{"id":35425,"date":"2026-03-23T10:22:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T14:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=35425"},"modified":"2026-03-23T10:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T14:22:10","slug":"are-elites-responsible-for-democracies-crises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=35425","title":{"rendered":"are elites responsible for democracies’ crises?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At last week’s conference on Democratic Resilience<\/a>\u00a0at Boston College\u2019s\u00a0Clough\u00a0Center, the star speakers were Steven Levitsky (a co-author of the bestselling How Democracies Die<\/em> and a forthcoming book on democratic resilience around the world); Daron Acemoglu (the 2024 Nobel laureate in economics, whose forthcoming book is entitled “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity<\/em>); and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each gave a long and rich talk that was basically a history of democracy in the past quarter century. Their narratives were quite different, as were their prognoses and recommendations, but they had one point in common. All three argued that elites across the world’s democracies have performed extraordinarily badly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Levitsky decried elites’ weak efforts at combatting populist authoritarianism and their willingness to comply with authoritarians, as well as the uninspiring agendas of the center-left parties in almost all democracies. Acemoglu listed “sins of omission” (failing to address serious economic problems) and “sins of commission” (imposing unpopular policies). Douthat highlighted three spectacular failures: the so-called “War on Terror,” the response to China’s economic rise, and COVID policies, which he described as too stringent to be accepted and yet too weak to defeat the pandemic. In the discussions, people also referred to the corrupt and interconnected elite that appears in the Epstein Files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think all three speakers cited accurate facts and chose trenchant examples. Yes, it’s ironic that senior professors from Harvard and MIT and a New York Times columnist would decry “elites” before an invited audience at Boston College, but this does not mean that they were wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, one puzzle is why elites should perform badly at the same time across the world, particularly if their predecessors generally performed better. Such a pattern seems to require a deeper explanation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One hint came from Acemoglu, who mentioned that leaders after World War II could “pick the low-hanging fruit” by introducing public services that had not been provided before. Maybe it is simply harder to innovate in a popular way after your country has already launched things like public schools and welfare programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am also a little puzzled why entrepreneurial pro-democratic politicians have not developed popular and effective policy agendas anywhere–if such agendas could exist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any given country, one can blame the specific elites. For example, people to the left of Barack Obama claim that the Democratic Party has been captured by neoliberals. But it is harder to explain why no party offers a successful alternative to populist authoritarianism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other limitations of these accounts is that I don’t know what to do as a result. Elites probably are at fault, but what does that leave us to do? My own contribution to the conference<\/a> was certainly more modest and less original, but it has the advantage that it gives you and me an assignment: we should join and strengthen voluntary associations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now is hardly the first time in modern US history when elites have faced widespread criticism. In 1971, The New York Times published the leaked Pentagon Papers, some 7,000 pages of secret documents about the Vietnam War. Among them was a memo<\/a> from an Assistant Secretary of Defense (John McNaughton) to the Secretary of Defense,\u00a0Robert McNamara. McNaughton wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I think the [current draft strategy document for the Vietnam War] underplays a little bit the unpopularity of the war in the\u00a0US, especially with the young people, the underprivileged, the intelligentsia and (I suspect) the women. A feeling is widely and strongly held that \u201cthe Establishment\u201d is out of its mind. The feeling is that we are trying to impose some\u00a0US\u00a0image on distant peoples we cannot understand (anymore than we can the younger generation here at home), and that we are carrying the thing to absurd lengths. Related to this feeling is the increased polarization that is taking place in the United States with seeds of the worst split in our people in more than a century. (May 6, 1967)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This passage seems so timely in 2026 that I wonder whether US democracy has ever been free of irresponsible elites, and how we have managed–more or less–to rebound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At last week’s conference on Democratic Resilience\u00a0at Boston College\u2019s\u00a0Clough\u00a0Center, the star speakers were Steven Levitsky (a co-author of the bestselling How Democracies Die and a forthcoming book on democratic resilience around the world); Daron Acemoglu (the 2024 Nobel laureate in economics, whose forthcoming book is entitled “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35425"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35440,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35425\/revisions\/35440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}