While Herrnstein and Murray believed firmly in genetic inequality, which, they argued, both explained and justified social and economic inequality, they also vigorously supported political equality; indeed, they suggested that humans could not be equal “in any other sense.” Citing the beliefs of the founding fathers as support, they asserted that “the best government was one that most efficiently brought the natural aristocracy to high positions.” And they expressed confidence that the “common people” had the good sense to choose what Madison called “men of virtue and wisdom” to govern—that is, those members of the cognitive elite prepared for such a role by their natural ability and their broad education in “history, literature, arts, ethics, and the sciences.” The great majority of citizens—that 95 percent not as intelligent as the cognitive elite—might not possess the right characteristics for the governing class, but, according to The Bell Curve, they could be counted on to recognize those who did.1

In 2016, the Democratic Party nominated a candidate for President whose background as an epitomical member of the cognitive elite closely matched The Bell Curve’s description of the natural aristocrat destined for political leadership. Graduate of a prestigious liberal arts college where she received the institution’s highest academic honor, the first student ever to address the school’s commencement—a speech covered by the New York Times and reprinted in Life Magazine—research assistant for the House Republican caucus the summer before her senior year, both research assistant for a seminal text on child custody and a volunteer providing legal services to the poor while completing her law degree at Yale, author of a highly cited article on children’s rights in Harvard Educational Review, all before going on to serve as First Lady, Senator from New York, and Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton would seem to embody that combination of “education of a particular kind” and commitment to public service which, according to Herrnstein and Murray, marked her as fit to govern.2 Whatever her undeniable shortcomings—the sense of political calculation that seemed to inform so many of her decisions, the careless treatment of her emails, the questionable futures contracts that paid off so handsomely, the inept public statements after the Benghazi attack—they would seem to pale in comparison with the flaws of her opponent: a notoriously thin-skinned, narcissistic, louche, reality-television host and shady real-estate wheeler-dealer in his third marriage with a penchant for childish, petty insults, a history of half a dozen bankruptcies despite having inherited more than 400 million dollars from his father, and a well-documented record for swindling people; in addition, Donald Trump had been sued thousands of times, insulted war heroes, mocked the disabled, attributed a hostile question from a journalist to her menstrual period, bragged of sexually assaulting women and barging into the dressing rooms of teen-age beauty pageants to leer at the contestants, referred to avoiding sexually transmitted diseases as his personal equivalent of Vietnam, and, in probably the crassest moment in the history of presidential politics, actually touted the size of his penis in a debate with other Republican hopefuls. Hillary Clinton enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as a policy wonk; before announcing his candidacy for the nation’s highest office, Donald Trump had no record of public service, and his main involvement in any issue of public or political significance was to spearhead the campaign to delegitimize the first African-American President. From The Bell Curve’s viewpoint, the outcome of the election was startling to say the least.

Trump’s victory clearly had little to do with either a coherent ideology or an enduring set of principles or policies, mainly because he had no firmly held beliefs of any kind, typically favoring whatever seemed most beneficial to his self-interest at a particular moment; basking in the adulation of the crowds at his rallies seemed to take priority over attachment to any particular substantive position. Over the years, he had changed party affiliation at least five times, ranging from Manhattan liberal, who had donated to the campaigns of Anthony Weiner, Andrew Cuomo, Elliot Spitzer, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, to right-wing zealot, even registering for a couple of years as a member of the Independence Party; pronounced himself “very pro-choice” before embracing the pro-life cause; argued that women should be punished for having an abortion at the same time that he praised Planned Parenthood; advocated for a single-payer universal healthcare system before rejecting it as a government takeover; supported a ban on assault rifles and longer waiting periods for gun purchases before opposing all such measures as a champion of the Second Amendment; had a long history of employing undocumented workers on his building sites and at his golf clubs before making illegal immigration the centerpiece of his candidacy; first supported and then opposed military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, swinging easily, as a group of Republican national security experts pointed out, “from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence”3; had at various times both opposed and supported an increase in the minimum wage, which he first thought should be set by the federal government and then decided should be left to the states; and donated more than one hundred thousand dollars to the Clinton Foundation before denouncing it during a presidential debate as a “criminal enterprise.”

Nor could Trump’s election be attributed to a sense that the nation was experiencing a crisis of some kind or heading in the wrong direction. In the fall of 2016, the United States was undeniably the world’s most powerful nation; by that time, its unemployment rate had returned from the double digits at the height of the Great Recession to just under the five percent figure regarded by many economists as the defining point for “full employment” and the poverty rate was near a historic low; the rate of major crimes—murder, “forcible rape,” robbery, and aggravated assault—was similarly at or near historic lows; and, for all the technical difficulties that plagued the onset of the Affordable Care Act, “Obamacare” had reduced the uninsured share of the population by half. While economic problems certainly remained and should not be minimized—especially the decline of the manufacturing sector and its effect on working families—little at the time could justify Trump’s melodramatic pronouncement of “American carnage.”

The 2016 election split the country in large part across educational lines. According to the statistician Nate Silver’s analysis, Clinton won handily in the fifty most well-educated counties in the nation, while Trump similarly prevailed in the fifty least. In Berkeley, home of the nation’s most prestigious public university, Clinton received ninety percent of the vote, while Trump, with three percent, finished third, behind the Green Party candidate. White men without college degrees voted for the Republican candidate at the highest rate since exit polls began; when Trump famously proclaimed his love for “the poorly educated,” it was not without ample justification. Among journalists, the disparity was unprecedented: of those newspapers and magazines that endorsed one of the major party candidates, 406 chose Clinton, including many traditionally conservative publications that had not preferred a Democrat in decades; 26 supported Trump, only two of which had circulation greater than 100,000. Clinton received endorsements from 77 college newspapers, Trump none. In a geographical reflection of this educational divide, Trump carried those areas well outside the city center that still relied substantially on manufacturing—the blue-collar workers who had constituted the Democratic base half a century earlier—while the Democrats were now what a Stanford political scientist called “the party of urban, postindustrial America.”4

In classic populist fashion, Trump exploited this educational division to create a narrative of conflict between a privileged, parasitic elite, undeserving of its position, and the common folk—between a highly educated but aloof class of people who exercised power to their own advantage as multicultural, global citizens, and the real Americans, a silent majority who sensed instinctively what was right for the country without having to rely on “expert”—i.e., elite—advice. As Trump himself expressed it in the Wall Street Journal six months before his election, “The only antidote to ruinous rule by a small handful of elites is a bold infusion of popular will. On every major issue affecting this country, the people are right and the governing elite are wrong.”5 People in general in this rhetoric were not meant to be synonymous with “the people,” only some of the former qualifying for inclusion in the latter.

Thus, rather than campaigning on any substantive agenda, Trump ran as a representative of an aggrieved minority resentful of the worldview espoused by The Bell Curve, in which differences in intelligence are offered as justification not only for income inequality but for differences in social status. Neither the book nor its remaining author was mentioned during the campaign, and Trump’s frequent reference to the “elite” was never preceded by the word “cognitive”; indeed, given his limited range of information, it is possible that the future president was not even aware of the academic controversy. But it was clear that this notion of an elite—a “natural aristocracy,” as Herrnstein and Murray had put it—entitled by intellect and education to its prerogatives, provided Trump with a foil against which he posed as avatar of the rage of those average people who sensed their exclusion from this favored group; Trump’s policies might not help them, but he hated the same people they did. Instead of recognizing the “hoi aristoi,” as The Bell Curve had predicted, the “common people” apparently resented them, and the fact that Trump’s opponent, clearly considering herself a member of the elite, characterized so many of his supporters as “deplorables” only served to confirm these feelings of resentment on their part.

As an increasingly “woke” society focused its concern on the plight of “marginalized” groups, working-class Whites, who were largely excluded from this sympathetic rubric, were told—despite their undeniable personal struggles, the loss of their manufacturing jobs in a globalized economy, and the consequent decimation of their communities—that they benefitted from a “privilege” based on their skin color. The title of journalist Ben Bradlee Jr.’s book—an in-depth exploration of the thinking of Trump supporters in one Pennsylvania county—accurately summarized its conclusion: “The Forgotten.” In an influential essay on “The Politics of Recognition,” published around the same time as The Bell Curve, the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor maintained that “Due recognition …is a vital human need,” and “misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound.” While Taylor wrote with a different context in mind—“minority … groups, some forms of feminism and what is … called the politics of ‘multiculturalism’”—his analysis seemed particularly appropriate to the Trump campaign’s recognition of working-class, non-college-educated Whites as people whose lives mattered.6 The oxymoronic notion of a populist billionaire became the vehicle for converting their pain into pride.

Of course, it was the liberals who had a lengthy history of overt opposition to Murray’s views, but they did not regard his conclusions as an adverse comment on their own abilities; rather, their outrage reflected indignation at the Platonic rigidity of The Bell Curve’s claim that a genetic characteristic exerted such a determinative effect on a person’s life. For Trump supporters, however, their obvious hostility at any mention of the elite had nothing to do with abstract concepts of a fair society; it was intensely personal. In an obvious allusion to the Godfather’s feckless son, Fredo, the conservative activist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, David Frum, described their thinking as “I’m not dumb, I’m smart, and I want respect.” These were people who knew they were smart, even if not in the same way as those effete country-club smart-asses with their ability to express themselves more articulately and their greater degree of cultural literacy. As the New York Times columnist David Brooks described it, the elites encouraged an image of themselves as “enlightened” people, who had attended “competitive colleges, … have the brainpower to run society and who might just be a little better than other people.” Trump punctured that impression, offering a counternarrative in which these “meritocrats are actually clueless idiots and full of drivel, and … virtue, wisdom and toughness is found in the regular people whom those folks look down upon.”7 The elites in this view might be comfortable handling a nine-iron but were clueless about how to use a tire iron.

Despite his own wealth, Trump was the ideal vessel to channel this sense of grievance, being inclined by both nature and experience to play the victim; “I have been treated very badly” was his mantra both before and after becoming president. Trump had long been looked down on by the elites in his home city as a crass and tasteless arriviste from an outerborough, unwelcome in Manhattan society no matter how much money he had inherited or how many buildings he erected. To begin construction on his eponymous tower he jackhammered the historically significant Art Deco bas-relief sculptures adorning the Bonwit building his tower had replaced, even though the Metropolitan Museum of Art had expressed interest in obtaining them; calling the act “esthetic vandalism,” the New York Times noted that “big buildings do not make big human beings.” Then, shortly after the tower’s opening—with its ostentatious atrium, exclusive shops on the lower floors and luxury condos above, purchased in many cases by celebrities—the Times called it “pretentious,” noting that his critics viewed Trump as “a raving egomaniac” and “a rogue billionaire, loose in the city like some sort of movie monster, unrestrained by the bounds of good taste.” Other New York journalists dismissed him as “a bridge-and-tunnel guy,” whom sophisticated Manhattanites “laughed at” and considered “repulsive.” In perhaps the most personally cutting incident, at a black-tie dinner attended by prominent entertainers and journalists, Trump found himself the object of mockery by the suave and urbane president he would seek to replace. Nor was it only liberal intellectuals who regarded Trump as tacky and boorish. The “Never Trumpers,” prominent conservative members of the cognitive elite originally attracted to the movement by the thought of people like William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol, bristled at the prospect of this yahoo as their standard bearer. George Will, for example, responded to Trump’s announcement of his intent to run by calling him “an unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate” responsible for the “coarsening of civic life.”8 Trump knew what it felt like to be dismissed as an uncultured rube and, even though extremely rich, could identify with that sense of resentment felt by the adoring crowds that flocked to his campaign events, eager to give the finger to the cognitive elite; their grievances were his grievances.

This conflict between the elites and the common people became a central theme of both the Trump campaign and the Trump administration, regularly invoked at the rallies held by the President both before and after his election. In a typical riff, Trump derided the “people they call the elite” as “stone cold losers,” declaring that “I have a better education than them. I’m smarter than them. I went to the best schools. … Much more beautiful house, much more beautiful apartment, much more beautiful everything. And I’m President, and they’re not.” It was his supporters, the people at his rally, Trump proclaimed, who truly merited the designation: “You’re smarter,” he told them; “You’re sharper. You’re more loyal. You’re the elite. We’re the elite.” And when he called on them to defend “your dignity” and take back “your country,” no doubt existed about the identity of the villains who were responsible for the assault on their dignity and had usurped control of the nation from its rightful owners: it was the people The Bell Curve had labeled the “cognitive elite.”9

Thus, the political irony: although Murray, a prominent fellow at one of the centers of conservative thought, was despised by progressives for his unrelenting opposition to programs of government support as well as his conclusions about racial differences in intelligence, nevertheless Trump ran as essentially the anti-Murray. The Bell Curve had argued that the cognitive elite rose to their appropriate position at the top of the class structure and in the halls of power because they are smarter than others; Trump reassured those who had been left behind that they struggled not because they lacked intelligence because they had been betrayed by the people with the high IQs. That this tactic proved successful should perhaps not be surprising. The meritocratic elite, whose wisdom informed policy, had instituted the financial rules that led to the Great Recession, presided over the global flow of capital that had decimated so much of American manufacturing, and provided the rationale for blundering into one disastrous campaign after another for regime change in the Middle East. When candidate Trump famously responded to a question about his policy advisors by announcing that “my primary consultant is myself,” it didn’t seem all that bizarre in view of the previous decade and a half.

For all his anti-elitist rhetoric, however, Trump generally refrained from attacking the uber-rich together with their corporate and legal enablers, a task that fell to the other populist in the 2016 race: Bernie Sanders, too, presented himself as a champion of the people against the powerful, though he rarely referred to the latter as “elites,” preferring to characterize them as the “millionaires and billionaires,” who had profited from financialization of the economy at everyone else’s expense. In contrast, Trump considered the extraordinarily wealthy his peer group—or at least wished to foster that perception in others. Shortly after the election, Trump announced that “I want people who made a fortune” in the cabinet—he would then appoint the richest cabinet in American history—and a billionaires’ row enjoyed the best seats at the inauguration, sitting onstage with the President. According to an investigation by the political journalist Robert Draper, President Trump “enjoyed being around billionaires”—people that one administrative official described as “superrich guys who wouldn’t give him the time of day” before the election. The new President also “stocked his Intelligence Advisory Board with wealthy businesspeople,” who would discomfit intelligence officials by asking questions related to their business interests; the chair of the Advisory Board, for example, was the co-executive of the private equity firm that owned a major defense contractor with a number of military contracts. And after being lobbied by a number of billionaire investors—Sheldon Adelson, John Paulsen, Thomas Barrack,, and others—Trump pardoned Michael Milken, the junk bond king and 1980s symbol of greed, convicted of various counts of securities and tax fraud.10 After all, these were the kind of people who purchased memberships in Mar-a-Lago, and rented office space and bought condos in his buildings.

Trump’s anti-elitism thus turned out to be highly selective, eschewing criticism of the finance professionals and private equity moguls, whose self-proclaimed brilliance had wreaked such havoc on the economy, and focusing his outrage instead on the knowledge elite, that segment of the cognitive elite that had chosen to pursue careers in the sort of professions crucial to the functioning of a complex, modern society—specialists with deep knowledge in their area. American democracy had long been marked by a distrust of so-called “eggheads” and a belief that the native wisdom of common people was preferable to the unrealistic assessments of intellectuals; when Richard Nixon, as Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952, called Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson an “egghead,” it contributed to the impression that he was out of touch with ordinary citizens. And William F. Buckley, himself an intellectual, famously declared that he would “rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” But this suspicion of educated sophisticates reflected a hostility to the prospect of their political leadership, not the factual information they could provide. In contrast, Trump’s opposition expressed itself as contempt for knowledge; as the Yale historian Beverly Gage observed, “Trump has taken it to a whole new level by not only attacking clueless elites but the entire idea of expertise.” In fact, according to the journalist Michael Lewis, immediately after the election, when the Obama administration organized the traditional briefings designed to ensure a smooth transition of power—for every federal agency a team of 30–40 people from the outgoing president meets with a similar group from the incoming in order to explain the working of the department—“the Trump people weren’t anywhere to be found”; not believing they had anything to learn, they just didn’t show up—not even for the session with the Department of Energy, an agency headed by a nuclear physicist on leave from MIT and charged with responsibility for the nation’s nuclear arsenal.11 Essentially, Trump ran and then governed against those with professional expertise, characterizing them as conspirators threatening the people’s sovereignty.

A study conducted during the run-up to the 2016 election by two political scientists at the University of Minnesota provided empirical support for the appeal of this approach to Trump’s base. A nationally representative sample of more than one thousand adult American citizens responded to a battery of questions about their opinions of the political process, many of the items adapted from survey studies of populism. The responses were subjected to principal components analysis, yielding three uncorrelated dimensions. The first dimension reflected “feelings of marginalization relative to wealth and political power,” characterized by agreement with such statements as “It doesn’t really matter who you vote for because the rich control both political parties”; the authors named it “anti-elitism.” As one would expect, supporters of the two populist candidates scored the highest on this dimension with Sanders’s people slightly ahead of Trump’s; none of the supporters of the other major candidates at the time (Hillary Clinton, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich) came close. The second dimension indicated “a general skepticism of science and expert opinion,” exemplified by agreement with statements such as “I’d rather put my trust in the wisdom of ordinary people than the opinions of experts and intellectuals” and “When it comes to really important questions, scientific facts don’t help very much.” On this dimension, which the authors called “mistrust of expertise,” Trump’s supporters scored the highest and Sanders’s the lowest by a large margin, only Clinton’s supporters coming anywhere near as low. That is, the anti-elitism expressed by Sanders’s supporters was rooted in economic inequality and what they perceived as the resulting political powerlessness, but it was not at all conjoined to the extreme distrust of expertise that characterized the Trump supporters. On the third dimension, “national affiliation,” reflecting a “collectivist ‘American’ identity,” Trump supporters again scored the highest and Sanders supporters the lowest, suggesting a populism that was not only anti-elitist but also ethno-nationalist. Echoing Sarah Palin’s reference during the 2008 campaign to specific parts of the country as “the real America,” this emphasis on a connection to national greatness helped to provide a basis for an otherwise lacking social status.12

Daniel Markovitz, the Yale law professor, sees such pervasive mistrust of expertise as an unavoidable consequence of meritocracy. “Because meritocracy identifies skill and expertise with elites,” he writes, “it condemns middle-class workers who accept the value of knowledge and training to internalizing their own exclusion and degradation,” requiring a rejection of expertise as a form of self-respect. As an expression of this logic, he points out, class resentment is directed not so much at entrepreneurs, even when very wealthy, but at professionals—those members of the cognitive elite whose status is based not on their incomes but on their education and knowledge. As Joan C. Williams, the legal scholar at the University of California Hastings College of Law and founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law, observes, blue-collar workers admire the rich, with whom they have little direct contact, but resent professionals because “professionals order them around every day.”13

Trump transformed this antipathy to professional expertise from rhetoric to reality, especially concerning issues not just involving abstract policy but affecting people’s decisions and behaviors in ways perceived by the President and his supporters as condescending attempts by the cognitive elites to determine how others, presumably less knowledgeable than themselves, should live their lives—decrees by sheltered academics and bureaucratic smart-asses about what kind of straws and light bulbs people must use; the economist Paul Krugman calls such opposition “regulation rage,” coming from people who “don’t feel respected, and who see even mild restrictions on their actions as insults perpetrated by elites who consider themselves smarter than other people.”14 It was no accident that so many Trump supporters chose as their emblem the Gadsden flag, its “Don’t tread on me” motto an announcement of their refusal to submit to illegitimate authority.

Nowhere did this rejection of professional expertise have more impact than Trump’s response to the novel coronavirus, which he treated as a wedge issue, providing another opportunity to attack elites. The President refused to endorse wholeheartedly the behavioral recommendations from public health officials designed to minimize the virus, instead offering encouragement to those supporters who chose to flaunt their disregard of these measures. But, just as Krugman had noted, this opposition was informed, not so much by a sense that the directives—to wear a mask, to avoid unnecessary travel, etc.—were ineffective, but rather by resentment at the presumptuousness, the effrontery, of the elites who assumed they could tell others how to behave. The voices on Fox News regularly echoed the anger of Trump’s supporters at being told what to do. Tucker Carlson, for example, host of the most watched program in the history of cable news as of the end of 2020, referred contemptuously to the lead member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force as “Lord Fauci” and told his viewers that the doctor’s “strategy” was to “keep ordering you around like an animal” so that you wouldn’t notice that he was “totally incompetent.” Before the 2020 holiday season, Fauci regularly appeared on television, pleading with people to stay home and avoid interaction with those outside their immediate household. “We hope you ignore that advice,” Carlson bluntly told his viewers. It wasn’t about the pandemic, he insisted; it was about “social control.” The goal of the elites, he declared, was to make it “a crime to live a normal life.” Especially for those struggling economically, resistance, first to the covid restrictions urged by scientists, and then to vaccination signified personal dignity and independence; after all, if expertise is tyranny, then the refusal to abide by its pronouncements becomes a declaration of freedom.

Although this hostility to expertise associated with elites exerted a particularly harmful effect on personal responses to the coronavirus, it also played a less noticed role in the strange subordination of data to the Trump administration’s wishful thinking. That is, the normal sequence, in which statements are based on evidence, was reversed, requiring that the latter be manufactured to provide support for Trump’s preference for the former; if those with expertise refused to compromise their integrity to produce the desired result, others without qualifications were solicited. For example, when the model created by epidemiologists projected a number of deaths from the coronavirus considered “too catastrophic,” someone in Jared Kushner’s office with a background in finance was ordered to create an alternative, receiving explicit instructions for the obligatory conclusion: “They [the epidemiologists] think 250,000 people could die” and this model should “show that fewer than 100,000 people will die in the worst case scenario,” the finance specialist was told. Public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were ordered to rewrite guidelines for reopening schools that Trump found too stringent, and when the President decided that extensive testing was resulting in too many cases of the virus, the CDC issued new testing guidelines, not written by agency scientists but imposed from above, that were called alarming and dangerous by medical experts. In a joint statement, four prior directors of the CDC, having served under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, referred to “these repeated efforts to subvert sound public health guidelines” as “putting lives at risk”; they could “not recall over our collective tenure a single time when political pressure led to a change in the interpretation of scientific evidence.” Perhaps worst of all, senior CDC officials complained that the agency’s most highly respected publication on infectious disease, “The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports,” was being turned into “a political loyalty test, with career scientists framed as adversaries of the administration.”15

Prominent scientists disinclined to affirm Trump’s erroneous assertions quickly found their role diminished in favor of more politically reliable spokespersons, characterized by an editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine—in a departure from its two-century-long practice of refraining from political comment—as “charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.” (Scientific American, too, broke its 175-year tradition of political neutrality and endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, noting that Trump’s “rejection of evidence and public health measures have been catastrophic.”) One of the country’s premier experts on vaccine development, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (the Department of Health and Human Service office responsible for medical countermeasures against bioterrorism and pandemic diseases) was fired after opposing the funding for what he described as “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections and by the administration itself.” And when the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases warned of severe disruption to everyday life during a White House press briefing, she was replaced by scientists who could be relied on to phrase their assessments with less candor.16 It was as if a pilot warned that Air Force One was unsafe and the President insisted on a different pilot; elites with expertise were welcome in the Trump administration only if they would tell the President what he already wanted to believe.

Murray himself emerged as one of Trump’s harshest critics, appalled that “we should have a malignant, narcissist grifter with dementia in the presidency,” though the blame for the election of such an unfit individual to the nation’s highest office he now placed squarely on the same group that he had once pronounced certain to “lead the country no matter what”: the cognitive elite. In Murray’s account of the process that had led to their culpability, when “the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities,” which had once been the province of “bluebloods and the wealthy,” were opened to “youth from all backgrounds” who could demonstrate “talent, pluck and hard work,” the new policy did not produce the “socioeconomic democratization” he had expected. At first, some young people not from privileged backgrounds benefited from such opportunities, he noted, but this “phase lasted only a generation or two,” as these supersmart youth of both sexes, segregated from the less capable and destined for economic success in a society in which “brains have become radically more valuable in the marketplace,” married each other, thereby “combining their large incomes and genius genes” to “produce offspring who get the benefit of both.” Consequently, “isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans”, this genetically favored group developed “a distinctive culture,” differing substantially from the majority of their fellow citizens—in “the food they eat, the way they take care of their health, their child-rearing practices, the vacations they take, the books they read, the websites they visit”—and resulting in their “condescension toward,” and even “contempt for ordinary Americans.”17

It was this arrogance on the part of the cognitive elite that Trump had successfully campaigned against, Murray argued, apparently oblivious to the role that his own work had played in fostering the syndrome he now condemned. The Bell Curve had described how, more than a quarter century before Trump’s candidacy, the cognitive elite—the “cream floating on the surface of American society”—had begun to constitute its own class, the members of which had little in common with their fellow citizens. Herrnstein and Murray then addressed their readers in a chummy style that took for granted that they were all members of this select group; this was clearly a book written by the cognitive elite for the cognitive elite. “Most readers of this book,” they declared, “are in preposterously unlikely groups”: many of their dozen closest friends are not only college graduates but hold advanced degrees—a result less likely than one in a million in a randomly selected group. And then, changing entirely to the second person, they wrote that “You—meaning the self-selected person who has read this far into this book—live in a world that probably looks nothing like” The Bell Curve. “In all likelihood, almost all of your friends and professional associates belong” to the cognitive elite, while those “whom you consider to be unusually slow are probably somewhere in Class II”—the 20 percent of the curve just below the cognitive elite but still well above average. That is, The Bell Curve congratulated its readers on the fact that their social world was so highly selective that even their “unusually slow” friends were smarter than 75 percent of the population. And shortly after publication of The Bell Curve, Murray explained to a journalist that in the past people were poor because of bad luck or social barriers; but now, he declared, “what’s holding them back is that they’re not bright enough to be a physician.”18

Indeed, although Murray clearly sympathized with the common folk’s hostility to what he called the “New Elite,” even his description of the latter’s emergence contained an unsubtle reminder of the former’s shortcomings. After all, if, as he noted, those elite institutions that provided the gateway to success were no longer just the province of the wealthy and the well-connected but now accessible to anyone with the requisite drive and ability, then the implication was unavoidable: others might resent the “people who count” but were excluded from their ranks only by their own intellectual or personal deficiencies. Thus, despite his condemnation of elite snobbery, both The Bell Curve and Murray’s own subsequent pronouncements had helped to lay the groundwork for its existence. If elitist condescension did in fact play a role in Trump’s election, it was an attitude that Murray had done his part to promote. Having earlier helped to poison the well, Murray then sought to present himself as the water inspector.

FormalPara Notes
  1. 1.

    Herrnstein and Murray The Bell Curve, 444, 531.

  2. 2.

    F.M. Hechinger, “Mood of Campus Valedictory Speakers Is Somber,” New York Times, June 15, 1969, 54. “The Class of ’69,” Life Magazine 66 (June 20, 1969): 31. The text on child custody was J. Goldstein, A. Freud and A.J. Solnit, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (New York: Free Press, 1973). H. Rodham, “Children Under the Law,” Harvard Educational Review 43 (1973): 487–514.

  3. 3.

    See the statement “coordinated” by E.A. Cohen and B. McGrath, signed by 122 “members of the Republican national security community,” “Open Letter on Donald Trump from GOP National Security Leaders,” https://warontherocks.com/2016/03/open-letter-on-donald-trump-from-gop-national-security-leaders/.

  4. 4.

    N. Silver, “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump,” FiveThirtyEight, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/. On endorsements, see the Wikipedia entry, “Newspaper Endorsements in the 2016 United States Presidential Election, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election. J.A. Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban–Rural Political Divide (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 42.

  5. 5.

    D.J. Trump, “Let Me Ask America a Question,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2016.

  6. 6.

    B. Bradlee Jr., The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald and Changed America (New York: Little, Brown, 2018). C. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. A. Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25, 26.

  7. 7.

    Frum is quoted in R.P. Saldin and S.M. Teles, Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 175. D. Brooks, “When Politics Becomes Your Idol,” New York Times, October 23, 2017, A23.

  8. 8.

    “Crumbling Patrimony,” New York Times, June 15, 1980, 20E. W.E. Geist, “The Expanding Empire of Donald Trump,” New York Times Magazine, April 8, 1984, 30. See the observations by Lou Colasuonno, former editor of the New York Post and the New York Daily News and by Dan Rather, quoted in M. Kruse, “How Gotham Gave Us Trump,” Politico (July/August 2017), https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/donald-trump-new-york-city-crime-1970s-1980s-215316. G.F. Will, “Donald Trump Is a Counterfeit Republican,” Washington Post, August 12, 2015.

  9. 9.

    Quoted in, for example, B. Cole, “Donald Trump on Liberal Elites: ‘I’m Smarter then Them. I Went to the Best Schools,’ Says He Has ‘A Much More Beautiful House’,” Newsweek. March 29, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-liberal-elites-smarter-schools-beautiful-house-1379578.

  10. 10.

    K.P. Vogel and M. Conway, “Trump on Cabinet: ‘I want people that made a fortune’,” Politico, December 8, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-cabinet-billionaires-fortune-232403. D. Alexander, White House, Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency Into a Business (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020), 65–66. R. Draper, “Unwanted Truths: Inside Trump’s Battles With U.S. Intelligence Agencies,” New York Times Magazine, August 8, 2020, 32. J.B. Stewart and J. Drucker, “Milken’s Ties Spurred Bid for Pardon,” New York Times, March 2, 2020, B1.

  11. 11.

    On Wallace, see T.H. Anderson, “The 1968 Election and the Demise of Liberalism,” South Central Review 34 (2017): 44. Gage is quoted in Quoted in P. Wehner, The Death of Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), 201. M. Lewis, The Fifth Risk (New York: Norton, 2018), 35–37.

  12. 12.

    J.E. Oliver and W.M. Rahn, “Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 667 (2016): 189–206.

  13. 13.

    Markovitz, The Meritocracy Trap, 64. J.C. Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class,” Harvard Business Review (web article), November 10, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class.

  14. 14.

    P. Krugman, “The Roots of Regulation Rage,” New York Times, September 18, 2019.

  15. 15.

    Y. Abutaleb, A. Parker, J. Dawsey and P. Rucker, “The Inside Story of How Trump’s Denial, Mismanagement and Magical Thinking Led to the Pandemic’s Dark Winter,” Washington Post, December 19, 2020. L.H. Sun and J. Dawsey, “CDC Feels Pressure from Trump as Rift Grows Over Coronavirus Response,” Washington Post, July 9, 2020. S.G. Stolberg, “Top U.S. Officials Told C.D.C. to Soften Coronavirus Testing Guidelines,” New York Times, August 27, 2020. T. Frieden, J. Koplan, D. Satcher and R. Besserd, “We Ran the CDC. No President Ever Politicized its Science the Way Trump Does,” Washington Post, July 14, 2020. N. Weiland, S.G. Stolberg and A. Goodnough, “Political Appointees Meddled in CDC’s ‘Holiest of the Holy’ Health Reports,” New York Times, September 12, 2020.

  16. 16.

    “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum,” editorial, New England Journal of Medicine 383 (2020): 1480. “From Fear to Hope,” editorial, Scientific American 323 (2020): 12–13. The Director of BARDA, Rick Bright, is quoted in M/ Goldberg, “We’re All Casualties of Trump’s War on Science,” New York Times, May 11, 2020, 26. G. Lopez, “How Trump Let Covid-19 Win,” Vox, August 24, 2020, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21366624/trump-covid-coronavirus-pandemic-failure.

  17. 17.

    Quoted in Saldin and Teles, Never Trump, 176. C. Murray, “The Tea Party Warns of a New Elite. They’re Right,” Washington Post, October 24, 2010. C. Murray, “Trump’s America,” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2016. J. Miltimore, “Charles Murray Interview: On Trump, the Chaos at Middlebury, and America’s Greatest Threat,” Intellectual Takeout, June 7, 2017, https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/charles-murray-interview-trump-chaos-middlebury-and-americas-greatest-threat/.

  18. 18.

    Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, 47, 121. Murray is quoted in DeParle, “Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?” 48.