New Elite Needed. Please Apply Here

We are constantly told, with justification, that many of our problems are caused by the ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’, ‘radical progressive’ or ‘woke’ elites who rule over us. These are the people who run our major governmental, educational, cultural and corporate institutions. It is these elites who have subjected us to uncontrolled mass immigration, forced us to look at the world through the lens of strange new ideologies, prioritised the interests of ‘oppressed’ groups and, when we have challenged their authority, done their best to shut us up. What we don’t hear about is how we might get rid of these elites altogether, or in other words, as US conservative political philosopher Patrick Deneen puts it in his 2023 book of that title, bring about “Regime Change” (of which more later).

The West has a long tradition of thought about the role of elites, but it has rarely come up with solutions that pass the harsh test of reality. Plato kicked off the tradition 2,500 years ago, advocating rule by a small elite whose members were characterised by wisdom and virtue and who had completed a lengthy philosophical education. When Plato put this into practice by trying to turn his pupil, Dionysius II, the ruler of Syracuse, into a philosopher king, it ended badly, with Plato falling foul of the ruler’s ire and only just escaping with his life. Four hundred years later, one of Plato’s Roman disciples, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, had similar hopes for his pupil Nero, whom he continued to advise once he became Emperor. Initially, it looked as if Seneca’s teaching about virtue had had some effect, but Nero became increasingly unpredictable, turning on those he suspected of plotting against him, including the almost certainly innocent Seneca, who ended up being sentenced to death by forced suicide.

Both stories leave one sceptical that education by itself is likely to bring about regime change. They are also a warning to intellectuals keen to cosy up to the latest strongman to appear on the scene (yes, I am thinking of Washington).

In the early 20th Century, Plato’s vision of a virtuous elite was still shaping the thinking of Spain’s greatest modern philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset. Ortega was highly critical of Spain’s current elite, which failed to provide the post-imperial leadership Spain desperately needed. Like Plato, he turned to education as the solution, arguing for the inclusion in all university courses of a synthetic overview of the major disciplines so that, whatever elite career students subsequently followed, they would be able to see how their own roles fitted into a wider whole.

Ortega was one of many in the 19th and 20th centuries who saw universities as the main focus for efforts to improve the quality of ruling elites. John Stuart Mill had made a similar point about developing students’ overall vision of the links between different branches of knowledge in his inaugural address as Rector of the University of St Andrews in 1867, as did the Cambridge literary critic F.R. Leavis, looking ahead in 1943 to post-war reconstruction, in his book Education and the University, which proposed courses enabling students to make deep comparisons between the contemporary world and a past historical period.

The problem with all these recommendations is that they over-estimate the potential role of an educational programme in shaping minds and actions. The courses proposed are also the ones most liable, in our current world, to be captured by activist lecturers using them not with the intention of widening students’ perspectives but as one teacher quite openly once put it, “curating minds” in support of “progressive” political causes.

The latest effort to reshape university education can be found in Matthew Goodwin’s impressive new book Bad Education. After analysing how our current universities – as a result of activist lecturers, intrusive bureaucrats and cancel culture – serve as one of the vehicles for creating and perpetuating an elite which holds the country in thrall to progressive ideologies, Goodwin makes recommendations that go beyond having yet more debates about the importance of respecting a diversity of opinions. The only way to tackle the problems, he argues, is “to enshrine in law the protection of free speech and academic freedom”. This would involve new requirements about “free, robust and uninhibited debate”, university neutrality on political and social issues and appointments uninfluenced by the political beliefs of academic job candidates. Compliance would be enforced through audits for academic freedom and free speech violations, with fines where necessary.

All this would be admirable but, even were we to have a government willing to confront the powerful vested interests involved – currently a distant prospect – it might take decades to replace the intellectual monoculture that currently prevails in universities, where eight out of 10 academics support parties on the liberal Left, rising to nine out of 10 in the social sciences.

For a more radical set of proposals, one has to turn to the US political philosopher Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change, which I mentioned earlier. This builds on Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed and provides a deep analysis of the relationship between elites and majorities in different regimes. Classical liberalism and progressive liberalism, he argues, are both regimes in which privileged elites govern at the expense of the majority. Classical liberals do this by removing economic controls and deepening economic inequality, while progressive liberals impose unwanted social changes and boss around the plebs when they fail to conform to the elite’s latest rules of behaviour. Both deeply distrust the people, relying as much as they can on experts. Marxism is not dissimilar, the majority being considered not good enough for the anticipated socialist utopia and thus having “to be pressed into its service” by a revolutionary elite. As for ‘conservatives’, such as the US Republican Party and UK Conservative Party, Deneen is clear they don’t even deserve their name and are merely a sub-set of classical liberals who want a slower pace of social change.

Although agreeing with the early 20th Century sociologists Pareto, Michels and Mosca that elites are both necessary and inevitable (Michels calling this inevitability “the iron law of oligarchy”), Deneen argues that there is one type of regime which, unlike the others, is capable of bringing the few and the many together. This he calls “common-good conservatism”, a regime in which the virtuous few are expected to work on behalf of the socially conservative preferences of the many. It is a regime which has no truck with identity politics and which combines the Left’s more egalitarian economic order with the Right’s stress on generational continuity and patriotism.

Unlike other philosophers I have mentioned, Deneen’s recommendations find support not from Plato but from Aristotle, who argued that in ruling the state, the knowledgeable few need to take into account the collective wisdom and common sense of the many. The precursors of common-good conservatism in the US include the anti-federalists and past populist movements, and in England, people like Burke and Disraeli. In Deneen’s view, given the sense of deepening crisis within increasingly “illiberal” liberal societies and the rise of new populist movements, now is the time to see what common-good conservatism might be able to achieve. 

The last part of Regime Change looks at what would be involved in developing a new elite “aligned with the values and needs of ordinary working people”. Deneen’s recommendations are numerous, varied and highly contentious: a major transfer of resources from universities to vocational education; the revival of a traditional university liberal education based on transmission, plus a practical “trade” course to help make the university experience less “gnostic”; a year’s compulsory service to the community; a big push on ensuring greater socio-economic diversity in top institutions; relocation of federal departments away from Washington with its “obscene” concentration of wealth; support for marriage and families; pressure on the elite to set a good example as regards morality and taste; the abandonment of ethical relativism in relation to “transgression and libertinism”. 

One finds echoes of Deneen’s proposals in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a 887-page plan for how a new US government might make radical changes to all its activities, prepared as advice to a new “conservative” US President. Conservatives interested in serving the new government are invited to submit their résumés and offered training. Trump dissociated himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, but some of its authors have been appointed to the new administration. Deneen has been cited as an influence by Vice-President J.D. Vance, but appears not to be associated with Project 2025.

In Regime Change, referring to him as the current “nominal champion” of common-good conservatism, Deneen describes Donald Trump as “a deeply flawed narcissist who at once appealed to the intuitions of the populace, but without offering clarifying articulation of their grievances and transforming their resentments into sustained policy and the development of a capable leadership class”. It remains to be seen whether these major criticisms will be addressed and the new US Government will meet the criteria Deneen has set for common-good conservatism. Trump’s dismantling of DEI, gender ideology and Net Zero, together with the drastic thinning of the state apparatus, seem to point in that direction, though whether the values-free ‘might is right’ foreign policy that is emerging is intellectually compatible with the idea of a common-good conservative elite at home is open to debate. But it is still early days. 

Dr Nicholas Tate was Chief Executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (1994-7) and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (1997-2000). He is the author of What is Education For? and The Conservative Case for Education.