The first two decades of the 21st Century saw three of the most catastrophic failures of expert leadership in United States history: the national security debacles of the 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent Iraq War morass, the global financial crisis of 2008, and finally, the COVID public health crisis in 2020.
Numerous books and even movies have been made that review the national security failures associated with 9/11 and the financial crisis. Now five years after COVID’s arrival on American shores, two new books autopsy the U.S. response to SARS-CoV-2 and particularly the performance of America’s elite leaders and institutions during that period. Their judgment is harsh, accurate, and supported by reams of evidence. The media, universities, the “public health” community, politicians, social media, and the international community all failed miserably, with massively adverse consequences in both the short- and the long-term.
After reading these books it is difficult to point to even one notable positive achievement brought about by elite leaders during the COVID crisis, other than the arguable step of producing a “vaccine” that provided minimal, if any, protection against infection in transmission in record time. Beyond this technical achievement, public officials mishandled the introduction of the vaccines. Rather than promoting social harmony and a sense of well-being among those facing higher medical risk or psychological fear of the virus, the shots inflamed distrust. It would be hard to imagine a more tragic example of policymakers turning a potentially positive development into flaming social conflict, an excuse for the worst civil rights violations in nearly a century, the end of professional and academic careers, and the most comprehensive peacetime censorship operation at least since the Alien and Sedition Acts.
In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee provides a thorough overview of the undemocratic shortcuts imposed on American society by its elites during the pandemic. They focus on the political dimension of Covid decision-making and the failure of elites to look beyond their parochial class and intellectual interests to consider the broader tradeoffs necessitated in dealing with the extended and widespread shock to society caused by Covid.
An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions by journalist David Zweig, focuses on the appalling sacrifice of America’s school-age children to hysteria and ignorance. As Zweig details, in the midst of America society’s neurotic response to the virus, all well-developed plans for how to deal with such a situation were jettisoned, the risk to children of acquiring and transmitting Covid were dramatically exaggerated, and the harms to children of extended school closures, mask mandates, and other idiotic policies were waved away.
Together, the books give both a birds’-eye and an up-close look at the mismanagement of Covid. But the books leave unaddressed two key questions that we need to answer in order to prepare for the inevitable next crisis.
First, how could America’s elites have failed so catastrophically and comprehensively? Is it plausible that such rampant failures, and subsequent rationalizations for those failures, can be justified by good-faith incompetence and groupthink? Or must it be that decision-making was also infected with self-interest, political opportunism, and motivated reasoning? In other words, is the problem limited to professional and institutional incentives? Or is there something wrong with the character of America’s elites?
Second, what does the Covid crisis portend for the future of the American democratic system? Elites play a crucial role in stabilizing democracy by tempering short-term passions and preserving minority rights. But the experiences of this century have cumulatively and justifiably shattered public trust. Cloistered in their ivory towers, bureaucratic office buildings, and newsrooms, these elites seem oblivious to how their own incompetence, narcissism, avarice, and naked opportunism contributed to doubts about their motives and capabilities. Populism may not be the answer, but it is an inevitable response to this failure.
In Covid’s Wake
In Covid’s Wake assesses the failure of the country’s political and legal institutions to reflect in a deliberative and pluralistic fashion the full range of citizens’ opinions and concerns. Especially in states dominated by the Democratic Party (“Blue” states), the end results were not only a suite of policies that reinforced existing class and other divisions but also involved extraordinary infringements on individual civil liberties, such free speech, that are key to the operation of those very institutions.
Macedo and Lee write, “Under Covid, enormous power was wielded by epidemiologists and public health officials with a narrow focus on minimizing Covid infections.” They argue that this narrow focus may have been “understandable” at the outset. “But as the weeks ticked by and serious people warned of the need to consider the obvious heavy costs of lockdowns and school closures, too many refused to listen or even allow an open debate and discussion.” Addressing an audience mostly on the left, they argue that this refusal should be especially troubling to egalitarians who are ostensibly committed to democratic politics.
Given the immense power wielded by public health officials, how did they perform? Not well. Macedo and Lee recite the litany of errors committed by “experts” and the long list policies adopted with no scientific foundation, including compulsory vaccines for those with natural immunity, the myth that vaccines would prevent infection and transmission of Covid, masks, the benefits of school closures, business closures and house arrest orders, the six-foot rule for social distancing. Many of those policies were mandated not only without any evidence to support them, but in the face of longstanding evidence to the contrary. Prior to Covid, the government thoroughly studied, deliberated, and recommended a suite of policies to respond to a future crisis exactly like Covid. Once Covid arrived on our shores, however, those well-laid plans were quickly abandoned with no explanation in favor of pell-mell improvisation of policy responses.
Writing from the perspective of political scientists, though, Macedo and Lee seek to emphasize a point beyond these scientific failures—the failure of democracy. Even if the experts had been right about “The Science”, every action taken in the name of reducing Covid’s toll came with significant tradeoffs in terms of other human goods. School closures, most obviously, exacted a huge toll on a generation of children with a long tail effect reaching indefinitely into the future from lost learning and socialization. Kids and adults alike were denied opportunities to socialize, young adults the opportunity to date, small businesses were shuttered and bankrupted while large chain stores and online merchants prospered. Moreover, the economic, social, and psychological toll fell hardest on lower-income workers who could not work online and therefore faced the greatest risk of infection.
Macedo and Lee argue that navigating these sorts of policy tradeoffs and incommensurate objectives is the basic reason we have a democratic process in the first place. Medical experts can’t decide how much economic carnage and unemployment is acceptable to reduce asymptomatic infection or even death, or what the acceptable toll is on kids unable to attend school or unnecessarily masked. Those are determinations that citizens need to make for themselves through elected representatives. Other examples from American history demonstrate that rule by the “best and brightest”, however well-intentioned, never succeed and are often counterproductive. The same elite groupthink and efforts to suppress politically inconvenient facts and discussion on display during the pandemic mirrored similar expert failures during the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, both of which dramatically undermined public trust in the system of government.
Yet progressive politicians and administrators appear to have drawn exactly the opposite lesson. Macedo and Lee conclude that “it is most troubling that elites now assert the need for control over the spread of ‘misinformation.’ The Covid crisis demonstrates—if such a demonstration were needed in the twenty-first century—that placing unchecked power to define ‘error’ in the hands of elites in government and the scientific establishment would be a grave error, incompatible with liberalism, science, and democratic self-government.” Instead of re-learning the lesson that elites need to check each other and that outsiders need to ask questions that will challenge groupthink, they note that many of those same experts who erred over and over again now want to define “misinformation” as a “technocratic” problem that has a technocratic solution—and conveniently would insulate the expert class from even the miniscule amount of pushback they received during Covid.
An Abundance of Caution
If Macedo and Lee are tough on America’s expert class, journalist David Zweig takes a flamethrower to them. Macedo and Lee focus on the need to make tradeoffs among competing social goals. For Zweig, however, the question of tradeoffs is largely beside the point because there were no benefits to many of the policies imposed by the expert class. Over 357 pages of text and 73 pages of endnotes, Zweig develops in scathing detail the appalling record of “expert” failure. He goes beyond Macedo and Lee’s acceptance of summaries of published studies, finding that many of the studiesclaimed to justify Covid policies were little more than stacked citations like a series of “Russian dolls”—but with no doll in the middle that actually proves the purported point.
Zweig focuses specifically on the decision to implement extended school closures. Beginning in March 2020 as part of the “15 days to slow the spread” schools were closed. The measure was supposedly temporary, but in most states remained closed until the end of that school year and in many states remained closed partially or entirely for most of the next year.
Where I live in Virginia, public schools did not reopen full-time until April 6, 2021—which, incredibly, made it the first school district in Northern Virginia to return to full in-person learning, some which didn’t return full-time until August 2021.
Even when schools returned to in-person schooling, the students and schools were burdened by a variety of restrictions and resource constraints—mask mandates, cancellation of extra-curricular activities, weird plexiglass cages around students’ desks, six-foot distancing requirements, and demands for expensive air filtration devices, not to mention the psychological toll on young students who constantly found themselves characterized as little more than viral vectors destined to “kill grandma” if they so much as played a game of pickup soccer.
School closure is a good target because it is one of the few areas in which even advocates of repressive policies have acknowledged that they may have erred. But even if they acknowledge the mistake in retrospect, they generally chalk it up to the heat of war—trying to “save lives” during a period of great scientific uncertainty and based on the “best” scientific understanding at the time. They claimed to simply be acting from “an abundance of caution” (providing the book’s title) to try to reduce transmission of Covid.
Hogwash, says Zweig. In fact, there was never any actual scientific basis for any of these policies and, in fact, abundant evidence to the contrary. It was known since the earliest days of the pandemic that children were at vanishingly small risk from Covid. The danger was not only less than that associated with seasonal flu. Children were also at far less risk from Covid than from other hazards we accept as part of ordinary life, such as drowning at home or being killed in a car accident. Supporters of repressive closure policies and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as compulsory masking appealed to an extraordinary exaggeration of the risks of Covid to children that seemingly remained impervious to correction over the span of the pandemic.
But even if children faced some risk from Covid, none of the NPIs or school closures themselves were ever found to have any effect on community transmission. As a result, there were no demonstrable benefits balance against the harms from school closures. Zweig doesn’t just take “The Science” at face value. Instead, he digs into the studies and discovers in many instances that the studies do not support the points for which they were cited. In some instances where he is unable to verify assertions from the published studies alone, he puts on his reporter’s hat and tracks down the authors of the study to directly question them on the basis for their assertions. Whether investigating claims about masks, HEPA filters, or transmission of Covid from children to adults, Zweig shoots down one excuse after another.
None of these interventions were based in direct observation. They were inferences from computer models. Repeatedly citing Alfred Korzybski’s famous aphorism “the maps is not the territory,” Zweig emphasizes that an epidemiological model is not empirical reality. The model is only as good as the assumptions it is based on and the realism of its modeling of human behavior. Predictions based on theoretically perfect compliance with mask mandates or social isolation, for example, do not describe the world in which human beings actually exist. In one discussion that would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic, Zweig evaluates the performance of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The National Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed multiple models of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths and found the top four most accurate models were produced by people from outside the public health field, including one by a company that does software development forecasting, a team from the financial industry consulting firm Oliver Wyman, and a Canadian physicist. The predictions provided by these “amateur” models beat out not just IHME, but also researchers from Johns Hopkins, MIT, Duke, Columbia, the University of Michigan, and the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, among others. As Zweig wryly observes, “It’s as though an auto mechanic and a scrimshaw artist started performing open heart surgeries, and achieved better outcomes than a dozen of the top cardiothoracic surgery teams in the nation.”
As for Neil Ferguson’s influential Imperial College London (ICL) model, which provided the basis for White House Covid coordinator Deborah Birx’s recommendation to shut down American society for “15 days to slow the spread” in March 2020, Zweig reports that according to the senior author of that study “the initial model… was based on an incorrect assumption about the transmissibility of the virus among kids.” The inputs and assumptions that drove those models were based on assumptions in other models of other infectious disease outbreaks that were embedded in earlier ICL models. In short, according to an independent epidemiologist that Zweig asked to review Ferguson’s work, the ICL model consisted of “models built upon models” based upon prior unsupported factual assumptions embedded in earlier models that might or might not have been valid and reasonable when applied to transmission of Covid in children. As that analyst summed up, “I don’t think [the ICL] had a firm, empirical understanding of transmission within US schools.” The whole enterprise was “a house of modeling cards.”
Within the first few months of the pandemic, moreover, it was no longer necessary to rely on models and untested assumptions as to viral transmission, the effects of NPIs, and the effects of Covid on kids and community transmission. There was manifest evidence from Europe, which chose a very different path from the United States with respect to schools. Some countries in Europe, notably Sweden, never ceased in-person schooling. Others shut down for short periods, but throughout Europe virtually every country reopened schools by the spring of 2020.
Virtually every NPI was tried somewhere, providing a rich empirical basis for testing the models’ assumptions regarding transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 by children, effects on community transmission more broadly, and the effects of different NPIs. Throughout Europe the evidence was resounding—there was no danger from in-person schooling, children were not vectors of community transmission, and adoption of NPIs had no measurable effect on community transmission or any other outcome.
It’s not as if these studies and reports were published in some obscure medical journals or the like. Real-world experiences were studied by European Union governments and broadcast to the world. Yet these reports were entirely ignored in the United States—in fact, I admit I myself had not been aware of until I read Zweig’s book.
After spring 2020, the US also had evidence from a handful of school districts in Montana and Wyoming that had resumed in-person schooling by the spring with no adverse effects. In March, US policymakers could arguably have had some uncertainty about the effects of Covid on children and community transmission. But by August, at the latest, US policymakers were no longer improvising under conditions of extreme uncertainty; they were simply denying established facts on the ground. Zweig asks the question to which we will return in a moment, “How was it possible that this real-world evidence was ignored?”.
In another remarkable passage, Zweig dissects a New York Times feature story that asked 132 epidemiologists the “dreaded question” as to whether it was “safe” to send their kids back to school in August 2020, as President Trump was proposing. Unsurprisingly, the Times’s “experts” were uniformly terrified by the prospect. But the article cited no evidence for the opinions of the ostensible experts, nor did any of the experts themselves. Instead, it was nothing but an extended appeal to authority of the opinions of various individuals deemed to be authorities in the field.
“It gets worse, though,” as Zweig dryly remarks. Unreported by the Times many of the quoted epidemiologists were experts in fields unrelated to infectious disease. Quoted “experts” included a consultant for smokeless tobacco companies, a substance abuse researcher, a PhD student who studied the effects of exposure to heavy metals, a professor who focused on disparities in maternal health, and a cancer researcher. Several respondents didn’t even have children, even though the article supposedly was about what they were going to do with “their” children if schools reopened. Zweig elicited a chuckle from this reader in observing, “Why should readers care that a childless grad student, who studies the health effects of cigarettes, has ‘reservations’ about sending kids back to school?” Zweig also observes many epidemiologists are not actually medical doctors at all but statisticians trained to analyze data, not provide medical advice. As Zweig again sums up the absurdity of the enterprise, “In short, not only did the article suffer from the appeal to authority fallacy, the ‘authorities’ surveyed in the article weren’t even experts in the subject on which they were giving their opinion.”
Covid, Experts, and The Future
In Covid’s Wake and An Abundance of Caution convincingly demonstrate the abysmal failure of the expert and elite classes. The “experts” were wrong about virtually every important fact and remained reluctant to revise their opinions even as new evidence poured in as to the ineffectiveness of their proposed interventions, the huge costs resulting from their policies,, and the unleashing of an unprecedented campaign of censorship in order to suppress public discussion.
But under this surface agreement lies a deeper question on which Macedo/Lee and Zweig somewhat part ways—to repeat Zweig’s question, “How is it possible that this real-world evidence was ignored?” Or to restate the question more broadly—what accounts for both the catastrophic failure of the experts and elites in responding to SARS-CoV-2 and their stubborn unwillingness on so many fronts to acknowledge their failure? And why, when criticized, did they respond by censoring their opponents as “misinformation” spreaders and attempting to strip the licenses of nonconforming doctors, rather than addressing their concerns?
Macedo and Lee imply that the fundamental problem was one of process. In the heat of the moment facing a supposedly novel pathogen, the authors suggest, most elites tried to respond in good faith (with some exceptions including apparently deliberate efforts to conceal the role of Anthony Fauci and American researchers in germinating the virus in the Wuhan laboratory). Despite their best-efforts, however, politicians, bureaucrats, and institutions were plagued by blind spots resulting from groupthink and an unfortunate if understandable decision to define the goal as minimizing infection. Once zero Covid was revealed to be a fantasy, US elites struggled in pivoting to policies that would allow the US to “live with” the virus. The solution Macedo and Less suggest also lies in process—recognizing the checks and balances built into the democratic process and protecting free speech, so ordinary citizens speaking through their elected representatives can muddle through to workable compromises.
Zweig, by contrast, hints at something darker. As he documents, with respect to children at least, there were no significant benefits from school closures. Prior plans from the early-2000s prepared by the US government did not contemplate extended school closures. Yet those were immediately abandoned during Covid with no sound explanation. Nor was there much uncertainty about any of this—as noted, Europe provided ample evidence that schools could reopen safely. The evidence was there, the experts simply chose to ignore it in favor of cockamamie theories and magical models.
Zweig hints that the explanation for the experts’ failures during Covid is not failed processes, it is failed people. And if that is true, preventing future catastrophes like the expert mismanagement of Covid (and by implication the Iraq War and the 2008 Financial Crisis) is going to require more than simple process tweaks.
Zweig recognizes the ideological dimension to the Covid response that Macedo and Lee largely ignore. Zweig presents survey evidence that shows the overwhelmingly left-wing political orientation of public health experts and epidemiologists. Moreover, given the determination of progressives to “get Trump”, the opportunity during an election year to tag Trump as recklessly cavalier and a “science denier” about children’s safety was too tempting to pass up. Notably, Macedo and Lee are high-status Princeton professors with well-established progressive credentials, which may incline them to a charitable opinion of their fellow-travelers. Zweig is a freelance reporter and part-time musician living in upstate New York. An outsider’s perspective that enables him to see the motivations of the elite class more clearly.
Recall Macedo and Lee’s verdict on the country’s response to Covid: “In important respects, looking back, we did poorly.” Throughout the book, they suggest that the breakdown of democracy during Covid was largely bipartisan. The problem with this narrative is that it is simply not true. Early on, conservatives also accepted school closures, social distancing, etc. But unlike progressives, many conservatives (including political leaders like Ron DeSantis) exhibited a firmer grasp of the scientific facts and more sober weighing of costs and benefits of restrictions. I personally risked my career by bringing suit against my employer in July 2021 to challenge the university’s vaccine mandate because I already had natural immunity after having recovered from Covid. I had videos removed from YouTube of lectures and interviews I conducted discussing my case (for violations of the platform’s “misinformation” policy). As far as I can tell, I was also shadowbanned on Facebook for expressing my opinions.
Censorship, dogmatism, compulsion, and violations of individual freedom were almost exclusively imposed by progressives. And Macedo and Lee do reproach their fellow progressives for violating their own stated principles of scientific integrity, belief in civil rights, and for adopting policies that exacerbated social inequality. Still, they are continually drawn back to the premise that the challenges of political tribalism were equal on both sides. (I acknowledge that this may be a rhetorical strategy to make their message more palatable so as to reach fellow progressives elites).
Further, many of the actions taken by progressive elites during the pandemic are difficult to square with the hypothesis that those advocating them were well-meaning but panicked or uncertain. As Governor of California, Gavin Newsome presided over one of the most authoritarian Covid response regimes in the country. Yet Newsome’s children attended in-person at an expensive private school while millions of less-privileged public school children remained chained to computer screens and isolated in their (often much-smaller) houses. Newsome himself was filmed dining at the high-end French Laundry restaurant in violation of his own rules discouraging such gatherings. Former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi secretly visited her hairdresser when the rest of the country increasingly resembled a second coming of Woodstock hippies.
The hypocrisy was not limited to politicians. Ferguson, author of the ICL model, was caught violating government orders by traveling to visit with his girlfriend. On this side of the Atlantic, Birx ignored her own guidelines by traveling to a large family gathering to celebrate Thanksgiving in November 2020. The list of elites who preached panic about the virus and acted otherwise can be multiplied. If they really believed what they were saying in public, they would have behaved differently in their private affairs.
I recall the moment where I realized that something was off. During spring 2020, under the instigation of Birx, Fauci, and other “experts” it was announced that there would be a brief shutdown of American life for two weeks. “Essential” businesses could remain open but “non-essential” businesses would have to close, although the distinction between them was never explained.
Almost immediately after the initial “fifteen days to stop the spread”, government officials announced that it might be necessary to extend that temporary period until the virus was “under control”—a goal seemed to rest on no objective measures. In response to these extended, open-ended closures, small groups in some communities gathered to protest this arbitrary assertion of governmental power. Public health officials in unison decried these protests for allegedly putting “profits over people” and accused critics of selfishly risking grandma’s life just so they could work out at the gym.
The same restrictive instincts filtered down to certain cohorts of the population. The area in which I live in Northern Virginia is one of the wealthiest, most highly-educated, progressive, and Democratic communities in the state. Many parents there prohibited their kids from physically interacting with friends in order to be “Covid-safe.” As a group, wealthy, highly-educated progressives bemoaned the “selfishness” of the small group who protested the government’s overreach and calls to reopen schools.
This all changed in May 2020 when George Floyd died. Parents who had vigilantly isolated themselves and their kids for two months suddenly turned out for mass demonstrations—their school-age kids in tow—that dwarfed the rag-tag anti-lockdown protests. Public health leaders added their endorsement to the BLM protests as promoting public health by rectifying systemic racism. Political leaders presiding over repressive Covid regimes, who just weeks before were attacking anti-lockdown protestors and arresting lone surfers, were all of a sudden at the head of these mass gatherings.
It is hard not to recognize that throughout the Spring of 2020, the public health community’s different response to anti-lockdown protestors and BLM protestors was motivated by politics, not science. And that my progressive neighbors who wouldn’t allow their kids to attend school or play soccer but would take them to mass public rallies full of shouting, cheering participants, were animated by something other than “The Science.” Zweig’s conclusion about school closures could be applied to the entire Covid enterprise: “Despite what Americans were told, keeping schools closed was not a science-based policy. It was a values-based policy.”
What were those values? Zweig points to the “safetyism” at the heart of modern progressivism. In the Covid context, neurotic fear of the unknown led to a reversal of the traditional way we think about risk and freedom in the United States. Rather than starting with the presumption that kids should be allowed to go to school and individuals should be allowed to socialize and work unless some evidence is presented to the contrary, progressives, teachers unions, and politicians put the onus on those who wanted to open schools to prove the absence of any risk from doing so. Meanwhile, they kept conjuring up new fears and new requirements that were supposedly necessary to allow schools to reopen.
Given how easily progressives abandoned their purported commitments to economic and social equality, democracy, civil liberties, bodily autonomy, and concerns about the rule of law, and how conveniently the proposed policy responses lined up with their own personal comfort, it is reasonable to ask the extent to which progressives actually believe in the principles they promote. Consider the effects of Covid policies on social and economic inequality. While white collar and knowledge-class professionals could telework in their jammies, less credentialed workers trudged off to Amazon warehouses, toilet paper factories, and restaurant kitchens. Professors jetted off to vacation homes on Martha’s Vineyard to teach classes remotely while students were required to pay full tuition. Anthony Fauci, reportedly the highest-paid federal government employee, never missed a paycheck, while he dismissing as “inconvenient” business closures that destroyed small businesses and laid off workers. The New York Times famously wrote an article on how readers could protect themselves from contracting Covid while traveling in an Uber or taxi—written from the perspective of the passenger, not the driver who had to transport people in order to pay his rent.
The impact of these policies in exacerbating inequality was also reflected in less-obvious ways. One friend of mine who has for many years conducted alumni interviews for his Ivy League alma mater noted that in all the years he had been conducting those interviews, he never saw as large a gap between the preparation and resumes of students graduating from elite private schools (who continued to attend school in person and to participate in extracurricular activities) and students graduating from top-ranked local public schools that were closed for extended periods. I have another friend whose son was an indifferent student whose primary motivation for being engaged in high school was to remain eligible for his hockey team. In his senior year he was elected captain only to see the season canceled, sending him into a deep depression and a complete loss of academic motivation.
Such stories can be replicated over and over again. People with clout thanks to their money, credentials, or favored “identity” saw their interests protected. Those with less influence were ignored or dismissed. In other contexts, progressives might see these outcomes as evidence of injustice. During Covid, they refused even to consider the possibility.
Can America Survive Its Elite Disease?
It is a near-cliché to remind readers that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. In a democracy, elites are distrusted and policy is guided by ordinary citizens. The Framers, however, rejected that model as producing instability and political disorder. They established a system of checks and balances between the branches of the federal government and between the national and state governments under federalism.
It is often overlooked that the Framers also established another type of checks and balances—between the people and elites. This is most notable in the original structure of Congress. The House is numerous, representing smaller districts, and is elected every two years. The Senate, by contrast, was originally elected indirectly by state legislatures on a statewide basis for six-year terms with older minimum age requirements. The Framers feared too much democracy and too much elitism alike.
Covid brought these frictions to light. Elites promulgated, endorsed, and to put it bluntly, lied about the basis and efficacy of the policies they were promoting. Where they did not exempt themselves from the policies they were imposing on others, they benefited directly from them (such as by the convenience of teleworking) while the costs and hardship were borne by others. Even worse, looking back over the Covid years it is hard to explain the mistakes of the elites as merely innocent, as opposed to the conscious or unconscious result of a fundamentally corrupt class leading fundamentally corrupt elite institutions.
Under the traditional balance between populism and elitism, elites bear the burden of stewarding institutions such as universities, churches, corporations, nonpartisan governmental bureaucracies, medicine and other licensed professions, media, and K-12 schooling. These institutions play an outsized role in shaping society because of credibility built up over centuries and their adherence to norms and practices of neutrality and professionalism. Since the turn of the century, however, those charged with maintaining the long-term integrity of these institutions increasingly have commandeered their credibility to advance their personal preferences and ideological agendas. As these institutions collapse, or more accurately as the leaders of these institutions draw down this accumulated capital stock of hard-won credibility to advance their own short-term goals, it leaves a vacuum at the center of American society and politics. Repairing that crater begins with elites understanding the legitimate reasons why so many Americans do not trust them anymore. Taking seriously the lessons of In Covid’s Wake and An Abundance of Caution would be a good place for them to start.
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