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I don't like the idea of the elite consensus being an emergent property of being elite without it being taken into account what shapes these emergent properties.
As an example, I think it makes sense from an elite perspective to be, to make a long story short, 'pro-Heritage Foundation'. If you own a lot of the economy it makes sense you want 'line' to go up. Simple.
But there are also cases where this doesn't make as much sense. For example, there is nothing self evident about wanting to tear down the old structures or make drastic changes to the order of society. Why would an elite, that is already on top, want to do such a thing? It makes no sense. Unless, of course, the 'elite' sees themselves as an outsider to those structures. Which was the case for the new elite of jews and Catholics that started making up significant portions of the elite in America from 1930's onwards.
The balance of the elite shifted from what it was due to this influx of outsider elites who had different incentives from the old elite of, what was mostly, Liberal Protestants. This led to the many debates and intellectual clashes that made up the culture war of old. Where the 'old guard' stood behind the old structures whilst the new elite was tearing them down and building new ones out of the rubble. The one I'm familiar with, on race, is highly illustrative of this. From Boas and his fraudulent anthropology, that is the bedrock of modern American anthropology. Which helped facilitate the landscape that pushed men like Carleton Coon away. To Gould and his alternative timeline of evolutionary biology and what would later be recognized as completely fraudulent biology. Contrasted with Wilson and his fights against Gould and Lewontin and I think you have, at least in a specific area, a good illustrative example of what was going on at every single level of academia where anyone was putting up a fight against the new elite. And whilst the ratio of old vs new, WASP vs jew, was still balanced enough that you could have an explicit culture war at the elite level, the ratio kept skewing further and further 'new'. Giving us what we have today.
Another illustrative example would be the drastic change at the ACLU. Which I assume most are familiar with.
This wasn't an emergent change that happened naturally because elites are how they are because they are elites. There was a stark change in the demographics of Americas elite. New faces. New races. And the drastic change is not just correlated with this new ethnic makeup and overrepresentation of jews but also corroborated by specific historical examples where these jews ousted the old to make way for a new ideology that better suited their being.
It's hard to write in support of the WASP elite since it, along with the white American middle class, is finally getting what they've had coming for a long time now. And though it may be the fault of the WASP to have ever let the new elite in, ultimately the real driving force behind the change was the new elite.
I think there's a great segment from the linked interview with E.O. Wilson that illustrates the failure of the old mindset:
Then I feel like you need to properly engage with the issues of Boas's methodology. The primary one being that his thesis rests on him comparing the faces of children with the faces of their parents to conclude that they are not similar. I had thought most people knew that the faces of children change with age. Sometimes referred to as 'growth'. And that, as detailed in the linked article, the dominant force for all such traits, on closer review, was genetic. Leading to the reason why it is possible to tell the geographical ancestry with of a skeleton with "90% accuracy" from skull alone. And why children take after their parents in one way or another.
The history you bring up has little to do with the point being highlighted in my writeup. The book was review bombed because the climate of anthropology had drastically changed. Being swept up in the Civil Rights culture war where, as you point out, Coon found himself on the side of segregationists.
Coon wrote the book in 1962 after having resigned as president of the AAPA. Coon resigned because a group of anthropologists had pressured him to defame a book that, upon closer inspection, Coon deduced none of them had even read, bar one. It was pure culture war. And the two sides were the classical scientific racists going up against the theories of Boas.
Though it's not important to my main point, since it's not claimed that every single 'member' of the 'new' elite is jewish, nor that every single 'member' of the 'old' is gentile, the biggest opponent of Coon at the time was a student of Boas, Ashley Montagu, real name Israel Ehrenberg.
Who are you quoting? Though this is mostly unrelated to what I've been talking about, I'd fall back on Kevin MacDonald and his theory for the specific nature of Boas and his motivations. But to be clear, I made no mention of "Jewish interests" in my original writeup. Which pertained to the new elite vs the old elite, and the difference in incentives between them that could explain the nature of differing emergent elite consensus.
If you have points to make on what "Jewish interests" are and who is advancing them vs who is not then I think you need to flesh that out in more detail beforehand.
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Yeah you're right. the ACLU has always been aggressively jewish. I felt the difference was that back then it had to play by old structure rules to get what it wanted with the Civil Rights stuff. Compared to now when it doesn't need to bother with such games. But I think that historical narrative is born more out of mythology than reality.
The early ACLU was a support organization for communist revolution in America. They may have dropped this once the Soviets shook hands with the Nazis, but they seem to have had few qualms about the whole mass murder part. Then again, I'm not sure how Jewish it was back then, so Jews might have actually improved it. This article mentions mainly gentiles.
https://reason.com/2017/12/14/communist-dissonance/
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