America’s Rancorous Public Square

Distressing as the spite in American public life is today, it reflects something fundamental about how people want to be governed that deserves proper consideration. This dispute runs deeper than the perspective offered by Left-Right or Republican-Democrat analyses. On one side are people who believe in elite leadership by credentialed expertise, typically in some combination of talents from government, big business, and academia. The other side consists of vague objections to power concentrated in such arrangements, not because expertise is valueless but rather because such combinations, though formed with the best of intentions, often end up serving the interests of the elites involved. If America can rid itself of the vitriol that is so distressing and evident today, that would be welcome. But forceful expressions from both sides of this divide are preferable to any alternative.

For decades, groupings of elites from business, government, and academe have gained power over ever-wider aspects of public and sometimes private life. Whenever the nation has faced a challenge, calls have gone out, usually by other elites, to form combinations of talents to guide the nation through its troubles. When these troubles seem frightening enough and people become desperate for guidance, the public will readily embrace such arrangements and eagerly cede personal decision-making to them. Franklin Roosevelt used the fears engendered by the Great Depression to build his “alphabet soup” of controlling agencies, which relied heavily on academic input and—despite his anti-business pose—also included the scions of industry and finance. Control by such elite combinations gained more ground during the Second World War and, of course, during the nuclear terror of the Cold War. Today, the reach of these elite combinations extends into almost every aspect of the nation’s life, including education, energy, the penal system, and race relations.

Such cooperative arrangements might be described as a corporation of sorts. Not a joint stock ownership corporation, of course, but a corporatist arrangement in which elite elements from business and academia cooperate with counterparts in government to form a joint agenda for control of some aspect of economic and political life—in energy, for instance, the environment, education, drugs, defence, autos, alongside other fields. Over time, such arrangements have multiplied and come to dominate the nation’s politics, economics, and more. There is no suggestion here of the existence of a sinister cabal. That would be the stuff of internet conspiracy theories, too many of which already circulate on both the Left and the Right. Rather than central direction, the nation has developed a patchwork of these elite corporatist arrangements, each of which controls its own area of society and competes for power in the teeth of public resistance.

Those on the left of the political spectrum tend to describe these controlling combinations in terms of business dominance corrupting the government and intellectual sides of life. A good example of this sort of thinking appears in Matt Stoller’s Goliath. Those on the right of the political spectrum tend to describe the corporatist arrangements in terms of regulatory dominance in which government imposes on both the academic agenda and legitimate business practices. A good example of this kind of argument appears in Philip Hamburger’s Purchasing Submission. Neither side is right. In fact, these arrangements are cooperative. All three parties settle among themselves how to proceed, and no single group necessarily dominates. Business and intellectual interests help set the regulatory and legislative agenda with government, and government helps set the business practices and intellectual focus. Parties from each side of the arrangement find career opportunities with other elements in the combination. Control is joint and the negotiations ensure that no side penalises another.

Public resistance to such arrangements has increased, however, especially over the last thirty years or so. The end of the Cold War seems to have lifted a great fear that had previously prompted public acceptance of corporatist control. Without that overriding concern, people have become less tolerant of elite control generally, more sensitive to the failures of such arrangements, and more resentful of the privileges and advantages the system accords its leading members. Public resentment and distrust have grown as these elite combinations have mounted a passionate defence of their power and privilege, and this basic contest has seeped into every major public issue—whether on race or abortion, climate change, mass incarceration, whatever—and made compromise impossible even when a particular issue seems amenable to accommodation.

Though substantive public resistance has only emerged since the end of the Cold War, the objectionable aspects of the system have been evident for some time. President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation in January 1961 included a powerful warning about the excesses of such corporatist arrangements. He focused on what he called the “military-industrial complex,” but his words make a broader point about these trends:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. … Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. … In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Overriding Cold War fears no doubt muted the nation’s response to Eisenhower’s warnings, but evidence of a much more significant public rejection has now become overwhelming. A recent Gallup poll showed, for instance, that American confidence in higher education has fallen steeply. Just 36 percent of respondents reported having either a “great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in universities and colleges. That figure is down from 57 percent as recently as 2015 and even higher figures in earlier years. A Washington Post-ABC poll found that a mere 39 percent of American adults believe that the police are properly trained, down fifteen percentage points from the first such survey taken in 2014. The once widely revered Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) presently carries as much public disapproval as approval, a vast change from less than a decade ago when 52 percent of respondents to a national poll reported a positive view and only eighteen percent a negative one. Another Pew poll records that only sixteen percent of Americans have confidence that Washington generally will “do what is right all the time or most of the time,” down from over thirty percent in 2005. Even confidence in the Supreme Court has declined. In 2021, Gallup reported that 36 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the institution. By 2023, that figure had fallen to 27 percent. The story is the same across all institutions.

Resistance to established corporatist arrangements is also evident in the public’s taste for disruptive political players. There can be little doubt, for instance, that Trump’s electoral victories owe much to this public rebellion. But the rise of the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in the Democratic camp is also indicative. Perhaps most telling is how frustrated Sanders supporters preferred the disruptor Trump in 2016 to the very well established and well connected Hillary Clinton. In that year’s general election, some frustrated Bernie Sanders supporters claimed to have voted for Trump. Likewise, Trump won majorities in many districts that had previously voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, a different sort of disruptor, and did so again in 2020 and 2024. The same resentments are reflected in how Trump donors also gave to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr before he dropped out of the race.

If Trump supporters see him as a way to break the corporatist hold on American life, they will surely be disappointed. He is certainly disruptive, but nothing in his policies or plans seems likely to break up the ongoing cooperation between government agencies, big business, and established academics. It is not even apparent that he is aware of the issue. At Trump’s inauguration, he stood in front of a phalanx of technology billionaires. These technology leaders, though they had once wholeheartedly endorsed other corporatist enterprises in other circumstances, could see that something new was about to form. Wanting influence in whatever new corporatist combinations were likely to appear, they had changed their political stripes to secure their interests in the new wave, however it might develop. Trump seems to have embraced the arrangement.