In a new video podcast from Modern Age, editor-in-chief Dan McCarthy discusses how conservatives from William F. Buckley Jr.’s time to today try to reconcile their elite backgrounds with the interests of the common man. This weekly series, “Modern Age with Dan McCarthy,” will explore how the history of conservatism informs and shapes American politics and culture.
Below, McCarthy discusses the tensions between elitism and populism:
It seems like William F. Buckley Jr. is an elitist, and yet he is well known for his remark—in fact, this is perhaps his best-known quote—about being governed by the first two thousand names in the phone book rather than the faculty of Harvard. And Buckley is seen as expressing a very popular sentiment there.
This is of course a paradox that conservatives in general often have to confront. Many times their critics will point to this and say that conservatives are hypocrites. Conservatives are talking about being populists. They’re talking about representing middle America. But in fact, they’re all quite wealthy. They’re well-educated. They are, in fact, elitist themselves.
Right now, for example, you see that President Trump and Vice President Vance both have Ivy League educations—partly through business school and through law school rather than undergraduate, in the case of J. D. Vance, but nevertheless, they are both, clearly individuals who could be considered elites. They’ve made a lot of money; they are highly intelligent and well educated. Yet they also seem to be functioning as a kind of tribune of the common man. And the fact that the Trump–Vance ticket had such a sweeping election victory in 2024, winning all of the battleground states, most of which were in the Rust Belt and in Middle America, does seem to suggest that there really is an element of authentic populism to the Republican Party right now and to the Trump–Vance movement, and perhaps to the conservative movement as a whole.
Now, how can we reconcile this? How can we take the elite elements of the conservative movement and the elite elements of the Trump administration and reconcile those with the idea of a movement that is supposed to represent the common man and that’s supposed to be in favor of middle America, mainstream rather than Wall Street and mainstream rather than the Ivy League as well?
Really, there are three kinds of elitism, and you’ll see that people who like to criticize conservatives and say that they’re hypocrites or they’re inconsistent on this are deliberately trying to obfuscate the differences between these three types of elite. . . .
Watch the rest here:
