Washington, D.C. 90210

Are the public and private high schools of Los Angeles's Westside the new St. Grottlesex?

Every high school has its Stephen Miller. Ours was a guy I’ll call Tom Smith. Smith ran for student body president on some sort of fascist program—I can’t recall the particulars, but he strutted around in military fatigues and a green Army helmet and said the sort of things that today would prompt school administrators to suspend him, or subject him to weeks of sensitivity training, or both. Since this was the 1970s, they just ignored him. He lost, and I assume outgrew his compulsion to offend. He did not, in any case, become a policymaker in the Trump administration, or acquire a talk-radio show, or get appointed to the Supreme Court, which is a great blessing to the rest of us.

My high school was Beverly Hills High School, which, along with various other public and private high schools on L.A.’s Westside, has evolved into something like what used to be called St. Grottlesex—the assortment of elite New England prep schools that incubated the American Episcopacy that guided American foreign policy through World War II and then blundered badly in Vietnam. It’s a weird phenomenon that diverges from the 20th century model because it’s a much more polarized cohort, consisting of people who either embraced the affluent liberalism of the place (the kind that embraces environmentalism and sexual freedom and treads lightly on questions of economic justice) or rebelled against it. I write about the new Westside hegemony this week in the New Republic.

(The headline on this entry is swiped from my witty friend Michael McGough, who used it on Twitter.)