Rediscovering a Dynamic Elite?

REVIEW ESSAY
Elites and Democracy
by Hugo Drochon
Portfolio, 2025, 336 pages

It is almost unimaginable that anyone observing contemporary Western societies could consider them well served by their elites. Even in the absence of agreement about who those elites are, what the term “elite” means, or whether an elite of some sort is desirable, interlocutors from every political perspective and walk of life can together loathe those who rule us.

To defend our existing elites convincingly would require rhetorical prowess beyond the abilities of any living writer. To defend the idea that there should, or must, be elites—to defend some version of elitism—is, however, possible even for intellectuals of modest talents. Such intellectuals, and perhaps some of their readers, can imagine that in making the case for an elite, they are pushing back against the main currents of present-day politics and political thought.

Hugo Drochon, professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham, laments that we “live in the age of the revolt against the elites,” in his new book, Elites and Democracy.¹ Drochon attempts, through the work of several modern political thinkers, to make a case for a proper kind of elite rule, compatible with the values of most educated Westerners employed in white-collar symbol manipulation: liberal rights, historical progress, and, within a certain measure, democracy.

Drochon calls this desirable sort of elitism “dynamic democracy.” He introduces the term first as a “theory of democracy.” In light of its supposed insights, we are to recognize that, like any form of government, democracy implies “the existence of an elite who control the levers of power, namely the state.” This is the “reality of power.”² Confusingly, “dynamic democracy” also circulates in Drochon’s text as the name of a kind of regime based on this theoretical insight. Here, a ruling elite, “democratic” insofar as it is elected, non-hereditary, or meets other criteria, is “dynamic” insofar as it opens itself to renewal and contestation from newcomers. Leaders of trade unions, spokesmen for marginalized minorities, and other competitors for power, with their non-elite constituencies behind them, put sufficient pressure on the ruling class for the latter not only to make changes in policy but also to make some of those leaders part of the elite. It is unclear whether Drochon means that “dynamic democracy” in this sense has been the default for much of modern Western history, or should be taken as an ideal, only partially realized, to which democracies ought to aspire.

Democracy and Merit

To support his polysemous notion of “dynamic democracy,” Drochon enlists the elite theorists seen in his discipline as having most cogently posed the question of elites in modern politics: Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941), Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), and Robert Michels (1876–1936). He supplements his readings of these core thinkers with chapters on another cohort, from Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) to Raymond Aron (1905–1983), whom he considers to have preserved some of the former group’s essential insights while losing hold of others. Readers unfamiliar with the intellectual tradition of Pareto, Mosca, and their interlocutors will learn something about elite theory and its commentators. Readers familiar with them will find Drochon’s insistence upon his purported recovery of key insights tiresomely aggrandizing. The reader, desirous either of an introductory explication or novel rereading of the elite theorists, would be better served by Natasha Piano’s recent Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science (2025), a book Drochon mentions only in a short, patronizing paragraph that reduces her work to a reflection of the rereading of Machiavelli by her PhD adviser, John McCormick.

Coining a superficially distinctive pseudo-concept, overselling the originality of one’s interpretations of texts, elbowing out younger scholars, and hastily connecting the topics of one’s supposed expertise with current political issues are such typical sins of academics that they must be forgiven. Some of the other problems of Elites and Democracy, however, are symptomatic of issues greater than Drochon’s professional deformations. They speak, rather, to a confusion about how to conceive of elites, pervasive throughout the segment of society charged with the public explication of such problems.

As Drochon states in his conclusion, the most vital of the elite theorists’ ideas is that “elites always rule.”³ Democracy cannot mean, as it seems to mean by definition and etymology, the rule of the people. Those who defend democracy must not lose sight of this fact, Drochon urges. They must resist projects that aim at doing away with elites altogether without thereby succumbing to a pessimism in which unceasing elite rule makes politics seem futile. While rule by an elite is inevitable, we are not destined to be ruled by any particular elite, and potential elites vary greatly in quality. To be better governed may not seem like a terribly stirring or noble cause, but unlike dreams of total emancipation from governance or the perfectly nonhierarchical exercise of power, it is not always and everywhere impossible. If Elites and Democracy leads any of its readers closer to this prudent, moderate wisdom, it may have been worth the effort of writing, although Drochon never makes a convincing case for why this wisdom requires either a newfangled term like “dynamic democracy” or an excursion through the writings of various political theorists.

To be sure, Mosca and Pareto, in particular, are stimulating thinkers, who came to their somewhat complementary understandings of elitism by observing the achievement of a liberal democratic constitutional monarchy in Italy, along with the rise of labor parties informed by Marxism, the emergence of the Soviet Union, and finally, Italian fascism. All of these movements attacked previous forms of government as the rule of what their proponents considered an overly narrow, self-interested, and reactionary elite inadequate to the challenges posed by industrial modernity. All of them made claims that some non-elite assemblage of persons, which might be a universal rights-bearing humanity, the proletariat, or the nation, had been excluded from power and oppressed. Yet none of those movements created a form of government in which elites of some kind did not rule. This fact inspired Mosca and Pareto to insist that elites would be an element of any possible regime, and to consider what specific modes of selection, education, and competition might produce the best set of political leaders. For them, the revolutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not a succession of decisive historical breaks so much as a series of reminders about the importance of pragmatically accommodating social tensions through the maintenance of an appropriately diverse, intelligent, and flexible elite.

Much of what can be gleaned from Mosca and Pareto along these lines is good sense, informed by observation of their own times but, mutatis mutandis, for our own. The core of this good sense, however, was by no means alien to the leaders of the liberal democratic, Marxist, and fascist revolutions who, whatever they said on behalf of the non-elite portion of humanity, were themselves keen theorists and practitioners of their own kinds of elitism. Lenin’s vanguardism, or the fascist cults of the great man, are what might be called elite theories. The writings that express them, beneath their rebarbative dogmatism and occasional character, are attentive to the problems of constituting a new elite capable of organizing desirable social change.

The democratic revolutions before them were likewise inseparable from thinking about elites. For example, one of the central thinkers of the French Revolution, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, in his 1789 pamphlet “What Is the Third Estate?,” provided a framework through which to organize intellectually and operationally the diffuse, inchoate demands thrust on the tottering monarchy. Like many of his colleagues, Sieyès saw the Revolution as the overthrow of a hereditary feudal aristocracy in favor of a new elite whose claim to power rested on what was called talent or merit. Framed by revolutionaries as a break with what they began calling the ancien régime, this was in fact only a scaling or speeding up of the latter’s own absorption of new members. The French monarchy, like almost all its contemporaries, had created pathways for commoners to ennoble themselves or their children in exchange for large sums of money or the performance of great public services.

Similar ideas were at work among the American founders, for whom political thinking was synonymous with reflections on the creation, continuance, and changeover of elites. Though they differed in their vision of the American future, and of the sort of people qualified to guide it into reality, the founders could take for granted that there are individuals of preeminent intelligence, ambition, and virtue qualified to rule. These individuals had to be rightly educated so that they would be of the best possible use to the republic. They also needed to be protected both from the jealousy of what that era called “the mob” and from their own temptation to monopolize power and crowd out colleagues. The art of government consisted chiefly in the creation of institutions, practices, and ethical guidance by which individuals would strive to earn a place among the elite through an intense but channeled form of emulation among rivals.

Even Westerners with a marginal historical vantage understand that political traditions of the preceding centuries, from the Far Left to the Far Right through the liberal democratic center, deliberate most centrally upon questions of leadership. A reading of the Federalist Papers, or an introductory university course on European history since 1750, should be sufficient to awaken students to an awareness that elitism—an acceptance that a minority always rules joined to a concern about the selection and education of this minority—is not an esoteric or heterodox position at odds with liberal democratic values. It is simply the default of modern Western political thought and of much more before modernity and beyond the West. We need not look beyond the immediate conceptual resources of our own most proximate traditions, or to redefine democracy, to discover the importance of a functional elite.

A certain kind of person, however, may need to imagine that in doing or thinking something well established, he is either inventing something new or recovering, riskily, something lost or hidden. Everything from having children to reading books to exercising has been, in recent years, cast by some interpreters of culture as a defiant shove against prevailing norms. We are omnidirectionally incited to conceive of ourselves as resisting something, rather than enacting and upholding: to be resentful toward our culture rather than grateful that, in its extraordinary generosity, it has offered us rich conceptual resources by which we can pursue and perhaps become who we want to be. Thus, “dynamic democracy” is presented to the reader as a revelatory term.

Mosca, Pareto, and Their Defects

If classic truisms can only appeal to us today when they are presented as novel, then perhaps Drochon is right, for tactical reasons, to warm over the elitism at the heart of modern Western political thought with his ostensibly novel concept. He is, unfortunately, rather charmed by some of the most idiosyncratic or inapplicable ideas of the thinkers from whom he sources his ideas. They are among the least able to help us understand the problems of the present. He is taken, for instance, with Pareto’s division of elites into “lions” and “foxes.” The former are “conservative, emphasizing the maintenance of unity . . . homogeneity, established ways and faith, placing the community’s needs over those of the individual.” The latter are “the innovators, happier with disaggregation . . . plurality and skepticism, placing the individual over the community.”⁴ This distinction was drawn from its originator’s historical experience of nineteenth-century Italy, where the traditional nobility was in friction with those made wealthy by finance and industry. The analogy must have appeared compelling to those who had grown up amid these conflicts and in a culture where such concepts still resonated.

Drochon, strangely, finds that the “lions versus foxes” binary illuminates our own more recent experience. “Recent European history,” he argues, has been “dominated” by the “values” of the foxes, who are the sort of elites capable of thriving in “parliamentary regimes” based on “negotiation and compromise.”⁵ Much of recent European history, in fact, has been characterized by frustration with parliamentary regimes, often described by their enemies either as useless forums for endless bickering or as the corrupt instruments of monied interests (Europe’s state bureaucracies and the super-state bureaucracy of the European Union may be understood as technologies for evading some undesirable aspects of parliamentarism).

Even leaving to one side the anti-parliamentary movements of fascism, Nazism, and communism, to consider European history after 1945, one of the continent’s most notable leaders, Charles de Gaulle, carried out a military putsch in 1958 to abolish what he considered the excessively parliamentary regime of the Fourth Republic. If that could be called a lion-like action, his subsequent program of presidential rule stressed the need to modernize France’s economy and society, which by Drochon’s lights is the special concern of foxes. Categories somewhat useful for understanding what motivated debates among Italy’s politicians five generations ago break down on contact with twentieth-century, let alone twenty-first century, phenomena.

Another regrettable element of Mosca and Pareto’s thought that appeals to Drochon is the idea of rising and falling social groups. The “dynamic democracy” he favors is open to talent and merit, of which individual non-elites striving upwards are the bearers, in addition to excluded groups that bring through their leaders pressure on elites, who respond by admitting some of those leaders into a reconfigured elite. All of this is par for the course. Far more critically, Drochon argues that the right kind of regime is ruled by an elite that remains open to the “perpetual challenge of rising elites to established elites.”⁶

This notion of a “rising elite” joining an “established elite” may seem a natural restatement of the two paths of entry by non-elites into the elite described above. But what does “rising” mean? Individuals brought into the elite through what are understood as personal accomplishments or as a means of collective negotiation can be said to have risen or rather to have been raised. But what Drochon means by a “rising elite” is that prior even to being admitted into the existing elite, they are already on an upward trajectory, part of a social group that is ascending in terms of its wealth and prestige, without having yet gained from the current ruling class what its members ascribe to themselves as their measure of deserved recognition.

This is to imagine that social groups form either a kind of collective subject that can be said to be pushing its way upward, or a superindividual entity being pulled upward by the motion of historical change. In rising, it converges and clashes with existing elites. But we do not know what groups are rising, or even what sets of people can maintain the political, cultural, and moral coherence sufficient to be qualified convincingly as groups at all, except through the struggles for power that Drochon takes to play out between future and present elites. Competition is not an arena into which an aspiring elite enters once it has passed a threshold of social development. Rather, the results of competition make the winners and losers appear, in hindsight, to have belonged to groups on an ascending or descending trajectory.

The frustrated aspirations of supposedly rising social classes were a great theme of eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-century Western political activism and theory. The historical progress of commercial and industrial modernity was understood to create a series of distinct classes, each of which, as it became more numerous and politically self-conscious, found itself pushing against the traditional structures of society and the elites presiding over them. The bourgeoisie, it was said, made such demands on the nobility; once the bourgeoisie had been accommodated, the working class made its own demands in turn. This way of thinking about recent history was not particular to Marx and the Marxist tradition. It was the intellectual context that made Marx’s ideas seem plausible. Tocqueville, for example, saw liberal democracy—the regime of the new non-aristocratic entrepreneurial and bureaucratic elite—despite the apparent failure of the French Revolution, as fated to do away with the remnants of the ancien régime and replace, or merge with, the latter’s aristocratic elite. In such a context, it could seem plausible to speak, with hope or dread, about the rising bourgeoisie or the rising proletariat as if one were discussing the inexorable movement of tectonic plates.

In the past half-century, historians have often questioned whether there were, in fact, such coherent social groups behind the revolutions of 1776, 1789, and 1848. Perhaps even greater doubt has accumulated against the confidence that history can be understood as a forward motion of economic and social development, comprised of smaller motions and countermotions by which assemblages of political actors try to hasten, slow, or otherwise respond to the pace of change.

It might be helpful instead to think of society, at a given moment, as having any number of possible counter-elites that are being stirred into self-consciousness through their would-be leaders’ efforts to enter the ruling establishment. Thinking along these lines, of potential rather than rising elites, would mean accepting that there is contingency not only in the outcome of clashes between current and would-be elites, but also contingency in the processes by which social groups come to exist, and contingency in the processes by which ambitious people are cast as representatives of such groups. What would make a particular set of would-be entrants into the ranks of the ruling class effective, or in some way legitimate, would not, by this perspective, be the fact of their belonging to rising or historically progressive forces.

Instead, our would-be elites ingratiate themselves among the existing elite by cogently styling their individual ambitions as the vehicle for the advancement of masses of non-elites. The latter, in reality, have effective political force and even social cohesion insofar as they are stirred into action or symbolically represented by their leaders. That leaders describe those they lead as preexisting social formations on an upward historical trajectory, bound to crash against the limitations of a conservative order, is a contingent—and perhaps disappearing—feature of a particular phase of modern Western history. As the era of the “rising” bourgeoisie followed by a “rising” proletariat (which never did quite rise) recedes, its characteristic political narratives should be accorded the same skepticism we would extend to stories about ruling factions that have gained or lost the Mandate of Heaven.

Deflated Elites

Mosca and Pareto combine the historicist notion of rising and falling classes with naturalist metaphors that, like ancient notions of a cycle of dynasties, assimilate political life to impersonal mechanisms. Drochon finds these metaphors appealing. For Mosca, the ruling class becomes “closed and stationary—in a word, conservative,” new contenders well up and return history to a flowing state. For Pareto, the “circulation of elites” either occurs through a steady stream in which new talent is continually absorbed by an open ruling class, or through “the river flooding and breaking its banks” in the revolutionary overthrow of an elite that had kept itself closed.⁷ By these lights, politics is the art of identifying fresh talents and increasingly powerful groups, and accommodating existing institutions to them such that change takes the form of a steady sequence of timely reforms rather than disruptive breaks.

Conceiving of politics in such a manner tasks established elites with a managerial, analytical, and ultimately anti-political mission. Rather than taking an active responsibility for bringing into being the social and economic conditions that they believe ought to prevail, elites educated to think in the above terms are essentially irresponsible. Pragmatically incorporating dissenters and new talent is sensible, of course. But one of the sources of our current political impasse and the wide dissatisfaction with present-day Western elites may well be that the latter have long been trained to divest themselves of political responsibility: to describe themselves as merely responding to imperatives posed by the logic of the market, national security, the moral arc of the universe, etc., rather than as leaders shaping and realizing a collective will. An elite whose members see their mission as Drochon describes it may be unable to exercise political leadership, especially across generations.

Drochon has much to say about the importance of accepting that all regimes, even democracies, will have an elite, and understanding that a functional elite is one open to new members. Both of these are surely true, even if one may question the effort expended to make these points. But there is no reason to think that such an elite must be open in the way that Drochon, drawing on Mosca and Pareto, conceives of openness. We have behind us a certain historical experience, or rather a historiographical narrative, of old regimes blasted down by a rising bourgeoisie, and of liberal orders threatened by insurgent working classes. We correspondingly have a moral and political common sense by which it appears self-evident that a small, closed, self-perpetuating caste is necessarily “conservative,” indeed anachronistic, and doomed to collapse if it does not stay open to new talent. Neither this vision of history nor that of closed versus open elites is obviously true. These notions might be considered as products of a specific, increasingly distant era in which revolution was a live prospect.

From both a broader historical perspective and an immediate vantage in the contemporary West, it is not at all clear why a set of elites could not successfully perpetuate itself without openness to new members. For much of recent history, status in a political, economic, and cultural elite has been passed down the generations through a few families whose members typically must pass some qualifying tests, such as exams or military service. If well-devised, such a system can long endure. One might consider Chinese imperial dynasties, which generally lasted two or three centuries. Such an elite might be more or less “static” while presiding over “dynamic” economic, sociological, and even political change. The converse can be true as well: a dynamic elite (composed of multiple groups in a shifting balance) is not necessarily best equipped to foster positive changes in society.

Stasis of a negative kind is well known to us. Our increasingly unequal societies are familiar with patrimonial wealth: we are, after all, seeing a shift back from the corporation to the family enterprise as the most salient form of economic power. Our young would-be elites, busily showing their merit and performing values associated with dynamism, openness, and progress, are usually children of elites who did the same.

Dynamic Democracy in America

Drochon wishes to convince us that since we cannot do without an elite, we must keep our elite open. He argues that in the United States particularly, the “circulation of elites” has “slowed, if not halted altogether,” creating conditions for “revolution” or at least “revolt.” It is true that the contest between Trump and Biden was rightly “decried as gerontocratic,” and as a worrying sign that the mechanisms for transmitting power to the next generation of elites were somehow blocked or breaking down.⁸ Yet nothing in Drochon’s analysis equips us to think specifically about the generational transmission of power, which after all can be a matter of children taking their parents’ positions. An elite could avoid gerontocracy while remaining closed to either new talent or to leaders of emerging groups. We can imagine a politically effective aristocracy of the middle aged or even the young, such as the princes of the Italian Renaissance, or more immediately, the young scions to the Kennedy and Trump lines.

For Drochon, however, it was the closure—rather than the age, incompetence, or malevolence—of the American elite that invited both populist anti-elitism and the dissatisfaction of a rising elite that has, at least temporarily, identified itself with Trump. The latter, Drochon argues in an implausibly sweeping assertion, won in 2024 with the support of a new elite that “has completely replaced the old elite.” The old elite was composed of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans (Drochon names only politicians); the new elite includes pro-Trump Republicans and “the ‘tech-bros Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, et al.” These “tech oligarchs” were a “rising elite,” apparently unhappy with the limitations imposed on them by the old political elite, ready to support Trump’s “regime change” to advance their interests.⁹ The extent to which these tech billionaires were a rising elite beforehand or what their specific interests are remain unexplained throughout the book.

Versions of this story have been told so often over the past two years that the existence of a specific social formation of tech elites, with its own interests and ideology, may seem self-evident. The political beliefs of individual Silicon Valley elites, however, are widely eccentric and unstable. Efforts to track the collective political behavior of the group, or to sketch its members’ shared commitments, so far, have been less than convincing. With tech elites seeming to adhere to every doctrine from anarcho-libertarianism to neo-cameralist authoritarianism and from transhumanism to heterodox Catholicism while moving their donations from neoliberal Democrats to MAGA Republicans, it becomes difficult to make claims about the character of this elite.

Some tech elites, to be sure, donated large sums of money to Trump, and this was likely critical to his reelection. But do these elites represent a distinct group, a rising class with its own worldview and historical trajectory, pressing against the gerontocratic structures of the Beltway like the French bourgeoisie against the Bastille?

Tech oligarchs, like other rich people, generally want lower taxes, less regulation, more government contracts, cheap labor, captive markets, and so on. Unlike other rich people, they may also have specific demands to make about, for example, water and electricity for data centers or the rollback of anti-monopoly laws. They may disagree with other rich people—and among themselves—about all sorts of other social and cultural questions. It is not obvious to what extent their specific demands cohere into a platform such that we could speak of tech elites as having clearly articulated common interests that must be accommodated by the political establishment.

It is even less obvious whether the past half-century of economic change associated with Silicon Valley and the tech sector can be analogized to the era of industrialization, which supposedly created new classes and rising elites, such that we could speak of tech elites as another such formation. That analogy, however, has oriented much of our thinking about both these elites, and more generally, about the new technologies and ways of living associated with computing, the internet, and AI. Analysts periodically inform us that through the inherent dynamism of technology, we are on the edge of, or have entered into, a new era to which our political, social, and cultural structures must be accommodated. That telling depended on such analysts having inherited an intellectual framework by which they could speak confidently about the nature of historical change and its inevitable sequence of epoch-making novelties.

It seems increasingly difficult, however, to chart history in these linear terms, or to track the rise and fall of social groups with neat bundles of interests and ideology. Political life and civic society increasingly appear to be inscrutable hieroglyphs, especially if they are read through the traditional methods of historicism and sociological analysis. The ever-changing course of the Trump administration, the unstable coalition behind him, and the mutability of tech elites’ worldviews seem symptomatic of this variance, as do the desperately garrulous attempts by commentators to provide types and classes through which to understand the fragmentary, protean, baffling forms of thought through which we move. Not a week goes by without some suddenly popular Substack essay announcing or denouncing the existence of a previously unsuspected category of person (such as, indeed, foxes and lions). It is made to seem imperative for our political future that we understand this category, or rather that we blatheringly discuss it until the appearance of the next essay.

Since the 1960s, the Left has searched for a social group to replace the working class as the agent of social change, placing its hopes on racial minorities, young people, and immigrants, while conservative observers have correspondingly focused their ire on a series of half-imagined groups from the bureaucrats of the deep state to the women of human resources. Sketches of the “tech elite” can fill a similar role, making them appear either as a danger or as an instrument by which to pry open an increasingly dysfunctional elite. But the pseudo-sociological talk that identifies new heroes and villains for our historical drama seems to have reached a fever pitch of ubiquity, incapable of reliably orienting our politics.

Envisioning a Future Elite

The foregoing may seem to be mean-spirited quibbling. Drochon wants us to accept that we need an elite, resisting the irrational thrust of populism. He wants our elite to be vital, energetic, and competent. This is commendable, and one cannot disagree. But in trying to use his readings of elite theory and his concept of “dynamic democracy” to make these points, Drochon presents us with false choices and false problems.

Those who share in his desire that Western societies be decently ruled ought not to conflate that desire, as Drochon does, with the desires for social mobility, or a responsiveness to the progress of history, which have prevailed as common sense since the late eighteenth century. These desires may be reasonable, or have a rational core that should be rearticulated for our era, but they have nothing inherently to do with either democracy or a healthy elite. Drochon, having accepted that democracy cannot do without an elite, tries to redefine democracy to mean a regime ruled by an elite that is open, mobile, and progressive. A regime ruled by a meritocratic elite, however, constantly open to new talent and eagerly scouting the social field for rising groups or alienated minorities, might be experienced by many of the non-elites whom it rules as undemocratic. This scenario, after all, expresses something of how Trump’s populist base sees the elites it identifies within the federal bureaucracy, lobbyist networks, media, and academia.

If we have decided that democracy cannot literally mean the rule of the people and has to be redefined, then there is no particular reason why we must accept democratic elites’ openness, mobility, or adherence to some ideals of historical progress to be the key elements of a redefined democracy today. Democracy, once decoupled from the idea of the people ruling, might rather mean that the inevitable elite rules effectively on the people’s behalf. From that vantage, we might consider anew whether the creation of an intelligent and virtuous elite that serves the people really does have so much to do with the question of that elite’s openness, as opposed, for example, to the quality of its education, the scope of its vision, or its sense of responsibility. Once we are no longer bound to narratives that have been consigned to history, or to physical metaphors that equate a good society with fluidity and motion, we might be free to rethink what we want from our elites and how to get it.

Our acute and widespread dissatisfaction with existing social, economic, and cultural arrangements is often routed through hostility to those perceived as elites and sometimes to any elite whatsoever. Protests against the stagnation and relative decline in living standards for the Western middle and working classes—which generate their members’ ethical disorientation and hopelessness—express themselves in imprecise, irrational forms that conflate resolvable problems with chimerical foes. Well-founded grief at the trajectory of our civilization wells up in bizarre, self-frustrating movements and beliefs. Complaints about the unaffordability of housing and health care, or about the increasing difficulty of securing a well-paying job and fruitful marriage, register themselves in diatribes against not only the leaders we happen to have and their poor decisions, but against having to be led at all.

The widespread feeling that we have been taken into an impasse and must find a new path is a political demand for collective action to reorder our world. People who seem to cry out for action, for politics, for leadership have become, as a result of the conditions against which they protest, so baffled and harried that they enroll themselves in demagogic movements that deliver them the fleeting illusion that something might be done in their favor (or more likely, done to punish the people they hate). All the while, this demagoguery further erodes not only their standard of living but their ability to discern action from gesture, politics from theater, leaders from showmen.

Over the past decade, calls for undoing the “administrative state” or “deep state” from the Right, or “the police” and “borders” from the Left, have been coupled, in an apparent paradox, with arbitrary, punitive uses of state power by conservatives and progressives alike to silence and humiliate their ideological enemies. Both impossible demands to abolish the necessary instruments of political power and egregious misuses of these instruments have been cheered on by large segments of the non-elite public. If throughout the contemporary West, the elite has failed the people, it must be said that the people, in turn, have lost their capacity to select, endorse, or recognize an effective elite.

Those of us in the cultural or intellectual elite must clarify to our fellow citizens—and first of all to ourselves—that an elite of some kind is necessary and that only through an elite can politics be reactivated and a path made out of our immiserating impasse. The case for this elitism should not rest on historical and sociological modes of thinking that, if they were ever useful, seem now merely to clutter our common talk with unworkable abstractions. We know without recourse to them that there is a ruling elite and that it rules us poorly.

We could begin to think positively about what a desirable elite would look like without imagining its desirability in terms of its ability to represent distinct social classes or human types. We might, indeed, consider breaking with the modern tradition that has understood the problem of elites in terms of the ruling class’s degree of openness to newcomers and consider higher things. Such openness would, of course, remain a topic for analysis, but one of secondary importance compared to our elite’s inherent virtue in a more Platonic sense: in their strength of character, clarity of vision, and stewardship of the nation. There are more important things in politics than simply the method of selection.

We also sense that there is, at the heart of human freedom, an ever-present call to recognize and participate in the shining, preeminent, superior quality revealed in certain dynamic individuals who reveal unsuspected possibilities for us to act. That this call has been perverted by demagogues, who pretend to be such people in order to beguile us with spectacular and empty gestures—who embody our grotesque failings and play out our worst fantasies rather than freeing us to live better in light of their own example—makes it all the more imperative that we hear it and echo it. If we hope to convince our fellow citizens to accept the necessity of an elite, and to make this necessary elite as competent and benevolent as possible, then we must start by uncovering and clarifying our elementary experiences of hierarchy, which have been occluded, in part, by the sort of appeals to historicism on which Drochon’s defense of elitism depends.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume X, Number 2 (Summer 2026): 226–40.

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Notes