Corruption evolves from crude bribery with money to sophisticated bribery with support and favors

A very good piece. The Crisis of the American Elites by Eliot A. Cohen. It provides an illumination of the dynamics I have been describing where the establishment protect their sinecures and privileges at a cost to the majority and in so defending those sinecures and privileges, do harm to both the majority of their fellow citizens as well as to our system of government.

Judith Butler and Ed Whelan have probably never met. And if they did, we may be quite certain that they would have very little use for one another. After all, what does the professor of comparative literature, author of (among other works) Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly who teaches in the Critical Theory Program at Berkeley have to do with the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the co-editor of Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith and a Life Well Lived? And yet, they find themselves embarrassed by nearly identical behaviors, forced to make shamefaced admissions that they have behaved like nasty, irresponsible idiots.

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The stories of Whelan and Butler have nothing to do with whether one thinks Kavanaugh and Ronell did nothing at all or behaved appallingly. They have everything to do with the current crisis of American elites in many fields, to include the law and higher education. For the lawyer and the professor are exquisitely similar. Their academic pedigrees are magnificent: Harvard Law School, Yale University graduate school. Their positions in their profession are eminent, if detached from the rest of the world. If you are a liberal you probably do not know or care that Whelan writes often for National Review and is a leading figure in conservative legal circles; if you do not know, or care to know, much about critical theory, the writings of Butler are academic in the unflattering sense of that term. But in their worlds they are, if not royalty, lords of the realm.

Their motives here are also similar: Eminent friends are being taken down at the peak of their professional careers by someone who is, in their worlds, a nobody. It’s outrageous, and it has to be stopped. And if, by so doing, you defame a classmate of Kavanaugh’s, accusing him of attempted rape, or effectively threaten to obliterate a graduate student’s career by lending a mob of literature professors the imprimatur of the MLA, so be it. That is the point and that is the sin: the willingness to stomp hard on a defenseless little guy in order to protect your highly privileged pal.

Of the many forms of cruelty, that directed against those who are weak or powerless is one of the worst. Of itself, it undermines whatever legitimacy a person can claim by virtue of intellectual or professional distinction. Societies and governments will have elites—that is simply inescapable, except perhaps in an ancient city state, and probably not even then. But in a free society, for those elites to exercise their power—their very real power, as those subject to it well know—they have to do so with restraint and good judgment. The alternative is, sooner or later, revolt, which is why higher education often finds itself battered by angry citizens who, in a different setting, conclude that the legal system, too, is rigged.

Butler and Whelan deserve credit for admitting their mistakes and apologizing. But there is not much evidence that they have thought about the broader point here. The issue goes well beyond the graduate student and Kavanaugh’s classmate who got an undeserved accusation. It is, rather, the broader setting that caused two eminent people to choose tribalism, hyper-ideology, and personal attachment over fairness, a moderate willingness to withhold judgment, and merest decency.

I agree.

It also illustrates one of the subtleties which make the establishment positions so hard to attack. I have had personal experience with this in terms of environmental protection and conservation.

We have a public infrastructure advocacy group, posing as conservationists, who are advocating for building connected trails through various city nature preserves. The plan has been repeatedly rejected by the neighborhood residents owing to the probability that the trails will increase crime, cause environmental damage, and will severely disrupt the local ecology. Concerns all founded on both direct experience and on empirical research.

In carrying the battle to City Hall, and other governing bodies, over the years, residents assumed that there were some very direct money exchanges going on. These do occur with distressing frequency in our City history, but that is not the case in this instance.

Yes, the two initial and primary funders of the advocacy group are a multinational construction company with large contracts with the City as well as an architectural/planning design company with multiple contracts with the city. The expectations initially among residents was that we would see a pattern of payments from the paymasters to the politicians.

It is far more complex than that. There is a pattern of such payments but they are generally of such nominal amounts that it strains credulity that those are sufficient to buy the regulatory and zoning approvals which are being purchased.

No. The real exchange of benefits has evolved as one might expect once sunshine laws and ethics laws have been passed (though regrettably too infrequently enforced).

On any given initiative, there are all sorts of backroom stakeholders involved. Acquiescence and approval are traded as favors among the establishment participants. I provide you governance backing on this board on which I sit (and do not care about) if you provide me support on this other board which we share and I do care about.

Support leads to coalitions of shared interest and coalitions of shared interest lead to fund raising and fund raising leads to grants. All by the same cadre of insider establishment players and all despite the articulated and evidence-based objections of the citizenry.

The corruption is still corruption but it is a corruption of governance and process rather than the familiar money under the table. It is all legal, all above board, and all morally wrong because it is the subversion of representative democracy and it all rests on hijacking the state power of coercion to the benefit of select establishment insiders.

Butler and Whelan are establishment. They use their prestige and privilege to protect their friends, even when those friends have demonstrably done something wrong (Butler) or where the defense results in harm to innocent third-parties (Whelan). Butler and Whelan are, to my extremely limited knowledge, not bad people but because they are part of the cocooned privileged establishment, they casually do bad things. They are the tip of the iceberg of corruption that follows from the privileges and sinecures of being members of the establishment.