I think Szalai had the chance to read Edmund Morris's "Edison" and that may be the example of exactly the kind of elite Deneen wants. Edison and the American pure science establishment lived essentially in mutual contempt and for all his flood of invention and grand ventures like the "Ogden Baby" that got overtaken by the market he never really invented anything that he couldn't sell to a broad audience.
I read the Jennifer Szalai review and that profile in that order and even told spouse after the review that I was upset because it appeared that I could have written that book better than Deneen seemed to. (I would have developed the idea that with all due respect to "creators must do whatever seems best to them" democratic societies run on elites that are accountable to groups that are broader than a small elite and are responsible for maintaining common democratic values and structures from the past. Democratic elites do not necessarily all have to have the genius of Hamilton.) I was calmed by the profile because if a) the Princeton politics department wanted him to have tenure he had the capacity to write a decent book about these ideas and b) the willingness to trade off some identity-based freedoms for greater labor power is not a necessarily conservative idea.
Deneen, or to the average American:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7NTVyVeT4g
I think Szalai had the chance to read Edmund Morris's "Edison" and that may be the example of exactly the kind of elite Deneen wants. Edison and the American pure science establishment lived essentially in mutual contempt and for all his flood of invention and grand ventures like the "Ogden Baby" that got overtaken by the market he never really invented anything that he couldn't sell to a broad audience.
I read the Jennifer Szalai review and that profile in that order and even told spouse after the review that I was upset because it appeared that I could have written that book better than Deneen seemed to. (I would have developed the idea that with all due respect to "creators must do whatever seems best to them" democratic societies run on elites that are accountable to groups that are broader than a small elite and are responsible for maintaining common democratic values and structures from the past. Democratic elites do not necessarily all have to have the genius of Hamilton.) I was calmed by the profile because if a) the Princeton politics department wanted him to have tenure he had the capacity to write a decent book about these ideas and b) the willingness to trade off some identity-based freedoms for greater labor power is not a necessarily conservative idea.
Maybe it’s the Oppenheimer/Teller difference: the underlying physics were the same but their social perspectives differed.