An Elite Unfit to Rule

Calif. Gov. Newsom Ignoring His Covid Regs.

 

 

Elites are inevitable; their legitimacy and continuity is not. Ours lack the virtue and wisdom needed for good governance and leadership. Instead of expertise, they offer incompetence, malice, and herd-like conformity to self-serving ideological fads.

— Nathanael Blake,  Federalist

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. 

— Ecclesiastes 1

We have talked about Sir Isaiah Berlin’s “two concepts of liberty.” His “negative liberty” means “leave me alone.” “Positive liberty” means "I know what’s best for you.” By identifying both concepts with “liberty,” Berlin gives each a favorable cast.

Berlin’s “liberty concept” dichotomy is only 65 years old. But elites have been around since civilization began. Rulers needed their priests — their intellectuals — to help them draw on “higher” powers others could not see, the “positive liberty” concept of the time. Priests shared their elite power with warriors vital for regime protection.

Anti-top-down “Negative liberty” only arrived with the 18th century’s “Age of Enlightenment,” with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations’ capitalism and America’s experiment with democracy. Democracy’s “one person, one vote” fundamentally threatens elite rule.

Elites maintain power by operating as a club, admitting new members who accept the need to preserve top-down control. Follow the rules and remain among the chosen. Business people, union leaders, feminists, socialists, civil rights activists — all are welcome if they help ensure “positive liberty’s” election victories. Elites must battle the grave threat of populism, which strives to unite ordinary people against elite rule.

Today's elite means to destroy populism’s personification — Trump.

Scott McConnell, founding editor of the American Conservative, chronicles the clash between establishment and the people beginning with 2008, when the financial crisis “pulled the rug out from a generation of debt-ridden college graduates,” as the elite helped business divert attention away from class warfare toward racial injustice.

What elite university humanities departments birthed became within the following decade the Democrats’ chief ideology. Progressives advanced “white supremacy” as also privileging heterosexuality and men over women. Wokeness evolved into a struggle against whiteness or white supremacy, but not against white people themselves, an evasion that allowed the white elite to energize woke politics.

McConnell notes that wokeness is paternalistic. It views blacks as people with little control over their lives, defined by slavery’s and segregation’s past injuries, burdened by an ill-defined structural racism so pervasive that standards of achievement or conduct appropriate for other Americans must be suspended for them.

Away from this one-sided white v. black struggle, however, McConnell describes another racial development. After 40 years of historically high immigration, America looks far different than it did when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Arrivals from Mexico, Latin America, Asia and the Mideast reduced the white population share from over 85% to under 65%; among school children, Anglos are less than half.

These non-Anglo immigrants and their children are not invested in black-white history or in rebalancing historic wrongs whites inflicted on black Americans. Most have lived their American lives in a post-civil rights nation with racial discrimination illegal and carefully monitored. Their ancestors didn’t own slaves; they don’t feel guilty about America’s past.

Asian Americans, in particular, find it hard to accept the woke approach to law enforcement and education. In New York City, blacks are six times more likely to commit hate crimes than whites. Blacks comprise half the suspects in anti-Asian attacks, complicating the woke narrative of a Rainbow coalition struggling against white supremacy.

On education, progressives rail against standardized tests, even though the SAT has yet to be discredited as a way to predict student success. Standardized testing does inconveniently reveal how much of a leg up affirmative action gives black students over white and especially Asian students. The mismatch means black students with less developed academic skills often end up near the class bottom. 

The use of standardized test scores is being dropped or rolled back in Lowell High School in San Francisco, the Boston Latin School, and Thomas Jefferson High in northern Virginia, and is under threat in New York City’s top public schools, where graduates of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech have won an extraordinary 14 Nobel Science Prizes. 

Asian parents are fighting tilting current level playing fields against their children. Parents will fight harder over their children’s education than almost any issue. 

We discussed earlier how Hispanics often don’t identify with progressives’ woke agenda. They and other minorities value qualities wokeness seeks to undermine: law and order, careers open to talents, advanced levels of science and technology—and the legal and cultural structures that make such progress possible.

Korean-American writer Wesley Yang surmises that a decade ago, progressives looked at Hispanic immigration and realized how much assimilation was actually happening. Just as Irish and Italian immigrants had been “allowed to become white,” the same thing was happening with non-European immigrants. So the woke countered with Critical Race Theory.

Intermarriage represents the ultimate threat. Mixed marriages between white Americans and new immigrants or their children are on the rise. Over time, majorities won’t be exclusively white, but will have some white connection.

On the other side, the actual woke number remains small—perhaps 6% according to Pew surveys. It is educated, mostly white, heavily concentrated in the media and universities. America, one hopes, may “overcome some day” today's race-based affirmative action, going instead for a non-racial attack on economic disadvantage. 

Perhaps with a new elite leading the way.