Elites Need to Engage with Populist Sentiment
When people complain about the electoral college or similar aspects of American government, some like to quip that, “the U.S. isn’t a democracy. It’s a republic.” While America is not a direct democracy, it has many democratic elements, and it is best understood as a democratic republic. At least some of the polarization in America today can be understood as the tension between these two sets of political values — democracy and republicanism — which can be at odds sometimes. Republicanism concerns itself with selecting virtuous individuals who are capable of identifying and working towards the common good. Democratic ideals put forth the idea that good solutions can be found by pooling everyone’s interests together.
In recent years, tension between the two has erupted into a battle between populists, who purport to be of and for the people (democratic), and a broad group made up of political, cultural, scientific, and economic elites that purport to know what is best for society (republican), who the populists believe have failed. Populist energy propelled Donald Trump to the presidency, and Bernie Sanders has enjoyed considerable political success of his own in his opposition to the establishment. Indeed, political scientists have found that there are many cases in which elites are, despite their efforts to understand, misinformed about what the public wants and believes. It happens with topics across the political spectrum. For instance, more people believe in climate change and are less isolationist in terms of foreign policy than elites tend to think they are.
What has been the response of the political, economic, cultural, and scientific elites to this backlash? It has largely been to double down. When democracy does not lead to their desired results — whether it be Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, or wavering support for pandemic restrictions — the response is often denigration, such as calling people “deplorables.” People who subscribe to elite opinions often look down on certain groups and say that these people are angry fools who are duped into voting against their own interests. Maybe that is the case, but it’s an easy answer that absolves whoever says it of any misperceptions or prejudices of their own.
Such individuals ask questions like, “how could COVID-19 get politicized? How could climate change get politicized?” These issues are political at their core. It is political to ask: Should we prioritize the present over the future, the young over the old, or government power over personal liberty and responsibility? Implicitly what is being said when someone laments that such issues have become politicized is: “How could the expert narrative be questioned? Isn’t this the only reasonable way to think about such a thing?” It is the result of mistaking their values and aims to be universal and scientific and it leads to more doubling down. Under such mindsets, counterarguments and even attempts at nuance are on shaky ground. It becomes a race to see who best fits the elite’s vision of virtue, and naturally gives rise to things like political correctness and cancel culture.
The elite and expert vision for the world has been so polarizing because it is so self-assured in its own exceptionalism that it can be toxic and fail to see that it may not always accommodate large segments of society. The result is significant numbers of people that feel sold out by globalization and automation, used or alienated by identity politics, and have their beliefs repudiated in the name of science. None of these things correspond to the common good that a virtuous republican elite were supposed to bring them, and thus they lose trust in the people who brought them those issues. This can lead to something potentially dangerous: a distaste and disregard for all elite political institutions. There arises a risk of destroying said political institutions and their functions, checks, and balances, and leads to things like the January 6th riot. Furthermore, when the old voices are no longer trusted, it can be easy to turn to new ones on things like social media platforms and fall victim to simple ideas and conspiracy theories that are expedient and affirm preconceptions.
Re-earning trust must start with members of elite classes that I have broadly referred to: the rich, the metropolitan, pundits, and even the 37.9% of Americans with bachelor’s degrees. They must be willing to approach the denigrated left-behind of all parties and walks of life in an effort to understand them and look past media stereotypes. Critically, they must meet these people where they are if they wish to convince them of anything, and in doing so they might just expand their own minds too. Only once this is accomplished might a more broadly democratic and less polarizing common good be found.
Image courtesy of NYU under the Creative Commons