Christopher L. Hayes > Quotes

“This is the cycle of a dynamic society. Equality is never a final state, democracy never a stable equilibrium: they are processes, they are struggles. Our task is now to recognize that that struggle is ours.”
― Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“We ask the education system to expiate the sins of the rest of the society and then condemn it as hopelessly broken when it doesn't prove up to the task.”
― Christopher Hayes

“There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there's a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler's head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“At its most basic, the logic of 'meritocracy' is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greates responsibility and import...But my central contention is that our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable. Sociologist Jermole Karabel, whose work looks at elite formation, once said he 'didnt think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition' as the United States. This is our central problem. And my proposed solution for correcting the excesses of our extreme version of meritocracy is quite simple: make America more equal”
― Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“Despite the fact nonwhite people are disproportionately the victims of crime, the criminal justice system as a whole is disproportionately built on the emotional foundation of white fear. But then, that isn’t surprising. American history is the story of white fear, of the constant violent impulses it produces and the management and ordering of those impulses. White fear keeps the citizens of the Nation wary of the Colony, and fuels their desire to keep it separate.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“The first commendment of hte post 1970s meritocracy can be sumed up as follows: "Thou shall provide equality of opportunity to all, regardless of race, gender, or sexual oritentation, but worry not about equality of outcomes." But what we've seen time and time again is that the two aren't so neatly separated. If you don't concern yourself at all with equality fo outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish.”
― Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“As inequality has grown, as its negative consequences have become harder and harder to ignore, our response has been to put more and more weight on the educational system, to look to school reform as the means of closing the 'achievement gap' and of guaranteeing the increasingly illusory promise of equal opportunity. We ask the education system to expiate the sins of the rest of the society and then condemn it as hopelessly broken when it doesn't prove up to the task.”
― Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“We can have a just society whose guiding ethos is accountability and punishment, where both black kids dealing weed in Harlem and investment bankers peddling fraudulent securities on Wall Street are forced to pay for their crimes, or we can have a just society whose guiding ethos is forgiveness and second chances, one in which both Wall Street banks and foreclosed households are bailed out, in which both inside traders and street felons are allowed to rejoin polite society with the full privileges of citizenship intact. But we cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“1 in every 28 children in the United States—more than 3.6 percent—now has a parent in jail or prison. Just 25 years ago, the figure was only 1 in 125. For black children, incarceration is an especially common family circumstance. More than 1 in 9 black children have a parent in prison or jail, a rate that has more than quadrupled in the past 25 years.”57 Not”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“There’s an old saying,” retired NYPD cop turned author Steve Osborne once told me, “that in police work, a cop ` s mouth is his greatest weapon. To go into a chaotic situation where everybody is yelling and screaming, sometimes there ` s alcohol, there ` s drugs involved—to be able to talk everybody down. When you see a real experienced cop do that, it’s a magical thing.” But as true as that is, the fact is that most cops are going to encounter these scenarios with little more training than I did—and I talk for a living! The typical cadet training involves sixty hours on how to use a gun and fifty-one hours on defensive tactics, but just eight hours on how to calm situations without force.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“The Thanksgiving tradition we celebrate today with a feast actually commemorates a betrayal that happened two years after the first arrival of the colonists. In 1622, Myles Standish, an English military officer working for the Pilgrims, heard that Indians planned to raid the newly established white settlement of Wessagussett. Standish organized a militia to repel the attack, but no Indians appeared. So he decided to preemptively attack by luring two Indians to Wessagussett under the pretense of sharing a meal. When they entered the house, Standish and his men killed them.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“with the exception of England, every other industrialized democracy has higher levels of income equality than the United States. Data from the OECD shows one consistent, general principle: The higher the taxes in a given country, the less inequality. This makes obvious and intuitive sense. Taxation is the primary method for redistribution, and as a general rule, the more taxation, the more redistribution; the more redistribution, the more equality. The United States collects a far smaller share of the national income in taxes than nearly every other industrialized democracy, and in recent years that rate has been dropping. Total tax revenue as percentage of GDP in the United States is at 24.8 percent, down from 29.5 percent in 2000. You can compare that to Denmark, which has the highest level of tax revenue as a percentage of GDP (48.2 percent) and the most equality out of any OECD country.15 Over the last thirty years or so we’ve seen rising inequality in pre-tax income, which means that before the government even starts its taxing, spending, and redistribution, there has been a profound and accelerating gap between high income earners and everyone else. The rich are earning more, while the non-rich’s earnings stagnate or decline. But these pre-tax earnings are run through the redistributive mechanisms of the state. And during the same time that pre-tax inequality has been growing, our tax system has grown less redistributive, further amplifying inequality rather than mitigating it. This”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“one of the best ways to predict a student’s SAT score is to look at his parents’ income: the more money they make, the higher the score is likely to be.13”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“So even as the meritocracy produces failing, distrusted institutions, massive inequality, and an increasingly detached elite, it also produces a set of very powerful and influential leaders who hold it in high regard.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible….Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“Accountability” is the word the comes up most in conversations with the new insurrectionist activists. We cannot achieve equality without first achieving some measure of accountability for those at the top.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“Imagine a weary sailor coming home to port in the midst of a brutal storm. Along the horizon he sees the burning lights of dozens of lighthouses. And yet he knows from experience that some are so old they've receded miles inland as the shore has grown. Others are simply fakes, put out by sadists and rivals. To be a citizen in these strange times is to perpetually find oneself in that poor sailor's perilous state. We know that danger lurks in the darkness, but we don't know if we have the means to avoid it.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“In addition to the authoritarian threat, there is another insidious possibility: that endemic elite failure will prompt the populace to retreat into denialism. As distrust spreads from institution to institution like a contagion, it can render the entire social structure of publicly accessible knowledge unusable. If the experts as a whole are discredited, we are faced with an inexhaustible supply of quackery. To”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“Bush paid into the myth that education will level the playing field.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“In the second stage, once those who oppose the status quo succeed in weakening the authority of the existing order, they are able to bring about new social and legal structures that actually reduce its power.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“Our task now is to recognize that that struggle is ours.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“Between the 1970s and early 2000, the ratio of the pay of the top 10 percent of CEOs to those in the middle doubled from two to four.14 Not only that, but CEOs even pulled away from their own deputies. A 2006 study found that the ratio of CEO pay to the average of the next two most highly compensated employees of the firm also almost doubled during the period between 1980 and 2005.15 In”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“Mills surveyed a postwar landscape in which Mass Man had been successfully alienated from the actual levers of power in the society. As institutions grew larger, and war and governance more complex, a subclass of men that Mills dubbed the “Power Elite” exerted more and more control over the nation’s pillar institutions. “Insofar”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“As American society grows more elitist, it produces a worse caliber of elites. The”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“The cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and inside Pakistan total more than a trillion dollars over the past decade, which would be enough money to pay the inflation-adjusted cost of Roosevelt’s New Deal twice over—or ten times the amount of the Marshall Plan.29 But more brutal are the human costs: more than 6,000 Americans have been killed in action, and another 2,000 have taken their own lives while serving or after completing service. More than 47,000 troops have been wounded, and 1,400 have had a limb amputated.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“The meritocracy offered liberation from the unjust hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation, but swapped in their place a new hierarchy based on the notion that people are deeply unequal in ability and drive.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds—steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence—produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“Pew’s Economic Mobility Project reports, “Germany is 1.5 times more mobile than the United States, Canada nearly 2.5 times more mobile, and Denmark 3 times more mobile.”58 They find that the only other country with similarly low levels of mobility is our sibling in meritocracy, the birthplace of the word itself, the United Kingdom. And”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“We have increased total defense expenditures by 83 percent from 2000 to 2010, and our war in Afghanistan is now longer than World War II. In”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy