Elite Failure
Understanding what happened last Tuesday requires holding more than one idea in our heads. Yes, Donald Trump may be the most transformative politician in recent political history. Yes, he may upend and destroy a liberal consensus that has governed the United States since after World War II. Yes, he is angry, resentful, vengeful, unpredictable, and will likely test the limits of legal and constitutional governance. Trump is a danger to the system of government we have. And yet, that may be the reason that a majority of Americans freely voted for and elected Donald Trump as President of the United States for a second time.
Some Trump voters are angry and ill-informed. They think that Canada and other nefarious actors are fixing the elections (at least until Trump wins and then they somehow accept the election results.). But many of those voting for Trump are voting rationally. From working class voters frustrated with the economy more focused on international trade than wages to billionaires upset with woke cultural crusades, the Trump voters who brought Trump back from the political trash heap after his attempt to undo the results of the 2020 election are neither ill-informed nor fascist. In last week's election, Trump won the popular vote and he is to be credited with building an impressive coalition. It includes not just angry white men, but also many Latinos, Black persons, and young people. It runs the gamut from billionaires to working class voters of all races and genders. What all these people share to some degree is a sense that the system is fundamentally broken. They no longer have faith in the political, academic, corporate, legal, or media elite. They think that their opinions—I mean, the opinions of the majority of the people—are ignored and disdained by people like me. They are against the state and they want to break the state apart. They may realize that they are playing with fire, but they are angry enough that they are willing to take that risk. For those of us who value the system and benefit from it, this anger and risk and resentment is terrifying. And yet, it is incumbent upon us to understand where this anger comes from, and why it is rational.
This hatred of the state is what distinguishes political movements from opposition political parties. Parties represent interests. Movements appeal to a mood. Fired by hatred of the powers that be, movements are held together by a mood of constant opposition, for, as Hannah Arendt writes, "the only thing that counts in a movement is precisely that it keeps itself in constant movement.” Arendt writes of a young Russian radical who goes to France and complains that there is no freedom in France since “the so-called [French] freedom was of the kind which leaves everything unchanged; every day was like its predecessors;....and so the young man who came from Russia was bored in France.” It is the mood of boredom with the status quo and craving for action and destruction that infuses the pan-movements. The state and the system were “felt to be in the way of the ever-changing needs of an ever-growing movement.” At this moment, the anti-establishment, anti-elite, anti-authority party is the Republican Party. If Nikki Haley or even Ron DeSantis had been the Republican nominee, the Democratic drubbing would have likely been far worse.
Right now the mood of much of the country is anger and resentment at intellectuals and elites who have built a world that works well for them – I mean for us—but not for the majority of the people. We can travel around the world and live in Europe and visit Iceland and go to weddings in exotic locations. We can debate pronouns and worry about the fate of oppressed peoples in Gaza and Ukraine. We can order in food to be delivered whenever we want. We can dine out in restaurants on a regular basis and we can drink funny cocktails that cost $20 and barely contain any alcohol while sipping oat-milk Matcha Lattes. We have investments and we have a future.
But too many people in this country and around the world—this is a worldwide rebellion against the liberal order—see very little in their present or their future. The opiod epidemic is killing more than 100,000 people a year and inflation combined with lower wages and technology replacing low-skilled workers means that for broad majorities of people, the system we have is an utter failure. Not all these problems can be solved immediately. But when people whose communities are burning see elites worried about pronouns, post-colonial studies, and gender affirming surgery for prisoners while once-vibrant communities around the country are literally suffering a deadly plague, they are not wrong to withdraw their support for the elites and the system they have created and run.
To understand what happened, one thing we need to come to terms with is the utter failure of the elites in this country and around the world. Few people have been better at acknowledging the failure of elites today than Walter Russell Mead. In an essay that appeared just before the election, Mead writes:
Since 1945, the most powerful armed forces in the world have only won one war (the Gulf War against Iraq). A massive, sustained and very public Chinese military buildup failed to elicit a coherent response from the American side. As a result, the balance of power in the western Pacific shifted dangerously in China’s favor, increasing the risk of catastrophic great power war. Twenty years of earnest attempts to build civil society in Afghanistan collapsed ignominiously when the Taliban stormed back into power in 2021. Decades of illusory “democracy promotion” by American diplomats and philanthropists failed to stem a very real “democracy recession” as the rule of law retreated around the world.
Much of what distressed establishment figures deplore as “isolationism” is nothing more than a well-grounded skepticism about the competence of American civilian and military leadership in international affairs. For many in the foreign policy establishment, it is easier to condemn the shortsightedness of neo-isolationism than to ask why as individuals and as a class we have made such major and such costly mistakes for so long and in so many parts of the world.
It is much the same at home. The intellectual and moral collapse of the public health authorities in the face of the COVID pandemic deeply damaged public trust. The instinctive response of many in the news media to rally around a misguided establishment, while also marginalizing critics and skeptics further poisoned the wellsprings of public trust. The rising (and in my view tragic) popularity of trends like generalized vaccine skepticism fills the vacuum created by the absence of confidence in public health leadership.
More profoundly, the failure of American society to respond effectively to widespread and deeply damaging phenomena like the fentanyl plague reflects the inadequacy of leadership in all walks of life. Spending political capital on affirming trans students by making tampons available in boys’ bathrooms in public schools while the opioid epidemic kills more Americans every year than the Vietnam War killed in nearly a decade strikes many sensible people as a sign of derangement. Are they wrong?
“Trust the technocracy” and “invest in institutions” is the message Americans hear from establishment media. But the state of our society does not inspire confidence. Key social programs ranging from Medicare and Social Security at the federal level to civil service pension programs in many cities and states are seriously underfunded and set on fiscally unsustainable paths. Infrastructure construction has become almost impossibly expensive. The urban doom loop of higher costs driving higher taxes driving business and residents out of the cities spirals relentlessly without much pushback from a Democratic Party ostensibly committed to bettering the lives of the poor.
Per-student costs continue to skyrocket in many school systems even as students score poorly on standardized tests. The higher education system saddles too many young people with unpayable debt. Graduates of a handful of prestigious universities often enjoy undeserved access to desirable jobs, but many of those universities have lost sight of the values it is their duty to uphold. When a president of Harvard University can be credibly charged with plagiarism, the signs of decadence and decay are unmistakable.
The policies that contributed to the housing boom of the early 2000s and that were adapted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were equally misguided, and the costs fell primarily on vulnerable families on the margins of the housing market. Home ownership, which is the foundation of middle-class prosperity and American political stability, is increasingly unaffordable for young families. At the same time, the weakening of labor unions has left millions of Americans without the support and protection that, imperfect as the old labor movement was, organization and solidarity gave to union members. The rise of identity politics testifies to the declining ability of American leaders to gain trust that crosses ethnic, racial, or gender lines, and the resulting fragmentation makes America harder to govern and deepens existing fissures in American life.
Americans are not wrong to believe that this level of comprehensive strategic and political failure across so many dimensions of our national life is unacceptable. They are right to withdraw their confidence from institutions and a leadership class that seems both unusually incompetent and indecently self-interested. But populism is better at expressing dissent than at planning for success. And the leadership problem transcends the division between populists and the current establishment. Populism too needs leaders, and many of those coming forward as would-be tribunes of the people are at least as poorly prepared for real leadership as the fumble-fingered elites they hope to replace.
While the American leadership class has been failing the test of history, not all of its sectors are equally culpable. When it comes to scientific and technological accomplishment, American culture continues to produce geniuses of all kinds. Although the rise of scientific fraud and the reproducibility crisis in certain disciplines points to some concerning trends, America’s failure point is not in the STEM disciplines. The failures come from where the wonders of technological progress intersect with the dysfunction of daily life. Our failure points are in the worlds of culture and social organization, not in the worlds of tech and hard science.