Aristo-Elitism

This is just a draft.

Please note I did not send this essay out as an email. If you’re seeing this essay, it’s either because you manually clicked on it, or because it popped up on your feed. I don’t expect these essays to get more than 200-300 views, despite having an audience of 3,600 subscribers. Basically I am just brainstorming, and I am releasing my brainstorming sessions for those who enjoy such rough cuts. If you only want to read edited stuff, just ignore all my essays that don’t come into your email inbox. Thank you.

Patrick Deenan’s concept of “aristo-populism” implies an HLvM alliance of tech bros with rednecks. A more accurate label would be “oligo-populism,” since he is not referring to a class of aristocrats, but a class of oligarchs.

In contrast to this, I’d like to propose “Aristo-Elitism,” which is a genuine aristocracy based on physical, cognitive, and personality traits.

When I did my debate with Isaac Simpson, one of his complaints is that we’re bringing in too many people from foreign cultures who are going to change our culture. My opinion is that this is already happening rapidly under Trump himself: Kash Patel, Howard Lutnick, Tulsi Gabbard, Scott Bessent, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and even JD Vance are all outside the traditional idea of a WASP elite. I don’t see why Trump’s attack on WASP identity is any less substantial than what we might see from the left. It doesn’t make a difference to me.

Isaac claimed that “trannies are disgusting,” and seemed to imply that Trump was reducing transgenderism. I don’t see any evidence that, under Kamala, social trends would be any different. Marginal reductions in the growth of trans identity are not due to the policies of the Trump administration.

Explaining why social trends go up and down is difficult, but the concept of a “vibe shift” is unempirical and self-serving. For example, crime went down under Joe Biden. Are we then to suggest that it was a Biden “vibe shift” which made black people less violent? That seems like too much for me. We have to point to specific policies, most of which were determined at the state and local level, which had nothing to do with Biden. Similarly, any changes in trans identity should not be attributed to Trump.

I bring this up to say that the right-wing has no mechanism with which to accomplish its cultural goals. It can reduce the number of Mexican dishwashers, perhaps, but it cannot make gay people straight. And it has done nothing to halt or reverse the de-WASPification of our elite. In fact, I would argue that Trump accelerated this process.

How we do select for good elites? The first layer of selection is the university system. One of Isaac’s commenters claimed that universities are not a good selection mechanism, since Claudine Gay is a dumb brown woman. I vaguely remember that she had some plagiarism controversy, but so did MLK, and I think MLK was nonetheless an intelligent person.

Anyway, I don’t think it is helpful to litigate Claudine’s intelligence as an individual, but to make a broader point, which is that conservatives now have the impression that ivy-league graduates are dumb. This is not empirically true, but right-wingers are wiggers who do not understand bell curves.

The average IQ of an ivy-league educated person is high, between 120 and 130. But because this average is distributed over a bell curve, there are also extreme geniuses (160 IQ) and extreme mediocrities (90 IQ) who are also present at the fringes. When I say the fringes, I mean that there are a few individuals, here and there, out of thousands and thousands of graduates. Conservatives ignore the geniuses, while hyper-focusing on the one or two mediocrities who slip through the cracks.

One of the interesting things about DEI and affirmative action is that the black people who “slip through the cracks” (and make it into Harvard with a mediocre IQ) are extremely unusual and motivated in other ways. The average 90 IQ black person can’t make it into Harvard; it takes a certain kind of special black person to pull this off. They have to jump through a bunch of hoops, filling out applications, speaking usually well for their IQ level, etc etc. I know nothing about Claudine Gay, but if her IQ were actually 90, that would be an amazing accomplishment on her part. It implies that she has incredible willpower and a desire to succeed no matter what. We can call her a social striver who obsesses over status -- even if you think that’s evil or disgusting, it is still impressive. Even if she did plagiarize this or that, I consider that kind of ruthlessness and boldness to be admirable, on some level. We can admire the criminals who steal the crown jewels, even if theft is immoral.

All of that said, it is possible to eliminate 90 IQ graduates from the Ivy League. You simply have to institute a hard floor on ACT, SAT, GPA, and IQ tests. There is no reason why this couldn’t be implemented, other than, it would disrupt affirmative action and reduce the number of black and Hispanic graduates by (in some cases) 90%. I don’t see any evidence that the conservative response to the Ivy League, Austin University, is implementing anything like this. I trust Steven Pinker when he says the whole thing has been an embarrassing failure, and Chris Rufo’s response, which has been to call Steven a pedophile, discredits the university even further. When someone makes substantive criticisms, and the response is “are you a pedophile, Steve?” I consider the argument to have been won decisively by the former party.

Therefore, I see no reason to believe that conservatives are on the way to solving the problem of the IQ floor. Instead, they are hyper focused on the partisan composition of universities, which is not one of my priorities. If conservatives did start a university with higher standards than we find in the Ivy League, I would be impressed and praise them. I do not predict this will occur. If there is to be reform, it must come from within the left.

Isaac criticizes me, like many others, for calling myself a leftist rather than a liberal. I can understand this criticism coming from Zohran Mamdani -- I’m not sufficiently socialistic for that crowd. Fair enough. But Isaac is part of the camp who regularly refer to “the leftist universities” when, if you look at their economics departments, they are overwhelmingly neo-liberal. They don’t use language consistently. When they encounter a neo-liberal, their attempt is to attack me on semantic grounds as having a false identity. But in all other cases, they are happy to lump in neo-liberals with “the left” when it suits their purposes. When Isaac told me to name my leftist policies, I said housing and food assistance for all -- he then said this wasn’t leftist because it was a form of charity, and charity is right-wing. I did not know how to respond -- I should have asked him to define the left, since he seemed hell bent on controlling the semantic frame and proving me wrong no matter what I said.

Anyway, I think the left (like the right) is a big tent with moderate and extreme factions. I actually don’t consider myself a moderate or centrist, because I am not interested in maintaining the status quo of the party for its own sake, but would actually like to see radical changes. One of those is that I would like to develop and ethos of elitism where we hold ourselves to higher standards. I would like to see “no child left behind” repealed, and replaced with new legislation to replace GPA with PA.

PA stands for “Percentile average.” Each assignment would not be graded from 0 to 100, but from 99% to 1%. If you score worse than 99% of the class, you get a PA of 99% on that test, quiz, or assignment. If you score in the top 1%, you get a PA of 1%. This PA is then totaled as a weighted average, with the highest PA being 1% (in the top 1% on every single test and quiz) and the lowest PA being 99% (in the bottom 1% on every single test and quiz).

Obviously PA is not “fair” in the sense that it creates hyper-competitiveness, but that’s what the SAT and ACT are for: they do not assign percentiles, but objective scores. IQ tests can similarly be administered.

The point of PA is to eliminate grade inflation and to begin to hold students to higher standards. When I brought this up to my Indian roommate, he told me “be careful, you are encouraging Asian hyper-competition.” I understand this risk, but I believe we can balance it out with other tools.

For example, I’d like to see students forced to complete a physical challenge, like walking across the Nevada desert over the course of a 30 day campaign. The government owns enough land that it should be easy to construct a trail where “pilgrims” could walk from point A to point B, over the course of a 100 mile trail, without coming into contact with civilization. They would be allowed to bring as many supplies as they could carry -- sleeping bags, tents, food, water, drugs, etc. Theoretically, it should be possible to walk 100 miles in roughly 10 days, but I think 30 days should be allowed for a more leisurely pace -- the problem being, of course, that the longer you dilly-dally, the quicker your food and water supplies will run out.

It would be cool to see the prospective students at the end of the challenge, dehydrated, starving, exhausted. If this is still not sufficiently challenging, we could introduce the threat of real violence by having warriors throw spears at the students from afar. There’s a scene in the movie “10 canoes” where the tribe has to undergo this kind of challenge, where one side throws spears at the other, and the defending party has to dodge the spears. We could get very creative with this and livestream it.

I’m going off the reservation here -- none of this is acceptable or realistic, but it represents the extreme ideal toward which I aspire. In reality, it would be an achievement if we could merely add some bare minimum athletic requirement to Ivy League attendance.

Another thing I’d like to see is a German system, where students are tested at age 12, and then slotted into life-long career paths. This prevents some of the hyper-competition we are seeking to avoid. If we know a kid is smart, we can place them in advanced classes, but not go too hard in forcing them to be perfect. It is a tragedy that some of the best years of life are wasted doing busy work, homework, and made-up volunteering. Smart kids should spend their youth having fun and making friends. When I say that we should select for elites, I want to be careful that we are selecting for beautiful traits, and not for money-grubbing strivers.

I don’t have a perfect solution, and I realize that the money-grubbing strivers will always find a way to sneak their way in. I have already written this essay before, and I got that criticism, and it is not a constructive criticism: I am aware of the criticism. There is no such thing as a perfect selection mechanism. Even with IQ floors, athletic floors, and spear-chucking 100 mile hikes, you will always get some rotten apples in the bell curve. No floor is perfect.

The goal isn’t to develop a perfect selection mechanism, but one which is superior to the present system. This is basically the way that we get a better elite, and it has little to nothing to do with immigration or transgenders or whatever other side issues people are interested in.