Progressivism splintered from republicanism first in reaching for greater central government control as its main weapon against the rise of an economic aristocracy and secondly by the creation of a new bureaucratic aristocracy embedded in the administrative state. Concentration in media and academia were subjected to competition in the past that is much less likely today.
In the America of Abraham Lincoln’s day, there was an obvious solution. If you didn’t like the news, start your own paper. The New York Times was founded in 1851 by one of the founders of the Republican Party. If you didn’t like the universities, start your own. Leland Stanford, the first Republican governor of California, did that. But the old institutions are far more entrenched now: It would take a century or more to create a new Harvard. In the meantime, only the people on the inside get to determine who is hired, promoted, or otherwise heard within the institutions. It increasingly seems as difficult for culturally conservative perspectives to penetrate these institutions as it was for an 18th-century French peasant to become a duke.
Today’s revival of republicanism among Republicans is of a different cast than its predecessors. Today’s elites are not, in any formal sense, hereditary, although the intermarriage of the “knowledge elite” tends to reinforce their distance from the rest of the population. But the movement that has come into focus in the past several years has gradually assumed the character of a cohesive critique of American society.
In this telling, the progressive march through the institutions has created enclaves of self-reinforcing and self-reproducing power that are effectively permanent. That includes cultural progressives who have burrowed themselves into effective control of the news media, the entertainment industry, the universities, the public schools, the social-media platforms, the administrative state, the public-health establishment, the NGOs and foundations, Wall Street, the bar associations, and even formerly conservative bastions such as the corporate boardroom and the military brass. The menace they present to traditional American republicanism is not merely that they enjoy a privileged position envied by others, but that they seek to use it as a sword, rapidly disseminating new orthodoxies through society and acting in unison to impose them on a general population that is permitted no say in the matter through elections or willing market exchanges.
These institutions are insulated from all the hurly-burly mechanisms of accountability that are supposed to be the hallmarks of republican America: popular elections, competition, the creative destruction of the free market. The new elites can neither be voted out nor removed by market forces. This is partly due to what I’ve called “the Great Bundling”: They attached themselves to valuable institutions and products they did not create, but that have entrenched positions in society, such that a lot of extraneous destruction is required in order to disgorge them.
Republicanism today is aimed at the aristocratic nature of our institutions; their lack of both accountability and competition. The competing factions of Madison’s extended republic seem neutered. These institutions and the elite that run them are distant and often contemptuous of a large swath if voters who seek a new mechanism to hold them accountable. McLaughlin identifies the danger in this new version of republicanism:
There is much to be said for the new republicanism, but there are two major hazards to be avoided, and it is not at all clear how that will be accomplished without dissipating the forces behind the movement.
The first is that attacks on expert and intellectual elites can easily devolve into a populist orgy of anti-intellectual assaults on expertise and knowledge themselves. There is nothing anti-intellectual, or even anti-expertise or anti-elite, about republicanism. To the contrary, a genuinely republican society is one in which informed, independent citizens have a duty to do their own learning and inform themselves from the best experts and the best minds in society. But populist rage at experts who misuse their position and authority can easily break loose from its moorings.
The second hazard is the flip side of the first: that populism married to republicanism will lead only to tearing down institutions that have arrogated themselves too much neo-aristocratic privilege, while doing nothing to replace them. Properly understood, republicanism requires what Yuval Levin calls “civic republicanism”: the tending of institutions that instill civic virtue and informed citizenship in ordinary people, so that they can fill the void left by aristocratic elites and the noblesse oblige they are supposed to embody. If the few are unworthy to rule, their replacement by an equally unworthy many is not an improvement.
The early republic was a response to a political aristocracy, an elite unaccountable to the people selected by privilege or family ties. The Progressive Era addressed a new economic aristocracy exercising political power and defacto power by concentrations of wealth. The earlier capitalists were self made and rose from the people but as this new economic power inhabited structures like trusts and monopolies a new breed of managers and directors acquired power.
This new republicanism addresses a new power inhabiting the institutions of media, academia and finance that are exercising a power without accountability to the people. Unlike the single billionaire who amasses wealth without seeking control of society, these new sources of power wield control of social institutions.
Is there a difference between elites and aristocracy?
We will always have elites in a technical world and we are free to choose the elites we respect. What has happened is a segment of elites does not return the respect, inviting contempt. When these elites lose respect and this leadership becomes entrenched and unaccountable, the people or the new republicanism seek clumsy tools to influence these institutions. This is a sound warning from the author.
As these institutions become more politically aligned the disrespected public feels forced to exercise political control over institutions that previously functioned outside of politics.
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