Trump's triumph over the establishment

Today’s Guardians don't recognize that they are an elite with responsibilities to the nation.

This essay is cross-posted from All Things in Moderation.

My main feeling, in the wake of Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in the 2024 election, is a vague but inescapable sense of dread, a fear that the chance of national and international catastrophe over the next few years has gone up significantly. I was at an art museum in the German town of Halle a few weeks ago and saw the 1936 painting “Cassandra” by the expressionist Karl Hofer (1878-1955), which depicts the prophetess against the burning ruins of Troy. Cassandra had predicted the destruction and downfall of the city, but it was her fate to have her warnings fall on deaf ears. That made her an emblematic figure for Hofer, whose art from the ‘30s foretells the hideous destruction and suffering of World War II. Over the past nine years, I have come to see the Never Trump Republicans in much the same light: a group whose warnings about the dangers of Trump proved correct in almost every particular, and yet who were ignored and dismissed at every turn.

I will leave to the pundits the inside-baseball explanations for why Kamala Harris’ campaign failed. But I think Democrats delude themselves if they blame her defeat on the alleged racism and sexism and fascism of the American electorate, or even if they see it as the manifestation of an anti-incumbent pattern in other democracies around the world. Their problem is bigger than that. They have become the establishment at a time when establishments are getting ground to dust between the millstones of left and right populism, as we’ve seen in much of Western Europe. And yet on some basic level they have failed to acknowledge that they are in fact the establishment, or to understand what that entails.

Two recent pieces in the New York Times illustrate what I’m talking about. The first is by David Wallace-Wells, who in his post-election newsletter points out that the Democrats had outperformed the Republicans in the popular vote tallies in seven of the previous eight presidential elections, “the first time in modern American history either party has achieved such popular-vote dominance.” But this decades-long majority cemented “the longer-term perception that liberals constituted the country’s ruling class.” He adds that “Most on the left haven’t seen it this way… But in profound ways that the party’s voters rarely recognize, the Democrats have been the country’s incumbent political force now for a full generation” — which made the Democrats more vulnerable than they appreciated to the anti-establishment resentments that intensified in the wake of the pandemic.

The second piece, by Ezra Klein, appeared a few days before the election. In it, he explains (drawing on ideas from Niskanen’s Steven Teles) why the election should not be seen as a straightforward left-right contest so much as one pitting Guardians against Counterrevolutionaries. The Guardians, in Klein’s dichotomy, are those who oppose Trump because they resent his challenge to the commanding institutions that govern American life. The Guardians believe these institutions to be trustworthy: staffed and overseen by highly educated and cosmopolitan elites like themselves, dedicated to using knowledge and expertise in the public service. The Trump coalition are the Counterrevolutionaries because they think these institutions — including government, academia, the media, think tanks, philanthropies, cultural entities, and even big business and the military — have been captured by a leftist revolution, and therefore need to be smashed and occupied by Trumpian loyalists.

My heart sank when I read this description, not because I disagreed with it but because I thought it all too accurate. Today’s institutional leaders, and the left-leaning college-educated and managerial-professional class from which they are drawn, have in fact become an insular and out-of-touch establishment rigidly defending the status quo even as discontent has been spreading far and wide. And Trump has achieved a remarkable degree of popular buy-in, from a wide range of ordinary Americans, to his insistence that the establishment has to be overturned, even if the Trumpists are far likelier to destroy the institutions they take over rather than make them more effective. Klein, perhaps without meaning to, was pointing toward a Democratic wipeout on Election Day — and so it proved.

I have some perspective on America’s institutional leaders because I wrote a book — called The Guardians, as it happens — about their experiences in the 1960s and ‘70s. The elites who ran most of America’s major institutions at that time were not at all representative of the population as a whole; they were nearly all men from upper-class, Northeastern WASP backgrounds, for starters, and their blind spots led them, among other errors, into the quagmire of Vietnam. But they shared a desire to modernize their institutions and open them to talented people from all walks of life, while still upholding the core defining principles of those institutions.

Today’s Guardians strike me as a more flawed establishment than the one of half a century ago, even though the people who constitute it are much more diverse in almost every way than their counterparts of yesteryear. But the kinds of diversity that they lack — above all of class and outlook — are a large part of the reason why Democrats lost overwhelmingly on Election Day.   

The guardianship metaphor is drawn from Plato’s Republic, in which the Guardians are presented as the ideal rulers of the ideal state. Their duty is to defend the state and its interests, to shun money and celebrity, and to enforce equal opportunity by raising up talented members of the lower classes and casting down untalented scions of the aristocracy. The Guardians should feel a patriotic sense of responsibility for the entire nation, which they must look upon “as their special concern — the sort of concern that is felt for something so closely bound up with oneself that its interests and fortunes, for good or ill, are held to be identical with one’s own.”

But today’s Guardians lack this sense of national responsibility, and indeed lack even an awareness of themselves as an elite needing to justify their legitimacy to the broader population. This is the common thread running through criticisms of institutions controlled by Democrats and the left. If elite universities believed themselves responsible for representing all Americans, for example, they would not have allowed their faculties to become uniformly left-wing, would not maintain double standards on freedom of speech and thought, would not have squeezed middle-class students out of the admissions competition, would not have permitted meritocratic standards for faculty hiring and student admissions to be corrupted by ideological litmus tests — and wouldn’t have been taken entirely by surprise by the public revulsion against their drift into cultural radicalism following the anti-Semitic demonstrations on campus in the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attacks.

Read the whole series:

The election, the elite, and the roots of our dysfunction.

The so-called “diploma divide” — the trend in which Democrats increasingly have become the party of the college-educated and Republicans the party of the non-college-educated — has helped spread academia-incubated cultural leftism through the Democratic Party. It has also distanced the Democrats from their former working-class base, which is a less-than-ideal strategy for winning elections when 62 percent of Americans aged 25 and older do not have college degrees.

This class distancing — and the sense that the elite has become self-enriching, self-satisfied, and contemptuous of Americans outside its ranks — underlay many other Democratic liabilities in this election. These included the failure to recognize that many Latinos (particularly men) were defecting to Trump; the Democrats’ initial dismissal of working-class anger over inflation, immigration, and crime; and the continuing decline of popular trust and confidence in government, the media, universities, and corporations. Of course, it is true that conservatives have long attempted to delegitimize those institutions — but it’s also true that the institutions’ own behavior has made such accusations seem plausible to a much wider section of the population than in the past.

The other factor that made me feel that Ezra Klein’s column portended doom for the Democrats is that the institutions the Guardians control have become increasingly inflexible, unresponsive, and ineffective. My colleague Jennifer Pahlka points out that Trump’s victory means that his loyalists will revive Schedule F in order to eviscerate the upper levels of the federal civil service bureaucracy, which they imagine to be a left-dominated “deep state.” Pahlka has no doubt that this is “a terrible idea” that could enable any number of “nightmare scenarios,” but she also notices that the specter of Schedule F often “makes anti-Trumpers dig their heels in and deny the problems in our civil service rules, for fear of validating Trump’s non-solution. This is a bad response to a bad idea.” And Klein’s framing of those who want to defend our institutions versus those who want to destroy them “leaves no room for people like me. The institutions are sometimes hard to defend, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need them. We need them fundamentally reformed.”

A similar rigidity extends throughout the Democrats’ model of governance — as Klein knows well from his analysis of why it’s too slow and expensive to build housing, transportation, clean energy infrastructure, or much of anything else in blue states. In his essay “What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds,” Klein quoted University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley’s observation in a 2021 Niskanen paper that liberal governance has come to prefer legitimating government action through following inflexible procedures rather than achieving desirable outcomes. But in Bagley’s view, “Legitimacy is not solely, not even primarily, a product of the procedures that agencies follow. Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair.” Democrats have lost that legitimacy in government and, I would argue, in most of the institutions under their purview.

Trump’s return to office is likely to prove so destabilizing that it’s hard to know how to respond except defensively, by trying to preserve as much of our constitutional and legal system as possible. But Trump’s red wave swamped the nation in part because many of our most critical institutions are no longer as effective as they once were or should be. They must be reformed from within, even as they try to withstand the onslaught from without.

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Geoffrey Kabaservice (@RuleandRuin) is vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center and the author of books including The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (Henry Holt, 2004) and Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party (Oxford, 2012). He hosts the Vital Center podcast at Niskanen.

Image: Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin