Went to see Robert Kaplan at WICA last night. He reminds me of a 20th century Herodotus.

He kept making references to “the elites” and how they consistently get things wrong. He described his own education, at a small Connecticut public university, and his subsequent employment at a small regional paper because he couldn’t get a job with the major papers because he didn’t have the Ivy League education. I think he’s always viewed himself as an outsider, with a bit of a chip on his shoulder.

I wanted to ask him about these elites. I’ve been reading him for years in The Atlantic, itself a bit of an elite national journal, so I confess to having pictured him as a member of the elites. I’m wondering who they are, and how they work; is it like the courtiers of the Ottoman Empire, with various factions and intrigues vying for the attention of the Emperor? Are they all the people who move from faculty positions at Yale and Harvard to positions in the Federal administration to emeritus positions in think tanks like the Heritage Foundation? Who are these people?