Issue Date: 02.05.01 Post Date: 01.25.01 Eight years ago, the Clinton administration ushered in what seemed like a social revolution. The Clintonites didn't just bring an ideology to Washington; they brought a caste. Gone were Poppy's crusty boarding-school WASPS. In their place was a new kind of elite: multicultural, aggressively brainy, confident they owed their success not to birth or blood but to talent alone. "Perhaps more than any in our history," wrote The Washington Post's David Ignatius, "Clinton's is a government of smart people." Or at least credentialed people. The White House staff alone boasted six Rhodes scholars. One-third of President Clinton's 518 earliest appointments had attended Harvard or Yale--or both. The president called his staff "the top ranks of a new generation."
The self-congratulation was grating. But it contained a grain of sociological truth. When George H.W. Bush, James Baker, and Nicholas Brady entered the Ivy League, admission still depended largely on pedigree. By the time Clinton, Robert Reich, and George Stephanopoulos got there, admission was based on grades and SAT scores. The Clinton administration symbolized the transfer of power from one elite to a different, more meritocratic one. "It's tempting," wrote Nicholas Lemann on the New York Times op-ed page two months before Clinton's inauguration, "to regard the ascendancy of the meritocracy as a sort of `end of history' of American elites."
Eight years later, the end of that end of history of American elites has arrived. Of George W. Bush's 14 Cabinet members, only two went to Ivy League colleges. His staff contains no Rhodes scholars. Where Clinton packed his administration with intellectuals, Bush's Cabinet boasts only one Ph.D., Secretary of Education Rod Paige--and his doctorate is in physical education.
Some have described W.'s administration as a kind of class restoration: a return to country-club elitism in the guise of cowboy-boot populism. But, while it's true that Bush has exhumed some of his father's old cronies, his administration does not represent the revenge of the Protestant establishment. It couldn't. The Protestant establishment that shaped W.'s father is dead--there is not a single powerful American institution that remains exclusively in WASP hands.
Sociologically, the new Bush administration represents something more contemporary, and more interesting: a second successor elite, also descended from the Protestant establishment but with an ethic entirely different from that of its "meritocrat" cousins. If the WASP elite handed over the Ivy League universities and top law firms to the meritocrats, it gave the leadership of corporate America, the military, and the Republican Party to an entirely different group, a group that shares not an ethnicity but a common experience: the organization men. The organization men who dominate W.'s administration have credentials, but not educational ones. They amassed them by ascending through the ranks of large institutions--government bureaucracy (Paul O'Neill, Dick Cheney), corporations (Don Evans), the military (Colin Powell), and the Republican Party (Mel Martinez, Tommy Thompson). As Lemann wrote in The Big Test, while the defining events in the meritocrat's life are standardized tests, the career of the organization man (or "lifer," in Lemann's parlance) is defined by his promotions. He may be personally ambitious, but he has developed values suited to institutional life: loyalty, hard work, managerial competence, a profound sense of caution.
These virtues are hardly insignificant. Not only are the Bushies more disciplined than the Clintonites, they are less arrogant. It is this discipline and humility that largely accounts for the success of the Bush transition, and for the success Bush will likely have in passing his agenda in the coming months. But the same qualities that today look so valuable may one day become an albatross. The Clintonites were at home with chaos, which was a good thing, given how much of it they created. But some chaos is inevitable, and it demands an ability to entertain new, even heretical ideas and to improvise--something the organization men have spent their lifetimes learning not to do.
f the Clintonites had a manifesto that defined their sense of themselves, it was Robert Reich's 1991 book The Work of Nations. A professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Reich was the quintessential Friend of Bill. He had studied with Clinton at Oxford and Yale Law School, and the two seemed to meld minds. The New York Times detailed how "large parts of Mr. Clinton's Putting People First economic program seemed to be plucked" straight from Reich's book. Both works described an America struggling to adapt to a transformed economic reality.
In his book, Reich identifies a heroic figure who can save the American economy in the postindustrial age. He is, in Reich's phrase, "the symbolic analyst." At first glance, the symbolic analyst is an unlikely savior. He is a bit of a geek-- a lawyer, journalist, management consultant, stockbroker, academic, or software designer. He is anyone who can "simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists and then, eventually, transformed back into reality." Or, without the jargon: The symbolic analyst is a member of the brainy elite that has profited from the new information economy. He is "skeptical, curious and creative"--the opposite of a stodgy corporate CEO. Salvation, Reich argues, lies in cultivating these symbolic analysts. The government must educate more of them. It should even subsidize the ones it has. Clinton subsidized symbolic analysts in the most direct way possible: He employed them. The Clinton administration was stocked with management consultants (Ira Magaziner, Susan Rice), academics (Lawrence Summers, Laura Tyson, Donna Shalala), investment bankers (Robert Rubin, Erskine Bowles), journalists (Strobe Talbott), and lawyers (practically everyone else). Guided by a parade of theorists--Amitai Etzioni, William Galston, David Osborne, Michael Lerner--the Clintonites set out to solve America's problems by thinking smarter thoughts than anyone before them.
Almost immediately, the project went awry. While the Clintonites saw themselves as gloriously democratic, they struck observers as deeply insular. Writing in these pages, Jacob Weisberg called it "Clincest"--the administration was enclosed within an arrogant clique of interconnected Rhodes scholars, Yale Law grads, and elite journalists. "The Clinton circle has a pronounced class consciousness that tells them they're not just lucky to be here," Weisberg wrote. "They're running things because they're the best." In 1993, the historian Stephen Ambrose said of Clinton, "I don't know anyone who's gone so far appointing friends and cronies since Warren G. Harding."
The hubris was best reflected, of course, in health care reform. Under the stewardship of Ira Magaziner--who wrote a book on industrial policy with Reich, his fellow Rhodie--the symbolic analysts went to work designing a solution to one of America's most entrenched social problems. Five hundred eleven wonks conceived a 1,342-page plan for reconstructing 14 percent of the economy. Toiling in closed-door conference rooms, Magaziner's wonk army was supposed to produce an utterly rational system--uncorrupted by the dirty, stupid, selfish world of politicians and interest groups. And, indeed, Magaziner produced a health care plan that was thoroughly rational; it was also mind-numbingly complex, hopelessly bureaucratic, and the product of an undemocratic process. And it almost ruined Clinton's first term. ithin two years of Clinton's election, his cadre of meritocrats had produced one of the most ferocious right-wing populist backlashes in modern American history. Newt Gingrich railed against Washington's "corrupt elite." Bob Dole called the new administration "a corps of the elite who ... never did anything real."
What the Clintonites called meritocracy conservatives had long called "the New Class": a cadre of elites educated in the 1960s who had inherited the Protestant establishment's institutions while waging war on its values. Viewed from the right, the Clintonites exhibited all the evils of intellectuals: a love of abstraction, a hostility to tradition and order, a predilection for social engineering.
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