Nearly midway into Christopher Lasch’s classic 1995 jeremiad, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Lasch makes a pause in his attacks upon the liberal elite’s “arrogance”, “insularity”, “abstraction”, and the fact that “the thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life”. As if coming to a sudden realisation, he adds, “none of this means that a politics that really mattered – a politics rooted in common sense instead of the ideologies that appeal to elites – would painlessly resolve all the conflicts that threaten to tear the country apart”. A politics rooted in common sense – ie, what “ordinary” people are most concerned with – is now said to have swept the Democrats from the White House and out of a Senate majority.
It is perhaps one of the signs of our present moment, caught, to borrow a famous formulation, between a world that is dying and one that is struggling to be born, that people fall back on familiar terminology even as they have forgotten exactly what that terminology means. Not one American in a thousand, I will wager, can tell you what defines a “fascist”. No doubt that is part of the reason that the Democrats’ feverish application of the term to Donald Trump in the last weeks of the election seems, rather, to have had the reverse of its intended effect. And now, for sheer repellent power, the liberal use of “fascist” has been replaced by the conservative use of “elite”. As a result, liberal elites, conditioned as they are always to be winning, are rushing to distance themselves from the term “elite” as fast as they can.
Forget the Hamptons, Truro, the Vineyard. Liberals cannot jump into overalls, trade in their EVs for a petrol-powered minivan and get to wherever America’s Wigan Pier is fast enough. A cosy contempt for “liberal elites” used to be the hallmark of conservative sentiment. Now it is a mark – along with having a house in the Hamptons, Truro or the Vineyard – of liberal pedigree. “The elites had it coming” went the headline of a post-election piece in the ultra-elite opinion section of the New York Times, a piece written by the ultra-elite political writer Thomas Frank. “Many voters have come to associate democracy with globalisation, corruption, financial capitalism, migration, forever wars and elites (like me),” writes Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, in a mea culpa for the same newspaper. Following the election, the Hill ran an opinion piece declaring the Washington Post and other liberal mainstays the “zombie elite”, defined as “a formerly important institution that doesn’t know it is already dead”.
Of course, elite “luxury beliefs”, to use the latest Laschian jab at liberal elites, are still alive and well. In the New Yorker, David Remnick ascribed Trump’s victory to “economic anxiety, cultural politics, racism, misogyny, Biden’s late start” – to anything but the shallow, token nature of the candidate and the vitiated nature of contemporary liberalism itself. Indeed, Remnick declared that “everyone who realises with proper alarm that this is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are”. What could be more remote, aloof, superior – elite – than an alarm that must be “proper” to be real? Perhaps if liberal cultural institutions refreshed the thinking in their upper echelons, liberal politics would follow.
One of the many contradictions in the way “liberal elite” is being thrown around now is that it is almost always accompanied by a lament for the liberalism of yore. Bring back the postwar liberalism that was connected to the lives of ordinary Americans, chastened liberals say. They point to FDR and the New Deal, and to the postwar liberal consensus that made possible Kennedy’s New Frontier and, far more consequently, Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It is true that, so great was the national consensus behind these programmes, that even Richard Nixon, that arch-villain of the liberals, did as much to advance the liberal agenda as the most activist liberal politician. When Kamala Harris raised the possibility of instituting wage and price controls to ease the painful effects of inflation on ordinary American lives, she was invoking Nixon, who had done precisely that. And, contrary to critics now who accuse her of not addressing the economic pain of ordinary Americans – she did nothing but talk about the economy until the final weeks of the campaign – she was denounced for invoking wage and price controls by both parties.
Yet the policies and programmes that characterised this liberalism – one based on class rather than cultural, or later, identitarian attitudes – were entirely the creation of elites. This was the case for FDR’s Brain Trust, drawn mostly from Columbia, for the Harvard-educated Kennedy’s slew of Harvard-educated advisers, and for Richard Goodwin, the Harvard Law School-educated adviser to LBJ who coined the term “Great Society”. For the most part, such figures had no more connection to what has become the hallowed working class than the working class had a connection to the Ivy League. But you would search in vain for any sort of thoroughgoing critique of them as “elites”. The term still referred, as it did in the radical 1930s, to those who possessed raw political and economic power. “Elite” in this sense reached its theoretical apotheosis in C Wright Mills’ classic book The Power Elite, published in 1956, in which the book’s title refers to what Mills famously dubbed the “military-industrial complex”.
It was not until 1964 that, in a feat of nimble intellectual ju-jitsu, conservatives flipped “elite” on its back. In his Republican convention speech praising Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate that year, Ronald Reagan said, “This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.” Everyone on the convention floor knew what Reagan meant by liberal elite “plans”. He was referring to the Civil Rights Act, which had been enacted just three months before. The new legislation meant, to put it broadly, the final legal enfranchisement of America’s black people. It meant, to conservatives, a new voting bloc that would deliver one local and national election after another to Democrats. The only bright spot, in the most far-seeing of conservative eyes, was that the new legislation would create a huge bureaucracy of entitlement that would mire, they believed, American cities in pathology, a dysfunction the right could use against the Democrats in future elections.
The liberals had paved the way for this transition from class war to culture war, from liberal opposition to an economic elite to conservative opposition to an academic and intellectual one. In the 1950s, the great liberal historian, Richard Hofstadter, upended the study of American history by attributing American populism to the “status anxiety” of heartland America, and then later explaining McCarthyism as a form of collective “paranoia”. What in the past few days American liberals are obsessing over as the “bread-and-butter” issues of economics and class was nowhere to be found in Hofstadter’s analysis. Until that point, the historical understanding of populism was that it had economic roots. Hofstadter replaced economics with psychology. Later, the New Left all but institutionalised consciousness – or psychology – not class, as the necessary focus of an oppositional left-liberal establishment. The shift from class to consciousness was not lost on the right, which has learned to repeat untruths until they become as familiar as the truth.
From the New Left’s elevation of consciousness – the Hill’s article refers waggishly to the “Censorship Industrial Complex” of woke culture – it was but a few steps to the identity politics of the 1990s and the woke politics of, well, yesterday. But Reagan’s unspoken, yet clear, reference to black people remains at the heart of this mutation of the word “elite” from liberal to conservative bugbear. Quite simply, the Democratic Party’s increasingly narrow focus on American blacks has now been replaced by the Republican party’s narrow and intense focus on, mostly, working-class whites. The irony is blunt. In the name of the working class, the Republicans, even as they continue to revile liberal “elites”, have only strengthened their own position as the elite once reviled by the radical left in the 1930s: ie, a stratum of people entirely defined by their control of economic forces.
It should be noted that this turn in the concept of “elite” is not at all what Lasch had in mind when he attacked liberals. Though he would heartily agree with the conservative critique of arrogant, pie-in-the-sky identitarians, he would have bridled at the conservatives’ own elite status, resting, as it does, on economic power. Elon Musk, not Henry George, is now the rapidly beating heart of the GOP. Lasch believed that behind (to use another Laschian formulation) the “narcissistic” personality that drives identity politics, is a culture shaped, driven and determined by money.
Money, not a fair redistribution of wealth, is at the centre of the new right populism. Unlike the innate qualities of brainpower or artistic talent, anyone, of any social status, of any race, nationality, or creed, can accrue money. When Trump says, in effect, that the only measure of worth is wealth – not the “weaponised” judgements of morality or the law – he is putting in the hands of his followers the greatest levelling instrument known to democratic society – never mind that for liberals, money’s unequal distribution is democracy’s greatest adversary. This is how Trump can get away with calling his enemies “low-IQ individuals”. He is reversing conventional notions of intelligence. They are “low IQ” because they have the “high IQ” of people who refuse to acknowledge the gutter wisdom of every-day life. Which, in the terms Trump has won on, is that whoever has the most money, or whoever is led by those with the most money, wins. Of course, reversing conventional notions of intelligence is long overdue. The question is whether Trump’s new terms are better than the old ones.
To be called an “elite”, on either side, is an abhorrence in a modern democracy. There will still, however, be people who, thanks to a slew of factors, in a countless variety of contexts, and playing one of an infinite number of roles, find themselves situated above other people. That is inevitable. And it is inevitable that they will be called elites by their opponents. What liberals must do now, instead of playing the parlour game of distancing themselves from elitism, is make a choice. Do they want to pander to the new apples of their eye, the working class? Perhaps Lasch’s sudden realisation, in The Revolt of the Elites, that “common sense” is not the magical solution to a democracy’s conflicts, is something the newly anti-elite liberal elites need to take to heart. It became “common sense” for the white working class in Germany and Italy in the 1930s to imprison and murder their liberal intellectuals. One person’s common sense is another person’s irrational fury. And Trump’s “populism” appeals to fury far more than it does to concern over wages and prices.
Or, as generations of left-radicals once did, do liberals want to labour towards elevating the working class above life’s brute material necessities and into the light of a greater autonomy, one that both encompasses material life and extends beyond it? Liberals have to decide. Will they be woke identitarians bent on national suicide, or enlightened thinkers, hailing from every stratum of life, determined to improve the lot of all – charges of “elitism” be damned?
[See also: Kevin Roberts’s fire-breathing American right]
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