Yes, If You're Talented You Should Probably Go To College
Learning from the French experience
(With apologies for the slow posting pace, as I have been laid down with the flu.)
One point I make often, online and in person, is that France is the only major country I am aware of that has a significant right-wing counter-elite, certainly as compared to the US and the UK, the two cases I am most familiar with.
These things are very hard to quantify, of course, but I would guesstimate that anywhere between 10 and 30% of the top echelons in the military, the civil service, the legal profession, the business world, etc. are some version of “hard right,” often secretly and maybe not so secretly.
To take just one example, while former CIA director Michael Hayden compares Trump supporters to the Taliban, his counterpart, former DGSE director Pierre Brochand is basically spending his entire retirement warning about replacement migration.
I think about this now because it is college admission season in the US, and so we are getting the tragically familiar news of very talented students, disproportionately white males, with excellent GPAs, SATs, extracurriculars, and so on, getting rejected from top schools.
This has launched a round of Discourse on Twitter! These kids should just opt out, get a skilled trade job, and make a lot of money!
Others are saying that this is catastrophic, that it basically consigns young right-wing men to second-class citizen status.
I’m afraid that generally I agree with the latter.
This is deeply unfair, but the fact of the matter is that We Live In A Society, and that this society is divided into a priestly-oligarchic class (college graduates) and everyone else (bottom caste citizens). While there are many exceptions, as a general rule you need a college degree to enter this class. Maybe this will change some day, but we are not there yet—and if this is to change, we will probably need a counter-elite in place to change that through legislation, activism (political or corporate), and so on. There’s a chicken and an egg problem.
It’s also useful to have conceptual clarity. It’s one thing to say “As a general rule, too many people are going to college now” (true), quite another to say “As a general rule, a talented, hard-working, ambitious young white man should opt out of college” (highly debatable at least). It’s one thing to say “It’s possible to make a very good living in a skilled non-college trade” (true), quite another to say “If you don’t go to college and become a plumber, you will surely be a multimillionaire business owner with 50 employers by the time you’re 25” (highly, highly questionable). And to be clear: of course there is nothing wrong in engaging in a trade, and of course there are many talented young men for whom that is the right path.
Nevertheless: since French aristocrats have been pushed out of political power, they have not just organized their romantic lives and marriages, they have also maintained their socioeconomic status through the most boring way possible: doing well in school, and then doing well in their career.
And yes, some went into trades: I have an acquaintance, an aristocrat’s aristocrat, who became quite rich by buying decrepit barns in the South of France, renovating them, sprucing them up with his impeccable French aristocratic taste, and selling them as historic mansions to rich Anglo-Saxons. If you find that kind of niche, more power to you. But the kind of advice that’s being discussed here has to be for the general case. Even my friend’s case can be misleading: he happens to have excellent artistic talent, which helps him tremendously as an interior designer, and which is not the case for everyone; and also, he went into his line of work after finishing law school, a good one where he did well, and which his father, a prominent jurist, insisted he finish. Starting a real estate business is also easier, if only psychologically, when you have a white-collar credential to fall back on if it fails.
Another illustrative evidence are Ashkenazi Jews in the first half of the 20th century in the US: when they got rejected from Harvard and Yale, they did not become plumbers. Instead, they went to City College and excelled anyway.
If the DEI regime persists in the US, talented white men may need to start thinking like a minority. It’s understandable why this should be so counter-intuitive. But there are many historical examples worth pondering.
I've been interpreting the "Don't go to college" mantra as "Don't *automatically* go to college."
If your talents lead you to STEM or the law, then by all means, go to college. But if you're going to college because that's what everyone else is doing, and you don't have any particular plans for what you want to do in college, then DON'T GO TO COLLEGE. It's going to be a waste of time and money. Do something else for a while after high school and figure out what your plans are. Then decide.
The prevalence of this kind of defeatist discourse really illustrates how much of mainstream-adjacent US 'conservatism' is just an assisted suicide machine. Tracing Woodgrains has a great piece on how we are basically at the brink of total exclusion from any kind of elite power: https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/the-republican-party-is-doomed , and this kind of talk helped bring us there. Thanks for countering it.
You write that: "France is the only major country I am aware of that has a significant right-wing counter-elite, certainly as compared to the US and the UK, the two cases I am most familiar with." This seems basically true, but one qualifier I would add is that precisely because it's held in such contempt by it's elite society, the German army and intelligence services seem to be dominated by genuinely hard right types.