E-Pluribus | April 1, 2024
The decline and fall of the Wonkocracy; the future of local journalism; and can't we all just get along?
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Walter Russell Mead: Twilight of the Wonks
A sea change is upon us, argues Walter Russell Mead at Tablet Magazine. Mead writes that ever-increasing technology and the universal availability of virtually all knowledge known to man is transforming how the world works, and that in turn is changing who is best equipped to lead.
The spectacle of the presidents of three important American universities reduced to helpless gibbering in a 2023 congressional hearing may have passed from the news cycle, but it will resonate in American politics and culture for a long time. Admittedly, examination by a grandstanding member of Congress seeking to score political points at your expense is not the most favorable forum for self-expression. Even so, discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that.
[. . .]
The aftermath of the hearings was exactly what we would expect. UPenn, which needs donors’ money, folded like a cheap suit in the face of a donor strike. Harvard, resting on its vast endowment, arrogantly dismissed its president’s critics until the board came to the horrifying realization that it was out of step with the emerging consensus of the social circles in which its members move. There was nothing thoughtful, brave, or principled about any of this, and the boards of these institutions are demonstrably no wiser or better than those they thoughtlessly place in positions of great responsibility and trust.
It would be easier to simply dismiss or take pleasure in the public humiliation of some of America’s most elite institutions—but we can’t. Universities still matter, and as Americans struggle to reform our institutions in a turbulent era, getting universities right is a national priority. The question is not whether our higher educational system (and indeed our education system as a whole) needs reform. From the colonial era to the present, America’s system of higher ed has been in a constant state of change and reform, and the mix of opportunities and challenges presented by the Information Revolution can only be met by accelerating the pace and deepening the reach of that continuing historical process.
[. . .]
Wonk privilege is a rarely examined form of social advantage, but progressively over the last century we’ve witnessed a steady increase in the power, prestige, and wealth that flow to people endowed with a sufficiency of Sitzfleisch. The wonkiest among us are deemed the “best” and the goal of meritocracy has been to streamline the promotion of wonks to places of power and prestige while sidelining the fakers: those who use good looks, family descent, wealth, or charisma to get ahead.
The 20th century was the golden age of the wonk, as one profession after another demanded people who had more and more of this ability. People who could do the work to get into and succeed in medical school, law school, accountancy school, engineering school, and other abstruse and difficult pre-professional programs earned high incomes and enjoyed great social prestige. But even as professionals developed greater degrees of specialized knowledge, the nature of their work changed. Early in the 20th century, most professionals operated essentially independent of outside supervision or control. Doctors, lawyers, and many others were often in practice for themselves, and their relationships with their clients were long term, confidential, and generally not subject to review by outside bodies.
[. . .]
If the 20th century was the golden age of wonkocracy, the 21st is its decline and fall.
[. . .]
The personal discipline and powers of memory and intelligence that make for successful careers in the age of wonkocracy will not lose their usefulness in the emerging world, and there may well be fields or specialized functions in which wonks remain essential. Still, after 150 years in which technological advance was inexorably increasing the importance of Sitzfleisch to human societies, we are now in a period in which technological progress is liberating humanity from the necessity of stuffing the heads of young people with an ever-increasing mass of specialized, functional knowledge aimed at creating a race of highly skilled rule-followers.
Read the whole thing.
Howard Husock: Can Local Journalism Be Saved?
That journalism is in trouble is universally acknowledged, but why that is the case and what can and should be done about it are not so readily agreed upon. At City Journal, Howard Husock examines two of the alternatives and the challenges that each approach faces.
American local journalism is withering away. Between 2004 and 2019, reports Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, the country lost more than 2,000 newspapers, with the total number falling by about one-fourth, from 9,000 to 6,700.
The decline bodes ill for democracy. Americans rely on local governments to provide basic public services, on voters to hold local officials accountable, and on newspapers to help the public remain informed. Yet even many surviving newspapers are shells of what they were, as private-equity firms purchase such storied properties as the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Baltimore Sun, and Buffalo News, only to sell off their downtown offices and printing plants and lay off reporters in droves. Doing so doesn’t make these firms evil; the economics of the news industry changed dramatically with the advent of the Internet and, eventually, social media. But the decline is nonetheless stark. In 1972, when my career began at the Middletown (NY) Times-Herald Record, the paper had three regional bureaus and one in the state capital. Today, it has just three reporters.
The recent emergence of nonprofit local news holds promise for at least arresting the negative trend. Reliant on philanthropy and reader support, these digital enterprises avoid the legacy costs of printing and home delivery and the pension overhang from unionized workforces.
[. . .]
The national project is ambitious in scope and complex in design. Participants in the so-called NewsMatch program, including the MacArthur, Ford, Carnegie, Robert Wood Johnson, and Hewlett Foundations, join the New York Times to direct funds to the Institute for Nonprofit News. The INN, in turn, distributes the money (as featured in a full-page announcement in the Times last November) via a $500 million fund-raising vehicle called Press Forward.
The INN professes to support “coverage [that] serves no cause beyond informing the public and the communities it serves.” Its communications director, Sharene Azemi, offers a useful summary of what local reporting means: “It’s actually going out, going to city council meetings, going to school board meetings, talking to officials, going to the hospital, interviewing the leaders, telling people what’s going on.” Still, Press Forward’s introductory press release raises alarms. “The philanthropic sector recognizes the need to strengthen American democracy,” it reads, “and is beginning to see that progress on every other issue, from education and healthcare to criminal justice reform and climate change, is dependent on the public’s understanding of the facts.”
[. . .]
Look deeper, and the alarms get louder. INN publishes a “diversity report” that stresses the need for “inclusive” and “equitable” media coverage. It asserts that “nonprofit newsrooms, founded as public trusts with a mission of public service, have the opportunity to reinvent news media as inclusive representatives of the communities they serve.” This “opportunity” extends to every aspect of the organizations that it supports—including “staff and board composition, operations, editorial collaborations and research.” The priorities are clear: “DEI is a central element or context for most INN programs, rather than a separate program on its own.”
[. . .]
A better approach to saving local journalism is available, with local civil society and business leaders teaming up with regional, not national, foundations. Consider the Cardinal News, a site focused on southern and western Virginia.
[. . .]
Cardinal estimates that 80 percent of its circulation area leans Republican. Because it relies on local donors and has no paywall, it must work to gain and maintain their trust. “Cardinal may reach more Republicans than all the other sites there combined,” says Blue Engine’s Grant, referring to an event at which Cardinal and other sites won industry awards. The site’s nonprofit model is enabled by local philanthropy from foundations and businesses, a board of volunteer advisors, and donations from readers who care about where they live and want local news.
[. . .]
This local donor model contrasts with the nationally driven philosophy behind most prominent local news nonprofits. A local foundation called the Secular Society—its name self-consciously chosen because of the founders’ dislike of conservative religious thought—pledged Cardinal’s first $300,000 over three years, based on its high opinion of Rife’s previous reporting. One staunchly liberal contributor, who prefers to remain anonymous, recoils at the idea of pushing Cardinal to do specific types of stories. “This is our home,” he says. “We just needed better and more reporting in our neck of the woods. You shouldn’t tell a journalist what to do. Our money is unrestricted.”
Read it all.
John Inazu and Ben Klutsey: How To Disagree Better
Discourse Magazine has released the latest in a series on classical liberalism by Benjamin Klutsey of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (Pluribus interviewed Klutsey here.) Klutsey talks to John Inazu of Washington University about his new book about issues impacting the public discourse, particularly in a pluralistic society.
[BENJAMIN] KLUTSEY: Oftentimes when I talk about pluralism with people—the idea that we can try to have conversations with people who have very different viewpoints, we have to learn to coexist peacefully amidst differences—the one question I get a lot is, “Where do you draw the line when it comes to pluralism? There must be some kind of a limiting principle; otherwise anything goes.” It’s a bit of a challenging concept for people.
How would you answer that, in terms of drawing the line?
[JOHN] INAZU: Yes, so a couple of different things. One: I think in the premise of your question is the important descriptive observation that there is no such thing as a truly pluralistic or completely pluralistic society; that every society is going to draw boundaries and say, “At some point that set of practices or that set of ideas is out.” That we’re not going to allow al-Qaida to exist in the United States or recognize the cult of human sacrifice.
And then the question, as you suggested, that becomes very hard is, “Well, what else fits in that outer intolerable boundary?” I think maybe the principle here to start with is, probably, especially in our contested, polarized society, many of us tend to populate that out-of-bounds category more fully than it deserves to be. Our tendency is to throw a whole lot of other people and beliefs and entities there when, in reality, in our very pluralistic, diverse society, they’re in bounds.
We might not like them. We might actually think what they’re doing is deeply harmful to society. We need to outvote them and win in the political process, but they’re within the boundaries of pluralism.
Now, this becomes, I think, a bit clearer when you get to the institutional level. When you have an institution, a board-governed organization or some sort of formal, recognized structure to what you’re doing, then you can define for yourselves what’s in bounds and what’s out of bounds—what’s the reasonable scope of disagreement and what’s not.
If you’re going to be, say, a Jewish day school, it’s perfectly fine and consistent to say, “Everybody who’s part of this community has to be Jewish.” You’re drawing a boundary that says, “Our boundaries of pluralism—we might have lots of discussions within Judaism, but we’re actually not going to talk about Christianity at this day school.” That kind of institutional line-drawing becomes very important. It also gives you internally a way to adjudicate what is reasonable disagreement and what’s outside the boundaries of this specific institutional focus.
[. . .]
KLUTSEY: On that, I’ll just mention your previous book, “Confident Pluralism,” where you highlight three civic aspirations, in addition to some of the constitutional commitments that we have, which are toleration, humility and patience—that sometimes these things take a very long time.
I remember I was talking to a group of students at McGill. It was maybe not too long after the Dobbs decision was made. They were concerned that there are institutions that are oppressing people. They were taken aback that the United States didn’t think that some of these questions are just settled and that we’re still arguing about these things.
I did offer your three civic aspirations, and patience in particular: that, obviously, young people want to see change fast. You also have to consider what the law, or the previous iteration of the law, what it meant for a certain group of people. They probably felt oppressed by it as well. It took all this time to change it. It might require patience to also flip it the other way, and all the work in the coalition-building and all of that that needs to take place. It’s a matter of patience. Sometimes change doesn’t happen right away—regardless of where your views are and your philosophical commitments are, every kind of change that you want to see will take a long time.
INAZU: I think that’s right. Also, it reminds me, too, that patience, and the application of patience, requires a kind of discernment and judgment as well. Sometimes the people in power will say, “Just be patient.” Sometimes the response to that claim or request is actually to be more prophetic than patient. But all of that requires a tremendous amount of judgment and discernment.
If you find yourself too passive and always defaulting to patience, then maybe what you need in your life is a little more courage to act. If you find yourself always impatient and prophetic, then maybe what you need are more voices and spaces to slow down and to think longer-term about what you’re trying to do. I think some of us fall in one direction more than the other at various times.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
Via Nico Perrino, the President of the University of Maryland, incredibly, proclaims that the heckler’s veto is apparently a glorious part of “democracy and free speech and academic freedom.”
Via Free Black Thought, former law professor Wink Twyman explains why he fears doctors who have been trained under the concept of “equitable practices” in medicine:
And finally, as Scotland’s new hate crime law takes effect, J.K. Rowling reveals her April Fools joke in the last tweet of her thread. (Click to see the whole thread, but don’t expect to find much to laugh about.)
There is something really ugly and unfortunate coming down the road that the disciples of the Social Justice faith, in their blind dogmatic zeal and their desire to install their program regardless of any possible consequences, will deny and refuse to see or admit: how can we trust the skill or competence of any professional in an "under-represented group" going forward?
If you see a professional from one of the protected victim classes (most esp a doctor) who's under age, say, 30 or so, how will you know they haven't been awarded their position because of "Diversity" instead of excellence? Of course even asking this will be met with an avalanche of bigotry accusations, but how can you claim both that standards need to be lowered for certain groups and then that noticing lowered standards is ugly and bigoted?
I guess to ask the question is to answer it: any adverse consequences will be denounced as "Racist!" as this is the reigning response of our time to anyone who states an unapproved thought, esp when that thought contradicts the sacred egalitarian mission of our Left clerisy.