Christopher L. Hayes Quotes & Sayings

But political crises, moments when the keystone of authority of some major governing institution is whisked away like a Jenga block, can produce a tumbling cascade of new forms of politics. We've been looking at the tower for so long we forget it's made of blocks; we forget it can be put back together in a different way. Previous crises of authority in America produced not just concerted movements to reform the institutions of the time, but organic bouts of institutional innovation that created fundamentally new ways of coordinating work and life. — Christopher L. Hayes

Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds - steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence - produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect. — Christopher L. Hayes

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

Today, the Power Elite is more geographically concentrated in specific areas. Economist Jamie Galbraith found that if you measured inequality across counties in the United States in the 1990s, half the rise occurred in 5 counties out of 3,150: New York, New York; King County, Washington; and San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo in Northern California.24 — Christopher L. Hayes

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 L. Hayes

As American society grows more elitist, it produces a worse caliber of elites. The — Christopher L. Hayes

People with insecure high self-esteem tend to be insensitive to others and to show an excessive preoccupation with themselves, with success, and with their image and appearance in the eyes of others. This unhealthy high self-esteem is often called "threatened egotism," "insecure high self-esteem," or narcissism.44 At its most extreme, the constant — Christopher L. Hayes

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

The gap between median black family income and median white family income hasn't changed in twenty years," he told me. "That is not a society moving toward equality. It's a society that's reproducing inequality by race."56 — Christopher L. Hayes

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

But disruption as disruption isn't enough. In order to actually effect deep and lasting change, those opposed to the current social order must locate another base of power that can credibly challenge the power of incumbent interests. I think the answer lies in a newly radicalized upper middle class. One — Christopher L. Hayes

it is very often the case in large metro areas that the geographic locations of desirable housing with good school districts are far from the place where there are the best job opportunities. Meanwhile, lack of access to a car is one of the most debilitating aspects of modern poverty, particularly for those in places where public transportation is scarce and unsteady. According to the 2000 census, 8 percent of Americans resided in a household without access to a car, but that number varies widely depending on class and location. Among the poor nationwide, 20 percent live in households that don't have access to a car, and — Christopher L. Hayes

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 L. Hayes

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

What we actually know firsthand is minuscule: the feel of the spring air on our skin, our own private daydreams and phobias. Outside of these tiny warrens of private knowledge, we have to depend on what others say. — Christopher L. Hayes

In this way, more information and more openness can, perversely, feed more mistrust and more wild speculation: The more we know, the more we realize just how in the dark we truly are. — Christopher L. Hayes

Because revelations of systemic deception erode our most basic, default expectation of good faith, they play an outsize role in producing a crisis of authority. Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds - steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence - produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect. Vertigo sets in, similar to that experienced by a spouse who, after decades of what he thought was a happy, loyal marriage, discovers his wife has been cheating all along. Suddenly we realize we live in a world entirely more depraved than the one we thought we inhabited. — Christopher L. Hayes

nearly half of all members of Congress have a net worth north of a million dollars, compared to just one in twenty-two households nationwide.26 Between 1984 and 2009, while the median net worth of American households remained essentially unchanged, the median net worth of members of the House of Representatives rose by 260 percent. Not only did the rich get richer, so did Congress. While — Christopher L. Hayes

We can never be sure just which other business cards are in the pocket of pundit, politician, or professor. We can't be sure, in short, just who our elites are working for. But we suspect it is not us. — Christopher L. Hayes

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

A wide distance between the governors and the governed will produce a state that is predatory toward its own citizens, indifferent to their desires, and subject to the inbred whims and compulsions of its ruling class. It will produce crisis. Countering — Christopher L. Hayes

When recruiting candidates for the House of Representatives, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) looks for aspirants to raise so much money, so early - $250,000 in the first quarter the candidate has declared - that it's almost impossible to do without a massive personal or family bank account. — Christopher L. Hayes

More than one-third of congressional staffers turn to a career in lobbying after leaving Capitol Hill. It's clear the staffer-turned-lobbyist's value to special interests depends on the robustness of his or her network on Capitol Hill. According to an August 2010 study, when a lobbyist's former boss on Capitol Hill left office, the lobbyist's salary declined by an average of 50 percent in the six months following the departure.27 Moving from Capitol Hill to K Street isn't limited to staffers: In 2010, 37 percent of the newly out-of-office members of Congress went to work for lobbying firms or clients. After losing his run for Senate in 2006, Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford Jr. moved to New York to take a job with Merrill Lynch with a guaranteed annual compensation of $2 million. At the time he had no experience in finance. What he was paid for were his networks: — Christopher L. Hayes

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

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

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 L. Hayes

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

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 L. Hayes

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

In 1928, the top 10 percent of earners captured 46 percent of national income. That was the highest share that the top tenth captured for nearly eighty years, until 2007, when we returned to the wealth distribution of the country on the eve of the Great Depression. The top 1 percent did even better. Between 1979 and 2007, nearly 88 percent of the entire economy's income gains went to the top 1 percent.49 One — Christopher L. Hayes

In Parton's telling, the Village is "a permanent D.C. ruling class who has managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth."17 It's not just the activist base of the left and the right who have recognized the widespread elite failure; more and more individual elites have broken ranks to acknowledge their own responsibility. — Christopher L. Hayes