Requiem for the American Establishment

Now a sad, shrunken subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it's trying to kill Bidenomics.

John J. McCloy, designated chairman of the American Establishment by Richard Rovere in 1961.

I’m shocked to learn that the first person to apply the term “the Establishment” to a politico-cultural elite was not, as I’ve been told, my late New Republic colleague the British journalist Henry Fairlie. Not according to The American Establishment, an authoritative 1980 book on the subject by Leonard Silk of the New York Times and his son Mark Silk, at that time a graduate student at Harvard and now professor of religion in public life emeritus at Trinity College in Hartford. That honor, the Silks explain, belongs to the British historian A.J.P. Taylor. Taylor applied it in an article about the 19th century British pamphleteer William Cobbett (with whom I have a personal beef for digging up the bones of Thomas Paine from their resting place in my hometown of New Rochelle, N.Y., and shipping them to London, where they were never reburied and eventually got misplaced; but I digress. I’ve written about this theft, and Lord Byron’s memorable response to it, here).

According to Silk père et fils, Cobbett identified the governing classes as “the THING,” a designation that, unsurprisingly, never caught on. Taylor, in The New Statesman of April 19, 1953, more elegantly renamed the THING the Establishment, a term that previously referred only to guardians of the Anglican Church (Anglicanism being the established church of England). In Taylor’s reformulation, Cobbett’s THING acquired the ironical connotation of a priesthood. The Establishment, Taylor explained,

talks with its own branded accent, eats different meals at different times from the rest of the populace, has its privileged system of education, its own religion, its powerful offices both visible and invisible.

Two years passed before Fairlie applied the same secular meaning to “the Establishment” in The Spectator in an article published September 10, 1955. Six years after that, the American journalist Richard Rovere did the same in The American Scholar and, later, Esquire, crediting neither Fairlie nor Taylor nor Cobbett (though the final footnote in Rovere’s Esquire essay cites an un-named “authority on the parent body, the British Establishment,” who is almost certainly Fairlie).

The two essays make very entertaining reading. Foreign Affairs, Rovere explained, was “the Pravda of the Establishment,” and Harper’s, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker all served Establishment clienteles. Except for Harper’s, that’s still true. Harper’s started losing its Establishment mojo after editor Willie Morris got pushed out in 1971, and eventually it was overtaken by The New York Review of Books, one of whose founders, Robert Silvers, was a former Harper’s editor. “The New Republic is coming up,” Rovere wrote. That’s still true, too, but the magazine’s frequent criticism of the Establishment perennially bars acceptance. “The Nation has long since gone down.” They wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Reinhold Niebuhr is the official Establishment theologian.” He has not been replaced because today’s governing classes feel in no great need of a theologian. I wonder how Rovere would today assess the influence of Niebuhr’s grandson Sam Sifton, assistant managing editor at the New York Times for cultural and lifestyle coverage. Sifton’s supervision of, and frequent contributions to, Times food coverage lends him a level of influence that his distinguished maternal grandfather could only dream about. Sifton actually controls what the cultural elite puts inside its mouth. And as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote, you are what you eat.

Since Roosevelt, Rovere wrote, “the only non-Establishment figure in the White House has been Harry Truman.” That winning streak would soon be broken by Lyndon Johnson. Nearly every president afterwards was non-Establishment; the only president after JFK that I feel confident identifying as Establishment was George Herbert Walker Bush. Since there’s no primogeniture in the American Establishment (I can’t speak for the British one), George W. Bush never even tried to become a member.

The Establishment is greatly diminished today. The Silks presciently observed in 1980 that it would have to appease the “free-enterprise” Anti-Establishment (subsequently renamed by Sidney Blumenthal the “Counter-Establishment"). What the Silks couldn’t anticipate was that the Establishment would essentially become a subsidiary of the United States Chamber of Commerce. My latest New Republic piece examines a recent attack on Bidenomics by Robert Zoellick as an attempt to rally the Establishment faithful, but there just aren’t that many of them left. And anyway, Zoellick criticisms are wrong. You can read my piece here.