Class Struggle

A question haunts the mind when reading Scott Johnston’s The Sandersons Fail Manhattan, a satire of the college admissions racket: is this a work of historical fiction or of current reportage? Until just yesterday, the novel’s targets—the elites’ self-abasement before the gatekeepers of higher education and the pitiless social hierarchies enforced by those gatekeepers—seemed like unshakable traits of America’s ruling classes and institutions.