The “Cosmopolitan Elites” Divide: Caused by Mediocre Public Schools and Their Deficient Curriculum
Donald Trump has repeatedly railed against the “elites” at his rallies, to the vociferous approval of his mostly non-college graduate audiences. Josh Hawley has railed against the “cosmopolitan elites”, a seeming inconsistency since he went to elite universities (including Yale Law School) and is a senator, if one does not consider he might simply be after the anti-elites vote or is a confused individual. QAnon’s believers are raging mad at the “elites”, going so far as to be convinced, with not a shred of evidence, that Yale Law School grad Hillary Clinton and others like her drink the blood of kidnapped children in the basement of a Washington DC take-out pizzeria (which has no basement).
The common link between anti-elitist Trump (despised by most of the New York City elite for his boorishness, dishonesty, and ignorance), his supporters, and QAnon believers is a low level of education, which leads to an angry feeling of inferiority and envy, as well as to an acute feeling of insecurity due to a flawed understanding of how the world works, of the real causes of economic and social problems, and of why they have fallen behind. Their resentful anger towards the “elites” is heightened by multiple decades of the political elites’ manifest incompetence, their gross failure to avoid repeated deep recessions and high unemployment, their gross failure to solve never-ending acute social problems such as addiction and poverty, and their gross failure to avoid repeated foreign policy debacles.
Back in the 1950’s and early 1960’s “cosmopolitan” was not a pejorative, it was a prestigious term associated with sophistication, culture, and openness to the world, as opposed to narrow-minded, philistine provincialism. A popular avant-garde woman’s magazine was named “Cosmopolitan”, as was a new cocktail. Many ordinary people aspired to belong to the cosmopolitan elite. The American environment was of upward educational, economic, and social mobility. People were not despondent, did not feel that they could not have a better life than their parents and grandparents. There were 20 uninterrupted years of economic growth and low unemployment from the end of World War II. The world was simple then, easy to understand, not ultra complex as it has been for the past twenty years.
“Cosmopolitan”s relatively recent transformation to a pejorative term is clearly connected with the increasing numbers of undereducated Americans, a reversal of the 1950–60’s trend. The culprit is first and foremost the terribly inadequate curriculum of our public schools, to which one can add the narrow, shallow education imparted by many of our colleges. We have come to the point where many undereducated Americans (Trump voters, comprising almost half the population!) despise highly educated people whom they resent and don’t identify with. Furthermore, they don’t aspire to be highly educated themselves, not even their children, feeling that is unattainable, which is understandable given the deficient education they received in public school. They feel left too far behind with no chance of catching up, neither they nor their children. Their productivity is low, many are mired in poverty or near poverty. Many are mentally disturbed. That is our nation’s biggest, most serious failing.
Not to be underestimated as a factor, the terrible record of American economic, social, and foreign policies over the past 50 years has tarnished the reputation of the educated elites who have been advising our unqualified presidents, senators, and representatives. In fact, those educated elites have been incompetent themselves, due to not being nearly educated enough no matter what prestigious university they graduated from, not being cosmopolitan (how many were fluent in at least one foreign language and culture, how many had lived and worked abroad?), and not having truly inquisitive minds. For example, they never challenged fallacious mainstream economic theories (e.g., on budget deficits, interest rates, trade deficits, federal debt, inflation, our supposed reliance on foreign capital) which were flatly contradicted by statistical history, but stubbornly and mindlessly applied them, leading to repeated, totally avoidable recessions and high unemployment. Also problematic, they never held people in high places accountable for their mistakes and misbehaviors, seemingly in tribal fashion.
Significantly, the dominant feeling amongst noncosmopolitan Americans in the 1960’s was that the United States was innately superior to all other nations, that Americans were innately superior to all other nationalities. But that mistaken feeling ignored the simple fact that Europe, Japan, and Korea had been destroyed during World War II and needed decades to recover economically. It also ignored the simple fact that China and Russia were suffocated by communism. We’ve seen that all China needed was to abandon communist ideology and fully embrace capitalism along with adopting very stimulative economic policies (in total disregard for western economic orthodoxy) to become an economic, commercial, and technological powerhouse, to the surprise and dismay of many Americans. The Chinese people were not inferior, they were simply oppressed educationally and economically by communism until the late 1980’s. The Russians have not developed nearly as well as the Chinese because they started embracing capitalism years later, did not encourage their youth to get advanced degrees abroad due to hubris, and have shackled their economy through a corrupt oligarchic system and grossly excessive military spending relative to their economy’s size. Our failure to give good economic advice to Russia after the fall of communism (we gave the opposite due to the bankruptcy of our economics profession, insisting on austerity and an artificially strong currency) led to a totally avoidable deep economic crisis and a rapid return to dictatorship. Regarding Russia, we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
It’s time the term “cosmopolitan” (as opposed to “provincial”) be rehabilitated. There is no contradiction between cosmopolitanism, internationalism, a commitment to democracy and human rights worldwide, and a high level of culture and education on the one hand, and love of country, love of family, love of friends, of community, traditions, and patriotism, on the other. The fact is, our isolationism and lack of cosmopolitanism/internationalism facilitated Hitler’s rise. Our provincialism is the reason why we failed to identify Islamic terrorism in a timely manner. Our provincialism is the reason our foreign policy has been disastrous for over fifty years. Cosmopolitanism, arguably, was right during its heyday in the 1950’s and 1960’s to not put religion on a pedestal and to reduce its influence. Religions, after all, throughout history, have been responsible for divisiveness, discriminations, egregious violations of human rights, violence, conflicts, and wars. Our severely deficient public school curriculum led to the resurgence of religion and the rise of Christian fundamentalism under Carter and Reagan. Religion is at its provincial and obscurantist apogee with Trump, an atheist who hypocritically embraced the religious right for its votes and campaign contributions.
Internationalism/cosmopolitanism, misunderstood by America Firsters, does not mean we should not focus on solving our social and economic problems. Or that we should disrupt our society by allowing the immigration of people who don’t believe in human rights (including women’s equal rights) and democracy, and who don’t want to fully integrate. Or that we should have unlimited immigration. Or that we should not have an intelligent asylum law, requiring all asylum applications to be made at U.S. consulates in the country of residence, not at our border, and granted only in accordance with traditional, universal asylum law, meaning only in cases of people being persecuted by their own government, not in cases of people fleeing poverty or crime. The asylum laws of the United States and of the United Nations, in fact, were both prompted by the Holocaust. What cosmopolitanism/internationalism does mean is that it is in our own national interest to be well educated and not provincial; to properly understand the rest of the world; and to help other nations rise out of poverty and develop into economically and socially prosperous democratic nations fully respectful of human rights. That is the moral and sustained solution to the waves of migrants at our southern border.
As for the very uncosmopolitan “cancel culture” even at some elite universities, why are debate clubs not encouraged, why are there no mandatory courses in logic and critical thinking, in ethics? Why are universities not channeling political, philosophical, and religious differences into reasoned, informed, good faith organized debate?
Apart from our decades-long public school curriculum deficiency, which is one of the biggest threats to our democracy as well as to our economic and social prosperity, another big threat is our modus operandi of not requiring political candidates to be truly qualified. At a minimum, they should be able to knowledgeably identify and discuss all the major mistakes in economic, social, and foreign policy of the past 100 years, and which would have been the correct policies. By that standard, none of our presidents, senators, representatives, governors, and mayors over the past 50 years have been truly qualified. That explains where we are today. How can just being a lawyer or businessman mean one is truly qualified to be president, senator, representative, governor, or mayor? Is it not illogical that we don’t have very advanced graduate school programs specially designed for, and required of, all political candidates? Just like our health depends on a highly qualified medical profession, our nation’s sustained prosperity requires a highly qualified political class. How we can continue to blithely allow objectively unqualified candidates to run?
We are on the brink, notwithstanding Biden’s win. The problem is practically no one has identified the main culprit of our nation’s perilous state, the totally inadequate public school curriculum. Therefore, there is no imminent corrective action. The trend of a rising percentage of undereducated, noncosmopolitan Americans remains in place. Pretty soon, if nothing changes, they will be the majority, and fascist Trumpism will reign. Once a dictatorship is installed over an undereducated population, it will very possibly never end. We are halfway to becoming a fascist banana republic. The Trump/QAnon Republican Party is a rogue party, a reflection of its leader Donald Trump, the personification of the “ugly American”. Traditional Republicans with a conscience should leave it and form a new party. How can they remain in a sore-loser, ignorant, dishonest, immoral party which disregards state court and even Supreme Court decisions confirming a valid, non-fraudulent election, and embraces a violent overthrow of democracy? Hitler’s thuggish supporters were called “patriots”, too, as they overthrew Germany’s fledgling democracy. Trumpists can cover themselves with the American flag and call themselves patriots, but they are betrayers of the nation, its constitution, and its democracy. They are our national disgrace. It is the nation’s fault that Trumpism developed in the first place.
There is no time to lose. There is only one solution. Nationwide, we need all our public schools to be “elite” schools, run like the top private schools, with strict discipline and lots of homework/study hall, the formula of all successful schools. Nationwide, the public high school curriculum must include four-year courses in: 1) logic and critical thinking (an antidote against falling for QAnon, cults, con men, aspiring dictators, dishonest and corrupt politicians, demagogues, liars and spinners; against believing Covid-19 is a “Democratic hoax”; against politicizing public health measures such as mandatory masks during pandemics; and against half the population not having the common sense to understand that masks are very effective against spreading the virus, and being oblivious to the example set by Taiwan and Singapore) with case histories and work shops; 2) economics and investing (with annual economic forecasting and portfolio management competitions), including explaining why QE financing can often avoid the need to increase taxes or cut spending; why QE-financed tax rebates (not ultra-low interest rates) should be the standard economic stimulus tool; whylong-term capital gains taxes should be eliminated, being especially unfair to homeowners but also to investors and economically counterproductive; and why many mainstream economic theories governing our economic policy are fallacies, such as those regarding budget deficits and the causes of inflation, as proved by relevant statistical history; 3) analysis of domestic and world history in great detail from 1900, focusing on the causes of World War I and II; on the causes of communism in Russia and why communism failed; on the causes of fascism in Germany and Italy; on the causes of the Great Depression; on the various causes of anti-Semitism and its culmination in the Holocaust; on the causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (“land” is a simplistic explanation); and on the causes of Islamic terrorism; 4) ethics and empathy (missing all too much in our society and government, as exemplified by our having separated migrant children from their parents) with case histories and workshops; 5) the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rightsand the history of human rights violations, which would serve to totally discredit racism, sexual and religious discrimination, intolerance, and censorship; 6) introductory law and Constitutional law, including explaining why the Justice Department’s OLC rule against indicting sitting presidents (ordered by Nixon to protect himself as Watergate was unfolding) is corrupt and unconstitutional; why the presidential pardon power is constitutionally limited by conflict of interest and corruption considerations (ours is not a banana republic constitution); and why attorneys general must recuse themselves from all matters pertaining to the presidents who appointed them (this conflict of interest rule would have freed the Mueller Report indictments to be prosecuted instead of being illegally suppressed by Attorney General Barr); 7) comparative religion, pointing out major religions’ similarities and differences, and the many egregious violations of human rights in the three holy books of monotheism; 8) history of art, architecture, and design; 9) history of music; 10) foreign languages/cultures; 11) the major mistakes in economic, social, and foreign policy over the past 100 years and which would have been the correct policies; 12) psychology accompanied by indispensable “group therapy” and “good parenting” workshops, which would greatly reduce violence, crime, addiction, abusive behavior, racism, and psychological problems. Of critical importance is to have individual assistance for the many students having academic or psychological problems, in order to prevent them from falling behind and dropping out. Donald Trump would be a much better person had he had such schooling.
To ensure that all our public schools are providing a high quality education, we need a national core curriculum which includes the above listed high school courses, and a demanding national high school graduation exam, with college scholarships awarded by the federal government to all students needing financial assistance. Since a well-educated citizenry is in the national interest, all public schools should be financed by the federal government, particularly since not all localities have equal financial means. Uniform public school excellence nationwide is a necessity.
This public school reform is absolutely essential for the nation. One can safely bet that not one of our politicians has a well-rounded education, and that they all have deficient knowledge in many of the critically important topics listed above. Conservative Republicans must understand that providing universally “elite” public schools is not socialism, it is enlightened capitalism. When all Americans are truly well-educated, well-adjusted, and cosmopolitan, we will have a serene, socially and economically prosperous society, with no poverty, no addiction, no abusiveness, no violence, no racism, no crime, with few political arguments and with sustainably low taxes. Universally “elite” public schools is the only way to fully realize the American dream. Somehow, that’s not yet widely understood. That misunderstanding has an extremely high cost. If it lasts too much longer, it will sink our nation. We fought against fascism and communism to defend democracy and human rights during the 20th Century. Yet in 2020, disgracefully, having allowed half the population to be severely undereducated, we almost reelected a fascist president who would have ended our democracy.
© Edward Sonnino 2021
February 14, 2021
