Twilight of the Elites

By Christopher L. Hayes

10 min read

Why does it matter? Because the meritocracy you believe in is designed to fail you.

The natural instinct is to blame the people. The bankers were greedy, the generals were reckless, the politicians were bought. Find better ones — smarter, more honest, less corruptible — and the machine starts working again. It's a satisfying theory. It's also wrong.

Christopher Hayes spent the first decade of this century watching institution after institution collapse under the weight of its own leadership, and came to a more unsettling conclusion: the people at the top weren't failing despite the system that elevated them. They were failing because of it. American meritocracy — the great sorting mechanism that promises to lift the talented and humble the mediocre — has quietly inverted itself. The harder it works, the more efficiently it produces an elite that is insulated from consequences, allergic to accountability, and structurally unable to see the damage it causes. Swap out the leaders all you want. The architecture remains.

Every Institution Failed at Once — and Nobody Lost Their Job

Something fundamental broke in American public life in the first decade of this century, and the people responsible walked away intact. That's not a partisan complaint — it's the structural story Christopher Hayes sets out to tell, and once you see it, the individual disasters stop looking like isolated failures and start looking like a single coherent pattern.

Run the list: the intelligence apparatus missed 9/11, the accounting profession blessed Enron's fraudulent books, the architects of the Iraq War spent 4,500 American lives on a catastrophe built from bad assumptions, FEMA let New Orleans drown, and then Wall Street engineered a financial collapse that shrank median household income by 7 percent over a single decade. Each failure was presided over by credentialed, pedigreed experts — the exact people the system had identified as its best.

Almost none of them paid a meaningful price. Dick Fuld ran Lehman Brothers into the ground, helped trigger a global panic, and walked out with nearly half a billion dollars. The Iraq War's architects were not prosecuted, not disgraced — many kept their television contracts. The pattern held with mechanical consistency: institutional failure at the top, consequences absorbed at the bottom.

What Hayes is naming isn't a run of bad luck. It's what happens when the people running things are insulated from the consequences of their own decisions. The system selected for intelligence and credentials. It forgot to build in accountability. And once you've seen that, the frustration you carry about politics, about expertise, about authority, has a shape.

Meritocracy Doesn't Pick the Best People — It Picks the Best Test-Takers and Calls It Justice

In June 2010, an eighteen-year-old named Justin Hudson stood at a podium inside Hunter College High School in Manhattan and told his graduating class something they didn't want to hear. Hunter is a public school, tuition-free, that admits students entirely through a single standardized test taken in sixth grade. The premise is pure meritocracy: one exam, everyone eligible, best scores win. Hudson, who is Black, had earned his seat by that premise. And then he spent his commencement address explaining why the premise was a lie. He felt guilty, he said — not grateful. His success felt like luck, not merit, and the system that produced it was broken.

The numbers behind his discomfort are hard to argue with. In 1995, Hunter's incoming class was 12 percent Black and 6 percent Hispanic. By 2009, those figures had fallen to 3 percent and 1 percent. The city's demographics hadn't shifted that dramatically. The kids hadn't gotten less intelligent. What changed was the growth of a test-prep industry charging families $2,550 per package to teach children how to beat the specific exam Hunter uses as its only admissions filter. A test designed to find talent regardless of background had become, in practice, a wealth screening mechanism dressed up as objectivity. The wealthiest families hired tutors; their children scored higher; their children filled the seats. The school's foundational promise — that it cultivated the city's brightest minds from every borough — quietly inverted itself into a subsidy for those already advantaged enough to buy preparation.

Chris Hayes uses Hunter to illustrate what he calls the Iron Law of Meritocracy, and once you understand it, the logic feels almost inevitable. Meritocracy depends on two things working together: rewarding talent, and allowing people to rise and fall based on performance. The first principle generates unequal outcomes — some people end up with more money, more status, more access. That's considered fine, even just, as long as the second principle holds. But here's the trap: those unequal outcomes don't just sit there. The winners use their advantages to give their children a head start. A $35 million income doesn't just buy comfort — it buys test prep, private tutors, college counselors, legacy admissions. Between 1979 and 2007, 88 percent of all income gains in the United States flowed to the top 1 percent. The system that was supposed to select for merit ends up selecting for inherited advantage and calling the result merit. The ladder doesn't disappear; it just gets quietly tilted until only certain people can climb it.

What makes this genuinely difficult — and what Hudson seemed to sense even at eighteen — is that no villain is required. The parents buying test prep aren't doing anything monstrous; they're doing what parents do. The school isn't corrupt. The exam isn't rigged in any simple sense. The system eats its own founding promise through nothing more than its own logic.

The Rules Only Apply to People Who Can't Afford Lawyers

The Iron Law doesn't stop at politics. It runs through every institution where the rules are applied downward and suspended upward — and nowhere is that more visible than in who actually goes to prison.

The United States incarcerates a larger share of its citizens than any other country on earth: five percent of the global population, twenty-five percent of the global prison population. That prosecutorial machine is genuinely formidable. And yet the same apparatus that grinds through so many ordinary Americans left almost entirely untouched the bank managers who engineered the financial collapse. Nobody went to prison for designing the instruments that wiped out trillions in household wealth. The disparity isn't a fluke or an oversight. It's the system working as actually constructed, not as advertised.

What makes Hayes's argument harder to dismiss than a simple indictment of greed is the insider language that circulated openly among the people building these instruments. There was a phrase — shorthand for the idea that the fees came now and the damage came later, after everyone had cashed out. It wasn't whispered. It was a joke. This is the detail that shifts the story from moral failure to structural diagnosis: when a system routinely insulates decision-makers from the consequences of their decisions, it doesn't just attract reckless people — it makes recklessness the rational strategy. The risks flow downward; the rewards stay up top. You don't need villains for that to produce catastrophe. You just need the architecture.

When Everyone Agreed, Everyone Was Wrong

Here's a question worth sitting with: if you want to know whether something is true, how much does it help that experts on both sides of the political aisle agree? Most of us treat that kind of convergence as the gold standard — if even the opposition is on board, surely something real is there. Hayes's argument is that this instinct is exactly backward. Elite consensus isn't a signal of truth. It's a signal of shared social networks, and those networks produce shared blind spots.

The clearest proof came in October 2002, when Congress voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. The House passed the resolution 420 to 1. This wasn't a party-line rubber stamp — it was bipartisan agreement at near-unanimous scale, with senior Democrats invoking the same WMD language as the administration. The smart, serious, credentialed people across the establishment had looked at the evidence and reached the same conclusion. Eighteen months later, no weapons were found. Over the following years, 4,500 Americans died in a war built on that consensus.

What the vote actually measured wasn't the quality of the intelligence. It measured how thoroughly a set of assumptions had circulated through the overlapping worlds where legislators, journalists, and foreign policy thinkers all moved — the same think tanks, the same background briefings, the same sourcing chains. When Judith Miller of the New York Times reported on Iraqi weapons programs based on access to defectors the intelligence community was already doubting, her proximity to power felt like credibility. It was actually the opposite. Being close to the people making claims is not the same as being close to the truth. In a system where access depends on not asking the wrong questions, proximity is capture.

When everyone in the room shares a network, disagreement looks like naivety. And that shared network isn't just a social phenomenon — it physically shapes how the people inside it perceive the world.

Power Doesn't Just Corrupt — It Rewires the Brain

In a psychology lab, people primed to feel powerful drew the letter E on their forehead so it read correctly to themselves — and backward to everyone watching. People primed for low status drew it the other way around automatically, without being asked. That's the whole study. It's also a precise picture of how power actually works.

The shift is neurological, not moral. Power — even arbitrary power in a lab setting — makes people more likely to project their own viewpoint and less likely to model anyone else's. The same researchers found that lower-status people read facial expressions more accurately than higher-status ones. That's not because they're more compassionate. It's because their lives depend on correctly reading the people above them. People at the top face no equivalent pressure, and so that capacity quietly atrophies.

Consider what this means for the institutions Hayes is describing. The Federal Reserve officials who dismissed the subprime crisis weren't stupid — they were calibrated to a feedback loop that ran exclusively through bankers. The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit working directly with borrowers, saw the collapse coming as early as 1998, a full decade early. Their 2002 report, "Quantifying the Economic Cost of Predatory Lending," documented exactly how these loans were structured to fail — findings that went largely unheeded at the top. Not because Fed officials lacked access to the reports, but because the reality of watching a neighbor box up her house was absent from the room where policy got made.

Katrina makes the same point without mercy. Emergency planners succeeded at evacuating New Orleans — they moved hundreds of thousands of people out of the city. What they didn't plan for was the 47 percent of the city's poor who had no cars. The plan was perfectly designed for the people who designed it. The ones left on rooftops simply hadn't been present, in any lived sense, when the assumptions got built in.

The trap Hayes is describing isn't a character flaw you could vote out of office. It's structural. The system concentrates power, power narrows perception, and narrowed perception produces decisions that look rational from inside the room and catastrophic from outside it. Electing more empathetic leaders doesn't break the loop — it just changes who gets slowly rewired.

The Smartest People in the Room Are the Most Dangerous People in the Room

The Cult of Smartness is worth understanding as its own kind of failure mode — not just a character flaw in individual technocrats, but a self-reinforcing system that mistakes social confidence for intellectual rigor.

Hayes captures it perfectly in the Davos story. He arrives at the World Economic Forum feeling like one of the elect — an invitation is, by definition, a credential. Then he watches the people who flew first class get swept into black Mercedes sedans while he lines up for a shuttle bus. Then learns, over cocktails that night, that the actual insiders didn't land at Zurich at all — they helicoptered in, thirty minutes from the city, with the Alps scrolling past the windows. Every tier carries the same experience: the brief satisfaction of having made it, instantly punctured by evidence that there's another tier above. Anya Schiffrin, who watched this machinery up close for years, described Schwab's genius as convincing accomplished people to pay thousands of dollars to feel excluded. The forum runs on competitive insecurity. So does the meritocracy.

That insecurity has consequences beyond wounded egos. When smartness becomes a social ranking — ranked in a hierarchy, like height — it creates enormous pressure to demonstrate that you belong. Liberal hawks supported the Iraq invasion partly because opposing it felt like intellectual slumming, like siding with protesters who hadn't done the careful reading. The Cult of Smartness doesn't just flatter the powerful; it polices everyone adjacent to them. Dissent looks naive. Agreement signals sophistication. The filter that was supposed to select for clearer thinking ends up selecting for conformity dressed in confident prose.

The deepest irony is the one Hayes can't quite escape, and to his credit he names it. The people most enraged by elite failure — the readers of the books, the attendees of the forums, the ones who want better governance and more accountability — are themselves largely products of the same meritocratic machinery. Their diagnosis is real. Their outrage is justified. But their instinctive solution, better selection, smarter leaders, more rigorous vetting, tightens the same loop that created the problem. You can't fix a system by optimizing the thing the system was already optimizing for.

The Insurgents Are Also Products of the System They're Trying to Burn Down

The most energized political insurgents of the last two decades aren't the dispossessed. They're the almost-arrived. That distinction matters more than Hayes's critics want to admit, because it determines what the insurgency is actually capable of.

The activists who built MoveOn and Daily Kos, the early Tea Partiers, the Occupy encampments — Hayes watched them and noticed something the movements themselves preferred not to say aloud. They weren't drawn from the bottom. They were drawn from the stratum just below the plutocracy: graduate degrees, mortgages, kids in decent colleges, six-figure incomes that used to feel like arrival and now feel like treading water. The Occupy activists skewed younger, but the class profile held — college-educated people carrying tens of thousands in student debt, their credentials purchasing nothing like what credentials were supposed to purchase. These are radicalized meritocrats. They believed the system's promise, performed well by its rules, and found the rules had been quietly amended for someone else's benefit.

That grievance is genuine. The fury is earned. But notice what it produces: demands for fairness within the existing structure. Better enforcement. Less corruption. Restored access to the ladder. What it doesn't produce — what it structurally cannot produce from that class position — is a demand to shorten the ladder itself.

Hayes's argument here is precise and uncomfortable. Equality of opportunity, the shared goal of every reform movement in this tradition, is mathematically impossible to maintain without equality of outcome. When the gap between top and bottom grows wide enough, the winners use their winnings to lock in their children's advantage. The Iron Law of Meritocracy doesn't require malice — it's compound interest applied to social position. You cannot fix the selection process without first compressing what selection is selecting between.

The proof that redistribution works sits in Brazil, where Lula's Bolsa Família grew incomes at the very bottom by 72 percent in five years — not through exhortation, but through direct transfers to the poor.

The sober challenge Hayes leaves is this: if you want equal opportunity badly enough to take to the streets for it, you have to want equal enough outcomes first. That's not the movement's instinct. It might need to become its demand.

The Question You Can't Meritocracy Your Way Out Of

Here is the hard thing Hayes leaves you with: the next wave of reformers is already forming, and they will be brilliant, credentialed, and certain that their intelligence is what disqualifies them from the failures they're correcting. That certainty is the system talking. The problem was never that the wrong people ran things — it was that running things, at sufficient remove from consequences, makes anyone wrong. Justin Hudson, the kid who gave that Hunter College High School commencement speech calling out meritocracy in front of the people it had just rewarded, is in his early thirties now. Whatever he's doing, the system has had a decade to make him a stakeholder. That's how it works: not through corruption, but through proximity and mortgage and the gentle pressure of having something to lose. The exit from that loop isn't better selection. It's structural compression — closing the gap between what winning gets you and what losing costs you, until the stakes are low enough that capture stops being rational. Brazil, under Lula, ran this experiment at scale: compress the income distribution enough and the professional class loses its stranglehold on educational access, because the stranglehold only works when the gap is wide enough to fight over. It requires giving up the idea that merit, properly measured, is the answer. It isn't. It's the story we tell to avoid the harder one — that equal opportunity lives downstream of equal enough outcomes, and always has.