
One hundred percent. At first, Donald Trump wanted to get
into Manhattan. That was going to be his innovation on
the Trump story, get us out of the boroughs, get
us into the city. Then he wanted to go to
Palm Beach. There's a whole fascinating little story about him
trying to get into the most exclusive country club in
Palm Beach, and he was, depending on who you believe,

(08:38):
he was rejected. He says, no, I wasn't rejected. But
then and this is the most sort of relevant part.
He turned this estate, Mara a Lago, which had been
a private home, he turned it into a club, and
as he said to his biographer later, he said, and
I have a better club than them anyway, which is
like the kind of spirit that you usually hear from
a ten year old. But he was him acknowledging that

(09:00):
this is about social rank, and so he ended up
creating his own version of the elite in his mind.
And this gets for me, at least, one of the
big takeaways in understanding what we mean when we talk
about elites is almost never are the critics of the
elite trying to get rid of it. They're just trying
to replace it and become it. They want to put
their own people on top. And Trump, in his own way,

(09:21):
is always it tends to be more blunt about this
than other frustrated elites. And he says at one point
he started saying right after he won the presidency. He
started saying in twenty seventeen and has said ever since
then to his crowds, he says, you know, they call
themselves the elite, but I think we're the elite. He says,
we have better boats, we have better this better that.

(09:41):
So that's his understanding of what it means.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
I lived in Yugoslavia with Melosovich and the Serbs who
told his people were the victims even though they were
actually the majority, and then they could attack people they
want putin and Russia is doing the same too. We're
the victims. Therefore we can do whatever we want. There's
power in victimhood. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
I think that's a huge insight because it's a binding agent.
It takes people of disparate issues, disparate geography. They may
have all these different things in common. But if you say,
we together are fighting this common foe, and even better
if it's like a faceless foe that doesn't really even
announce itself. I mean, the best possible foe is hidden, right,
it's the deep state, or it's these you know, it's

(10:23):
media editors who are pulling the puppet strings. You guys
have talked about this on the show. But the idea
that there might be some actual entity, some force, some
Masonic solution to like the things that we can't really
explain in our own lives, seems to be somehow hardwired
in what we want.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
But I was wondering if you could talk gal briefly
on politicians who channeled that sense of like they're against
us and I'm gonna because no program is complete without
going back to the Roman Empire. There were the patricians
and the plebeians. Everybody knew in that mobila volgas. That's
where the word mob comes from. You know, it's like
the how do the patricians take care of the underpaid

(11:02):
poor in the streets? And famously, the plebeians were getting
more and more power, and they finally reached out to
one guy who said it was going to give it
to them all, Julius Caesar, and he got rid of
the republic and get rid of it all. So what
is the business model for elites to basically gaslight people
into thinking that they're going to represent them and are

(11:23):
able to represent them. Because it works, It's worked for
the last two thousand years.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
So there is this we could call it a sort
of populist opportunity, and it's cyclical. As you say that,
you get this kind of building of charge. I think
sociologically that as people get more frustrated, they see the
demonstrations of wealth and power that are concentrating into the
hands of a few. This is a reality.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
It happens.

Speaker 1 (11:46):
But there are two ways that you can get through it.
One way is you get through it by people at
the top saying we think this is unsustainable, we think
this can't last, and they almost willingly say, I will
make an adjustment to a void revolution. I mean the
example is this is not abstract. This is essentially what
the New Deal was. And there was a book that

(12:07):
I thought is really interesting on this subject by a
guy named Peter Turchin called End Times, where he looks
at the American experience and he says it was in
the nineteen twenties we were reaching a point when a
demigogue could have emerged in the United States and said
I'm going to harness you workers and we're going to
overturn the system. Instead, what you had was Franklin Roosevelt,
a traitor to his class, as he would acknowledge, basically saying,

(12:31):
I'm looking at our current disposition of power in this country,
and if we continue down this track, we will not survive.
We will succumb to the kind of revolutions we've seen
in other countries. This was after the Bolshevik Revolution, and
so amazingly as a result of New Deal sort of
redistributive programs, but also efforts to try to help the
very poor. You actually saw the number of millionaires in
this country decline on an absolute basis between nineteen twenty

(12:54):
five and nineteen fifty, which is an amazing thing considering
how much population growth there was at the time. That
was in a sense, Roosevelt was recognizing the patterns that
Jerry you're describing and saying, these are our options. I'm
going to take the non revolutionary route.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Let's take a break.

Speaker 4 (13:11):
We'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
And Rebecca, let me turn a little bit here, because
I think no journalists to spend more time with Joe
Biden than you have. Are there beliefs that Joe Biden
seems to have that he sticks with even if they're
no longer true. Like, for example, I follow Russia and
there's a lot of us are frustrated with how the
administration has dealt with Putin of late in Ukraine. They

(13:40):
seem to tend to act as if Putin is Mikhail
Gorbachev and they're negotiating an arms control treaty and they
got to worry about the balance of power and saving
face and avoiding escalation when I'm frankly, you know, I
look at Putin as a gangster, and you have to
deal with them in a different way. So in your
dealings with Biden, what is his mindset around these kinds
of things?

Speaker 1 (13:59):
So it's an interesting thing to describe as a conspiracy,
But I'll tell you one that he deeply believes in,
which is that he believes that there is still, in
fact a possibility for conspiratorial progress in American politics. Meaning
he believes that if he can get Mitch McConnell and

(14:20):
Joe Manchin to sit down with him, that they'll look
each other in the eye and they'll reach some half
a loaf solution. And the truth is he hasn't been
one hundred percent wrong. He's actually managed to do that,
particularly with Manchin. He was able to pick the lock
and find his way there. But he has run up
against the outer limits of what that theory allows when

(14:42):
it comes to dealing with people who are essentially combatants
rather than politicians. The Matt Gates is of the world,
the Marjorie Taylor Greens right now, particularly the House Republicans.
And I think you guys see this ten times better
than I do. There are some core operating systems with
how you imagine human affairs, And if you're from the

(15:02):
Putin playbook, let's say, or the Siegen Ping playbook, you
really are not all that interested in coming up with
a political solution to a problem where you get something
and I get something and we've come away a little
bit unhappy. No, they believe ultimately that power is the
bottom line, and that powerful people and countries and entities

(15:23):
should prevail over weaker people and entities. And Joe Biden
really doesn't believe that. Joe Biden believes in this other thing,
which I don't want to romanticize it, but like at
various points in our history, it has actually been very
possible that you can get a bunch of people into
a room with very different ideas, but you can find
that area of overlap, and that's been a powerful that's

(15:44):
been an asset for him, but there are limits to it.
I do remember flying with Biden at one point back
from Ukraine in twenty fourteen. He was over there in
his capacity as VP, and I was writing a piece
about him, and this was after the invasion of Crimea,
and his view at the time, not that anybody was
particularly listening. He was the vice president's not the most

(16:06):
coveted office in the land. And he was pretty brutal
about what he thought Vladimir Putin was. And he said
at one point he was describing this scenario. And people
can quibble with whether this anecdote happened exactly is described,
but as he remembers it, what he says is that
he looked into Putin's eyes and he says, I don't
think you have a soul, and Putin said, I'm glad
we understand one another. And when he told me that,

(16:28):
which is in marvelous ago. But when he told me that,
I say, that sounds like a movie line. Did it
happen exactly like that? He said, absolutely positively. So whatever,
let's bracket it and say that it was an expression
of what he thought. And what he said to me was,
that's who this guy Isvan.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
Let's talk about us for a little bit, the US
being the deep state. This is another one of these
very elastic terms. It means everything and nothing, and maybe
it's a rorschat test as to how you view the world.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
So this idea, of course, the deep state is a
concept's been around for a long time and it's been
really a t active I remember that. One fun detail
that always caught my attention was that, you know, Osama
bin Laden's final residence, one of the things that they found,
either in hard copy or on his computer was a
copy of a book about Bohemian Grove. Because he was

(17:15):
trying to figure out how power works in America. And
give him time, I'm sure he would have been reading
about skull and Bones or these other imagined sort of
frameworks that we have. And it's so the current incarnation
of that is what has come to be known as
the deep state, but Steve Bannon called it the administrative state.

(17:36):
And what they were getting at was this idea that
there is this group of people that is and you know,
braided into that means a combination of they went to
fancy your schools than I meaning the person who believes
this theory went to So they.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Went to Harvard just exactly.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
But that's part of this gets back to the frustrated
elite aspirint thing. Bannon not only went to Harvard and
then worked at Golden Seat, but in some ways he
was always had his nose pressed up against the glass.
Like Tucker Carlson. He was trying to get as in
as you can possibly get. And this is a pattern
that repeats all the way back to the War of
the Roses and this idea of people who wanted to
be the ruling class, and when they get a piece

(18:17):
of it, but they're kicked off the ladder at the
higher rungs, then it radicalizes them and they become Bannon
Carlson Trump. That is a very recognizable pattern. And in
fact Trump had enough, he could find enough of those
people around that he could fill a hole a good
chunk of his administration with some version of that. So
I think in that way, Jerry, I think that the
current version of the deep state is it's a cousin

(18:39):
of an imagination of power that is all the way
rooted back in the ancient tropes around anti Semitism too,
which is that it's impossible that I am rising or
falling on my own merits. Therefore somebody must be conspiring,
I guess.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
And what does that look like? On the left? Growing up,
it was always those the power leads control everything. That
was something that traditionally was more on the left things
of things. It's the military industrial complex is running everything.
Is that cyclical as well? Who's in or who's out.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
Well, it's notable too. It's fun to think about that.
The concept of the power elite, which is the current
incarnation of this theory, and that got rooted in the fifties.
Eisenhower is famous for having established the idea of the
military industrial complex. And one of the fun details is
that actually Eisenhower wanted to make it the military industrial

(19:30):
congressional complex. Yeah, and he thought about the military industrial
scientific complex, and in the final speech it came out
what it did. But he that's Eisenhower, not exactly a
left leaning progressive, and so in some ways it tends
to be that I think this exists in both forms.
I mean the current version on the left, and Bernie

(19:52):
Sanders is an eloquent exponent of this. But as often happens,
it's impossible to be far enough in one position forever
because there will always be somebody who outflanks you.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
So we've been talking about elites using the term elite
to attack other elites. Let's talk about the average people
out in the country.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
Now.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
In your book Wildland, you travel around the country. Is
the fury that people have out in the country is
it based on lived realities or are people being manipulated
to believe these things and to be so angry.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I made a choice,
a really specific choice, which is the subtitle of my
book is deliberately the making of America's Fury, because making
is a process that both happens partly of natural causes
and partly it's artificial. It's generated, and there is a business,
as we know, a business in making people angry. And

(20:51):
you know, if we're being self aware, we see it
in ourselves. We're more inclined to click on that link
that seems to say something treacherous about somebody we don't like.
But out in the country, I found this constantly. My
first job out of college was in West Virginia, and
I've always been going back over the years to try
to understand how its politics have changed and moved. And

(21:11):
when I first lived in this town called Clarksburg, West Virginia,
it was overwhelmingly Democrats. This was in the late nineteen nineties,
and then over the course of the last twenty five years,
it's just transformed and it's now really squarely Republican territory.
But I'll give you an interesting little demonstration of how
things have moved in interesting ways. In nineteen sixty, remember

(21:33):
the famous Democratic primary in which John Kennedy had to
prove that he was not captive to the elite of
the day, which was of course the Vatican, the Pope.
People said, John Kennedy is going to be controlled by
the deep state in the Vatican.

Speaker 4 (21:48):
That was how it was.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
And one of the ways that he proved that wasn't
true was by going to West Virginia where it was
an overwhelmingly Protestant state, and he could show that Protestants
would vote for a Catholic Democrat. And one of the
things that was notable to me when I looked at
that compared it to today, was in this town of Clarksburg,

(22:10):
West Virginia. In nineteen sixty, John Kennedy came to town twice.
Robert Kennedy came to town, Hubert Humphrey came to town.
All these figures came to town one after another, like
really serious power brokers. John Kennedy went on television in
nineteen sixty for half an hour and answered questions from
people in Clarksburg, West Virginia. And I asked folks at

(22:30):
the Historical Society, okay, since then, which big Democratic power
players have come to town? And they said, well, we
went back and looked, and we, as far as we
can tell, only one it was Jesse Jackson came in
nineteen eighty eight and that was it. So in some ways,
as the party became more focused on urban areas and
moved away from places like West Virginia, West Virginians began

(22:50):
to say, maybe the Democratic Party, but not only do
they not think about me? Are they actually maneuvering to
make my life harder? And on some level they weren't wrong. Now,
I could have a whole argument and about what Republicans
were doing in that period to emserate West Virginia. But
the practical effect is that at the moment it's a
place where the making of fury has been very possible.
It's fertile territory for them.

Speaker 3 (23:11):
And yet you've got guys like Jeff Bezos. So two
hundred billion dollars and I did some rough estimates for
an average worker at Amazon to ever get to where
he is now, it would take them four point five
million years. It it'd be back to the Pleocene era.

Speaker 1 (23:29):
Right, Yeah, I think that Americans have always had this
slightly conflicted relationship to wealth and disparities of wealth. We are,
after all, a country that was founded as a rejection
of aristocracy. You know, we were supposed to be a
place that was ideologically, spiritually opposed to things like inherited wealth.

(23:50):
But at the same time, we were also always pioneering.
We were frontier oriented the idea that you could build
something out of nothing. It's one of the reasons why
we're vulnerable to conmen, because we've always valorized the idea
that you could go you could be Gatsby, you could
go from zero to wealth in one lifetime. When wealth
disparities have become when they have ballooned to radical levels,

(24:16):
that's when it trips a wire in the American psyche
and we begin to get angry. And we saw that
in the Gilded Age, and I think it's a very
credible case to be made that we're living through some
of that now. I don't see how that can endure.
I don't think that a country with that level of
radical dissimilarity in lived experience can still hold together very well.

(24:39):
Just to give you one prime example, if you're in
McDowell County, West Virginia, you're an adult male, your life
expectancy is eighteen years less than if you're over in Fairfax, Virginia.
That's a very hard political solution to maintain. And so
one piece of good news that is really interesting is

(24:59):
that But actually, just in the last year or so,
under it's really been during the Biden presidency, we're beginning
to see levels of inequality narrow for the first time
in a very long time. There was this period known
as the Great Compression, when inequality did narrow from the
nineteen thirties into the mid seventies, and it's been growing
since then. But it's actually beginning to narrow to some degree.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
But how do you push back on these things?

Speaker 1 (25:23):
So I think one of the things that the data
tells us is that if you can get people to
pull themselves out of this nationalized political conversation all the
time and get back to thinking about local issues, that
is a step in the right direction. Take West Virginia,
which we were talking about a moment ago. West Virginia
historically had more little newspapers than anywhere else in the country.

(25:47):
Just as a practical matter, the roads were poor and
you couldn't deliver a newspaper very far and get it
there by breakfast time, so every twenty miles there'd be
a different newspaper. And so you had this intensely localized
awareness of what was happening. You knew if so and
so down the street had just opened a store or
closed a story. You knew if the water treatment plan

(26:07):
in your town was working or not working. And as
everybody who listens to this podcast knows, local news is
in real crisis. It is collapsing across the country because
the economic model doesn't work. But one of the reasons
why this matters is that the less people are getting
from their local news environment, the easier it is for
me to imagine the worst about my neighbor, because all

(26:29):
I know about my neighbor is that he flies a
Biden flag or a Trump flag. He is Team A
or Team B. And I don't know that he and
I both care about quality of education in the schools
because we both have kids, or I don't know that
he and I are both thinking about running for office.
There's a way in which, when you lose that local

(26:49):
connective tissue, people upload their political mind to the cloud,
in effect, to the Fox News, to whatever Facebook is delivering.
And so I do think one of the ways days
of beginning to arrest that slide is by reinvigorating these
instruments and these the sort of what some people call
civic infrastructure, the spaces, the places, the institutions that really

(27:11):
do give you a sense of place.

Speaker 3 (27:13):
Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for
a minute or two.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
And we're back. Hey, One thing I like about your
article is you brought up Paul Fussell his book Class,
and I remember years ago, I don't know even I
was in graduate school reading that book. It was such
a hoot and he enjoyed reading us So. Jerry brought
up about the plebs, but Fusso talks about the polls.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
Fussel got something big about how societies work, which is
classes are everywhere. You put two people in an elevator
and they'll find a way to make one of them
feel like they are outranking the other. You know, during
the Culture Revolution, they got rid of any insignia on
the uniforms, and that was part of this kind of
radical spasm of classlessness. They discovered was that just doesn't

(28:01):
work in practical terms, and so they needed to be
able to figure out who's an officer and who is
a plead to use Jerry's term. And what they discovered
was that they had to come up with a new
way of identifying themselves. So depending on if you had
a pen or not, that signified if you were in
the officer class, and the more pens you had, the
higher up you were. So we can't just pretend it
doesn't exist. But it's about managing it so that we

(28:24):
understand that it doesn't become a source of this kind
of nuclear powered dysfunction that has been so helpful to
people like Steve Bannon who want to harness it.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
And Steve Bannon you can argue as a Leninist or
a Molist.

Speaker 1 (28:36):
Essentially he is he really is. That's an analytical judgment,
that's not a criticism. The man is a Mouist and
he acknowledges it actually on some level. Maybe he'll write
into the pod and say he's not. But he is
somebody who believes in the nature of revolution as an
organizing principle.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Where did the concept of elites come from?

Speaker 1 (28:55):
The term came into our use from somebody vil Fredo Peretto,
who is this kind of interesting, slightly eccentric economist, at
the beginning of the twentieth century who was observing exactly
the phenomenon you're talking about. Jerry. He was looking at
societies and he was seeing everywhere he went that he said,
it tends to be that there are always going to
be elite. He didn't have the term yet, he coined

(29:16):
it later. If you're talking about shoeshiners, there will always
be elite shoeshiners, there will be some who lead the rest,
same thing with thieves. There will be elite scholars, there
will be elite political figures. And he needed a term
for it, and that's where he brought in this French word.
He was half French, half Italian, and he brought in
this word elite, and that was derived from the Latin
to choose, to select. And so you had this idea

(29:39):
of this group of people, and that idea just seemed
to satisfy something that we needed. But I think that
concept turns out to be an instrument. That is, it's
everywhere in Chinese jingying. Elite is something that people talk
about and they will rail against the elites until they
become elites, and it happens over and over again. Historically.
One of the things that you do find is that

(30:01):
people who are students of power tend to be very suspicious,
like Saddam Hussein. They are suspicious of anybody who poses
a threat to them because they know that in Sinsevilfredo
Pereto was right. There is a circulation of elites. That's
the term that Parretto had, which is elites never die,
They're just replaced. There is always going to be a

(30:23):
new generation that comes up and replaces you. And in
some ways Parreto said, that's healthy. That's how societies get
new leaders. And he used this metaphor of a river
that if you damn the river, and so the elites
refuse to give up power, then the water backs up
and eventually bursts the banks. Look, I think there is
an art we're dealing with a garrintocratic moment in American politics.

(30:44):
We do have too many people who have stayed too
long at the top of power across the board, and
I think part one of the effects is that you
get produces some strange effects in our politics.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
Is Joe Biden elite.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
One of the things you would assume President of the
United States as a person at the height of American
politics for now, half a century, you would think, how
could you be any more elite than that? And yet
anybody who really knows the texture of this community will
tell you Joe Biden's kind of never really been at

(31:19):
the pinnacle because it's about social status. It was because
Biden didn't go He's a first president not to have
gone to an Ivy League school in a long time,
because he was going home to Delaware in the evening. Remember,
of course, because of the death of his first wife.
He would go home because to take care of these kids.
But as a result, he wasn't part of the Washington
social scene. There was also just an element of his

(31:42):
personality that he was always a little too obviously ambitious.
He was not the cool, calm, professorial type who could
play it off. And so for a long time, the
real elites in democratic politics, there was the Obama world
and there was the Clinton world that says, I'm described
this is not my analysis. I'm just I mean how
it's actually felt by the players. And Biden was always

(32:03):
a little bit on the outside. And it's one of
the tensions has always been between the Obama world and
the Biden world, and that has always been a source
of energy for Biden actually and has been. I think
one could argue a source of the reason why he
eventually was able to make it to the presidency.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
So elite is a social construct as well. Right, it's
not for the audience. It's not like you get your
Elite card and dental plan, so you may be elite.
I would consider Joe Biden elite, but he may not consider,
which is a weird thing. My wife is British and
there's a huge difference in there British culture between social
status and money. I think money is often seen as

(32:41):
being dirty, right, whereas in the US you've got status
if you're rich, and in Britain it's not that way.
You can be very rich, but you can still be
like lower class.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
But like Donald Trump's a walking example of you can
have the money and not be elite. Because he was
not a part of that commune. He was not in
the country club he wanted to be in. He would
did not have the art collection that that would demonstrate
cultural knowledge. He didn't use the right utensils at the
right time, that kind of thing. This is why I

(33:12):
think it's so fun about Paul Fussell's analysis is that
he gets to the idea of the difference between an
oriental rug in your living room versus a worn oriental rug.
One of them is high prole, as he would put it,
and one of them is elite.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
The used one is higher class. Right always, what's the
deal with JD. Vance speaking of West Virginia and Ohio
and issues.

Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah, he's an interesting case because, as people will remember
his self narrative is that he came out of Appalachia,
and his whole memoir is about him distinguishing himself from
the people around him, the people who would call in
sick to the job, the people who didn't show up
or didn't work hard. And he has a remarkable story,

(33:59):
goes on becomes a marine, and then eventually goes to
Yale Law School. And then interestingly, one thing that I
have encountered over and over again is that his description
of his own experience really bothers people in Appalachia. It
is not a book that people like in that part
of the world, because it feels as if he is saying,

(34:23):
I did this through my own sheer, grit and smarts
and discipline, and you guys are failing. And it gets
to this underlying question that is at the core of
any discussion of elites is about how much do I
both deserve what I have and how much am I

(34:44):
the author of my own destiny? And Jade Vance sort
of wants to be this portrait of the rugged individualist
who made it on his own. But a lot of
people in the part of the country where he's from
say that portrait does not ring true to me.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
So what are some of the current conspiracies about elites?

Speaker 1 (35:02):
I think one of the big ones is the idea
that the government is going to take away everybody's guns.
I encountered this before even Trump was on the scene,
but it's a super theory. It encompasses a lot it
requires for this theory to be true. And one of
the great terms I've learned about conspiracy theories that I
love is that they are self sealing. If they get punctured,

(35:25):
they will figure out a way to seal themselves. So
they still make sense. And one of the things that
taking away guns requires is knowing where the guns are,
so that means registering them. And anytime you start talking
about registering people, that starts to ring a lot of
conspiratorial bells. The idea that some faceless government entity will

(35:45):
come and take you someday and tell you where to
live and how to live. That's the thing that freaks
people out. Thank you my pleasure.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
This is fun. I really enjoyed it. It was great meeting. Yeah.
I hope to actually genuinely drink a beer with you
sometime before.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
I'd love that. I'd love that. Help me in please,
I'll book a flight to Hawaii and my family will
just be there for a month.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
You'll barely know where that's all right.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
Yeah, that was fun, guys. It's a treat to join
you on here. Thanks for the invitation.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
So let's now welcome Adam Davidson, a super numerary in
all things conspiratorial. Adam, good to have you back.

Speaker 4 (36:22):
Good to be here, guys. Did you have fun with
my pal avan?

Speaker 2 (36:25):
We did an impressive guy.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
I try to read everything he writes because you're going
to get insights and he's done the legwork, so he's
an inssive dude.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
So, Adam, I got a question for it. After talking
to Adam, he is like the poster child of mainstream media.
What's your take on mainstream media now becoming like a
pejorative and sort of Evan's place in that.

Speaker 4 (36:48):
The reason the New Yorker is so trusted and respected
is obviously there's some great individuals, but there really is
a system, Like there's this legendary fact checking system. There's
these amazing fact checkers who really kill you as a reporter.
They're really going I feel like every human being should
go through a New Yorker fact checking once in your

(37:10):
life because you realize.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Yeah, I've gone through it.

Speaker 4 (37:12):
Yeah, it's not the stuff that you were worried about.
Like if you're writing an article about a country you've
never been to, you actually end up getting a lot
of those details right because you know you don't know
them in yours, but it's all the stuff you knew
for sure was true.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
Whatever. It is so unlike this podcast.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
Unlike this podcast where we have like the opposite of
fact checking. So there's that, there's amazing editors, there's not
to mention the lawyers and et cetera, et cetera. By
some by the time you are reading something, it's gone
through an incredible process. The thing is it's totally non economical.
And I will say a dark secret, which is The
New Yorker doesn't pay very well in fact, journalism is

(37:48):
a profession where the more prestigious you get, very often,
the less money you make. I went from NPR to
being economics writer at the New York Times magazine to
the New Yorker. I would that are each a step
up in prestige, and I made about fifty thousand dollars
less a year with each move.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
I hate to tell you about working at the CIA
doesn't make you much money either.

Speaker 4 (38:10):
It doesn't either, and we thought this podcast game would
do it.

Speaker 3 (38:13):
When you go to the senior ranks at CIA, you
actually take a pay cut, right because you don't get
over time anymore.

Speaker 2 (38:19):
Yeah. And you see a lot of people on social media,
in other words, if they disagree with your point of view,
if you're a journalist or someone who worked in the
government the deep state, if you will they tell you about, oh,
how much money they're paying you, how much money you're
making money? Because the things that I care about, good
journalism and credibility and people who actually know what they're
talking about and working in government actually don't make much money,

(38:41):
if any.

Speaker 4 (38:42):
I'm not going to name anyone at The New Yorker
or elsewhere, but I will say within journalism, we really
respect the ones who do the legwork and respect the
other ones less. Now, Evan's also a really good stylist,
which is, you know, being a great reporter and a
good stylist and a hard worker. You know, we if
we had a thousand more Evans, this would be a

(39:04):
different country.

Speaker 3 (39:05):
So, and the thing that's thrown out often is that
in mainstream media there's a slant. And I think that's
fine to have a right or left slant as long
as you know what it is, as long as the
facts you report and what you're saying is accurate and correct. Right,
the facts are right.

Speaker 4 (39:22):
Yeah, that's the New Yorker approach. The New Yorker is
clearly it's from a point of view, but then we
have to check our facts and make sure right true.

Speaker 3 (39:28):
But Tucker Carlson goes out and says things that are
demonstrably not true, and arguably I don't think even he
describes himself officially as a journalist, right, I think he's
an entertainer or I'm not even sure.

Speaker 4 (39:40):
That's what his lawyer said in a lawsuit. They said
this is entertainment. It would be absurd to imagine anyone
would believe a word he said.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
But cable TV rewards that in a certain sense. They
make their money off people coming on, filling up the
time with people talking. I remember I never had spoken
to a journalist or did anything, but when the twenty
sixteen election came on, there was all the issue about
Russian intelligence and what they might be up to. I
found myself speaking to a variety of television stations and
radio stations and things, and it's interesting. So I would

(40:06):
go on to speak about something that I knew very
well because I was directly involved with Russian intelligence in
Russia and working the issues from here. But then they
would call you literally every day to come on and
talk about everything, and I just be like, no, I
don't want to just get out there and blab about anything.
But that's their model. They want people to come on
there and just start throwing out opinions. And it's one
thing to have an opinion that's backed up. It's another

(40:27):
one to have an opinion just because you're mildly paying attention.

Speaker 4 (40:30):
Yeah. I was never good at that. I had a
phase of my life where I was on cable TV
a lot, like a lot, and I just found I
couldn't like the people who really thrived were not the
ones who knew more. They were the ones who were
better at bullshitting, interjecting something that sounded like an opinion
about something I knew for a fact they knew nothing about.

(40:52):
And I struggled with that, although my wife and some
of my friends would say, I do not struggle with that.
I am very capable at bullshitting.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
Makes sense that when people said, you can have your
own opinion, but you can't have your own set of facts, right,
And I think with Alternate Fix that's changed. Now.

Speaker 4 (41:09):
Yeah, you really sound like, what did he just.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
Say, Adam? Can you tell me what he does?

Speaker 4 (41:13):
He was doing that boomer thing about how facts are
like factual or something and not relative.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
Alternate Fix, great.

Speaker 4 (41:21):
Show, guys, As always, we really blowhearted our way through
another one.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
Adam, I would vote to put you in the Elite
even if no one else. You may be the last
guy picked for the Elite team, but I still think
you're on it.

Speaker 4 (41:36):
Thank you. Jerry, coming from another low life, you're the rut.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
Of the leader.

Speaker 4 (41:41):
Yes, that means so much.

Speaker 5 (41:46):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher,
and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission implausible.
It's a production of honorable mention and a bottle of
all pictures for iHeart Podcasts.