welcome to the ilona show we'll get the real headlines with none of the mersey are coming live in washington d.c. now tonight we've got a special guest here in our studio chris hayes is going to be joining us to talk about his new book twilight of the elites well talk about meritocracy and how the ideal that we believe in could be what's failing us as a country that will host our monday hangover panel and talk about the greek election results and what it means for the eurozone and the global economy well all of that and more for you tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look with mainstream media decided to miss.

all right so it's a monday and boy is it a busy one so today i actually feel like the mainstream media isn't doing too shabby of a job trying to cover all the bases. the muslim brotherhood supporters celebrating in the streets of car with this morning after the party declared its candidate the reader rodney king the man at the center of the nine hundred ninety two riots who became a symbol of police brutality is dead president obama and other world leaders today they're in mexico for the g. twenty summit of the world's largest emerging economies all of the leaders here are breathing a little easier following the sunday voting freeze that at least for now keeps the eurozone intact there is new fallout over the president's controversial decision to stop deporting young illegal immigrants voters were new their commitment to staying within the eurozone but financial problems across the continent are killing any

investor excitement governor mitt romney is taking the pulse of america's heartland targeting some key battleground states voters in greece are supporting the nation's controversial bailout there but the romney is in wisconsin he's helping to drive the day's discussion with his bus tour president obama in mexico talking about europe with the president of russia and other world leaders the hard line muslim brotherhood claiming victory in the first free elections in egypt in history the talk is all about the president's new immigration policy to give some. oh many young illegal immigrants the chance to stay in the u.s. . are now i'll be talking about some of these developments on the show as well tonight but before we go there i do have to point out a little something that i couldn't find in the mainstream media's coverage something that happened right in their backyard yesterday thousands of people by some estimates up to fifty thousand people marched on the streets of new york in silence in protest of stop and frisk policy it's now some called it institutionalized or legalized racism the new york times describes it as a policy that's created an atmosphere of martial law for the city's black and

latino residents and the numbers are there to back it up you see every year records keep being broken for how many people are stopped and frisked in the ten years of mayor bloomberg brain the new york civil liberties union as the mates of more than four point three million people have been stopped and in two thousand and eleven alone that number was more than six hundred eighty five thousand and last year eighty seven percent of those who were stopped were black and latino black or latino and the thing is that for many people it happens more than once the last year amongst black males ages fourteen to twenty four the number of stops was greater than their total population in new york so the point is that you should be treated like a criminal in this country just because of the color of your skin and so far the response from mayor bloomberg has been a condescending one at best over the last few weeks he has defended the policy on more than one occasion saying that it just needs adjustments but not to be canceled he claims that it's actually what's good for those black and latino communities he says that it keeps guns off the streets but the truth is it's not about guns which

already of those who are stopped or let go because they've done nothing wrong more often than not if something is found might be a small amount of marijuana but there are no numbers of the n.y.p.d. has offered us that show that guns are being taken off the streets now the good thing is that over the last year this policy has gotten a lot more attention thanks in part to reporting by organizations like the associated press and on sunday we saw more than three hundred. organizations indorse this march from unions to the occupy wall street and the answer coalition and many others who came out so this is a civil rights issue and yet for some reason the mainstream media seemed too preoccupied this weekend to give it much thought now i wish i was wrong in fact if you saw some deserving coverage out there then please correct me but for my to my team and i observed a few seconds here and there was all that it got maybe because there weren't of clashes with police it was largely a silent and nonviolent protest it didn't attract the cameras and so often we find

that to be the problem with mainstream coverage of political protests and social movements it's not sexy enough unless there's tear gas and rubber bullets now i don't think of the movement against up and frisk is going to go away or quiet down anytime soon as long as racial profiling is used by new york to police to victimize and create an environment of fear opponents will not rest so hopefully at some point out there the mainstream media will catch on but for now they choose to miss . well you'd be hard pressed to try to argue that this is a great time for america with an unemployment crisis a foreclosure crisis an overall crisis of confidence in our institutions what we see a lot of these days is anger but in order to channel that anger into change that we have to look at the fundamentals of what went wrong to understand why inequality

has grown and why the wealth and power of the nation belong in the hands of a small set of elites do we have to revalue our belief in meritocracy joining me tonight is chris hayes host of s n b c's up with chris hayes and author of the new book twilight of the elites america after meritocracy chris thanks so much for joining us tonight it's a granddaughter that is also editor at large of the nation right where we forgot to add one of those in there so you start off here by you know looking at a lot of polling that's out there we see a lot of numbers that show us that americans don't trust their institutions anymore be it the supreme court or congress or the office of the presidency you know you even bring in the media and you bring in the catholic church and major league baseball but at the root of it all why is it such a dark time. you know the historic levels of distrust we see in our pillar institutions and this as you know it's been captured by polling polling that started i should say in one thousand nine hundred thirty which was the last crisis of the in the country right in the wake of watergate in the wake of vietnam there was this broad sense that we had lost trust in the traditional sources of authority

and our pillar institutions they started pulling them and ironically that period of trust in the rearview mirror now appears the high watermark we are now right now based on this polling at historically low levels of public trust institutions and i think the reason for that is fairly straightforward we have seen a remarkable record of institutional failure crisis and catastrophe over what i call the failed decade if you begin in two thousand to two thousand and one with the nineteen hijackers with box cutters getting through the largest security apparatus in the history of civilization to the iraq war to katrina to the largest housing bubble in history and the worst financial crisis in seventy years we're still trying to get out of what you see is a series a cascade of institutional failure and that has left americans with a deep profound and broad distrust of their institutions now you know of course you mentioned that since the seventy's we've just seen this continue to slide downward fortunately we don't know what it was like during the great depression george right because there was no polling at that point but i think that it's fair to say that

there probably has always been a sense of distrust for americans and i think that you could say that that rigs this everywhere when it comes to the power and the the power list that has something fundamentally changed in the sense that we can't we can't change it this time around that we become powerless to flip it back i don't think we're powerless but i do think there's a few things that mark out this is different first of all just in absolute terms you know we we see lower levels of trust second of all there are no longer institutions aside from the united states military which is the one exception to the rule here which actually is the most trusted institution american life and also the only institution that's really seen gains in confidence over the course of the decade aside with that is that exception there aren't a lot of places in american life where we have any kind of consensus authority established in and what that does is it produces the strange balkanized nature of the american public discussion around the election around issues as ranging as tax policy to climate change. there are no or burgers of truth anymore because we each

have different sources of authority different people we trust and it creates some some effect that i think are largely positive right we've seen new voices enter into the natural conversation my show is one of them you're suppose one of them but it also it also carries with it some pretty profound risks which is under this environment in which we can't find anything that we have consensus trusted can we produce the level of social consensus necessary to make the scale of change that we need i want to get back to that in terms of i think that the media plays quite a role there and i want to get back to first you brought up this point about the fact that the military is the most trusted institution in america can you explain why that is to me right i mean we've just gone through a period where we've been in constant continuous war for ten years it's not slowing down i mean if anything we are scaling back these are ending these massive land wars that we have but we have an increased campaign a special forces drone strikes that are spreading all across the world in terms of these shadow wars we have some disgraced generals we have generals that are not

honest with the public and the are not honest with members of congress when they actually go and testify on the hill because we have the figures out there to back it up and to prove that what they say doesn't gel with with reality and so how is it in military still the most trusted institution i think it's a really complicated story of why the case one is that i actually think it's. in a certain sense it has done what we have asked to do quite competently right so so when we say we need to go to war in this place we need to find these targets there's not a sense that it's an incompetent bungling or bungling organization that's particularly true when compared to some of the things that we do feel are incompetent and bungling for instance the banks write the words and the degree to which americans find the words unpopular particular afghanistan which is quite unpopular now it's quite bungled who if you ask me what i mean yes i think it is but i think the people well i don't think it's bungled because i don't think it could have if it ever could have had success that's a sort of different argument but i do think that americans blame that on the

political system and i think largely rightly they blame it on the political system i also think there's a really interesting phenomenon in the u.s. right now and i write about this book which is an increasing social distance between the the relatively small number of people that are asked to bear the burden of our the longest period of war in the history of american public republic which is about two two and a half million service members when you can count me in total and the rest of american society and particularly among the elites i mean there's a lower percentage of veterans in congress now than we pretty much ever had in the history of public and that distance creates a lot of the a lot of structure of a lot of the conversation we have about the military. in that sense to how do you compare that to the way that you think of the rest of the world sees america i was i think that probably there is more trust in our institutions. and some of these notions of democracy around the world compared to the way that they see our military right if you look at poll that came out last week and you want to talk about drone strikes in the majority of the countries i think it was eighteen sure seventeen of the twenty said that they did not agree with our drone strike policy

now you have as well you know this black mark on america's record in many respects with cia secret prisons about the grave with guantanamo bay you know russia just came out and said that certain u.s. officials involved on time of day are barred from entering i mean before it could you even imagine that kind of argument being made but you know has america lost. it's moral standing o. there's no there's no question that a lot of the activities have been undertaken over the last ten years and that's up to including drone strikes that have killed civilians in numbers that we don't we still don't know the tally of right. and not just on strikes there's also been cruise missile strikes there was one particular bad one in yemen there's no question that that's have some moral authority of the country and there's no question that the torture regime of the black sites also set the moral authority the country we talk about people having trust in our other institutions from abroad i mean one of the one of the day mimics that you see in the development literature comparatively one of the reasons i'm so obsessed with institutional performance and trust is that in countries that have low levels of institutional performance you

see this vicious cycle of low performance and distrust feeding each other right so if you think the tax collector will hit you up for a bribe right you don't pay your taxes and if you don't pay your taxes the government is starved for revenue and the government to start for revenue it doesn't pay the salary of the tax collector who then hits people up for bribes in order to make a living and that cycle reinforces itself right that's the kind of cycle of dysfunction and distrust that you want to avoid that's the thing i worry about in terms of the american landscape and then now i guess let's go back to this argument of what exactly meritocracy is you know in the way see the you see it the way that you want to define it so the reason i ended up talking a lot about meritocracy is when you talk about our institutions you have to talk about institutional failure and it's not about a leap failure bad decisions corrupt decisions sometimes being made by people that are at the top of the social hierarchy and the social model that we've had in the us more or less the last thirty years we call the meritocracy and the idea behind the meritocracy is look we're not going to bar entrance to the elite based on your

race or gender or your where you're from the country religious creed right we're going to open it up to everyone it's not the old wasp northern male establishment everyone's going to compete and they're going to have the sorting process that finds the best and brightest the talent most talented industrious to helm our banks to run the country and barack obama is is the kind of crowning glory of that model i mean it's only under this model that the man with that name. that background could be president but at the same time this has been happening we've also created a society with accelerating in extreme inequality and more importantly in some senses but less covered declining social mobility so if the bedrock promise of the meritocracy is precisely that you can start at any station and go as far as your talents and will will take you we're actually seeing over time the odds of you starting at the bottom and into the top are growing longer and longer which suggests to me that the model of meritocracy is not delivering on its foundational promise and that's is here to talk about the you know the american psyche because the figures are there the statistics are there to prove that you know the

inequality is only growing in the wealth gap is only becoming larger and yet the other polls out there that you still ask people what are the chances that you think you'll be a millionaire one day or the majority of americans will say i will be and so i mean is that why are we too blind to actually figure out what's going on because we all have this kind of self delusion we we all believe that you know it if i can still join the club i'm going to try to and so who cares about. tearing it apart well yes so there's a really deep paradox riches americans can if you poll across nations americans have a firmer belief that you can start at the bottom work your way to the top in america than almost any other country and yet we have lower levels of actual social mobility than a lot of the industrialized democracies and you would put us in the in the same category as that tension. because we can actually have a frank discussion and debate about the american dream about meritocracy as a system it manifests itself as a general sense of frustration and betrayal as a sense that the game is rigged and if you want to look at

a phrase that characterizes the feeling of americans across the political spectrum a phrase i have heard said to me by tea party activists and by occupy activists and by disaffected centrist establishment types it's the phrase the game is rigged the idea that the people at the top are not playing by the same rules as everybody else and that i think is that is the sentiment the visceral frustration anger betrayal that is at the core of american public life right now are we have to take a break but we will get back to that because is it just a sentiment or an idea or is the game actually breaking i wish i had to fundamentally believe that it is so we're taking a break we'll be right back with more from chris hayes. a lot of american power continue. things are. might be time. and they're going to

be very good. radio. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then. some other part of it and realize that everything. is a big. story . book and they alone and so they'll get a real headline with none of them are the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v.

anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back to t.v. . to the capital account i'm lauren lyster. all right so we are back with more from chris hayes host of m.s.n. we see is up with chris a's ad author of the book twilight of the elites america after meritocracy so ok before we start the break we were talking about this

sentiment his notion that tea partiers occupy activists all have right now that the game is rigged and that you're no longer starting from you know of from the fair playing field so we don't all have an equal chance. but isn't that just the way it is you know isn't that just the truth i think it largely is the truth i think the game is rigged and one of the things i talk about in the book is that embedded in the notion of meritocracy is the idea that we can separate equality of opportunity right everybody's going to run the race starting from the same place and equality of outcomes which is people get you know come in with different times and the fact the matter is in reality those are very difficult to separate people who get who are at the top of the income distribution find ways to pull the ladder up after them or to lower it down selectively for their children or their friends or people in their social network and so there are all kinds of that all the time especially on a lot of the networks these days when it comes to you know former presidential daughters becoming journalists and the elites and this is something is

a true fact about elites in all places in all time across history in all countries right i mean this is how elites work but we have this idea that somehow our system is going to make that not the case and we see it subverted the other thing that we see is the way that meritocracy operates particularly with the outsized genes that are available on top is that induces a certain amount of cheating it induces a certain amount of corner cutting right because it turns out it's much trickier than it would first appear to create a system with huge rewards for performance that isn't also a system with huge rewards for cheating we saw that in major league baseball i spent some time in the book writing about the steroids there are many major league baseball and what you saw there was major league baseball's a meritocracy right i mean it doesn't matter if you're nineteen year old dominican kid or you're you know an aging slugger whose dad played in the game whether you can play or not is what determines it so in that sense i mean are you too easy on the elites because you're saying that you know blame it blame it on the system and not on not on not on them and not on the fact that they are missing some level in

our reality of that you know it's the way it's set up i mean this is what we hear a lot with the elections in the way that it's going now that you have democrats that are decrying the influence of money in politics and super pacs in the citizens united to say. but you know you got to play the game if you want to hit back a republican so we need to have people donate to super pacs too and put out these negative ads and whatnot i think that there's a certain amount of moral opprobrium for cheating that is extremely necessary to any social order and i think one of the problems is that what you see breakdown in institutions that start to have demick corruption like wall street during the crisis is that cheating big begins to become the norm it's winked at it's apologized for it becomes an inside joke and then protected when it comes to the courts and when it comes to exactly what is this department it's been projected in terms of the accountability of the scene or the lack of accountability for people that. and so what ends up happening is you yes it is it is

individual choices that are immoral or amoral right and those deserve sanction but the question is in what environment are people imbedded such that they're behaving immoral or are a morally and one of the things i sort of disagree with you in certain senses actually we'd love to get moralistic about individual failings right i mean bernie made off everyone loved it in the wake of the bubble you know there were a million stories about how he was a terrible person how he was evil how he was a cheat right sure they are really true right the question is what are the conditions that produce a bernie madoff able to do what he was able to do what are the conditions that produce the kind of systemic failures we have and i think actually we end up focusing too much on these narrow morality tales it's the same way in steroids right roger clemens is a bad guy or jose conseco these individual people are bad guys no it's a system they're embedded in that's producing this result so in that sense is the media a part of it you know does the media have to cheat too because i don't think that we because that's exactly who we see obsess in moralize over individuals you can

see a soundbite played over and over and over again or this perp walk of shame video played over and over and over again and that's what the cable media just rants on about for hours and then you know i think that there are some exceptions out there like your show i want to talk about that too but but overall they kind of miss the big picture and that's why every day after the show this mainstream is here as they often are missing the greater picture and what this all means. i think that the media as a whole right in america is the people that are running at the top of it and again i'm implicated in this book i hate when people are right wing populist like dick armey i saw him once giving a talk at the heritage foundation railing against the elite it's like you are part of the elite right so i'll be very clear what i'm implicated in this book and people that i love and consider part of my social circle are implicated as well and i think that the media is the people that helma media the people at the top of that social pyramid are implicated in precisely the same set of incentives and the same sort of cultural pathologies that are are very similar to what's going on on wall

street right now to be part of the club to everybody want you know buying any part of the club is a universal feeling the question is do you create a culture of meritocratic achievement that just exacerbates i mean i quote in the book an essay from c.s. lewis beautiful essay given in one thousand nine hundred five he says if you ever walk into a room where two people are speaking and when you walk into the room they stop speaking he says if you have the new understand the desire to be in the inner ring and that desire to be in the inner ring will prove to be the source of most corruption in your life so how do you see that playing out with let's say the the white house leak scandal that we have going on right now because on one hand you have bipartisan members of congress that are up in arms that are calling for the special counsel you have joe lieberman who want to just create some crazy blanket legislation that's going to make the disclosure of any classified information illegal and then you have to and feinstein who's going out saying that she couldn't believe that when she read david sanger's book there was stuff in there that he knew that was leaked that she didn't know while sitting on the intelligence

committee and did she actually care you know that it was in david sanger's book or just because we've set up these groups this secrecy that has to exist in the higher up the more you know when it comes to classified information and she's angry she isn't she wasn't the one that knew it. was going to believe or if she didn't know it i think that the current conversation about leaks particularly as regards the kill list in the sanger piece and stuck to. the times is extremely complicated in this fascinating way i think as a general principles of journalist we want more information not less about what our government is doing in our name we have seen the huge growth of top secret america right in the wake of nine eleven all the metrics for secrecy have gone up the number of documents that are classified the number of people that have top secret clearance right we have also see congress largely abdicate its responsibility for accountability i mean there's two sides of this story which is the executive has gotten more powerful but it's gotten more powerful partly because congress hasn't

wanted to actually exercises its oversight function and they're locked in a dysfunctional relationship in this respect and the only thing that seems to trigger any breakup of that relationship to trigger some national conversation about what exactly we are doing behind closed doors our press reports and if you know to the extent those press reports are truthful to the extent of those press reports shine light on what we're doing i think that's absolutely vital to democratic accountability so why is it that we see so few shows like yours or you know on this show i like to think that we can have extended conversations where we're not going to give you a two minute interview and then shut you down you know why is that not the norm but rather the exception you know i don't really know the answer to that because i haven't i'm new to t.v. in certain ways and i'm new to the conventions of the genre and figuring out what works and doesn't work and i do know that you know. all genre conventions evolve over a long period of time the murder mystery the police procedural on t.v.

the cable new show these are all things that are accumulated wisdom about what works and what doesn't what people want what don't wholly with blockbuster and i think sometimes that accumulated wisdom can prove to not be as accurate as people who are exposed to it think it is i think we've done things in our show and i should say my boss has really encouraged us to do those things to only do three topics in two hours to carry a conversation over three or four breaks that the audience has responded well to and i think that goes against the conventional wisdom of what the appetite is but i think that sometimes conventional wisdom just proved to be wrong and you just have to try out something new well it's a question of you know we're always told does the media actually reflect the the people's desires are they talking about celebrity gossip because that's what the audience actually wants to see or is it the media that's actually setting the tone for that and so you know i have to bring up something we have here in studio i can ask her about it but there was you you became the center of the media storm out of outrage i guess you could say when you made this comment on memorial day asking

whether you can really call every single soldier a hero you know whether that ends up sometimes moralizing and news perpetuating more war and you got a lot of flak for it and then you didn't apologize for say it but you did release a statement that kind of walked it back in so i'm just curious what happened there you know did you do you no longer believe what you said that day i think i i believe what i said in that statement about failing to live up to my standards of rigor and empathy and respect in that moment and i think that's important because you know you you genuinely have a burden if you have the privilege of a platform not to avoid controversial topics not to say things that might provoke a backlash but to take care with people's hearts to take care with. the feelings of people who are exposed to the issues that you are discussing and the e-mails that are i receive from the people who work who are close and intimate with what this

war has done with people that have died serving in that war made me realize that i had failed to live up to that standard to take that care and that taking that care is very important that is a different thing from not talking about controversial topics because talking about controversial topics is the point of having a free press right and we and we talk we talk on or on our show all the time about race reliably and we talk about race off script and people know that talking about race off script has proved it has produced in in the past tremendous firestorm people have ended up fired because of things they said and. that is the nature of that comes with the territory in our current media environment of talking about it so it's something that you felt you had to deal with i didn't know i didn't have a rabbit out there and we just had a break unfortunately maybe we can keep this going to a minute so if we can finish it up and listen as they come back so we'll take a break.