David Brooks takes on Elitism.

Nobody does elitism right any more decries David Brooks in todays NY Times Op-Ed where he wistfully pines for the great old days of Waspy (read lilly white) domination of our nation.

I remember working with Specialist firms on the New York Stock Exchange.  These firms had a monopoly on making bid and offer markets for NYSE listed stocks.  With this monopoly the Specialists would siphon off huge amounts of cash from investors while taking very little risk themselves.  Because of this privileged position, these firms would be willing to stand in and buy when the market was tanking (up to a point).  Why let the game blow up when you know you can make it all back and more when things stabilize?  In other words, the monopolist has a vested interest in keeping the rigged game rigged and is willing to pay off on the odd occasion where the system is threatened.

That is exactly the problem with the old Wasp elite.  They were not more ethical or moral, they simply knew that it was in their own interest not to kill the golden goose.  Stability was their birthright.  The current "meritocracy" that Brooks discusses is an entirely different world.  In the first place, it is hardly a meritocracy.  The same advantages of wealth and access exist as before, it is just that overall the system is vastly less secure and so the elite have less of a handle on what they need to risk in order to maintain it.
 
The people who get ahead in this system know that their status can be taken away from them as quickly as they got it.  While they delude themselves into believing that their innate cognitive abilities and effort got them this far, in fact they are not secure in the way that the old Wasps were.  They have adopted a fatalistic throw away view of the future that leads them to try and score quick because the rules may change.