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THE POLITICAL CLASS &
ANDY NELSON
BY DAVID A. HOROWITZ
Politics and governmental affairs were “of limited
salience" to many Americans, wrote political scientist Stephen
C. Craig in 1993, because the public believed it no longer could
control or direct the system. Craig’s pessimism was echoed by
Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg, who described a “dispirited,
alienated, and fragmented" citizenry in an environment in which
“nobody seems to be in charge, nobody can be trusted to do
what they say, and nobody is in position to see the country
through." By the last decade of the 20th century, social critics
and social commentators like Christopher Lasch and Kevin
Phillips were suggesting that the dysfunctional political system
reflected the division of American society into two distinct and
antagonistic factions. Beyond the reach of ordinary citizens and
removed from the physical demands of the productive economy,
a subculture of administrators, social service professionals, and
academic consultants set public discourse and advised govern
ment leaders. Comprising a key element of a nationwide “guard
ian class," knowledge specialists and interest group advocates
thrived upon an enhanced public sector. A progressive, rights-
oriented philosophy and emancipatory cultural ideals further
distanced the group from the majority of Americans. Lasch
believed that conflict between the two groups amounted to
“a form of class warfare" in national life.
“The heart of every complaint I hear about our govern
ment today," amateur politician Jesse Ventura observed in 1999,
was the conviction that the political system was controlled by
"comfortably ensconced people who are many levels removed
from the working people of this country." Convinced that the
political class devoted too much energy to “keeping itself in
business," Ventura won an independent race for Minnesota's
governorship in 1998 on the Reform Party ticket. Two years
later, Republican senator John McCain of Arizona attracted the
support of independents in an unsuccessful but widely publicized
run for his party's Presidential nomination that called for sweep
ing campaign finance reform and attacked special political
interests. Meanwhile, fellow Republican George W. Bush, son of
the former President, squeezed out a bitterly contested Electoral
College victory over Democrat Al Gore by insisting on less
government and more trustworthy leaders. Once Islamic terror
ists mounted deadly suicide attacks on New York City and the
Pentagon in 2001, Bush dedicated his Presidency to the protect
ion of citizens through increased homeland security and the
deployment of U.S. military force in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ventura, McCain and Bush each played upon suspicion
of the guardians who comprised the nation's governing elites,
social policy consultants and opinion molders. The sentiments
expressed by these political figures had an extended history.
Hostility to the socially committed knowledge and professional
sector first had erupted in Wisconsin, the laboratory of Progres
sive reform and the state where university specialists initially
assisted in the formation of public policy. During the 1920s,
contention over the societal role of intellectuals helped to
engender bitter debates between modern secularists and moral
traditionalists. Both the Leopold-Loeb case and the Scopes
Monkey trail provided ample grounds for discussing the place
of scientific and cultural experts in defining society’s mores.
Discomfort over rapid social change and the perceived influence
of intellectual elites helped to shape the impassioned rhetoric of
the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, whose leaders ostracized liberal opinion
leaders as strangers to the American Way.
Impacted by enormous demands of the Great Depres
sion, President Franklin Roosevelt turned to a brains trust of
academic and legal advisers after 1932. Yet by appearing to
bypass the cumbersome legislative process and by concentrat
ing policymaking in the White House, Roosevelt left his admin
istration vulnerable to charges of undemocratic procedures.
Criticism was particularly strong from representatives of small
agriculture and independent business who sensed that the
President’s experts were ignorant of their problems, apathetic
about their interests, and hostile to their needs. Anxiety over
the role of executive branch consultants led to overstated
charges of White House complicity to anticapitalist conspiracies
or other attempts to redesign and restructure the political
system. Nevertheless, suspicions about the use of applied
intelligence continued to complicate the Roosevelt's adminis
tration's attempts to induce economic recovery and stabilize
the country's institutions.
Once Roosevelt won reelection in a 1936 campaign
in which the brains trust was a major issue, concerns over
executive branch advisers and bureaucratic administrators
contributed to a series of political crises that seriously marred
the President's second term. Congress resisted White House
reorganization, criticized the consumerist bias of Roosevelt
economists, objected to the dominance of antibusiness attorneys
affiliated with the National Labor Relations Board, demanded
limits on the arbitrary power of executive agencies, worked
to reduce the number of professional staffers in government
bureaus, and sought to limit social experimentation in recovery
programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps. Some critics of
the New Deal went so far as to depict Washington's emerging
political class as a haven for radical Jews.
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The coming of World War 2 and the menace of foreign
totalitarianism intensified concerns over the evolution of a perm
anent bureaucracy in Washington. Threatened by the executive
branch’s growing power, Congress mounted highly publicized
investigations into the influence of academic and professional
experts on domestic federal spending, social programs in the
civil defense agencies, stateside propaganda activities, govern
ment price-fixing, and long-range economic and social welfare
planning. Concern over the preservation of traditional economic
virtues, democratic principles and their own political power led
congressional leaders like Martin Dies, Jr. to undertake inquiries
into the alleged radicalism of a number of academics employed
by the Roosevelt administration. By 1945 a majority in Congress
had rejected the New Deal’s flirtation with collectivist social
experiment and high-minded reform.
With the onset of the Cold War, the philosophy and
behavior of government managers, policy experts and academic
consultants came under increasing suspicion. Critics associated
the intelligentsia with a communist movement that supposedly
functioned as a strategic interest group for power-hungry know
ledge elites impatient with democratic procedure. The postwar
controversy over political intellectuals emerged full blown with
questions concerning the character of New Deal manager David
E. Lilienthal. A series of congressional inquiries into the alleged
threat of Communist subversion intensified the growing chasm
between New Class insiders and traditional power brokers in
local politics and business. Distrust of cosmopolitan elites also
shaped the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investi
gations into the past conduct of the Hollywood Ten and Alger
Hiss. Accusing President Harry Truman’s State Department
officials, high-ranking military officers, and foreign policy
advisors of insufficient awareness of the Cold War’s moral
implications, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy mounted
a populist attack on the administration's alleged toleration of
domestic Communists. McCarthy's portrait of arrogant, privile
ged and unaccountable political academics received support
when lengthy hearings by the McCarran committee led it to
denounce the scholarly Owen D. Lattimore as a conscious
instrument of the Communist conspiracy.
The debate over the security clearance of physicist and
nuclear weapons consultant J.Robert Oppenheimer reintroduced
doubts concerning the loyalty of intellectual elites to core nation
al values during the Eisenhower era. Yet Republican occupation
of the White House led to the demise of Joe McCarthy when the
Wisconsin senator turned against the military establishment in
the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. Meanwhile, congression
al Republicans led an investigation into the alleged role of tax-
exempt foundations and social science researching in formulat
ing collectivist government policies and influencing public edu
cation and social attitudes. In a period in which anticommunism
appeared to incorporate deeply held anxieties over the intrusion
of remote elites into daily existence, a series of grassroots cam
paigns focused on the unseen dangers of flouridated municipal
water supplies.
The Cold War emphasized the extent to which the
American public entertained profound suspicions concerning
the cultural ideology of sociopolitical professionals and policy
makers. The civil rights revolution of the 1960s shifted the
grounds of such concern. By involving white professionals,
intellectuals and social activists as strategic allies, the crusade
for racial justice intensified anxieties over the role of federal
administrators and regulators in using state coercion to erase
human distinctions. Threats of depersonalization and power
lessness became a major focus of George C. Wallace’s Presi
dential primary campaign of 1964. In the general election,
Republican Barry Goldwater charged that forgotten and silent
Americans had been eclipsed by powerful social interest groups
aligned to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Johnson’s War
on Poverty elicited fears among local politicians that adminis
trators were building their own power bases in local communities
by colonizing the poor and selecting favored clients for lucrative
patronage awards. Accusing the Great Society of double stand
ards of racial justice, governors Ronald Reagan and George
Wallace tied a culturally permissive liberal elite to the social
disruptions, crime and street violence of the 1960s underclass.
Such themes became the focal point for Richard M. Nixon’s
campaign for the Presidency in 1968.
Despite Nixon’s coolness to social programs, the new
administration endorsed a controversial affirmative action plan
in the construction industry bitterly opposed by organized labor.
Yet the Republican President also courted working class support
for the Vietnam War and opposition to would-be members of
the professional classes in the student New Left and peace
movement. Expropriating themes from Goldwater, Reagan and
Wallace, the Nixon White House denounced campus dissidents
as a radical elite whose cultural values defied basic decency and
common sense.Nixon's hatred for perceived allies of the antiwar
movement contributed to his fatal involvement in Watergate-
related attacks on the Liberal Establishment. When Jimmy
Carter rode a reform tide to the Presidency in 1976, opponents
effectively fused condemnations of special interests and opposi
tion to progressive social values into a creed of populist conser
vatism that helped bring the Carter administration to its political
knees.
During the 1980s Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan
and George H. W. Bush built powerful electoral coalitions on
the demonization of big government and on public impatience
with the nation's New Class guardians and political intervention
ists. Once Bill Clinton won the White House, he and his wife
Hillary became the target of critics who saw post-World War 2
baby-boomers as politically unreliable and tainted by cultural
deviance. Although Clinton’s affirmative action policies and
interventionist health care proposals strengthened such senti
ment, America's controversy with the guardian class appeared
to peak at century’s end with the culturally infused debate over
the White House sex scandal and the subsequent impeachment
of the President.
Originating in a variety of ideological perspectives
across the 20th century, the response to America’s political
class and social guardians has contained enormous contradict
ions. During the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan and other social
conservatives charged that academic intellectuals were exert
ing an excessively liberal influence over the nation’s cultural
agenda and social morality. Yet Republican populists from rural
states simultaneously denounced scholarly specialists who used
their expertise to deliver pro-Wall Street testimony before
congressional committees. When the Great Depression led to
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the Democratic White House
relied on market-oriented economic advisers who sought to