The Critical flaw of the American Elites

i thought everyone knew that smart people were stupid

assuming that you mean book smart, we lost that somewhere along the way. My grandparents generation (born@1910)certainly knew it, I heard this criticism of the book smart often from them, my parents generation (born @1940) however put a lot more stock in credentials then their parents did.

So you are claiming that the Tea Party is a "meritocratic melting pot"?

No, however I do believe that the tea party is partly a movement from the non elites against the elites, whom they accuse of being out of touch, ignorant, and hostile towards all who are not elites. Tea party members believe that America has been hijacked by a bunch of book smart ignoramuses, and that it is time for regular Americans to take back control of this country.

So if students are from the 2/3 of America that is not in small cities, towns or rural areas then they are not of America? Seems like they are much more representative of America and the challenges it increasingly faces than those from small town Americana. As for the idea that the "elites" were taken off guard by the tea party movement, that is a joke. Elites made the tea party movement. The tea party is funded by rich elites, stoked by rich elites and given marching orders by rich elites. Every tea party candidate is primarily funded not by donations of $10 or $20 from "their base", but by donations of $10,000+ laundered through political action groups. They are pawns of one group of elites who are battling other groups of elites and like many "populist" movements before them, they are convinced that they are true blue Americans fighting the elites and willingly ignorant of how they are being used. US history is filled with "movements" like the tea party whipped up by one power faction and hurled at other ones. Nor are elites new to the halls of power. The signatories to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were some of the most elite people in the fledgling United States. Small town "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" is a great movie, but it is fiction.

As to the demographics of the most elite colleges in the country, the author is right on the money, but those aren't the only universities around. Students choose those schools because they are exclusive, but many state schools offer an equal education at a price much more attractive to the middle class. Check the University of North Carolina or Auburn or Virginia Tech or UCLA or any of a hundred solid universities and you will find a much more diverse mix of economic backgrounds. Harvard grads might run Wall Street, but main street is run by these state school graduates. (Of course the tea party folks are staving these schools which seems to favor the elites at their exclusive schools again. Strange how that works.)

at this point the quality of the education is irrelevant. A university degree is only considered as valuable as its ability to get a person into the right job, and unless you have lived in a cave the last 25 years you know that there is a huge difference in the value of the various schools credential. The elite schools are much more valuable. In the Heyday of Wall Street (pre great recession) an Ivy league degree was almost a requirement to land a Wall Street job.

such is the knock on it from the left, however this has not been proven to me.

That's true about Wall Street, but look at the halls of government in just about every state and you will find a lot more graduates of State U and State Tech. That is where America's middle class and aspiring middle class goes to get their degrees and where the majority of local lawyers, nurses, doctors, teachers, and business leaders come from. Just about all engineers come from state universities, usually with the words State, Tech or A&M after their names. These are the government elites you are complaining about. Those Wall Street elites aren't bothering with government; doesn't pay enough.

You are making my case for me..Government has long been considered a low class job, one step above teaching....

There are some elites who work for government, but most who take government funding but dont actually join the government.

I know you are fairly well read, so you can't have missed the stories on the Koch brothers or the numerous advocacy groups who don't reveal their donors and are dropping seven figures in various campaigns across the country. What kind of proof do you require? If you dismiss all of this as being from the "liberal media" and the conservative media isn't going to bite the hand that feeds them, what are you left with?

At this point the funding picture is so muddled thanks to the idiotic SCOTUS that we can not say much about funding. The first step would be to get some handle on how much the money matters, as there is evidence that the ace in the hole for the tea party is the energetic grass roots networking done over the internet, at no costs.

Hardly. Most congressmen and senators of both parties are lawyers or businessmen, just not ones who went to Harvard. These guys did experience a broad cross-section of their state when going to college at their state schools. He hear a lot about political dynasties like the Kennedys, Bushes and Gores, but that is because they are rare. Self made folks are the typical political leaders all the way across the country. The premise of the original article that sheltered elites in fancy universities are ignorant of "real America" may have some validity, but doesn't fly as a argument against government based on the typical makeup of just about every major government body in the US. Those "elites" don't govern and those in government we ridicule as elite are often the exact people we would hold up as someone who has attained the American Dream if they weren't in government.

I agree about the SCOTUS ruling. If you have a link on tea party grass roots fund raising, I would be interested. Articles I've read have said the tea party has run out of steam in small dollar fund raising, but I don't recall seeing hard numbers.

Edit: Here is a nice article showing strong tea party fund raising.