The Entitled Under Attack

Here are two articles, about completely different topics, but which struck me as having a common theme.

The first is this. It's an enjoyable piece by Caitlin Flanagan dealing with the American university entrance cheating scandal: Flanagan once worked at a posh Los Angeles school with children of the kind who feature in the scandal.

The second is this. It's Giles Fraser continuing his controversial thoughts on Brexit, this time responding to a point Will Self made about listening.

As I say, two completely different stories. So what is the common theme?

Entitlement - and the wrath of the entitled when scorned.

From Flanagan's piece: "These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them. They pay thousands and thousands of dollars for untimed testing and private counselors; they scour lists of board members at colleges, looking for any possible connections; they pay for enhancing summer programs that only underscore their children’s privilege. And—as poor whites did in the years leading up to 2016—they complain about it endlessly. At every parent coffee, silent auction, dinner party, Clippers game, book club, and wine tasting, someone is bitching about admissions. And some of these parents, it turns out, haven’t just been bitching; some of them decided to go MAGA."

From Fraser's: "The Brexit debate can be characterised, without too much deformation, as one between a group of people who are used to being listened to and a group who are not. The Remain heartlands are in London, and university towns like Oxford and Cambridge. These places were most enthusiastic in signing up to the petition to cancel Article 50. They are used to being listened to. ... Pin your ears back. In 2016, the clear majority of those who spoke asked to leave the EU. Yet ever since, the political class have pretended not to understand, thus insinuating that what was said was itself unclear. It wasn’t unclear, they just didn’t like it. And so what we need now is not more coffee and chat. We need a whole new political class." (See also this, polite comments by Rob Ford in reaction to more overt signs of Brexit Derangement Syndrome on the part of Jolyon Maugham.)

Still, those entitled people will probably be OK. The abolition of slavery in the southern states of the US was a massive blow to the wealth of the wealthiest (must of which was held in the form of slaves). But within 10 years, they had bounced back. I'm sure that Remainers and doting parents of the coddled mediocre will bounce back too.