An “anti-establishment” mood is all the rage. Our media pundits cannot help classifying presidential candidates as either “anti-establishment” or in some “establishment lane.” But when candidates with views and even temperaments as diverse as Sanders, Trump and Cruz are lumped together under the rubric “establishment,” we should suspect there is some major confusion afoot.
The “anti-establishment” abstraction is superficially exhilarating, or exhilarating to the superficial, because it fosters the illusion of a simplistic populism or individualism. If it weren’t for that darned establishment, then (left version) the sweet and innocent “people” could flourish in perfect harmony, or (right version) every individual could be left alone to run his own life, or (nationalist version) our country could simply re-assume its inherent greatness.
Each of these versions of the anti-establishment illusion might contain at least a grain of truth, but all must repress a hard fact of the human condition: there will be an establishment. It’s called government. We may be governed more or less wisely, justly, liberally or morally, but we will be governed. At least we had better hope that there is some established government, for without it we are ruled by the strongest criminal on the block, by the fiercest warlord, by chaos.
Thus both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams — the left and the right, one might say, among our Founders — recognized the inevitability of an establishment, an elite, an “aristocracy,” as they said. They understood that some will always have more influence than others; even if a perfectly fair and equal “starting point” could somehow be engineered, Adams observed, in one generation superior ambition and talents would cause a few to gain inordinate influence, which they would inevitably use to the advantage of themselves, their families, and their friends.
To address the seeds of inequality sown in human nature, Jefferson proposed to recruit a rationalistic elite to be “raked from the rubbish” of ordinary men. John Adams, for his part, would have us rely more on the character-forming power of the Christian religion and inherited moral scruples. Neither imagined we could do without an “establishment.”
No aristocracy is more dangerous than one that advances under the banner of “democracy.” The most dangerous elite is one that claims not to exist, but masks itself as the pure agent of “the people,” in the language of both Robespierre and Lenin. In the United States, the political and intellectual descendants of Jefferson’s rationalistic and secular aristocracy, such as the statists Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, having long ago abandoned Jefferson’s suspicion of federal power, have persuaded themselves and many among us that people can be empowered by giving ever more power to centralized agencies and to federal judges with their advanced moral sensibilities.
On this “liberal” or “socialist” view, the failures of the federal establishment must be redressed by giving ever more power to that establishment — and thus by further weakening, in the name of an abstract “social justice,” the informal “establishment” of civil society: strong (that is, authoritative) families, religious morality, and local institutions attuned to an established way of life.
As University of Virginia political scientist James Ceaser has shown in a brilliantly synoptic article in the Weekly Standard*, the confusion of our present politics, which is only compounded by the abstraction of the “anti-establishment,” stems from an ambiguity concerning the nature of the “system” that we attack or criticize. “Progressives” align themselves against a system supposedly dominated by free-market economics, but by now “Progressivism is the system, at least as much as, if not more than, liberal capitalism. And with its vast interests to defend and its clients to sustain, progressivism is also every bit as much constitutive of the status quo.
Just as liberal capitalism has bred pathologies like crony capitalism, progressivism has created its dysfunction of crony progressivism.” The insidious political genius of progressivism is that “as its actual influence expanded to cover more and more aspects of American life, progressives continued to disclaim responsibility for any of the ills that plagued society. These were all the fault of the system. Like Peter Pan, progressivism will not grow up. By its own self-conception, it cannot.”
A grown-up alternative to this progressive Peter Pan establishment would have to confront the task of enabling the re-establishment of a healthy, moral and free civil society. This is the criterion by which to judge a candidate, “anti-establishment” or not.
We are not wrong to feel that our establishment is corrupt. But it is the purest of delusions to invest our anti-establishment hopes in a greater central power, either progressive or nationalistic. The dysfunctional establishment will have to be replaced by a re-establishment of moral and civic self-government.
*“What Next for the Left? The progressives go from bad to worse,” Feb. 8, 2016.
Ralph Hancock is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University and president of the John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of BYU.