The Disconnect between American Elites and the American People

Populism is rampant throughout the countries of the West. By populism, I mean any political movement where many people believe the country’s elites have stacked the deck against them. Populists believe elites are doing them harm for the benefit of those elites. The fact so many in the West are motivated by this divisive belief points to a huge disconnect between the countries’ elites and the people they purport to rule.

To my knowledge, the first populists in the United States were those in the progressive movement in the late nineteenth century. At the time, the elites which elicited progressive hostility were the corporate elite and the political elite which supported it. An echo of that populist revolt has continued to this very day.

However, a century-and-a-half later, American populists are more likely to be on the political right than the left. A very large fraction of Americans, perhaps even a majority, find themselves disconnected, not just from corporate and political elites, but from the elites of the news media and academia as well.

It is all too possible to paint this picture with too broad a brush. The American people are greatly polarized in their beliefs about the nature of social reality and the role of government. American institutions and their ruling establishments have simultaneously divided into ideologically competing groups. Nevertheless, ever since the beginning of the progressive movement, American elites have gradually moved toward the political left. This process was accelerated about a century ago during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, who encouraged the growth of the regulatory (aka administrative) state. It gained momentum again with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Keynesian response to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The distrust of American elites may be particularly severe among so-called “conservatives” (more accurately described as neoliberals). Yet, many progressive Democrats are also alienated from some elites, particularly corporate managements.

The Disconnect between American Media and the American People

The polarization of elites is particularly apparent with the media. News media like ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times might be propaganda organs for progressive Democrats. However, there are a few news media who favor the neoliberal right, at least implicitly. These include such organizations as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the Washington Times. Nevertheless, the bulk of media have allied with the Biden Administration and the political Left.

Not surprizingly, the views of many journalists about what they do is quite different from how the majority of Americans would characterize it. A recent Pew Research poll of journalists, published June 14, 2022, shows 75 % are extremely or very proud of their work, and 70 % are very or somewhat satisfied with their job. However, 71 % say made-up news and information is a very big problem for the country. (On this last question, MSNBC probably has Fox News in mind, while Fox News attributes fake news to MSNBC.)

Meanwhile, a Gallup poll dated October 7, 2021 shows American’s trust in news media falling to a dismal level. It reported that in late 2021 Americans’ trust in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” fell four percentage points from the previous year to 36 %. Gallup also reported

In all, 7% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” and 29% “a fair amount” of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting — which, combined, is four points above the 32% record low in 2016, amid the divisive presidential election campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In addition, 29% of the public currently registers “not very much” trust and 34% have “none at all.”

Gallup Report, October 7, 2021

In the same report, Gallup provided a plot of the percent of the public that has a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media. It shows the public trust in the news media trending downwards from at least 1999.

As you might expect since most of the media supports the Democrats , the public’s media trust is sharply polarized politically. Gallup reports 68 % of Democrats, 31 % of independents, and 11 % of Republicans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust. Nevertheless, the trust of both Democrats and independents fell five points between 2020 and 2021.

Clearly, a diminishing minority of the American electorate believes what they are being told by the media.

The Disconnect between Academic Elites and the People

The roles of public schools and universities in educating the young have come under particular scrutiny. Many Americans have a growing conviction that that role has become less about education and more about indoctrination of children in leftist dogma. During the Biden administration, elementary and high school indoctrination became a public scandal for the following reasons:

• Indoctrination that falsified U.S. history and the nature of the country. According to leftist academic elites, the American Revolution was fought only to preserve slavery, and racism dominates the country down to the present day.
• Indoctrination to persuade elementary school children that their sexual orientation might be different from their birth gender.
• An aborted attempt by the Biden Administration’s Justice Department to prosecute outraged parents who protested public school indoctrination at local school board meetings. They were to be investigated by the FBI as domestic terrorists.

However, it is in universities and colleges, where our future elites are educated and trained, that our societal leaders obtain their leftist beliefs. Jason D. Hill, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University, gives the following testimony:

Thirty-three years ago, when I entered college, left-wing ideologies dominated American universities, and especially the humanities and social sciences. But one still could get a fair, balanced education by consulting traditional canonical texts that countered the dogma. Free speech was alive on college campuses. …. Today, after 22 years of being a college professor, and having traveled much of America to lecture, I am sad to say the situation is not the same. The core principles and foundations that keep the United States intact, that provide our citizens with their civic personalities and national identities, are being annihilated. The gravest internal threat to this country is not illegal aliens; it is leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this country.

Jason D. Hill, A professor’s call to shut down our nation’s universities

The degree to which the left controls universities and colleges can be seen in the party affiliations of faculty. The latest survey of faculty party affiliation I could find was a post by Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens in January 2020 on the National Association of Scholars website. In their study, they sampled 12,372 professors in various disciplines. In the bar chart below, they showed for various disciplines the ratio of the professors registered as Democrats to those registered as Republicans. They call this the D:R registration ratio.

In every one of these intellectual disciplines, Democratic faculty substantially outnumber their Republican colleagues. Ironically, economics departments have the strongest Republican showing with only three Democrats for every Republican.

Supposedly, university and college faculty know a lot about the world. They are the custodians of all our knowledge. What we know about science, mathematics, history, philosophy, and the so-called “social sciences” is all in their care. Yet, they increasingly favor enlarging the power of governments to solve social problems. This intellectual trend advances despite the fact a truly huge amount of empirical data from a variety of sources tells us that governments lack both the competence and the capability to solve or even ameliorate most social and economic problems. In fact, history tells us that the more a government tries to solve all problems, the more it moves toward political tyranny and wrecks its country’s economy to boot. What, then, can possibly explain the D:R ratio chart above? Variations of this question have bedeviled me for years.

One possible clue comes from the disciplines which have the highest Democrat-to-Republican ratio, and from those which have the lowest. Those with the highest ratios include anthropology, sociology, English, philosophy, and psychology. Those with the lowest are chemistry, economics, and mathematics. With the exception of mathematics, these are subjects where beliefs are constrained by large amounts of empirical data. Mathematics, on the other hand, requires rigorous intellectual discipline. The departments with the highest D:R ratios are ones in which values as much as empirical data influence their practitioners. Nevertheless, even the discipline with the lowest ratio, economics with a three-to-one Democratic advantage, is resoundingly Democratic. What is the explanation? Peer pressure from their colleagues? Wishful thinking? Perhaps it is because new faculty are chosen usually by existing faculty. The old faculty would naturally want to select candidates that agreed with their views and values.

This disconnect between academic elites and much of the American people is a dangerous thing. By instilling hostility to traditional U.S. institutions and values, academia is inciting a civil war.

The Disconnect between Corporate Elites and the People

I have commented before on the disconnect between ordinary American citizens and the elites of corporate management. In the post Are American Elites Killing Democracy?, the elite on which I focused was the corporate elite of large corporations. In that essay, I noted that

The fact that academic, Democratic Party, most news media, and cultural elites have been in favor of increasingly authoritarian government is very old news. What is new is the defection of many from the economic elites to the ranks of progressive authoritarians. Time Magazine reporter Molly Ball noted two odd things happened after the 2020 elections. First, despite expectations, there were no riots in the streets after the election (at least not immediately). Second, and more telling, hundreds of major business leaders turned on Trump and his supporters. 

In the cited Times Magazine article, Molly Ball wrote,

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy. …

(It was) a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.

Molly Ball, Times.com

To Molly Ball, this was a praiseworthy effort. From the title of her essay, it was “the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election.” The conspirators “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.” They were saving the world from Trump.

Corporate establishments may rue the day that they became “woke.” Will our business titans remain allied to the progressive Left? The empirical evidence from the history of all economically developed countries is that as governments expend an ever-larger share of GDP, their economic growth declines. As a government monopolizes an ever-larger fraction of the nation’s income, that leaves less for companies to invest to increase their productive capacity. Also, companies tend to invest in productive capacity only when they think what they make can be sold. Welcome to the declining branch of Rahn’s Curve. This is shown in the scatter plot below. Each dot represents a developed country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the year 2013.

In addition, we can show that as governments increase their control over their economies, economic growth slows. This can be shown in a scatter plot of developed OECD countries’ growth rates versus the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. This index is zero when a country’s government totally controls its economy and 100 when the government has absolutely no control.

It is hard to believe that American corporations would opt for economic stagnation. Besides, progressive Democrats hate them.

The Disconnect between Government Elites and the People

It is hardly necessary to write this section. By now, it is painfully obvious to just about everyone that Joe Biden’s administration is a failed presidency. If you do not agree with this assertion, please peruse the following posts.

• A Pyrrhic Victory for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
• Joe Biden’s Support Is Rapidly Eroding
• Is a Powerful Counterrevolution Building Against Progressive Elites?
• The Idiocy of Joe Biden’s Climate Plan
• Biden’s Administration Should Take a Course in Economics 101
• What Can the Democrats Do About Joe Biden?
• The Fascism of American Progressives Is Becoming More Apparent
• How Progressive Democrats Try to Violate the Classical Laws of Economics
• The U.S. Economy Is Melting Down in June 2022

Not in living memory has one president presided over so many disasters over such a short period of time. The political result has been predictable and unforgiving. Over the past year, more than 1 million voters in 43 states switched their registration from Democrat to Republican. Today, June 29, 2022, the Real Clear Politics average on President Biden’s Job Approval shows 38.1 % of voters approve while 57.4 % disapprove. The time evolution of this approval/disapproval is shown in the following chart.

One meaning of the word “elite” is “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.” Another definition is “a group or class of people seen as having the greatest power and influence within a society, especially because of their wealth or privilege.”

By alienating so much of the American people, American elites are endangering their elite status among much of the public. Certainly, many are beginning to believe the elites lack superiority in their qualities and abilities to manage society. If this continues to be the case, the present-day elites might find their power and influence curtailed. They could then be replaced.

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