Elite capture and woke liberalism

Michael Anton has an essay in Compact magazine where he makes a pessimistic case for the future based on the trends prevailing in the present. Anton's angst is motivated by several disturbing features in American politics and society, many shaped by the woke liberalism that is the dominant ideology.

He describes the real power wielders in the US.

We still choose, sort of, but that hardly matters, because the people we nominally elect do not hold real power. And when they do, they often use it for unconstitutional ends. America’s real rulers are not the constitutional officers we nominally elect, and certainly not the American people, whom our understanding of political legitimacy asserts to be sovereign. They are, rather, a network of unelected bureaucrats, revolving-door Cabinet and subcabinet officials, corporate-tech-finance senior management, “experts” who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police them. 

In this backdrop, David Brooks has an honest introspection from the side of the liberals. He writes about the liberal intelligentsia's economic incentives

Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom. After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, he continues, because “the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”

He describes the modern meritocracy and its exclusionary basis,

We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation. 

Michael Lind has an excellent article where he draws attention to a single national elite in the US who get selected in their late teens or early twenties by virtue of their college admissions. 

Societies in which members of a single, homogeneous national elite with similar backgrounds circulate easily among all of the various centers of power—government, business, academe, and the media—are familiar in the modern world. In Britain, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge and a few elite private schools who live in a few neighborhoods in London dominate powerful institutions. In France, the grandes écoles play the role of Oxbridge in Britain. The University of Tokyo functions similarly in Japan.

Increasingly, the pattern in the United States is similar. It resembles a candelabrum: Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation, including the arts, outside of the military and the clergy... The lateral circulation of members of the same elite through revolving doors in the public, private, and nonprofit realms is a formula for oligarchy.

In an interesting essay in Compact magazine, Benjamin Studebaker argues that economic incentives and the political economy corrupt our morals and values. 

As Aristotle—and following him, Aquinas, in the Treatise on Law—had argued, moral exhortations don’t work when the hearers lack the necessary material incentives. But words are always cheaper than action, and so there is always a tendency to rationalize, to pretend we can achieve through opprobrium what can only be achieved through the hard toil of politics.

Across the West today, the market relentlessly coerces citizens to contemplate and grasp for money, subordinating every other value. They are exhausted. In their misery, they seek out every kind of coping mechanism imaginable. Instead of learning temperance, they construct their identities around their desires, around the products they consume.

Progressives in the United States who advocate for cash-transfer programs, like the expansion of the earned-income tax credit or universal basic income, overestimate the capacity of market systems to develop citizens. It isn’t enough simply to create free time. The market forces that incentivize consumption and melancholic repose need to be curbed for the moral health of the people. Meanwhile, most cultural conservatives maintain a blissful ignorance of the nexus between the material order and the spiritual, gainsaying how the capitalization of health care, housing, and education have led to the capitalization of the family and of interior life; how citizens derive no meaningful social roles and are alienated from themselves, their kin, and their communities.

Michael Lind posits an alternative world of elite pluralism where multiple elites inhabit

... a system of plural elites, each with its own admissions standards and internal promotion mechanisms. Examples of vocations that are structured along these lines are the US military and the clergy of the more organized among the organized religions. In the case of the military, not only is working your way up through the ranks one way to become a general or an admiral, it is the only way. Likewise, the papacy isn’t an entry-level job open to people who spent most of their lives outside of the Catholic priesthood...

In 21st-century America, campaign donors can still buy prestigious ambassadorships. But in today’s United States you can’t graduate from Harvard or Yale or Princeton, do a stint at McKinsey, work for Goldman Sachs, dabble in making documentaries about climate change or global poverty, invest in a startup, donate heavily to one party or the other and be appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, any more than you can become Archbishop of Boston with that résumé. Labor unions are another example. Leaders of traditional labor organizations work their way up through the hierarchy. They don’t parachute into the top in midlife after another career in finance, real estate, or political campaign management, brandishing their Ivy diplomas.

I can think of an entrenched confluence of three groups of people and interests who have had an important role to play in creating this equilibrium in which liberalism is entrapped. 

The first group consists of immensely wealthy donors (and also the individuals who own influential technology platforms) who have made huge money, especially in either Wall Street or Big Tech, and who now want to go beyond their professional realms and shape the world around their views on critical public and social issues. Their world views and ideologies are in turn shaped by their economic interests and they want to form the public narrative in a manner that promotes those interests. 

The second group consists of the late baby boomer and millennial cohort who have achieved personal economic comfort and social status by working in sectors like especially Finance and Consulting, and are now jostling to become thought leaders and opinion makers on these same issues. Its members are invariably well-credentialed, having graduated from elite colleges and worked in elite companies. They, supported by their latter generational cohorts, are the leaders in creating and perpetuating the economy, society, and polity that is shaped by these narratives. 

The final group consists of academic researchers in elite universities and think tanks who believe that the world should be run based on their narrow technical expertise. Their world views converge with those of the first group and they become active in shaping the narratives. In simple terms, they are the ideologues who provide the technical rigour and scholarly credibility to the ideas being bankrolled by wealthy donors. 

Many who research widening inequality and the problems of increasing automation are also direct or indirect beneficiaries of the same corporate interests whose actions create these problems. Many passionate advocates of the restoration of union activity are also power users of Amazon Prime and voracious Starbucks coffee drinkers. All of them are passionate believers in the superiority of technical expertise and experts in solving social problems and policy challenges and also scorn the application of political choices in such decisions.

Sympathy is cheap, and talk is cheaper. In contrast, actions are hard. Hypocrisy is the dissonance between words and actions. This is one of the biggest problems with today's liberals (or woke liberalism). Liberals have been dulled into being compradors for modern capitalism by their economic incentives. They are active participants and among the biggest beneficiaries of the prevailing exclusionary economic system. Anything beyond talk and bluster risks cutting off the branch they're comfortably ensconced. But that may well be the need of the hour.