Fighting Fire with Fire; The Need for a Counter-Elite! By James Reed

Given that elites will arise in any society because people are not equal but substantially differ in abilities, and the ordinary people are just … well … ordinary … there needs to be a meta-political strategy to counter what the evil globalist elites are doing, which is a planned destruction of Western civilisation. These monsters now control the nerve centres of society, such as the universities, and the education system from the ground up. Thus, there are no intellectuals left in any Australian university opposing say, the Great White Replacement by mass immigration, although back in the 1980s, with the Blainey debate about Asianisation, that was not so, there were a few voices.

To oppose these institutions parallel ones must be set up. Thus, to counter the universities, thinkers and dissent intellectuals who are not in the academy, need to be supported, which is the foundation of a counter-elite. This requires a movement, rather than a spontaneous uprising, as was seen in the UK protests. And that in turn requires an organisation which can serve as a resistance, and supply funding for dissent thinkers. The extreme weakness of conservative movements is a general meanness with money; witness the Left who always come up with funding, from the likes of Soros; no tight purse there! An example from Soros is needed for the conservative movement.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/08/12/an-elite-needs-a-counter-elite/

"The events of the last week have confirmed the fears of many people that the next five years are going to see a progressive elite, already dominant across all major sectors and institutions of our society, insinuate its views ever more deeply into the national psyche contrary to the wishes of the majority of the population. There will be a doubling down on identity politics, the state will extend its tentacles even further into people's lives, the autonomy of our nation state will be undermined, the school curriculum will be turned upside down, and, most worryingly of all, our freedom to express our views about some of these developments will be under assault from an elite that appears not to value free speech.

Is there anything we can do to keep this progressive elite in check, or are we faced with an unstoppable juggernaut to which, not for the first time, we will simply have to bend the knee?

The Inevitability and Necessity of Elites

Writing in the first half of the 20th Century, the Italian sociologists Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto argued that whatever form societies took, they would all be led by a minority ruling class and that it was this class that would largely determine the history of that society. Michels called this "the iron law of oligarchy". Despite their realism about the inevitability of oligarchies, all were keen that ruling elites should respect the liberties of their fellow citizens. The challenge was to find ways of ensuring that the oligarchical rule to which we are all going to be subjected would be as respectful of the general interest as possible.

One way of doing this might be through education. They were cynical, however, about whether some kind of education in civic virtue would do much to induce elites to act against their own interests. They would certainly not have agreed with a recent book which saw education as "the primary determiner of the future of society".

Avoiding the Emergence of a Hereditary Meritocracy

Pareto was particularly hard-nosed about the measures needed to keep elites in check. In his opinion, two approaches are necessary. First, an elite should be self-renewing with continual movement of people both in and out, making the emergence of a hereditary meritocracy less likely. Second, an elite needed a counter-elite sufficiently influential to force it constantly to re-examine itself.

Back in 2017, David Goodhart's The Road to Somewhere had already pointed to the risks of the development of a hereditary meritocracy with the 20% of "Anywheres" – "the highly educated and mobile (minority) who… comfortably surf social change" – ensuring that the benefits the graduate ruling class had acquired were passed on to their children. It is true that more people from what Goodhart called the "Somewheres" – the socially conservative and largely non-graduate majority – now go on to higher education and then into elite roles, but there are many parts of the country and large sections of the population so poorly represented in government and in leading institutions that the gulf between them and those with power and influence is massive. These are the areas that people were promised in 2019 would be 'levelled up', but which have little to show for the past five years and little hope that the next five, under the shadow of the country's Net Zero 2050 plans, will see anything better.

Inequalities in Educational Attainment: What the EBacc Data Show Us

Some of the data that indicate most clearly where the future English elite is likely to come from (and is currently located) are the scores for the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), a performance measure showing the proportion of pupils who, at 16, have obtained a GCSE Grade 5 or above in five of the most important and academically demanding GCSE subjects. Successful completion of the EBacc is an indication that a pupil has a strong academic foundation on which to base further study. Not all pupils are entered for it, and less than a quarter attain it. Success greatly increases one's chances of going on to get good results at A Level, participating in higher education and then landing a good job. Success in the EBacc is one of the strongest indications of whether a young person is en route to ultimate membership of our elite.

What the 2022 EBacc data (published in August 2023) show is that getting on to this academic track is proving much more difficult for boys – who have a 34% EBacc entry rate and 17% pass rate – than for girls – a 44% entry rate and 24% pass rate. It is also proving more difficult for white British candidates – a 34% entry rate and 18% pass rate – than for Asian candidates – a 51% entry rate and 28% pass rate. One of the striking features of the data is that far fewer white candidates are even following a curriculum that allows them to be entered for the English Baccalaureate: 34% compared with an entry rate of 47% for black candidates whose pass rate, at 20%, is only slightly higher than that of white candidates.

More striking still are the geographical discrepancies. The pass rate for England overall was 20% – 17% for boys and 24% for girls. The overall London pass rate, by contrast, was 29%, with some London boroughs having stunning results – Hackney 32%, Barnet 38%, Hammersmith 41%. Many other parts of the country, particularly in the Midlands, the North and some rural areas in the South (for example, Cornwall at 13%), were hugely below the average pass rate of 20%. These areas also show even wider gaps between boys and girls than the national average.

Many of the places where there were recent violent disturbances have among the lowest pass rates in the table: Blackpool 6%, Stoke-on-Trent 10% (13.2% girls, 6.8% boys), Rotherham 11%, Middlesbrough 12%, Bolton 16%, Liverpool 17%, the North West as a whole 17%, Manchester 18%, the North East as a whole 18%, Sunderland 19.2% (girls 24.4%, boys 14%).

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that very few young people from these backgrounds end up following the path that leads to membership of the elite, or that, in the absence of such people, our current elite has proved itself so tone deaf to the possible existence of underlying causes behind the recent violent disturbances in these parts of the country. Goodhart highlighted how Anywheres at times governed in their own class interests in areas such as family policy, immigration and the prioritisation of educational expenditure. The resources poured into metropolitan education that made the above EBacc results possible are a prime example of this.

The Case for a Counter-Elite

Pareto's second approach to keeping an elite vigilant and ensuring that it is responsive to the needs of citizens and reflective about its own plans and performance is to ensure that, alongside every elite, there is a counter-elite. Duties apply to both parties: on the counter-elite to try to empathise with the position of the ruling elite and to give credit where credit is due, and on the elite to provide space for the counter-elite to express itself – in other words, to guarantee the freedom of expression without which debate between sets of ideas – between the elite and the counter-elite – is never going to lead to any kind of synthesis.

Even more worrying than the Labour Government's policy agenda is its assumption that disturbances are likely to be prompted by people's online posts – that is by words – rather than by grievances and gut feelings that arise from circumstances, and that, therefore, the solution to the unrest is more regulation of speech. The Director of Public Prosecution's menacing and nanny-like warning to the nation to "be mindful of what you are saying", the involvement of the National Security Online Information Team, public speculation about reintroducing the 'legal but harmful' section removed from the Online Safety Act – none of this augurs well.

The good news is that the informal counter-elite in the U.K. is in a stronger position than it was a few years ago, with a TV channel, GB News, which allows legitimate views to be expressed that would never find their way onto a BBC programme; with sites like the Daily Sceptic, Spiked, and UnHerd; organisations like The Academy of Ideas and the Free Speech Union; and a growing range of Substack accounts operating without the risk of arbitrary closure. It is because all of this is thriving that the defenders of radical progressive orthodoxy on issues such as immigration have become increasingly shrill, demanding – not for the first time – the immediate shutdown of GB News.

Even if, in due course, a political party or parties emerge to challenge the radical progressive, technocratic elite head-on – and it seems some way off at the moment – this nascent counter-elite, in all its diversity, looks set to continue playing the kind of role that the Italian sociologists I have been reading envisaged for it."