OPINION:
Observers of all political persuasions agree there is a major disconnect between the elites who shape our government and social institutions and the views of many ordinary Americans. Conservative observers have concluded that our elites live by different standards and act without regard to the views of ordinary Americans. In one sense, this is true; elites have displayed ever less humility in instructing Americans how to think and behave.
Just below the surface, however, there is a deeper reality. American elites continue to live their own lives by rather traditional values—marriage, children born in wedlock, hard work, savings, balanced budgets, respect for the law, and security with tolerable risk. But they have lost confidence in themselves and these values; they are afraid the political radicals will denounce them. They pretend these values are no more than arbitrary prejudices that others may take or leave as they please.
Consider the American family. That a stable two-parent family is the best environment in which to raise children has long been understood. In their own practice, elites understand this. But they are afraid to say this out loud today. To say publicly that the proper order in which young lives should unfold is to have a job, then marriage, and only then children—stains one as bourgeois, hopelessly intolerant, and even racist. Elites have lost confidence in their own values.
It is much the same with the fraught issues concerning race in America. Anyone with eyes can see the position of Black Americans has vastly improved and that there are few remaining institutional obstacles to Black advancement. Elites know this, of course, but are afraid to say so, preferring instead to echo the ever more bizarre and meaningless fantasies of political and academic race hustlers. Today a member of the elite does not dare to say that all lives matter, which of course, they do.
The current debate over policing makes this point as well. Everyone, including members of the elite, knows that policing is a key part of minimizing criminal violence. Members of the elite—of all races—teach their children respect for the law and the police. Elites live in relatively safe neighborhoods from crime, at least for now, and are no strangers to gated communities and private security. But they advocate abolishing the police, defunding the police, or re-imagining the police, whatever that might mean. We hear from them ever new ways of explaining why crimes should not be prosecuted and criminals punished. What elites argue aloud is in flat contradistinction to how they live their own lives.
Nowhere is this phenomenon starker than in spending and tax policies. In their private lives, elites are generally careful to restrain their spending and cover their expenses with income. They are generally sensible enough to run only deficits that are sustainable and repayable. However, when it comes to federal spending, the values of prudence, self-control and long-range planning disappear entirely. Large and unsustainable debt is the order of the day. The word salad of modern monetary theory has conveniently arrived just in time to justify any level of deficit spending that one pleases. Elites have lost the self-confidence to assert in public the values which have helped to make their own lives financially secure.
Doubt has crept into American foreign policy as well. From the beginning of the American republic, elites believed that the values which shaped America were valid for all peoples. This, of course, did not mean that America should attempt to impose these values by force on other peoples. In the heady days of post-World War II American dominance, America became more aggressive about exporting its values. In recent years, we have learned that this is not always possible to achieve. But a deeper kind of doubt has emerged. It is one thing to be cautious about imposing American ideals on other nations; it is another matter entirely to doubt that these ideals are universal. Is China’s combination of quasi-capitalism and political authoritarianism a better model? Should we no longer hold up our ideals for all nations but rather try to “understand” these other nations? This pseudo-cosmopolitanism, of course, runs hard up against the fact that people from almost every nation, including China, would rather live under a system like ours. What is massive immigration about if not this?
Beneath the domineering face of elite condescension, there is a hollow moral core and ebbing self-confidence. In place of a moral core, we get instead the masterful manipulation of words which stand as markers of political virtue.
George Orwell described this perfectly. So did Solzhenitsyn. The elites they described did not really believe what they said either; they acted very differently in their personal lives than what they mouthed in public. They were cynical through and through and lived in constant fear of being denounced by one of their own for not believing in a system that nobody else believed in either.
Failure to practice what you preach we call hypocrisy. Failure to preach what you practice is called cowardice.
Ordinary Americans have begun to ask themselves why they should listen to elites. Elites have not responded to this challenge with self-reflection but with deeper condescension. Donald Trump was the first but will not be the last result of this. Unless elites find the courage to shed their fear of political correctness and the false moral relativism in which no one actually believes—and begin to speak again for the values by which they actually live their own lives—we will be looking at an increasingly dangerous political situation.
• Jeff Bergner has served in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. His most recent book is The Vanishing Congress.
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