The Surprising Origins of America's Elite Class
Former NPR business editor Uri Berliner earned extensive conservative accolades for his recent essay besmirching the federally-funded media organization for what he described as a newsroom increasingly biased in favor of the woke tenets of the Democratic Party. Yet as embarrassing as Berliner’s analysis was to NPR, it wasn’t exactly surprising — a survey from two years ago found that more than seventy percent of NPR’s audience describe themselves as “consistently liberal.” Perhaps the more interesting story hidden in Berliner’s exposé is that despite overwhelming evidence dating back decades, the leaders of America’s elite institutions either do not view themselves as disproportionately biased, or think that bias is essential to ensure our nation’s progress and flourishing.
Consider Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, who in what might be interpreted as a delayed April Fools’ joke, argued in an 8 April op-ed that “Democratic officials and the broader left generally support America’s long-standing system of universities that operate largely independently from partisan politics.” Bacon adds (with no evidence) that “the overwhelming majority of American students attend public colleges that don’t have intense left- or right-wing activism.” Yet, he bemoans, “It’s unfortunate that higher education has become such a political issue. But today’s right is at war with many ideals that I thought were safe and sacrosanct.”
Pace Bacon, that academia is overwhelmingly liberal is not exactly a controversial observation. According to a 2016 study in Econ Journal Watch investigating the voter registration of 7.243 faculty members at forty leading American universities, 3,623 were registered Democrats, and 314 were registered Republicans (that’s a ratio of more than 11 to 1). As for student activism, after the October Hamas attack on Israel, college groups across the United States didn’t just criticize Israeli policies towards Palestinians or express objections to further bloodshed — they unashamedly celebrated Hamas’s massacring of unarmed Israeli citizens. Prior to that, liberal student groups from Middlebury College to the University of North Texas to Evergreen State College have gained a reputation for harassing conservative academics or students with little, if any, disciplinary action from administration officials.
West Virginia University professor Jeffrey E. Paul’s new book Winning America’s Second Civil War: Progressivism’s Authoritarian Threat, Where It Came From, and How To Defeat It helps illuminate how so many journalists and academics have come to excuse their obvious political bias. It is a fascinating, surprisingly obscure story about how the first generation of America’s doctoral faculty were educated in German universities whose curriculum were largely antithetical to American ideas about liberty and property. That education in turn engineered a progressive mentality that now defines the beliefs visible not only on our nation’s campuses, but across our nation’s elite institutions.
The first Ph.D was not awarded in America until Yale did so in 1861, a result of our republic’s relative isolation from Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the following decades, other elite universities followed suit. Yet these doctoral programs in the social sciences did not organically originate from a shared uniquely American intellectual heritage based on the Framers’ belief in the natural rights of life, liberty, and property as foundational to our government and society. Rather, this new crop of academics relied on ideas they had imbibed at various research universities on the European continent, institutions that rejected natural rights theory in favor of an all-powerful, beneficent, managerial state governed by experts.
Charles Edward Merriam studied in Paris and Berlin before founding the political science department at the University of Chicago. Merriam argued that the “individualistic ideas of the ‘natural right’ school of political theory, [e]ndorsed in the Revolution,” have been “discredited and repudiated.” Frank Johnson Goodnow, who taught at Columbia and later served as president of Johns Hopkins, described rights and the separation of powers as “inefficient” and inconsistent with modern life, instead recommending government rule by experts. “The political philosophy of the eighteenth century was formulated before the announcement and acceptance of the theory of evolutionary development,” he wrote.” Johns Hopkins academic Richard T. Ely argued for an aristocracy to replace American democracy, while John Dewey redefined liberalism to mean not private rights, but the “use of government action for those at economic disadvantage.”
These anti-republican ideas did not long remain in the ivory tower. As Paul notes, when former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson became president, he encouraged “progressive statesmanship,” in which supposedly disinterested technocratic experts would leverage the powers of federal bureaucracy to circumvent supposedly ignorant and capricious voters in the name of efficiency. As Hillsdale professor Ronald Pestritto has observed, the undermining of the separation of powers was, in Wilson’s view, a small price to pay in the creation of the modern administrative state, whose unelected, largely unaccountable bureaucrats now exert tremendous influence over the lives and decisions of all American citizens. It should come as no surprise that Democrats outnumber Republicans in federal service, perhaps by a margin of two- or three-to-one, if federal employee contributions to political parties are any indication.
To take one more example cited by Paul, American corporate media are also dramatically disproportionately represented by liberals. According to a 2017 Harvard University’s Kennedy School study, more than eighty percent of coverage of then-President Donald Trump in the New York Times, Washington Post, and CBS was negative. A 2023 study found that less than 4 percent of journalists are Republicans. And a 2020 survey by the Washington Post found that 8 in 10 journalists who identified with a political party said they were liberal/Democrats.
The point need not be belabored. Obviously, our nation’s elite institutions are dominated by liberals. It’s possible that academia’s liberal turn in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was the catalyst for this broader societal shift, given that federal bureaucrats and journalists have, for generations, been by-and-large educated in those same progressive institutions. It is also reasonable to assess these trends as mutually reinforcing — even in the nineteenth century American journalists were, as a demographic, more progressive than the general populace, questioning established mores for the sake of raising readership.
What’s more interesting is why members of that elite class — such as Berliner and Bacon — do not interpret this bias as related to our broader cultural distemper, in which a record low percentage of Americans trust the media, government, and higher education. Is it simply a reflection of heightened levels of political polarization, so much so that many liberals do not view their overrepresentation across elite institutions as a problem, but rather as the very means to accomplish their ideological objectives, even in the face of unprecedented degrees of public distrust? Perhaps it is not cynical as much as it is realistic to observe that if one has the upper hand, there’s little reason to surrender that advantage simply for the sake of fairness, regardless of the paeans we may otherwise sing to diversity and inclusion.
Yet in another sense, Berliner and Bacon’s analysis indicates the incredible success of progressive’s intellectual forefathers in America’s first Ph.D programs. Rule by technocratic experts has so thoroughly replaced the republican, natural rights-based system of our founding — amounting to what Christopher Caldwell has termed a “second constitution” — that for many, and sadly, a seeming majority of our intellectual class, it seems the only sensible political reality. As Politico correspondent Heidi Przybyla claimed in a revealing February interview on MSNBC, our rights do not come from God, but from “Congress” and the “Supreme Court.” Why should governing be left to the fickle masses of religiously-influenced deplorables when we have specially-trained, impartial experts to benevolently tell us what’s best for us?
