President Joe Biden during a presidential debate with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta. Gerald Herbert/AP Photo.
President Joe Biden during a presidential debate with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta. Gerald Herbert/AP Photo.
It is hard this past week not to wonder what is happening to Western political elites. From Biden’s debate debacle to Trudeau’s by-election blowout to Macron’s parliamentary election meltdown, everywhere, all at once, our governing elites seem to be in retreat if not collapse. It is the ideological equivalent of the Ernest Hemingway maxim about how we go bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Why is this occurring? And what does it say about the future of our elites?
Much of our thinking about why elites are facing a crisis of legitimacy is itself a narrative constructed by the leadership class in politics, government, and the media. The story is familiar to the reader. Elites today face powerful and destabilizing forces that are out of their control. They are battling mass disinformation and misinformation on social media. Foreign actors are manipulating and poisoning their democracies. Inflation has roiled voting publics, panicking them about rising prices and falling living standards. The “far-Right” is weaponizing migration for crass political purposes. Big corporations and their powerful lobbies are thwarting needed reforms. Climate change is the polycrisis of our time, destabilizing everything from the economy to geopolitics. And so on, and so on…
None of these claims, taken individually, is demonstrably false. But taken together, they show a persistent, if not intensifying, bias among our political elites to blame outside groups and forces for their failures, real or perceived.
This past week’s trifecta of elite blowups in the U.S., Canada, and France revealed just how deep the neurosis of “blame avoidance” currently is within the commanding heights of our politics, media, and governments. The consequences are far-reaching and will reverberate for months to come.
Exhibit “A” of the particular flavour of elite crisis we are now witnessing is last Thursday’s U.S. presidential debate.
The portent of the debate was much more than Joe Biden’s decrepit onstage performance. What rightly outraged Americans was the willingness of an entire elite apparatus—from the White House to liberal media to the DNC donor class—to obviate the obvious: President Biden is incapable of running, let alone governing, for a second term. The debate exposed in the starkest of terms the illegitimacy of much of America’s political elites at a huge cost to their power and prestige. So why? What explains the world’s great amalgamation of elite opinion and political power running the risk they did last Thursday, failing in the process and incurring disastrous consequences not only for their standing and authority but for the U.S. as a whole? For answers, we need to go from the profound to the mundane, from the world of presidential power and prestige to the hyperlocal politics of Canadian by-elections and the Liberal Party’s stunning loss in Toronto-St. Paul’s last week. The Conservatives’ win in a riding that for thirty-plus years was the safest of safe Liberal seats wasn’t simply an important political event, it was a cultural moment. And as with Biden’s debate, its significance lies not so much in the result but in the elite reaction to the event: sheer panic. The Liberals’ ongoing meltdown is justified. The riding’s loss suggests every seat they hold is hypothetically in play. It indicates a good chunk of their core voting constituency, or urban progressives, have rejected their legislative agenda, soured on their party’s identity politics, and just want Justin Trudeau to go away. Canada’s Liberals don’t have to be soothsayers to see what likely lies in their near-term future, regardless of who is leading their party. Just look at France. This past weekend’s snap French parliamentary elections, orchestrated by President Macron to stave off his own crisis of legitimacy, saw his party humiliated and the “far-Right” positioned to win a plurality, if not the majority, of seats in the second round of voting on Sunday. Here we find the root cause for why elites, especially their progressive variety, from the banks of the Seine to the Potomac to the Ottawa River, seem in an ever-greater state of desperation, willing to take seemingly irrational steps to perpetuate their tenuous leadership. Most of their core propositions—intellectual, political, cultural—have lost resonance with voters in our post-COVID world. The inconvenient reality is that calls for a more equitable, green, and government-curated economy, society, and culture are increasingly coming across to publics as “luxury beliefs” out of tune with their day-to-day lives. Put bluntly, progressivism today, especially the highly symbolic and identitarian variety practiced by Justin Trudeau, has few if any compelling answers for a low-growth, supply-constrained world of falling living standards. It is this dissonance, the widening gap between ideology and reality, that is pushing the West’s progressive elites into panic mode. They remain enthralled with the correctness of their beliefs and the righteousness of their cause. Yet they sense their publics (and party faithful) slipping away. They are convinced that they need just one more mandate, one more turn twisting the levers of government, to finally convince us of their vision for society. Yet they know, deep down, the political tide that made them into our governing elite is ebbing and a generational change is underway. The consequences of our elite’s intensifying fear about their dwindling power and relevance is all around us. It is an elderly Biden pushed out onto a debate stage he never should have been on. It is Macron calling a desperate election to try and salvage what remains of his now lame duck term as president. It is a disastrous capital gains tax to help pay for an ever-expanding government as Canadians’ per capita GDP stalls out at 2013 levels. It is our enemies in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran sizing up a West whose leadership looks desperate, confused, and more ripe for confrontation by the day. The current crisis of our governing elites is something to mourn not relish. We need more than ever coherent, effective leadership that can restore our economies to growth, renew our optimism in a shared future, and project power and confidence abroad. The moment demands a governing class concerned with the practical and pragmatic and not abstract, aspirational theories about government, society, the economy, and the environment. We urgently need elites who focus on the mundane but essential task of governing or all the small stuff that makes our society work. We require a leadership class that relearns the importance of fostering the stability, continuity, and consistency in people’s day-to-day lives that are so essential to human flourishing. We deserve so much more than our currently panicked and ideologically exhausted ruling elites seem willing, able, or interested in doing. In sum, we need new elites and not a moment too soon. The moment demands it.
