Of the Elite, by the Elite, for the People

Populism as a response to the corrupt commandeering of social resources

An elite institution invited me to come speak with its leaders on the topic of “Reforming Elite Institutions in a Populist Era,” which I found to be a very interesting topic, and so I thought I might share here as well what I prepared for that discussion.

As a starting point, I think the framing is especially helpful in feeling the way toward a useful definition of “populism.” At first glance, one might think populism means simply doing those things that are popular, but in that case it seems not so different from just the basics of democracy. At the other extreme, the term is often deployed disparagingly, to mean capitulation to some lowest common denominator. In this telling, populists pursue a course they know to be unwise for the sake of the power they can obtain by channeling the irrational impulses of the masses.

Elite institutions provide a reference point for a useful middle ground. Populism is an attack on elite institutions when they fail to play their role and fulfill their obligations in a society.

I’m one of those people who believes that elite institutions are both important and inevitable, that no modern society can function without them. Perhaps that’s a discussion for another day, but for now let’s stipulate that we have them, we have always had them, and no one has ever successfully removed them. Those institutions include the government, major corporations, the media, the academy, non-profits, and the legal and medical professions. The people who control those institutions wield enormous power over ordinary citizens, who have limited recourse beyond their vote in the political sphere and their purchasing power in the market—and in this latter realm, the sheer scale of the upper-middle-class’s disposable income dominates.

For a liberal society to function, leaders must take seriously their obligation as keepers of a public trust in the operation of these institutions. That does not mean operating them as charities (except for the ones that are charities, of course). But it requires some understanding of what role citizens expect and need each institution to play, and for what purpose. Policymakers can adhere to Edmund Burke’s dictum that “your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion,” while still applying that judgment on behalf of interests beyond his own. The distinction is between ends and means. The political leader may best understand how to achieve some end, but he cannot substitute his own end for the one preferred by his constituents.

Universities are supposed to educate people and produce knowledge. The media is supposed to inform and entertain. Corporations are supposed to deploy capital productively, maximizing their profit while keeping their behavior within the boundaries of not only law, but also ethical custom, as Milton Friedman famously argued. Doctors have an oath, and lawyers a bar, intended to constrain them and focus their priorities.

In fulfilling these obligations, a tension will always exist between advocacy and acquiescence. A leader in any domain will have his own values and preferences, his own view of the priorities that his institution should advance, and one element of leadership is making that case. At the same time, leaders must recognize when their case has not yet won the day, and accept that their station in life obliges them to look beyond personal preference, rather than entitling them to impose it. This is the essence of noblesse oblige in a liberal society, or what Plato called the “noble lie.” In one of my all-time favorite essays, The Ignoble Lie, Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen explains:

The underclass is likely to accept the myth because they realize it works to their advantage. Its members are keenly aware of the fact of inequality. That part of the “lie” hardly seems false to them. What is novel, and what works to their advantage, is the idea that inequalities exist for the benefit of the underclass as well as the rulers. That is, members with noble metals in their souls are to undertake their work for the benefit of everyone, including those whose souls are marked by base metals. By contrast, members of the ruling class are likely to disbelieve the myth out of self-interest. They balk at the claim that every person, regardless of rank, belongs to the same family. They do not want the advantages that might solely benefit their class to be employed for the benefit of the whole.

When leaders of elite institutions take their responsibilities seriously, market democracies function well. But, perhaps inevitably over time, and as Plato predicted they would, elites come to see their power as earned and themselves as entitled to wield it however they might wish. Political leaders see themselves as elected to do what they want to do. Deans transform their campuses into reeducation camps. News editors take it upon themselves to decide which narratives will shape public opinion as they wish, while Hollywood studios try to tell audiences what movies with what actors they should want to watch. Public health officials contort science to promote their conception of social justice. This is a kind of corruption—a commandeering of public resources for personal gain—that is in many ways more serious than common embezzlement or the holiday flight on the company plane.

Our extreme political polarization, and the sense of rising stakes with each election, are a non-intuitive symptom of the illness. Voting performs two different functions, as both an expression of the popular will and the selection of its agents. We try to infer from election results what people want, and we also use the results to determine who gets power. In a well-functioning democracy, election outcomes just shouldn’t matter that much. If the race is a lopsided one, say 60-40, everyone knows who is going to win and what they will have a mandate to do. But if a race is 51-49 one way or another, or if results flip from 51% for one party to 51% for the other each cycle, the binary outcome of who wins swings entirely out of proportion to people’s wants. Has the popular will or public values really shifted at all? Whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump won the 2024 election yielded almost no information about what the American people want. Indeed, as of 5pm on election night, most people thought it could go either way. So why should Donald Trump, if he won, govern differently than Kamala Harris, if she won?

“I won, so I get to do what I want,” misunderstands the obligations of the democratically elected leader. The over-wrought efforts to declare a “mandate” for any victory over 50.0% suggest an awareness that no such mandate exists.

The political skew in universities is a good example as well. Who cares whether a faculty is 90% Democrat, 90% Republican, or 50-50? Most people who have attended a university and taken courses on charged subjects will have stories of professors who they may have disagreed with politically, but who were the very best teachers. The personal political outlook of the professor who takes his professional obligations seriously matters little. A collection of professors who take their institutional obligations seriously can govern a university well regardless of their politics, just as a set of very liberal or very conservative business executives can run a business well.

The problem comes when the professor who is a Democrat decides his task is to teach students to be Democrats, or when an overwhelmingly progressive faculty decides it is their prerogative to coopt the university to advance progressive social goals. Of course, some ideological balance on a faculty might be important simply to foster a healthy exchange of ideas. But demands for ideological balance as a response to institutions veering astray are a second-best solution, envisioning two groups checking each other because neither is able to check itself.

What are ordinary people to do when they find that elite institutions are being run for the benefit of the elite rather than for the benefit of all? They have little power as consumers. Changing a vote from one set of elites pursuing their own priorities to another set yields little meaningful reform. Their only option is to elect someone from outside the elite entirely, whose message and mission are premised on assaulting and disciplining those institutions from the outside. Elites will understandably tend to unite in opposing and disparaging any such effort. They will have convinced themselves that they are acting for the common good when they act for themselves, and so they will perceive the attack as irrational and counterproductive demagoguery. A vital feature of democracy, though, is that a population sufficiently disgusted by the status quo and willing to tune out the mocking and the warnings can in fact force change.

Perhaps it seems contradictory to lament the swings in our politics when one party or the other gets to 50.1%, but then regard a disruptive outsider reaching that same threshold as a legitimate agent of change. The difference is that the outsider is not one of two elites between whom the baton has been passing back and forth. Someone like him would have started at 0, perhaps then reached 10 or 20… at 30 or 40 one would think leaders might take notice, perhaps even see the error of their ways. The relevance of a populist reaching 50% is not that he is 1% more popular than the other candidate, but that he is 50% more popular than in a world where elite institutions were behaving as they should.

The question of reforming elite institutions in a populist era is whether they will be reformed from within or from the outside. Reform from within is preferable—leaders “scared straight” into rediscovering their obligations can chart a better course with much less disruption. In the United States, that has happened in some realms but not others. Corporations have thrown “ESG” and “DEI” to the wind. In Silicon Valley, social media platforms have suddenly discovered that maybe they shouldn’t try to suppress news stories they deem unfavorable.

Universities, by contrast, appear to have learned nothing. And so they find themselves now under extreme financial pressure from a federal government hell-bent on bringing them to heel. This is not the preferred path to reform, but it is the inevitable one for institutions that will not reform themselves. They deserve no sympathy.

Ideally, they will wake up soon to the reality that their preferred status quo is no longer an option, and between harsh discipline from the outside or internal reform, they will choose the latter. But my impression is, and their actions over the past five years suggest, that many of them are corrupted irrevocably.

- Oren