Nov. 4: Show Time

Worst jobs report in four years; The death of an "idea"; Scroll vindicated on Imane Khelif

Nov 04, 2024

The Big Story

The presidential election is tomorrow. Neither Tablet nor The Scroll is making an official endorsement, and as always, we welcome readers of all political persuasions, even when our coverage makes you want to hurl objects across the room. That said, I, Scroll senior writer Park MacDougald, cast my ballot for Donald Trump in New York City last week. It would take me days to compose an adequate essay explaining all my reasons for doing so, but in today’s Big Story, I’ll highlight two recent stories that emphasize my fears of a Kamala Harris presidency, to which you can add my essay in Tablet last week titled “The Democrats’ Insanity Defense.” I don’t expect all readers to agree, and again, this is merely my own perspective—one of many at the magazine.

The first story is a Sunday report in The Wall Street Journal that Iran is telling Arab diplomats that it is preparing a “strong and complex” attack on Israel in the wake of the U.S. election. Details of the potential attack are sparse, and Iran is famous for threatening apocalyptic consequences and then failing to follow through. But Arab and Iranian sources quoted in the story suggest that the attack could involve Iran’s conventional army (in addition to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), that it will not be limited to “missiles and drones,” and that any missiles used will have larger warheads than the ones deployed in Iran’s previous direct attacks on Israel.

I would remind readers that direct Iranian attacks on Israel are a novelty of the Biden-Harris administration, which has not only declined to impose serious consequences on Iran but has also aggressively lobbied the Israelis not to do so. Simultaneously, the administration has worked to ensure that the Iranians can continue financing their multi-front war on Israel. On Friday, for instance, former State Department official Gabriel Noronha reported on X that the Iranian government had submitted its budget proposal for 2025, which calls for tripling the military budget, financed in part by what it expects to be a 32% increase in oil revenues over 2024. The budget only makes sense if Harris wins the election and continues the current policy of nonenforcement of U.S. oil sanctions. That’s why, as the Journal reports, “Iran doesn’t want to influence the U.S. election with its attack,” according to an Iranian official, who added that “the response will come after Tuesday’s voting but before a new president is inaugurated in January.”

I (and Tablet) have written tens of thousands of words over the past year on the Obama-Biden-Harris team’s attempts to protect Iran and its proxies from Israel following the Oct. 7 massacre, which I won’t recapitulate here. The key point is that the administration’s posture is not an accident or a mistake (attributable to “Iranian moles” or somesuch) but the logical outgrowth of its regional policy—first formulated by Obama, continued under Biden, and to be continued under Harris if she wins. Indeed, we would encourage our readers to go back and reread Tony Badran and Michael Doran’s May 2021 Tablet essay “The Realignment,” which describes this policy in detail. What is most remarkable to us is how the essay, written only four months after Biden’s inauguration, precisely predicts the administration’s behavior in the wake of Oct. 7, down to the specific political tactics—the bear hug, the “values feint,” and the cynical elevation of the Palestinian question to the center of the U.S.-Israeli relationship—that the administration has used to knife the Israelis and elevate the Iranians while pretending to do the opposite. And more so even than the elderly Biden, Harris is a cipher for the party establishment with no developed thoughts on foreign policy; her closest foreign-policy advisors will be people like Phil Gordon, an architect of the Iran deal and ally of the disgraced Robert Malley. So you can expect her policy to be either more of the same, or worse.

The second story is domestic and only loosely related to the first at first glance, but in the end they are part of the same story. At their Substack “Truth Over News,” independent journalists Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke report on the newly obtained transcript of a Jan. 17, 2017 meeting between then outgoing President Barack Obama and 17 unnamed “progressive” journalists, in which they discussed Trump’s upcoming term and allegations that Trump had colluded with Russia. As Carlson and Mahncke note, Obama knew the Russia allegations were false; his CIA director, John Brennan, had briefed him in late July on a “proposal from one of [Hillary Clinton’s] foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference from Russian security services.” Within three days of that meeting, however, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched its “Crossfire Hurricane” counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, and the espionage would continue until Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20, 2016.

In the meeting, Obama reassured the journalists that while a single Trump term was survivable, “eight years” of Trump posed a “genuine threat.” On four occasions in the conversation, he seeded the Trump-Russia collusion narrative among the journalists, despite knowing that it was a false piece of Clinton campaign propaganda. As usual, Obama spoke in innuendos, rather than directly, but the point of his briefing was clear. He blamed Trump’s victory on the Clinton campaign and the media for not reporting enough on “the Russia leaks.” He stated that “the Russia thing” was a “problem” with the incoming administration and said it’s “hard to know what conversations the President-elect may be having offline with business leaders in other countries who are also connected to leaders of other countries.” That’s an apparent reference to the discredited Alfa Bank conspiracy theory, shopped first to the CIA and then the press by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, which held that Trump was secretly communicating with Putin through the servers of a bank. Obama suggested that Trump was receiving indirect payouts from Vladimir Putin through Russian nationals purchasing apartments in his buildings.

Finally, Obama left them with this morsel:

What I would simply say would be that any time you have a foreign actor who, for whatever reason, has ex parte influence over the president of the United States, meaning that the American people can't see that influence because it's not happening in a bilateral meeting and subject to negotiations or reporting—any time that happens, that's a problem. And I’ll let you speculate on where that could go.

All this, again, about a piece of Clinton campaign opposition that Obama himself knew was false. It would be an understatement to say that the press fell for the scam; this entirely fake story became the dominant political narrative of the first two years of Trump’s presidency, and it is still believed by a narrow majority of Democratic partisans, who nonetheless consider Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election to be disqualifying from office.

I highlight this briefing not only because the transcript is new but also because it points to the origin point for the derangement of American politics over the past eight years: the Obama faction’s weaponization of the security state and the press to deny the American people a legitimate opportunity to reject their agenda at the ballot box. That agenda was described (in part) in the first half of today’s Big Story: alliance with Third World regimes abroad and the cultivation of a Third Worldist political culture at home, complete with corrupt spy services, rigged elections, a lackey press, the censorship and legal harassment of the opposition, sectarian division of the population among party-designated identity categories (“LGBTQI+” and “AAPI”), and violent street displays targeting the perceived enemies of the ruling regime, whether “racists” and “cops” (as in 2020) or “Jews” and “Zionists” (as in 2023 and 2024). Indeed, both in and out of government, the party-state machine constructed by Obama did its best to create, in lieu of a governing program that could appeal to the majority of Americans, a vast public-private apparatus of censorship and thought control targeting dissident speech as “misinformation”—a project that was thwarted only by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022. More recently, the criminal prosecution of Trump on absurdly inflated charges suggests a willingness to abuse the legal system to go after opponents and interfere with electoral outcomes—unless, of course, they suffer blowback at the ballot box.

Some of our readers, we know, are fans of Trump who need no convincing. Some may be considering holding their noses or sitting this one out. And some, no doubt, plan to vote for Harris. We’re happy to have all of you as readers and hope you will continue reading regardless of the outcome of the election. We’ll leave you with this thread from Jeremy Senderowicz, a friend of the newsletter and no fan of Trump’s, articulating the reasons for his vote:

Jeremy is being coy, but we’ll give you a hint: Richard Spencer, 2016’s most famous white supremacist, endorsed Kamala Harris on Friday.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Walter Russell Mead on America’s crisis of leadership

The Rest

→Stat of the Day: 12,000

That’s how many net jobs were created in the United States in October, according to a Friday report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—the worst number in four years and far below projections of 100,000 to 120,000. The report also revised the (relatively strong) estimates from August and September downward by a combined 112,000, the 17th time out of the last 18 reports that the initial topline numbers have later been revised downward. You would think the report would be a boost to the Trump campaign, but Friday’s news cycle was dominated by Trump’s comment at a rally that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney would be less enthusiastic about foreign wars if she were the one “with the rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.” Several outlets, including CNN and MSNBC, reported that Trump had called for Cheney to be “executed” or to face a “firing squad,” and on Friday, the attorney general of Arizona, a swing state, announced that his office was investigating whether Trump could be criminally charged with making a “death threat.”

→Image of the Day:

That’s a photo, shared by our friend Liel Leibovitz on X, of Aliza Shagrir, an Israeli television presenter who was among the four people killed in the 1980 bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris, France, by a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Last year, a French court convicted a Canadian man of Lebanese descent, Hassan Diab, in absentia for the murders. Who is Diab? Currently, he is a professor of sociology at Carleton University in Canada, where he teaches a course on “social justice in action.”

→“Hezbollah is an Idea”:

With the IDF’s Monday announcement that it had eliminated Abu Ali Rida, a regional Hezbollah commander, the Israelis have now killed 19 of the “idea’s” top 19 leaders—no doubt a decisive defeat for the Israelis, according to the Biden-Harris logic that killing your enemies is counterproductive. On the bright side, if you know any young men struggling in the current economy, we can now decisively identify one organization that offers quick paths to promotion. Benefits are negotiable, but there’s a dress code, and relocation to Beirut is a must. Candidates should, however, be able provide their own beepers, due to ongoing issues with the supply chain.

→Imane Khelif, the gold-medal-winning Algerian boxer who was allowed to compete as a woman in the Paris Olympics despite being disqualified by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for having XY (male) chromosomes, is a biological male with “testicles,” according to a 2023 French Algerian medical examination reported in Reduxx. Khelif’s participation in the Olympics was controversial from the start, but it became a flashpoint after an Italian boxer, shocked by the force of Khelif’s punches, quit their bout after only 46 seconds in the ring; subsequent reporting revealed that during a training retreat in Spain, Khelif had been forced to practice with male boxers after injuring all of her female practice partners. The International Olympic Committee (and most of the media), however, defended Khelif’s participation in the face of the uproar, arguing that she was “female” due to the sex listed on her passport, that it’s “scientifically not true anymore” that chromosomes determine sex, and that the IBA’s genetic testing was politically motivated Russian disinformation.

In our Aug. 5 edition, we laid out our theory (really, Colin Wright’s theory) of what was going on:

Khelif is not transgender, so the working theory is that she has a disorder of sexual development such as 5 alpha reductase deficiency or partial androgen insensitivity—i.e., she is chromosomally male and retains male competitive advantages in sports.

That turned out to be right on the money. According to Reduxx author Anna Slatz, the June 2023 medical report “drafted by expert endocrinologists Soumaya Fedala and Jacques Young, … reveals that Khelif is impacted by 5-alpha reductase deficiency, a disorder of sexual development that is only found in biological males.” The medical examination also found that Khelif has underdeveloped male genitalia and testosterone levels typical of males. Khelif did take testosterone suppressants prior to competing in the Olympics, but these drugs are not capable of fully eliminating a biological male’s advantages in muscle mass, bone density, or strength.

→Donald Trump, the Great Uniter:

That, from Nachman Mostofsky on X, is a video of an Orthodox Jewish pro-Trump caravan in Rockland County, New York. As Mostovsky writes, “I’ve never in my 40+ years of life seen the Orthodox Jewish community push a presidential candidate as if it was a local one.” Trump has also sought—and received—the favor of the other peoples of the empire. On Saturday, Trump nabbed an endorsement from several leaders of the Minneapolis Somali community, and the weekend before that, he was endorsed by a group of Arab and Muslim leaders in Michigan, including Imam Belal Alzuhairi and Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi. According to a recent report in Fox, Amish voters in Pennsylvania are also enthusiastic for the former president, especially following state police raids on Amish farms earlier this year for the crime of selling raw milk.

TODAY IN TABLET:

Five Things You Can Do to Make America a Better Place Tomorrow (No Matter Who Wins), by B. Duncan Moench

Stop believing what you see on television and social media and start paying attention to local government and the U.S. Constitution

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

America’s Crisis of Leadership

How Teddy Roosevelt can help save us from our Marie Antoinette problem

by Walter Russell Mead

The biggest single crisis facing the United States on the eve of the election does not come from Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. It does not come from our enemies abroad. It does not come from our dissensions at home. It does not come from unfunded entitlement commitments. It does not come from climate change. Our greatest and most dangerous crisis is the decay of effective leadership at all levels of our national life, something that makes both our foreign and domestic problems, serious as they are, significantly more daunting than they should be.

Average confidence in institutions ranging from higher education to organized religion rests at historic lows, with fewer than 30% of respondents telling Gallup pollsters that they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in major American institutions. Only small business, the military, and the police inspire majorities of the public with a high degree of confidence; less than a fifth of Americans express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, big business, television news, and Congress.

Much of the country’s political and intellectual establishment responds defensively to numbers like this, blaming falling confidence on the corrosive effects of social media or the general backwardness and racism of the American public. The East German communist hacks Bertolt Brecht satirized also blamed their failings on the shortcomings of the masses: “The people have lost the confidence of the government and can only regain it through redoubled work.”

While social media is problematic, and not every citizen of the United States is a model of enlightened cosmopolitanism, America’s core problem today is not that the nation is unworthy of the elites who struggle to lead it. That superficial and dismissive response is itself a symptom of elite failure and an obstacle to the deep reform that the American leadership classes badly need.

Signs of elite failure are all around us. In foreign policy, the field I follow most closely and one in which I myself have not been error-free, the American establishment fundamentally misjudged the global economic and political situation over the last generation, thinking that the world had entered a posthistorical utopia even as China and Russia laid the foundations for a formidable challenge to the American order. NAFTA was going to make Mexico more democratic, reduce cross-border migration, and enrich American workers. Conferring permanent most-favored nation status on China and admitting it to the World Trade Organization was going to turn it into a peaceful and law-abiding member of international society. It was certainly not going to create a new communist superpower determined to challenge the United States around the world.

Since 1945, the most powerful armed forces in the world have only won one war (the Gulf War against Iraq). A massive, sustained and very public Chinese military buildup failed to elicit a coherent response from the American side. As a result, the balance of power in the western Pacific shifted dangerously in China’s favor, increasing the risk of catastrophic great power war. Twenty years of earnest attempts to build civil society in Afghanistan collapsed ignominiously when the Taliban stormed back into power in 2021. Decades of illusory “democracy promotion” by American diplomats and philanthropists failed to stem a very real “democracy recession” as the rule of law retreated around the world.

Much of what distressed establishment figures deplore as “isolationism” is nothing more than a well-grounded skepticism about the competence of American civilian and military leadership in international affairs. For many in the foreign policy establishment, it is easier to condemn the shortsightedness of neo-isolationism than to ask why as individuals and as a class we have made such major and such costly mistakes for so long and in so many parts of the world.

It is much the same at home. The intellectual and moral collapse of the public health authorities in the face of the COVID pandemic deeply damaged public trust. The instinctive response of many in the news media to rally around a misguided establishment, while also marginalizing critics and skeptics further poisoned the wellsprings of public trust. The rising (and in my view tragic) popularity of trends like generalized vaccine skepticism fills the vacuum created by the absence of confidence in public health leadership.

More profoundly, the failure of American society to respond effectively to widespread and deeply damaging phenomena like the fentanyl plague reflects the inadequacy of leadership in all walks of life. Spending political capital on affirming trans students by making tampons available in boys’ bathrooms in public schools while the opioid epidemic kills more Americans every year than the Vietnam War killed in nearly a decade strikes many sensible people as a sign of derangement. Are they wrong?

“Trust the technocracy” and “invest in institutions” is the message Americans hear from establishment media. But the state of our society does not inspire confidence. Key social programs ranging from Medicare and Social Security at the federal level to civil service pension programs in many cities and states are seriously underfunded and set on fiscally unsustainable paths. Infrastructure construction has become almost impossibly expensive. The urban doom loop of higher costs driving higher taxes driving business and residents out of the cities spirals relentlessly without much pushback from a Democratic Party ostensibly committed to bettering the lives of the poor.

Per-student costs continue to skyrocket in many school systems even as students score poorly on standardized tests. The higher education system saddles too many young people with unpayable debt. Graduates of a handful of prestigious universities often enjoy undeserved access to desirable jobs, but many of those universities have lost sight of the values it is their duty to uphold. When a president of Harvard University can be credibly charged with plagiarism, the signs of decadence and decay are unmistakable.

The policies that contributed to the housing boom of the early 2000s and that were adapted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were equally misguided, and the costs fell primarily on vulnerable families on the margins of the housing market. Home ownership, which is the foundation of middle-class prosperity and American political stability, is increasingly unaffordable for young families. At the same time, the weakening of labor unions has left millions of Americans without the support and protection that, imperfect as the old labor movement was, organization and solidarity gave to union members. The rise of identity politics testifies to the declining ability of American leaders to gain trust that crosses ethnic, racial, or gender lines, and the resulting fragmentation makes America harder to govern and deepens existing fissures in American life.

Americans are not wrong to believe that this level of comprehensive strategic and political failure across so many dimensions of our national life is unacceptable. They are right to withdraw their confidence from institutions and a leadership class that seems both unusually incompetent and indecently self-interested. But populism is better at expressing dissent than at planning for success. And the leadership problem transcends the division between populists and the current establishment. Populism too needs leaders, and many of those coming forward as would-be tribunes of the people are at least as poorly prepared for real leadership as the fumble-fingered elites they hope to replace.

While the American leadership class has been failing the test of history, not all of its sectors are equally culpable. When it comes to scientific and technological accomplishment, American culture continues to produce geniuses of all kinds. Although the rise of scientific fraud and the reproducibility crisis in certain disciplines points to some concerning trends, America’s failure point is not in the STEM disciplines. The failures come from where the wonders of technological progress intersect with the dysfunction of daily life. Our failure points are in the worlds of culture and social organization, not in the worlds of tech and hard science.

Nor is the leadership crisis entirely our fault. Countries around the world suffer from a leadership deficit in these difficult days; one big reason is that the disruptive consequences of the Information Revolution make the tasks of leadership objectively more difficult. When transformational changes are surging through the economy and society, it is much harder to lead institutions from the federal government to a local middle school. Every firm, every political party, every school or university, every religious institution, every family, and anyone trying to make a living or invest for the future must cope with the unpredictable changes rippling through every society in the world.

And yet America’s leadership problem is only likely to become more acute as the international situation grows more challenging. In stable times, the need for effective leadership can recede into the background. But in crisis, institutions and societies with weak leaders often perish. Great Britain could survive the rule of sleek nonentities like Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s, but after Hitler’s blitzkrieg broke the allied lines in Europe, only Winston Churchill would do. Franklin Pierce and John Tyler might have been good-enough presidents for peaceful times, but it took an Abraham Lincoln to lead the country through the Civil War. Average leadership may work fine in average times. But extraordinary times demand more.

No matter who wins tomorrow’s election, a stormy period in American and world history lies ahead. Unless the quality of leadership in American life dramatically improves, the country could be heading toward some extremely dark hours.

***

The Versailles Problem

One way to describe America’s leadership problem is to say that our leadership class has become too French. In 1682, Louis XIV moved his court and government to Versailles and began to compel the French aristocracy to take up residence in the palace. One hundred seven years later, in October 1789, his descendant and successor Louis XVI was escorted back to Paris by an angry mob. The aristocrats fled in disorder; ultimately many, like their king, would ascend the scaffold to the guillotine. In the view of many historians, the palace of Versailles was not only the crowning glory of the French monarchy. It played a significant role in its fall.

Once ensconced in the palace, the French aristocracy were, as Louis intended, cut off from their independent sources of power in the countryside. Instead of living on their estates, surrounded by the peasants and townspeople who made up most of the population, France’s natural leaders became wrapped up in the culture and life of an exclusive society that revolved around the king. From inside the bubble around Versailles, they lost touch with public opinion, and grew distant from the families and connections who, in the past, had supported their families and their power. They were more interested in squeezing the last drop of revenue out of their country estates to support the lavish expenses needed to cut an impressive figure at court than in representing local interests before the king.

Like the denizens of the Capital District in the Hunger Games movies, the nobles in Versailles embraced one extravagant fashion after another. They lost themselves in quests for power, for pleasure, or simply for distraction. One intellectual fad after another captured their attention. Enjoying the least natural, the least authentic lifestyles that planet Earth had ever known, Marie Antoinette and her ladies in waiting dressed as simple milkmaids and pretended to be innocent peasant girls.

Marie Antoinette and her ladies have their counterparts today in the enclaves of privilege around the United States. They would be perfectly at home making land acknowledgments, growing heirloom vegetable varieties, and drinking fair-trade coffee cut with “milk” made from organically grown oats. Brooklyn trustafarians embracing carefully curated simplicity and celebrating the virtues of “indigeneity” are as likely to be mercilessly mocked by posterity as poor Marie Antoinette and her coterie.

Immersion in the Versailles bubble ultimately cost the French aristocrats everything they had. First, they lost their roots, then they lost their wits, and last they lost their heads. Those inside the bubble lost their ancestors’ ability to understand the nation in which they lived. The culture and the sentiments of the majority grew increasingly incomprehensible to them, even as the ideas among which they habitually moved became unrecognizable to outsiders. France’s old leadership elite failed to understand the rising tide of peasant discontent. It failed to understand how the urban middle and professional classes were turning against the regime. And, when the denizens of Versailles finally began to see the peril rising around them, they were unable to cope with the storm.

In America, too many of our society’s natural leaders have lost both their roots and wits. Let us hope we do not go on to the head-losing stage of the process.

No Sun King commands the migration, but America’s elites have been losing touch with their fellow citizens for more than 50 years. Each generation is further away from a real knowledge of the rest of the country, more caught up in an inward-facing bubble of elite culture and jargon, and less capable of either discerning what the country needs or of persuading their fellow citizens to take the steps their favored policies require.

Physically, the affluent suburbs in which the upper-middle classes live are increasingly segregated by income and class. So are the public and private schools that serve them. After the 2020 election, a Brookings Institute report found that the 520 counties Joe Biden carried accounted for 71% of America’s economic output, while the 2,564 counties carried by President Trump were responsible for only 29% of the country’s GDP.

Economically, the income and wealth gaps between the upper middle class and the rest of society have become chasms. 2021 Census data show a median household wealth of $8,460 in ones where no one has graduated from high school, and $55,030 in households with a high school diploma but no college. Households where the highest level of educational attainment was a graduate or professional degree had a median wealth of $555,900.

Increasingly, the children of the upper-middle and upper classes attend school together, travel abroad together, engage in sports together, and socialize together. The world of the upper-middle and upper classes is all they know, and as is only natural, their parents use all the financial resources and social capital they can command to give their children the greatest possible chance to remain in Versailles.

For most aspiring members of the American elite, the path to success lies in mastering the codes of Versailles, rather than demonstrating the ability to work effectively with people on the outside. The forces that, in past generations, opposed this tendency have lost much of their power. In mid-20th-century America, for example, having a good war record was something an ambitious young striver wanted. That generally involved serving as a combat officer leading a small group of nonelite fighters. This required the ability to win the trust of one’s comrades and forge deep bonds with “ordinary” enlisted men, bonds that often endured for decades after the war. Managing a factory effectively often meant dealing with unions and shop stewards.

Today those qualifications mean much less for earnest young professionals striving for the heights. It is more important to be able to navigate the shifting expectations of one’s fellow professionals than to have working-class friends from your military years. The general decline in working-class power means that success in the executive ranks depends less on one’s ability to build trust and confidence with workers outside the bubble. And even the entertainment industry, which once built blockbusters on catering to popular tastes and upholding popular values, has grown more distant from its customers’ preferences, and seeks to instruct rather than entertain.

The main difference between the French aristocrats at Versailles and the American upper-middle class today is one of scale. Only a few thousand nobles were in Versailles at any one time. Tens of millions of Americans live in the bubble of the upper-middle class, and with more than 22 million American millionaires, roughly 50 million to 60 million Americans live in households with a net worth of more than a million dollars. Mass affluence is a good thing, and a social system that enables so much accumulation by so many people cannot, by any historical measure, be called a failure. But mass affluence can intensify the Versailles problem. The elite bubble in which many successful Americans live, move, and have their being is larger, richer, more attractive, and more encompassing than anything the French nobles knew.

The deracination of the American elite means that each new elite generation has less intuitive and emotional connection with their fellow citizens outside the bubble, and is therefore less able to understand, much less to lead the society around them. At the same time, those outside the bubble become progressively less able to operate effectively in the world of power and elite institutions. Bridging that gap is traditionally the responsibility of educational and cultural institutions, but those institutions are less and less capable of fulfilling that role.

***

The Roosevelt Solution

The last time the United States faced a crisis of leadership on this scale was the era following Reconstruction. It was a time when our politics was thoroughly corrupt, our society profoundly divided, and our role in the international system was beginning to change in dramatic ways.

It was also a time of enormous social, cultural, and economic disruption, driven primarily by the Industrial Revolution. Small farmers were increasingly squeezed as the development of new farming technologies like fertilizers and mechanized farm equipment both drove down the price of food and increased the amount of investment needed to farm profitably. Small manufacturers could not compete against giant firms. Cities filled with millions of non-English speaking immigrants from around the world. Booms and busts roiled an economy that policymakers did not fully understand and whose gyrations they were often powerless to control. Meanwhile, the relatively peaceful era of great power politics that followed the defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815 was drawing inexorably to a close. The Pax Britannica was beginning to look unsustainable, and an era of global competition for resources and power was taking shape. The dawning 20th century seemed certain to pose harsh tests for American foreign and security policy.

The most remarkable leader that came out of the Gilded Age, when the Industrial Revolution disrupted American society and created a powerful but politically incompetent and culturally tone-deaf plutocratic elite, was Theodore Roosevelt. While historians focus on Roosevelt’s political achievements, his interventions in the worlds of culture and education were equally crucial in America’s successful transition from an agrarian to an industrial republic. Understanding what Roosevelt and his associates accomplished nearly 150 years ago can help us grasp the nature of the tasks ahead if we are to revitalize American leadership for the digital age and take our democratic experiment to a new and higher stage.

In or out of office, Roosevelt was a dominant figure in American politics from the late 1880s until his early death in 1919. Had he lived, he would certainly have received the Republican presidential nomination in 1920 and won and served a second full term. But Roosevelt was more than a political figure. Although he grew up in elite circumstances, the son of a wealthy New York businessman and philanthropist, he was in many respects a self-made man. A sickly child, he dedicated himself to physical fitness and as an adult sought out adventurous engagements with the world ranging from cattle ranching in the West to army service in the Spanish-American War. In his youth, he built himself up physically and morally by these methods. As an adult, he propagated an approach to leadership based on the principles that, in his view, had led him to success.

Roosevelt was not the first proponent of the educational approach that he popularized. Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Britain’s Rugby School between 1828 and 1842 instituted a series of reforms aimed at producing a less savage and more useful British elite. Charles Kingsley, appointed by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to tutor their unsatisfactory eldest son, proclaimed a creed of “muscular Christianity.” Combining athletics and religious training, supporters believed, would give young people the strength of mind, body, and above all character needed to face the storms of life.

Muscular Christianity and its allied movements are often associated largely with the elite education offered by what are called public schools in the U.K. and prep schools in the United States. But the movement played a much larger and wider role in the formation of the 20th century than many recognize. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, consciously modeled them on the educational methods pioneered by Thomas Arnold—at least as these methods were described in the mid-Victorian novel Tom Brown’s School Days through which the ideals of muscular Christianity were propagated around the world. In the United States, institutions like the Boy and Girl Scouts, the YMCA and YWCA movements, the settlement house movement, and many others bore the imprint of an Americanized, Roosevelt-inflected version of the Arnold approach to the education of youth.

In American history, Theodore Roosevelt’s importance as both an example of and a propagandist for the new approach toward the cultivation of leadership in American society cannot be exaggerated. As a proponent of the strenuous life from the bully pulpit of the White House, TR inspired millions of young people and educators with a vision of leadership education adapted to the needs of a democratizing republic.

My focus here is on elite education, but Roosevelt’s influence was not confined to the prep schools. While the elite educational model of the prep and public schools could not be universally extended, Roosevelt and his allies believed that the values behind it were essential to democratic success. The early American republic rested on the virtues, habits, and instincts of self-employed, independent agricultural proprietors. Industrial America, with its teeming cities and masses of urban factory workers, would need to find its own ways of inculcating rising generations with the character and temperament necessary to the preservation of the “ordered liberty” on which any democracy depends. Scouting sought to bring city children into the woods; the YMCA and YWCA established gymnasiums and classrooms to serve urban youth. The educators of the Progressive Era looked for ways to make the public schools effective instruments of “Americanization,” helping the children of immigrants find their feet in American life and, in the case of the brightest minds among them, offering pathways to elite education through competitive academic high schools and rigorous public college programs like New York’s famous City College that counts 10 Nobel Prize-winners among its alumni.

As a student at Groton School in the 1960s I lived, literally, under the shadow of Theodore Roosevelt’s accomplishments. The heads of animals he shot on his many hunting safaris were stuffed and mounted and hung on the walls of our classrooms. They stared down at us as we labored over a curriculum that had changed little from the days when he served as a founding member of the Board of Trustees and sent his sons to be educated there. The Roosevelt method, however, wasn’t working as well in those years. The Vietnam War was, as David Halberstam documents in The Best and The Brightest, planned in large part by products of the Groton approach like the Bundy brothers, McGeorge and Will, defended by Groton-educated (and Roosevelt-related) pundits like the Alsop brothers Stewart and Joe, but largely not fought by Groton grads who, for the most part, wanted no part of their fathers’ war. Nor were they greatly stirred by appeals to values and traditions that no longer seemed relevant to the changing conditions of American life.

Though conditions have changed dramatically since Theodore Roosevelt’s day, there are some elements in the Roosevelt method that Americans today would be well advised to adopt. In its frank understanding of the costs of failing to inculcate the values and character needed for leadership, in its clear-sighted approach to the role of education in preserving democratic culture, and in its determination to provide an intellectual foundation for future leaders that equipped them to view the realities of domestic and foreign politics clearly and unsentimentally, the Roosevelt method in its heyday was almost infinitely more realistic and effective than the various ideologies and approaches that have sought to replace it.

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Education used to hurt, and elite education hurt as much or more than the other kind. This was not because the teachers were sadists, though my remove form housemaster Mr. Savage wielded the cane with what I felt was unnecessary enthusiasm. The food was Spartan (a particularly unattractive black bean soup often featured on the Groton menu), the rooms and furnishings sparse, the rules strict, and the punishments both common and tough. In the old days, boys showered in cold water. Our water was hot, but we made our beds, swept out our cubicles, and waited on tables in the dining hall. Exposure to popular entertainment and the outside world was strictly limited. Boys were forbidden to own radios or record players, and the single television allotted to each dormitory was limited to half an hour per week.

The schools were generally sited in rural or semirural places, where the temptations were few and generally unappealing. In any case, there was not much money to spend. At Groton, the sons of captains of industry and scholarship students were allotted the same $2 a week in pocket money.

This was all by design. For Roosevelt and his allies, educating children in excessive comfort and ease was a form of child abuse. On the national stage, it was a form of political suicide. It produced morally stunted adults, addicted to pleasure, too weak to lead and too lazy to achieve. It ensured that the offspring of the wealthy would be confirmed in self-destructive vices—narcissism and self-indulgence married to political incompetence. Conscientious parents needed to save their children from such a fate, and as patriotic citizens it was their obligation to equip the heirs to great fortunes—and a carefully curated sprinkling of able scholarship students—with the ability to contribute to the country’s well-being.

Relentless competition was part of the process. As in Hogwarts, schools were often divided into Houses that competed against each other through the school year. Sports, debate, academics: All were competitive pursuits in which one struggled both for individual achievement and the honor and glory of the group.

Far more than in most schools today, students were left to govern themselves. Hazing was common among the younger boys, kept in line if at all by student prefects. The faculty handled academic matters and discipline in class, but student prefects supervised the behavior of younger students in the dormitories, hallways, and on the grounds. This system inevitably had its rough edges; 17-year-olds are sometimes less than Solomonic in their judgments. But the occasional miscarriages and injustices of a system only loosely overseen by faculty were, in the minds of the Rooseveltian educators, more than offset by the advantages. Younger boys needed to learn to cope with the occasional injustice and to learn to navigate their course through a hierarchical system. And the older boys gained wisdom and experience as they learned to manage their often rebellious and ingenious charges.

They would draw on these experiences when, in 1917 and 1942, students only recently out of secondary school found themselves leading slightly younger peers into combat. At Groton, the names of graduates who died in the service of their country are carved into the walls of the chapel.

The new educational movement saw major changes in girls’ education as well. Founded in 1843, Miss Porter’s School offered a rigorous academic program and inaugurated a baseball team in 1867. Schools like Miss Porter’s School, Concord Academy, and the Ethel Walker School gave girls a stronger academic education with more emphasis on physical activities and often defined themselves as “college preparatory” schools rather than traditional finishing schools for young upper-class women. From them came many of the intellectual, political, social, and athletic figures who did so much to shape the 20th century and redefined the place of women in American life.

The parents who consigned their children to this educational system often knew from their own experience just how disagreeable school life could be. But they sent their children to similar schools out of a mixture of duty, ambition, and love. They believed that the only way to enable their children to overcome the curse of a privileged background, flattered and indulged by servants and surrounded by gold-digging hangers-ons, was to separate them, ruthlessly if necessary, from the coddling that came with social privilege and expose them to real moral and physical hardship in their youth.

Without real testing, which of necessity includes the real possibility of failure, real growth and maturity does not happen. A youth who has never been tested and tasted the bitter results of failure from time to time can never grow up. From Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School to Reverend Endicott Peabody’s Groton and Frank Boyden’s Deerfield Academy, these schools consciously strove to give their students the opportunity to stand or fall on their own, not to enjoy an artificial success based on daddy’s dough.

No educational method works for all people, and the Roosevelt method had its weaknesses. Schools infused with the spirit of muscular Christianity were not always the most welcoming homes for budding poets or painters, or for students with more contemplative and less competitive temperaments. But these educators understood an important truth that is too often overlooked by those charged with the education of young people today. The world is a hard and dangerous place, and what many young people need is an arena to prepare for the struggles of life rather than a safe space in which to flourish undisturbed. As a method of producing young people with the will and capacity to lead, there is much to be said for it.

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The cult of happiness as interpreted by a society organized around the excitation and satisfaction of demand in a consumer economy is one of the most destructive features of the contemporary world. The chief purpose of education and child rearing more generally has historically been to guide young people to the realization that duty and honor matter more than the gratification of appetites. It is through sacrifice, work, and the denial of self that we become who we were born to be.

This is above all true of leaders. We see it in storybooks. Heroes achieve their quests through dark and lonely encounters with danger and hardship. We see it in the biographies of great leaders. Whether it is George Washington on Braddock’s retreat and at Valley Forge, Franklin Roosevelt coming to terms with paralysis, or Frederick Douglass rising from slavery to achieve intellectual and spiritual greatness, the people who built and defended the foundations of this free society developed the strength of character and depth of soul that made them great through encounters with serious perils and agonizing setbacks.

Elizabeth I did not become a great monarch by indulging her appetites; the renunciation of normal personal happiness was a cornerstone of her reign as the Virgin Queen. Under vastly different circumstances, her distant relative Elizabeth II achieved her own form of greatness through decades of patient duty and sacrifice.

But this is true in ordinary life as well. The joys of parenthood and family life require the subordination of appetites and casual inclinations to a sense of duty and loyalty. One cannot serve an ideal or build a community without renunciation.

It is not possible to build a solid human life or an enduring human society on any other foundations than these, but we have increasingly sought to bring up our children, including our potential future leaders, in hothouse conditions. We protect them from bullying on the playground, from danger in every imaginable form, and are neurotically vigilant against anything that might damage the luxuriant flowering of their self-esteem. One hears of parents referred to the police because they let their unaccompanied children walk to the store. We would be better off as a society if we reserved our censure and mockery for the neurotically interfering helicopter parents whose lack of emotional control and maturity leads them to cheat their offspring of the chance for real growth.

Wisdom, like greatness, has its price. Odin surrendered an eye. Aragorn and Gandalf pursued lonely lives away from the power and ease that their gifts at any time could have won for them. Moses kept sheep in the wilderness before returning to Egypt to lead his people. Jane Austen never enjoyed the happy domesticity she destined for her favored characters. Helen Keller, Dorothy Day, and Aung San Suu Kyi all paid a high price for their achievements.

Today’s elite educational institutions are too often nurseries of vanity and futility rather than character and wisdom. Rather than correcting for the corrosive effects of wealth and self-indulgence on young people, educational institutions too often amplify them. Flattered by their elders, carefully bubble-wrapped and protected from all injury or insult, they lack the experiences and inner resources that the old methods of education attempted to provide. The result is an educated elite that increasingly lacks the strength, vision, and character to lead.

It also lacks the legitimacy that leadership requires. The problem is not simply that young people need to overcome real obstacles and encounter real problems to mature into competent adults. The perception that leaders have been tested by experience and suffering and that leadership requires sacrifice is an important factor in giving legitimacy to leaders at every level of life.

Nothing does more to undermine the legitimacy of a given elite than the perception that its privileges are unearned. People should flunk out of Ivy League colleges in droves; if nothing else, this confers some respectability on the survivors. Students hoping for the prestigious credential that a diploma from a prestigious school affords should expect to work much longer hours on more difficult assignments than their peers. They aim for high rewards; they should be judged by tougher standards.

Many people will not want to work that hard or to be held to such rigorous standards or have the personal strength and commitment to measure up. That is fine. It is normal and natural. Not everyone wants to be, can be, or should be at the top of a profession, a civic organization, or a political entity.

Leaders in a serious society faced with real problems cannot have it all. Tradeoffs are real. It is a sign of decadence to believe otherwise. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were bad fathers. Catherine the Great did not have much time with her children. Thomas Jefferson neglected his personal and business affairs. We all have feelings, but those called to the public service and positions of great responsibility must sacrifice many of their personal feelings and preferences to the high goals they pursue. An elite class that thinks it can enjoy the privileges and power that elite status confers without paying the full fair price such power demands appears to the wider society like a class of gilded, entitled, and narcissistic parasites—like Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride.

The widespread belief that America’s elite have not earned their places through real work is one of the major reasons behind public disenchantment with elite culture. Few ideas are as profoundly destructive to social harmony and basic justice as the idea that the privileged members of society’s elite, as they pass from one well-paid post to the next, should have it all. That attitude is grounded in entitlement and privilege that in itself is toxic and corrosive; it also betrays a blindness to the realities of life and the demands of leadership that demonstrate an utter failure to understand one’s responsibilities.

Many of our best young people understand that something is wrong with the way they are being brought into the world. They resent the artificiality of their lives and see a vast and growing disparity between the world around them and the world they have been prepared to inhabit. Sometimes this manifests as fear, crippling at times, of the various disasters—climate change, thermonuclear war, AI run amok, economic or political collapse—that threaten humanity in our increasingly fiery century. Sometimes it manifests as cynicism, which is often the public face of an inner despair. Sometimes it manifests as rage.

We can do better. It is nowhere written that decadence is irreversible. TR and his allies helped two generations of Americans pass the stern test of their times and avoid the fate of the Bourbons in France. Regardless of what happens at the ballot boxes tomorrow, there is no reason why we cannot repeat that accomplishment in the decades ahead.