The Problem with Educated Neoliberals

A comment on “An expert class and the grassroots,” a post by Peter Levine, Jan. 11, 2019. (https://peterlevine.ws/?p=20829)

PL: “The participants [in conferences where the topic is the state of democracy in the U.S.]…are the kinds of people who can get their flights to California reimbursed from an organization’s budget, who can put titles on their name tags, and who can be asked to address specific issues as experts.”

MB: Maybe it’s just me, but perhaps I’m not alone in holding a skeptical view of the ability and willingness of these “kinds of people” to prevent democracy from degenerating into a system in which the only people whose values, priorities, and views matter are their own kind. In regard to such beliefs and dispositions, the liberal members of the professional class more closely resemble their conservative and libertarian counterparts than they do the vast majority of people. Even the prominent members of the academy, media, and government who talk a good game about democracy are out of touch with ordinary people. Worse, they are far too comfortable with the “rules of the game” (which of course were devised by and for just the sort of people they’ve become) and far too accepting of its outcomes.

PL: “Because bureaucracy (within appropriate limits) boosts efficiency, it also confers power. …But it must be demographically unrepresentative of the people it intends to help, at least in terms of age, employment, and educational attainment.”

MB: “Boosting efficiency confers power.” Indeed it does. But does it confer moral authority? Why should “efficiency” be the value and priority according to which power is distributed in a society? Efficiency is about money; specifically, about squeezing the last drop of it from those who have little and ensuring it remains within the possession and control of those who start out with a lot of it, and for whose continuing enjoyment thereof the rules of the game are designed.

PL: “At our best, I think we can blur some of these boundaries. …We can cross boundaries in our own lives and careers, spending some time in settings where we are not experts or leaders… But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that social change occurs without organizations or that organizational leaders can be truly representative of the public.”

MB: What does it look like from the perspective of the proles and peons to have “experts or leaders” drop in on them from time to time? Do they detect in the latter a genuine willingness to share prosperity, political authority, and power with them? Or do they correctly perceive that the fly-over class has no intention whatsoever of really shaking the tree where the wealthy and powerful sit in the uppermost branches, making the decisions that create and maintain the conditions in which the impoverished and powerless steadily lose what hold they have on everything that matters?

This so-called republic grows less democratic and more oppressive by the day, while professionals content with oligarchies in academia, organized philanthropy, the media, and institutional politics attend conferences where they exchange expressions of concern and share “new ideas” before returning to their secure, comfortable positions and lives until the next opportunity for socializing with members of their class-bubble arises. Outside, the people wait for “social change” that will never come, not because the problem is too complex or their plight too extreme, but because actually bringing it about would require the professionals to betray their own class and its interests in keeping them prosperous, powerful, and self-deluding.

What is left for us as a society if equality and morality are so ideologically interpreted or so lightly taken that the comfortable count it sufficient to carry on with business as usual, while failing to see that they are not part of the solution because they are part of the problem?