David Brooks, with his clear eye, is one of those writers with a knack for capturing a cultural moment in print. BoBos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2001) was a standout achievement for the year it appeared, describing the culturally dominant new man that arose in the decade after the project to produce homo Sovieticus was abandoned: the bourgeois bohemian, a peculiar creation of the last decade of the twentieth century. Bobos, as he called them, combined the hitherto incompatible identities of square and hippie. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, they earn like accountants and eat like organic sheep farmers.

　　That same year, 2001, he published in The Atlantic an article on what he called “The Organization Kid.” These were the children or younger siblings of the Bobos—raised on calculus and quinoa—and every moment of their lives was scheduled and organized to produce the most compelling applicant to Princeton University (or some equivalent).

　　Now, a generation later, Brooks has returned to these same cultural precincts and is horrified. His most recent essay, again in The Atlantic, is entitled “How the Ivy League Broke America.” So horrified is he that he has not even given us a catchy term for the people being broken by the Ivies. Are these the children or the grandchildren of the Bobos? Given their delayed childbearing, it is hard to tell. It could be either or both. They might be the offspring of organization kids, but only if procreation made it into their daytimer.

　　Bobos were a little annoying, in Brooks’ account. “Pretentious” does not quite capture their attempts to disguise their wealth at the same time that they flaunted it. They had a peculiar ability to be uncomfortable and self-satisfied all at once. But we have seen their type before: whites “slumming” in Harlem during the Jazz Age, for instance. The organization kids, on the other hand, were something new. The students he met were astonishingly successful and accomplished at their assigned tasks, but a little sad. They had playdates and clubs, but no friends. Brooks’ response to both was gentle, even bemused. He has a gentle soul.

　　The Academy has moved on to its next phase now, red in tooth and claw, and the scene isn’t pretty. Brooks avoids reveling in the self-inflicted wounds of the Ivies and their near peers. Consider the cases of the leading institutions on opposite coasts. Who would have thought both Harvard and Stanford would lose their presidents in the same year, one to allegations of plagiarism in the case of Claudine Gay and the other of academic misconduct on the part of Marc Tessier-Lavigne? And then there is the reproducibility crisis that is afflicting, it seems, every experimental science. In some studies, up to 70 percent of published experiments could not be reproduced by other researchers, leaving whole fields in doubt.

　　Brooks, however, does not criticize the institutions, their leaders, or faculty so much as the products of those institutions. His particular indictment of elite education is not focused on the content, such as it is; to him, the damning statistic is that as much as twenty percent of Princeton students pursue finance-related fields after graduation. Given the greatest educational resources ever assembled, he despairs that so many young people seek out mere riches, as if Princeton didn’t make them woke enough. This is not the lament of Peter Thiel’s quip: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Theil was pointing out the distance between what we thought the future would entail and what we really got. Brooks is agonizing over the moral formation of the students. He wanted a meritocracy and got a plutocracy.

　　He thinks this moral issue can be addressed by changing our definition of merit and its narrow focus on intelligence. He is not the only one to make this critique. In its place, he would prefer an education that rewards curiosity, drive, social intelligence, and mental agility. These may be fine goals, but it is unclear that they would select for anyone different from the current system. General intelligence tends to be associated with all of these.

　　Brooks is right, however, to suggest that something different is going on now, or at least that it is going on in a new and different way. This is not the “tadpole philosophy” denounced by the early twentieth-century socialist economist R. H. Tawney, in which the successful—those hatched near the edge of the pond, in the analogy—can take personal satisfaction in their success because they could swim and the rest—those hatched far from shore—only sank. Something more is going on, which brings us to the politics of it.

　　Brooks believes that all societies have their hierarchies and says he just wants to see a better one formed. This was the ambition of Harvard’s James Conant in the 1930s, following in the aspirations of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson argued that an aristocracy of talent would develop if the new country would institute a competitive educational system in which “the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish” and continually promoted up the system. It would allow a natural aristocracy to displace the “pseudo aristocracy” that ruled Europe. As he wrote to John Adams, “For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” This is not too far from the century-long meritocracy Brooks criticizes. What went wrong? We should consider the counter-argument to Jefferson.

　　According to Adams, the natural aristocracy certainly includes natural intelligence, but it includes much more. It includes parentage, which confers many of the benefits Brooks despairs of, including wealth, contacts, and legacy. But Adams also thought that some people have a natural ability to sway others, to command a room, to understand the workings of social situations. These set some apart and give them an advantage. They also look a lot like the qualities David Brooks would like to develop under an improved understanding of merit. The difference, however, is that Adams held no illusions that this aristocracy would be any better than other versions.

　　What Brooks fails to see is that our modern meritocracy’s “raking of the rubbish” into the Ivies has allowed it to form a distinct faction more successfully than any aristocratic marriage market ever could.

　　Brooks seems unaware of Adams’ concerns while sharing Jefferson’s hopes. He would simply like us to use a different type of rake. Accepting that societies will be hierarchical, he wants one that is more meritorious, one that would include the qualities mentioned above, such as curiosity, drive, social intelligence, and agility. The ones who succeed in the current system might merit advancement, but they do not represent the best, the aristoi, that the country has to offer.

　　Adams disagreed with Jefferson in that he thought an aristocracy would arise in every society and it was the job of constitutional framers to keep the aristocrats in their place. For Adams, this was the point of the Senate: “Throw them all, or at least the most remarkable of them, into one assembly together.” Put all the most ambitious men in the country into one room and let them fight it out. Jefferson, like the progressives after him and the meritocrats Brooks criticizes, seemed to think those at the top would never abuse their positions if only they were a “true” elite. Adams had the better take: “Your distinction between the aristoi and pseudo aristoi, will not help the matter. I would trust one as soon as the other with unlimited Power.”

　　Adams’ advocacy of a bicameral legislature rested on his suspicion of a natural aristocracy and its outsized influence on any political system. As he explained to Jefferson, in a room of 100 men, twenty-five would be able to control the majority: “Every one of these 25, is an Aristocrat, in my Sense of the Word; whether he obtains his one Vote in Addition to his own, by his Birth Fortune, Figure, Eloquence, Science, learning, Craft Cunning, or even his Character for good fellowship and a bon vivant.” Bicameralism was meant to isolate them and give room for the rest of the citizens.

　　It is helpful to consider that Brooks despairs at the 20 percent of Princetonians who go into finance, but he does not speak about the other 80 percent. Where do they go? For the most part, they will go into careers that rely upon their friends and classmates in the finance industry such as NGOs, the nonprofit sector, higher education, biomedical research, or the government side of the revolving door. Financiers might make more money, but they are all part of the same class, education, and “meritocracy.” What is new is that the meritocracy is colonizing the rest of society. Brooks blames the Ivies for their selection criteria, but he should blame the fact that those institutions set the tone for all the others. In turn, the sensibilities of Ann Arbor or Bowling Green are not too far from New Haven or Hanover, New Hampshire.

　　Brooks acknowledges what Peter Turchin described as the overproduction of elites. As more people get university degrees, those elite members of society, the meritocrats, have colonized the rest of society. As Turchin points out, while the number of congressional seats has remained the same over the past fifty years, the number of lawyers has more than tripled. The result is that there is scarcely a segment of society that is not now run by meritocrats. What Brooks fails to see is that our modern meritocracy’s “raking of the rubbish” into the Ivies has allowed it to form a distinct faction more successfully than any aristocratic marriage market ever could. Kids with perfect SATs are funneled (raked?) into a small number of institutions. If they return home at all after their education, they take leadership positions and bring with them the guiding principles of gender studies departments and DEI administrators. Brooks cites statistics showing that graduates of our elite institutions conform very well to ideological expectations. In other words, they fit into elite society much better than Harriet Smith, despite Emma Woodhouse’s best efforts.

　　Brooks is obviously disturbed by the public distrust of the elite class. He draws parallels between Donald Trump’s success in America, Marine Le Pen’s in France, Viktor Orban’s in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Edroğan’s in Turkey, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. The range of political positions in this list might give one pause, but Brooks sees them all as a collective telling-off of the educated classes. Why tell them off? Because they, as a faction, have taken over all the political space. Consider that Le Pen’s RN party and the AfD in Germany (not cited by Brooks) are, despite significant gains at the polls, held at arm’s length by the “legitimate” parties. Prefigured in other parts of Europe, farmers in the UK have taken to protesting policies that have as little respect for their trade as Michael Bloomberg showed them. The “clingers” and “deplorables” are despised by the elite class and systematically denied a political voice.

　　We have the meritocratic system here and in much of Europe that Conant and Jefferson would have wanted, but it has not produced the smooth-running machine of government they hoped it would. Instead, the experts bungled Covid, opened the borders, and alienated their populations. Brooks suggests tinkering with the system a little. But John Adams foresaw these developments, or rather he foresaw what would happen if the natural aristocracy was allowed to run amok.

　　No new system of admissions is going to change the fact that the natural aristocracy, in Adams’ sense, will find its way into the elite academic institutions. I, too, have taught at these universities here and abroad and their students do not lack the “non-cognitive” traits Brooks would like to see promoted. Given the advantages that go along with attending universities sitting on billions of dollars, few will try to evade the teeth of their rakes.

　　The positive reaction to Brooks’ Atlantic article (which is well deserved) might prompt him to write a whole book on the topic. I would look forward to such a work. If I might make a suggestion to such an eminent author, however, there is a larger problem to consider. The meritocracy has turned itself into a faction with, as James Madison explained, its own interests separate from the whole. At the same time, it has been so successful at perpetuating and expanding itself that membership—signified by university attendance—is becoming more telling of voting than race or income. Again, this is not an exclusively American problem, but we will need to find an American solution.Law Liberty has no shortage of articles for Brooks or any of us to get started with. While this is an educational problem, it is also a political problem. John Adams thought deeply about this very issue and sought a republican solution to an aristocratic problem.