What Happened to Our Elites?
The populist revolt happened for a reason.
Among other things, it’s been a rough publishing season for American elites. Between Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works, and any number of others, the liberal governance of the past 15 years of so has been under a lot of scrutiny lately. Even as the Trump administration barrages the news cycle with one crisis and absurdity after another, a reconsideration of the order Trump’s movement has largely overturned is nonetheless ongoing, and the results of that analysis are pretty ugly.
The picture that emerges is one of almost universal elite failure. The liberal elite has accumulated a lengthy list of disasters—a cost of living crisis disproportionately plaguing blue states; a post-Covid inflation spike resulting partly from Biden’s large public spending packages that overpromised and underdelivered; an extraordinarily tone-deaf failure to address mass illegal migration; the learning loss and mental health impacts dealt upon a generation of children through what now appears to be the indefensible choice to maintain school closures during the pandemic; continuously deteriorating situations in Ukraine and Gaza; and finally, the outrageous choice of Joe Biden and his top aides to run for a second term as the President had entered unmistakable cognitive decline that the public had been expressing deep concern over for years.
It’s debatable to what extent “the media” was inadequate in its coverage of these subjects, but it’s clear that large segments of the public saw enough of a gulf between the media representation of reality and their own experience of it that it created a large appetite for a now thriving alternative. That media is less centralized, but also holds itself to a far lower standard. I would be the last person to claim that alternative media is superior or even a theoretically viable alternative to the mainstream—but its very existence and popularity is a testament to how our media institutions have failed. And thus the expert class in government, academia, and the media effectively lost public trust, and we are all living in the consequences.
To discuss elite failure is to acknowledge the existence of a specific group of people who exercise disproportionate power over our society. C. Wright Mills first introduced the modern concept to American political science in The Power Elite, but clearly a close analogue to the concept was integral to the founding of the constitutional order. In Federalist 10, James Madison argued against pure democracy largely on the basis of the expediency of elite rule:
The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.
The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for that purpose.
Madison specifies three virtues that he holds the representative class to possess to a greater degree than the people as a whole—patriotism, wisdom, and justice. Richard Hanania, who has recently generated a lot of new discussion about the nature and role of elites, seems to have drawn on similar observations to Madison’s. Hanania refers to the elite class as Elite Human Capital, or EHC. I like the definition he supplies:
Elite Human Capital refers to the class of individuals that emerges in any sufficiently developed society, composed of people who are smart, idealistic, place relatively high emphasis on achieving morality-based status over money, and are usually tilted towards classical liberal ideals. They have a tendency to form truth seeking institutions like media, academia, and government agencies, when these things function in the way they should. Elite Human Capital does not always have the opportunity to form well-functioning institutions — if it did then we would see such institutions everywhere — but when you find them, it is EHC that is responsible for their creation and maintenance. Without EHC and its values, the press only chases sensationalism and celebrity gossip, academia becomes completely dysfunctional and fraudulent, and government turns into little more than a source of privilege for the most connected.
I agree with this definition, and subsequent history has, for the most part, shown that the representational model of liberal democracy outlined by Madison works pretty well—in certain periods, exceptionally well. It was representative republics that won the Second World War, with every viable alternative seeming to require genocide, famine, and extraordinarily authoritarian measures to achieve objectively worse human outcomes. As I believe Steven Pinker has convincingly shown repeatedly in The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, it isn’t just that we’ve managed to avoid the disasters of fascism and communism—liberal societies have consistently produced innovations that have transformed human life for the better, over and over again.
But recent decades have given us cause for confusion. If elite rule works so well, why has it bled over into a populist revolt? And why would it seem that in many cases, it is the elites that are causing the failures of the institutions that are leading people to embrace those populist alternatives? And how, once the elite has become incapable of running the institutions it’s tasked with steering, and has lost the trust of the public, is the elite re-engineered so it not only regains public trust, but is actually deserving of it?
A readily available hypothesis is something along the lines of Ross Douthat’s theory of a decadent society: that after the space race, once we realized just how overwhelming the challenge of further space travel would be, the frontier had effectively closed. Society entered a period of stagnation since it lost hope in expansion, and with that, a cultural, spiritual, and intellectual decay set in. Peter Thiel speaks of this in terms of a transition from progress measured in atoms to one measured in bits, and even liberals Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson use this language of closed frontiers in Abundance to criticize the way major cities have come to be seen by their mayors and governors as luxury goods, not as places for ambitious but unprivileged people to move and become contributors to a great meritocratic social project.
I think this view has become more plausible as the insults to the dream of the liberal world order piled up after the turn of the millennium. Hopes for a global democracy ended in the utter failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the revanchist authoritarianism of Russia and China, along with the ongoing collapse of any hope for a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; hopes for a multicultural society have soured as mass Arab migration into Europe have generated credible fears of demographic replacement by a deeply illiberal population; hopes for the benefits of technological progress are turning into dread at the creation of a generation of young people psychologically mutilated by social media and the apparent potential of an AI superintelligence taking over. And, of course, there’s the ultimate metaphor of cultural sterility, which is our literal sterility: people in developed countries (both liberal and authoritarian ones) are not having children, and are reliant on immigration just to maintain their population.
Under this view, it seems like we have hit a wall, and perhaps this gives us some indication of what happened to our elites that made them so dysfunctional. If we view our elites as leaders, then it is as if they were the point of the spear of a liberal consensus that shattered against hard realities and disappointments, its fragments shot in all directions. A small contingent shot in the general direction of Peter Thiel’s conservatism, being to varying degrees libertarian, authoritarian, religious, Nietzschean, techno-optimist transhumanist, and techno-phobic traditionalist. A much larger contingent shot in the direction of progressivism—the average scholar in the humanities has been left-leaning since at least the Second World War, but now it is almost assumed that they are some brand of progressive, usually heavily bought into critical theory and intersectionality to one degree or another. It is the latter group of elites that have been failing us since Obama’s second term or so, and the former group of elites that is failing us right now. My guess is it’s the current reactionary elites who will prove to be the worst of the bunch, but perhaps that’s my liberal priors talking. At any rate, they all seem generally worse than their more classically liberal predecessors.
This sort of ideological diffusion among elites is not unprecedented—the shock of the First World War brought a similar ideological diffusion among elites that crystallized into relatively coherent factions of liberalism, fascism, and communism.
The results of liberalism in the aughts (the War on Terror and financial crisis in particular) suggests that such a re-evaluation by the elites of the consensus view was probably necessary, and perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that in this period of ideological re-evaluation, the ability of even the sharpest and most well-intentioned among us to properly perceive reality would be fatally obscured. But as things currently stand, I see no particular reason to expect the elites to reconsolidate around a more stable and realistic consensus.
I don't have the time to organize these coherently, but I'll throw a few thoughts out there that this piece gave me.
1. The possibility of a systemic failure, i.e. conditions growing worse short and long term, seems to hang in the air as a feeling moreso than it did in the 2010s, I think. Back then the big bad was climate change, and it was something in the popular conscience that could be solved by turning off a few more lights and recycling. (Nuclear war as well, but that's perennial.) But now the distrust in elites, which did exist before, is now more total and more widespread. There is certainly no more halo around the office of the president as there was, or around any office to be honest.
2. The game in academia is completely rigged. Again, the popular notion of an "expert" is now not someone who is smart/knows a lot about the field but is ignorant to some practical aspect of ordinary life, but someone who is out of touch completely with the average person, perhaps even a mere puppet for someone else's agenda etc.; because it is no longer possible for an average person to become at the same time an expert.
3. At the same time the "elite human capital" is getting harder to find, we've degraded societal norms and ethical obligations to others and adopted a morality-is-for-suckers attitude. The remaining functions and roles formerly played by morality have been absorbed by cultural and political beliefs. More can be said, and I would like to find a good book on this that's neither overreactionary the-west-is-fallen nor snarky "um every generation thinks the younger ones are terrible!", preferably with a critical and honest historical analysis.
4. In every era until around the mid-20th century, to be an intellectual elite generally meant you were well-versed in a classical education, and you understood not everything but a sufficient deal about history, politics, philosophy, mathematics, arts, sciences, etc. even if you specialized in a certain area; because there was simply less you needed to know to know a sufficient amount. Now unless you are insanely dedicated you can't do that because you need to be spending all your time specializing. Plus K-12 school curriculums have been on average dumbed down and even the kids who fail get pushed along anyway, because the incentives have been fucked and gamed. I knew someone who thought the Romans flourished before the Greeks, that the Bible was something "found at some point on the Sea Scrolls", and didn't know that Christianity had its roots in Judaism or Islam in Christianity. We're seeing hordes of future "experts" go into grad school to become professors with not even a baseline functioning idea of the history of the world.
That's all, I think.