My religion is among those that challenge their adherents to love the unlovable. Let me therefore express my sincere affection for a truly despised group: The Establishment.
From coast to coast, millions of Americans who agree on little else share the conviction that The Establishment is inept, corrupt and out of touch. Whether these voters’ hearts are set racing by Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, they are sure that America needs a revolution to be great again.
Really, they should get out more. To Iraq, for example, or Libya, or Venezuela or the Central African Republic, or indeed to any nation that lacks an establishment: a stodgy network of long-serving elected officials and senior civil servants, elite university professors and graduates, prestige national media outlets and venerable cultural institutions and tastemakers. Such a network backed up by a consistent middle-class consensus is precisely what gives nations stability, a word that not coincidentally shares its derivation with the word establishment.
In sharp contrast to the many countries in which revolutions have been a regular occurrence, the United States has been blessed with 150 years of Establishment-led political stability that set the stage for historic economic growth, increased life expectancy and expansion of human rights. Disruptions in the social order that sent many other nations into chaos — economic downturns, world wars, strife between racial and ethnic groups — were successfully managed by The Establishment, which preserved essential traditions and basic stability while enacting reforms at the same time: the New Deal, Medicare and Medicaid, the civil rights laws of the 1960s. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Some critics would carp that The Establishment’s willingness to enact reforms in the face of more radical political demands has taken the winds from the sails of needed revolutionary change, be it on the political left (universal health care and a guaranteed national income) or the right (closed borders and elimination of birthright citizenship). But if you dislike The Establishment for how it skillfully defused your preferred revolution by meeting you halfway, remember that it was just as good at doing the same with the revolutions you opposed.
Trump made a concession to The Establishment with his use of a teleprompter the night of Tuesday's primaries. "I hate a script; it's so boring," he told Establishment stalwart Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, last month. Recounting the exchange on CNN, McConnell said he responded, "Put me down in favor of boring."
POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media
None of this is to say that The Establishment has ever been completely fair-minded or unfailingly open to outsiders. For example, 100 years ago virtually every establishment figure in the USA was a white male Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Yet as with other changes in society, The Establishment has been very good at reforming itself in response to increasing diversity in society and attendant demands for equality, including by absorbing people of diverse religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds. It is after all The Establishment and not any self-styled revolutionary that is offering the country the first woman candidate with a good chance of becoming president.
Teenagers being raised by long-married parents often chafe at the rules their elders set, the traditions they keep, the mistakes they make and the conventionality they exude. Yet if those unhappy young people have a friend who is growing up in a home in which multiple divorces have occurred and the faces and rules have changed markedly every few years, they might gain a new appreciation for the stability they have enjoyed.
American revolutionaries should likewise look at the world’s unstable nations before raging at their own country’s establishment. We would all miss it terribly if it were gone.
Keith Humphreys is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. Follow him on Twitter: @KeithNHumphreys.
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