Replace the Elite https://t.co/3fzQkHx2aF— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) August 15, 2020
First Things
Patrick Deneen reviews The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite by Michael Lind.
Deneen:
Not unlike the managerial elite he criticizes, Lind fails to draw the correct conclusion from his own analysis. What’s needed is not “democratic pluralism” in which the ruling class remains a neoliberal, managerial elite who strategically concede some wealth and status to their inferiors. What’s needed is a fundamental displacement of the elite ethos by a common-good, popular conservatism that directs both economic goals and social values toward broadly shared material and social capital, toward the support of family and community life. We do not need libertarian overlords who buy off the working class with some welfare, nor a federal government that doles out tax receipts to localities, nor secularists who grudgingly grant some space to religious believers, but a ruling class that is itself informed by the very values that Lind believes were once regnant as the price of admission to elite status itself. Only the fear of not conforming to the regnant ethos will sufficiently move elites, but that fear will arise subsequent to the wholesale defeat, displacement, and discrediting of the regnant elite ethos.
This means, contra Lind, that what is needed is not “democratic pluralism,” which Lind envisions as a balance of power between an otherwise exploitative ruling class and an electorally powerful underclass. Rather, the current ruling class needs to be displaced by the ethos of the underclass: people shaped by and supportive of guild, ward, and congregation. The ruling class, no less than the working class, should be shaped by commitments of solidarity and subsidiarity, and not merely accord grudgingly with those who are. Lind regards the revival of such institutions as the Church as an unrealistic goal and calls for some sort of functional equivalent. Yet the decline of organizational forms of unions, local politics, and Church has been significantly advanced by the individualist, materialist, and secular ethos embraced by today’s managerial elite. If these institutions declined due to sustained efforts by the managerial elite, their renewal can be effected through the displacement of that elite with a different one informed by an opposing ethos. The power sought is not merely to balance the current elite, but to replace them. In the end, there is no “functional equivalent” of solidarity and subsidiarity, and only a leadership and working class steeped in such values will restore the republic.
This is the conservative fantasy, that they will gain power -- the "illiberals" or common-good conservatives will enact common-good conservatism when they get power, after enlisting the support of the working class. Tell me, who is going to provide the financial support to make this happen? Donald Trump? How are they going to overcome the gatekeepers within the Republican Party who act on behalf of the oligarchy?
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