LASCH, Christopher

The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

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The current catchwords—diversity, compassion, empowerment, entitlement—express the wistful hope that deep divisions in American society can be bridged by goodwill and sanitized speech. We are called on to recognize that all minorities are entitled to respect not by virtue of their achievements but by virtue of their sufferings in the past. Compassionate attention, we are told, will somehow raise their opinion of themselves; banning racial epithets and other forms of hateful speech will do wonders for their morale. In our preoccupation with words, we have lost sight of the tough realities that cannot be softened simply by flattering people's self-image. What does it profit the residents of the South Bronx to enforce speech codes at elite universities?”

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The political process is dominated by rival elites committed to irreconcilable beliefs (...) the politics of ideology distorted our view of the world and confronted us with a series of false choices between feminism and the family, social reform and traditional values, racial justice and individual accountability. Ideological rigidity has the effect of obscuring the views Americans have in common, of replacing substantive issues with purely symbolic issues, and of creating a false impression of polarization.

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The idea that democracy is incompatible with excellence, that high standards are inherently elitist - or, as we would say today: sexist, racist, and so on - has always been the best argument against it. Unfortunately many democrats secretly - or not so secretly - share this belief, and are therefore unable to answer it. Instead, they fall back on the claim that democratic men and women make up in tolerance what they lack in character. The latest variation on this familiar theme - its reductio ad absurdum - is that a respect for cultural diversity forbids us to impose the standards of privileged groups on the victims of oppression. This is so clearly a recipe for universal competence; or at least a disastrous split between the competent classes and the incompetent, that it is rapidly losing whatever credibility it may have had when our society, because of its abundance of land and natural resources, combined with its chronic shortage of labour, offered a more generous margin for incompetence.

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