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America after Meritocracy
Crown
June 2012
On Sale: June 12, 2012
320 pages
ISBN: 0307720454
EAN: 9780307720450
Kindle: B006OI2BMC
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A powerful and original argument that traces the roots of
our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the
meritocracy. Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and
rage as one institution after another – from Wall
Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate
America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the
weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the
Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust
in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary
citizens and elites lies in tatters. How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites,
Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the
1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of
men and women into power, they learned to embrace the
accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very
top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned
a new American elite--one more prone to failure and
corruption than any that came before it. Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary,
and deep historical understanding, Twilight of the
Elites describes how the society we have come to inhabit
– utterly forgiving at the top and relentlessly punitive at
the bottom – produces leaders who are out of touch with the
people they have been trusted to govern. Hayes argues that
the public's failure to trust the federal government,
corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of
authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but
our day-to-day lives. Upending well-worn ideological and partisan categories,
Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times.
Twilight of the Elites is the defining work of social
criticism for the post-bailout age.
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