The Trust Trap: Greater public faith in elite institutions requires evidence of restraint, not just of competence (Yuval Levin, August 11, 2024, Sapir)
In 1970, in what may well have been the best of his many landmark essays, Irving Kristol took up this peculiar challenge of legitimacy. “The results of the political process and of the exercise of individual freedom — the distribution of power, privilege, and property — must also be seen as in some profound sense expressive of the values that govern the lives of individuals,” Kristol wrote. If elites hold power or privilege for reasons that most of their fellow citizens don’t consider adequate, the entire society will lose respect for the rules by which it says it lives.
Not many would enjoy living in such a society. It would feel not only unequal but also unfree. “People feel free when they subscribe to a prevailing social philosophy; they feel unfree when the prevailing social philosophy is unpersuasive; and the existence of constitutions or laws or judiciaries have precious little to do with these basic feelings,” Kristol concluded. The principles according to which our elites exercise power must somehow be, as he put it, persuasive.
So how do our own elites now justify their status and that of the institutions they lead? Implicitly, without ever quite articulating it, they tend to fall upon a mix of technocratic credentials and progressive high-mindedness. This broadly describes the self-image of the unusually cohesive elite class that now runs most of our major institutions. Its members (at least most of them) earned their places by demonstrating a peculiar sort of merit — through admission to a selective university, followed by various honors, certifications, rites of passage, jobs, and stamps of approval that signify competence.
This is a cold and almost clinical standard of worth, but the nagging guilty feeling that it may not be a sufficient rationale for status and authority is then allayed by a kind of secondhand atonement — a ritual acknowledgement of the sins of others that played a part in creating today’s conditions of inequality. This might entail, for instance, naming the privilege that results from the inegalitarianism of prior generations or naming the Native American tribes that once occupied the lands we now possess.
The bizarre intensity with which such rituals are enforced sometimes feels like the working out of an authoritarian instinct, but it is at least as much a function of the depth of the guilt they are meant to placate. And if, after all that proof of formal qualifications and moral purity, the public is still skeptical of elites, then their skepticism is presumed to result from the failure of ordinary people to value rational competence, or from their bigotry or small mindedness. What else could explain it?
Their failure to ever reckon with the dubious foundation of their belief system leaves them overconfident in an ideology most in the Anglosphere have long rejected.