Elites Failed the Discernment Test

The path forward, from all of this, will be legal and institutional, but it will also need to be cultural and social. Both have their own institutions, of course, and their own unwritten laws in their norms. But those institutions and those unwritten laws are macro-products of micro-behaviors, the result of ethical choices you and I and all of us make throughout every hour, every day, and every year.

What all of this is showing, now, is that the micro-choices made by many of our elites, and many of those adjacent to them, in the decade or two before all of this happened (and happened with demoralizing speed once the far-right took control in January) were broken or cramped. They refused to see, or in fact participated in, what was happening while it was still in the phase something could’ve been done. Before it metastasized into our present moment.

They still do it. You can see it every time the press or a national magazine publishes another fawning “aren’t these people interesting?” interview with a character from one of the right’s fever swamps. A professor who thinks maybe what we need is a Catholic theocracy. A couple who advocates for traditional families, and large ones too, because birth rates are down, and by that they mean birth rights among those who share their skin color and cultural origins. A podcaster who winks at antisemitism, or maybe doesn’t wink, but raises its tropes with enough plausible deniability to make whatever journalist it is feel okay with writing up the interview. The person who takes money from the far-right because it’s a job or it’s funding, and maybe a little of what the far-right says has a point behind it because it sure feels like our cities aren’t as safe as they remember when they were still sheltered by their parents’ roof. Whatever the crime stats say.

The world is diverse. And the content of that diversity changes. That’s what a liberal, pluralistic society is. You can’t have it otherwise and still have liberal pluralism. But that doesn’t mean you have to like every tributary of that diversity, and it doesn’t mean you’ll feel as comfortable with all of it as you felt when you were a child sheltered by your parents’ roof. You go from being a kid to talking about the kids these days, and that’s natural, because all of us stop being kids, and in stopping being kids we settle into preferences and give up experimenting. Mostly.

So you look out at that diversity, and that change, and you put up with it, because that’s what it means to be a liberal. Which you think of yourself as, in part because the non-liberals, at least the ones who call themselves that outside of limited circles of post-liberal academia or the attendees at a National Conservatism conference, are just so uncouth. So uncultured. So proletariat.

But sometimes a resident of one of those tributaries, or someone sharing the same stream as you in all this pluralism, tells you the way you think, now, might’ve been okay, or at least accepted, during your formative years, but it’s not anymore. You can’t say that. Not about those people over there. You can’t joke at their expense. Or you can’t treat the people who work for you that way, not like people in your position in years past were able to get away with. Or you have to accept that people who look like you, or come from the same background as you, aren’t so much the culture’s focus anymore. Instead, people who don’t look like you, or didn’t come from the same background as you, have a degree of privilege and regard that feels, in its emphasis, like privilege and regard taken from you.

You’re still a liberal, you tell yourself, but this is all a bit too much. You’ve earned more than you’re getting, or feel you’re getting, not just (or even) financially, but in terms of having things be the way you want them to be. The future you imagined when you were still on your way up has been taken from you, maybe before you even reached the top. You’re haunted by its absence, a ghost of what never came to be.

And here are these people, on the fringes, in strange corners of the intellectual and social landscape, removed enough from you and your peers to feel slightly exotic, saying that, actually, what you’re feeling is okay. Proper. Because that future, that settled feeling of being atop the culture and uncriticized in your ways, that you were anticipating, or had a taste of, was taken from you. By them. The people not like you. The youth, or the culturally distinct, or the woke, or the professors in the sociology department. This isn’t change you’re experiencing, or not just change. Instead, it’s corruption. It’s bad values, bad beliefs, replacing good values and good beliefs. The good values and beliefs are the traditional ones, the old ways, because they were the values and beliefs from before all this corrupting change. And you know they’re good because they’re your values and beliefs, or a heightened version of them, and your values and beliefs can’t be bad. Otherwise you wouldn’t hold them, and that’s what’s so unjust about the youth or the woke or the professors in the sociology department telling you that making those jokes or treating your assistant that way isn’t okay and you should knock it off.

So you cozy up to them. You might not buy the whole of what they’re selling, but you’re intrigued. And, besides, they feel a little transgressive, and that reminds you of the rush of your own youth, when you were the one telling your parents’ and grandparents’ that their beliefs needed updating. Or maybe you’re still young now, but feel out of step, uncomfortable in the culture, and here are these people telling you that it’s the culture’s fault. And so you give them interviews, you hang out with them at conferences, you take jobs and money from them, and let them into your circles, if only on the periphery. Because, again, they might be outsiders, but maybe they’re onto something? Their ideas are fun to think about, anyway.

This was all one thing when they stayed on the periphery. It wasn’t wise, because the content of those ideas was, let’s be honest, always rather abhorrent, because the content of those ideas always included racism, and sexism, and a belief in natural hierarchies among human beings. It wasn’t moral to entertain the beliefs of this fringe. It was a sign of poor character to find them intriguing and titillating. But now... Now those ideas and those attitudes are no longer on the periphery. They are the commanding heights. They control the federal government, and are asserting control over our institutions. They’re mainstream because they’ve poisoned our political headwaters.

When we get through this, then, when our political institutions are no longer controlled by the sorts of people who currently control them, we’ll need to think long and hard about how we got here, and about the degree to which getting here was the result of not just tolerating, but entertaining, these ideas.

They must no longer be edged up to because they feel transgressive. They are not harmless, we now see. They are gravely, apocalyptically harmful. We knew this from history, of course, because we’ve seen this before, but the people who really needed to see it only had in the pages of history books, where a kind of depersonalizing sanitation takes place. Where there’s enough distance, over space and time and culture, that we can turn our eye away from seeing ourselves, or seeing our friends or acquaintances or colleagues, in their pages and their stories of how other places and other times ended up here.

Every time another one of these people makes the news for taking the mask off to such a degree that what they really can no longer be ignored or explained away, and if you spend time in what we’ve taken to calling “elite circles” over the last decade or two, you’ll hear the same refrain. I used to know him. I used to work with him. I used to have drinks with him. I had drinks with him last week, he’s a fun guy. Often there were signs of the kinds of values that lead to believing these ideas, and then believing them enough to take the mask off. He drank and harassed interns. He joked about women or gays or minorities. He was rather fond of talking about genetic differences in IQ or how evolution built women to be better in the home than the boardroom. It’s all unfortunate because he does good work, though. It’s just foibles. It’s all in good fun.

That’s what we have to abandon, when we get through this and begin the process of rebuilding our political and cultural institutions. Liberal pluralism means allowing, in a legal sense, bad people to hold bad ideas. There are calls, as we watch the horrors around us, to give that up. To turn the state against the expression of these ideas, when liberals regain the state. We mustn’t do that, mustn’t give into that urge, because we’re seeing now what it’s like to have a state use its muscle to crush what its rulers believe to be improper ideas. Besides, it wasn’t the allowing that got us here. The failure of elites wasn’t that they merely tolerated a certain fringe. It’s that they gave platforms to that fringe, normalized it, sanitized it. If they’d only ignored it, we might be in better shape. But instead they were intrigued by it, liked what it had to say, made its voice part of the conversation they then pushed, through the outlets they controlled, to everyone else who might’ve otherwise left it on the fringe, too. They were corrupted by it, by the fact that it was telling them their feelings of alienation from the wider culture, or from their children and grandchildren, were justified and their sense that alienation resulted from cultural injustice valid. And they were corrupted by knowing enough of these people to believe them fun to have drinks with.

We have to give that up. We have to make these ideas and the people who hold them socially anathema again. Not legally, because the First Amendment is good and just, but they ought not to be our friends. They ought not to be welcome members of our social and professional groups. There needs to be consequences for aiding and abetting all of this. We’ll need to relearn the lessons of history elites waved away out of a pull towards the exotic and a desire to be maybe a little transgressive themselves. We’ll have to relearn what is acceptable and what isn’t, what leads to a wholesome society and what drags us into a vicious one.

We’ll need the courage of our convictions, if we in fact mean them, to reshape the culture so that these ideas, of racism and sexism and hierarchy and domination, are forced back to the fringe. And stay there.