To save the world, Joel Stein has writ­ten a call to arms for the elite. Not actu­al arms, since the elite don’t think peo­ple should have those, but metaphor­i­cal arms, which are the type of arms that will be use­less against the pop­ulists’ arms, which are real arms. Which is why he is not stand­ing up to the pop­ulists in per­son but in print, where none of them will know about it. In Defense Of Elit­ism is a rant against the deifi­ca­tion of ​“the gut” over exper­tise. Stein spends five days in Roberts Coun­ty, Texas, the coun­ty with the high­est per­cent­age of Trump vot­ers. He talks to the Dil­bert cre­ator and Trump sup­port­er Scott Adams, as well as Nev­er Trumpers includ­ing Bill Kris­tol. He infil­trates secret elit­ist soci­eties by clev­er­ly accept­ing their invi­ta­tions. He talks to wor­ried tech bil­lion­aire Reid Hoff­man and com­forts doc­tors frus­trat­ed by patients who argue with their diag­noses based on skim­ming one Web­MD arti­cle. He spends a day with L.A. May­or Eric Garcetti, see­ing what would hap­pen if Stein, a total­ly untrained, unknowl­edge­able out­sider, ran the city. And he does it all while using real­ly big words with unsur­passed pulchritude.