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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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American Elites

https://www.rmgresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Elite-One-Percent.pdf

I found this recent Rasmussen presentation, it focuses on subsections of the elite. It was funded by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a libertarian thinktank. One might consider them elite heretics or counter-elites (and sure enough they have a slide at the end saying ‘oh there are some elites who are good and trustworthy'). Us non-Gold Circle normies only get the slides, so it's a little unclear what they mean.

Anyway, they define elite as postgrad urbanite with 150K per year income. They further split elites into those who went to 12 top colleges and the ‘politically obsessed’ (definition unclear but I imagine it means they spend a certain number of hours reading/watching/discussing political media). For instance, I imagine we would be considered ‘politically obsessed’.

As you might expect, the elite are the ones who approve of Biden and Congress. They trust the government to do the right thing. I imagine that even if they don’t think the government’s doing a great job they’re friends with high ranking officials and feel a certain amity for them. In my experience, their brother might be an ambassador, they might have an AI regulator over for lunch. Even if they’ve been astonished by the stupid questions journalists ask them, they’ve still got fairly positive impressions of the prestige press and read at least two or three newspapers.

Elites are also much more likely to say ‘there’s too much individual freedom in the US’ than voters, especially the politically obsessed elites. Likewise, they favour strict restrictions on private usage of gas, vehicles, meat and electricity. It’s bizarre that 55% oppose non-essential air travel since this class is the most likely to go on overseas holidays, I don’t understand how this works. Anyway, they want restrictions on everything except border security, which they couldn’t care less about. Plebs hold the opposite beliefs.

I was most surprised by how 29% of the elite thinks that China is an ally, compared to 9% of ordinary voters. I would’ve thought the elites were the hawks! Maybe some of them have commercial interests in China or they want to work with China on climate change or they’re ethnically Chinese, anyway this is really odd to me. The hawk faction may be in control but the doves haven’t been totally eviscerated. Does anyone have any explanations or observations on this matter?

35% of the elite would rather cheat than lose a close election, rising to 69% of the ‘politically obsessed’. Only 7% of pleb voters would cheat. That seems like an underestimate to me – who goes and says ‘I would rather cheat than lose an election’ on a poll? Wouldn’t people be embarrassed (or tactical) and lie – they’re cheats after all! Again, I don’t know the exact definition of cheat but I imagine many more would do something subversive like hold back successful COVID vaccine results until after the election or engage in various procedural manipulations. Edit for an example of what I mean for 'non-cheating' manipulation: https://twitter.com/stevenmackeyman/status/1764876192648499220

I think it’s clear that these are the people with actual power and influence, the ones who set the agenda, the key actors in tech, media, government and law. They create outcomes, or lack thereof. Just about every judge would be elite by this definition, along with nearly all AI workers (OK maybe not the work-from-home guys in the Colorado mountains). All lobbyists, the heads of most NGOs, the most important lawyers – everyone except the right-wing politicians who seem unable to achieve any of their goals.

It’s not like it’s hard to close the US border. The US is a global power after all. The US seems to think it can defend Ukraine’s borders against the Russian army from the other side of the world and secure Taiwan’s borders against the PLA, it must be at least 1000x easier to defend the US border against stateless, unarmed mobs. They just don’t care, indeed their energy seems to swing the other way – see the recent US-Texas standoff over barbed wire and the border. The survey said not one respondent cared about the border as a priority, presumably some think immigration is quite a good thing and want more, illegal or otherwise.

On other fronts, we observe these creeping changes – everyone seems to need a college degree if they want to do anything. That’s not the will of the majority but it is what the elite want. You can see these articles that go ‘relax nobody’s coming to take your gas stove’, how they struck down the federal bill. But the state legislation in New York and other cities is proceeding, it’s clear that this is the path that the US is on. Likewise, the disputes over the 2020 election. I'm suspicious but can't prove that the election was rigged, or that Epstein didn't kill himself. Nevertheless, US democracy doesn't seem in very good shape if its elites are so willing to win by fraud.

I don't think this is a useful kind of analysis, even if the survey wasn't online. It's still asking vague questions that different groups of people will take 10 seconds to answer and interpret in very different ways, and treating them like obvious truth. From this pdf, we find ... 68% of elite ivy league graduates support banning private air conditioning and non-essential travel to fight climate change? I just do not believe that, there's clearly something wrong with the poll. Even if there weren't, consider: For the 'freedom' vs 'government control' question, they plausibly just read it as "do you support conservative-coded views or liberal-coded views" and answered the one that was more liberal. And, you know, that's not an incorrect interpretation of the poll - you don't ask questions like "Does the united states provide too much individual freedom, too much government control, or both?" if you're trying to discern truth, the framing of that is heavily conservative, "government control" one side of a Russell conguation and "individual freedom" is on the other side of one. 90% (!) of ivy league graduate elites support "strict" rationing of "gas, meat, and electricity", when they probably just support carbon taxes in practice.

The whole presentation, along with the report, is on the discourse level of a political TV ad.

35% of the elite would rather cheat than lose a close election, rising to 69% of the ‘politically obsessed’. Only 7% of pleb voters would cheat. That seems like an underestimate to me – who goes and says ‘I would rather cheat than lose an election’ on a poll? Wouldn’t people be embarrassed (or tactical) and lie – they’re cheats after all

... Okay, this just isn't true. Come on. "who goes and says ‘I would rather cheat than lose an election’ on a poll" - yes! that is a great question! You noticed something was off, which is good, and then somehow used that to infer that outgroup = bad. I know a fair number of "politically-obsessed" "elites", and even in private they don't talk like that at all! The answer is just "people who are lying or trolling on the poll".

Now, all that aside, the "elite" do have a number of beliefs that are bad and are harming themselves and others by implementing them. But bad analysis doesn't get one any closer to fixing that.

68% of elite ivy league graduates support banning private air conditioning and non-essential travel to fight climate change? I just do not believe that, there's clearly something wrong with the poll.

i think this is a reasonable possibility. i've heard it claimed there is a strong social desirability bias when answering surveys and the 'correct' thing to do is to fight climate change. just because they answered positively in a survey doesn't mean they would actually support the policies if it came to a vote. the cheating question is very weird and I suspect somehow they worded the question without explicitly saying cheating and claimed they question meant cheating in their summary.