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"What do we owe elites?" is a fine question, but "What do our elites owe us?" is a better one. In an ostensibly meritocratic society, our highly-trained elites enjoy wealth, influence — and, increasingly, political power — that ordinary citizens only dream of.
Noblesse oblige is the governing concept that a country's elites have a duty, not just to give back in the form of charity or public service, but to nurture and protect their country's institutions and cultural norms. That idea is often "More honour’d in the breach than the observance," as Shakespeare wryly noted four centuries ago.
I'd add that a tip of the hat to our institutions and norms performed in public provides cover for all the hypocrisies our elites and experts might care to indulge in private. That's not just human nature — it's good sense. When the best among us abuse the public's trust, they risk the wrath of the "rabble."
But what happens when those genuflections, genuine or not, give way to something more sinister?
These were my questions reading Tyler Cowen's Monday piece for The Free Press, headlined, "Our Elites Don’t Deserve This Much Hatred."
Before diving in, let me say a few words about Tyler Cowen. He's one of the good guys, a lifelong defender of free markets. I've read his stuff for more than 20 years, and while I sometimes strongly disagree, I've always had a warm respect for his work. So this week's essay is written much more in sorrow than in anger — with, as you'll see, one glaring exception.
"It is no surprise that we are especially skeptical of elites these days," Cowen began. "The Great Financial Crisis did not exactly go well, and the Covid pandemic was only slightly more than five years ago. Plenty of mistakes were made in both, even if parties do not always agree in which direction."
"As trust recedes in authorities," which Cowen conceded is understandable, "strange beliefs are proliferating, whether it is about life extension, global conspiracies, or even whether Hitler was the chief villain of World War II."
But other "strange beliefs" proliferated, too. Among them were questions regarding the moral hazard implicit in public bailouts, doubts about the efficacy of masks and public distancing, and concerns about liberty-usurping abuses of authority.
Not everybody who said it was harmful to mask kids who weren't at risk leaped to "Hitler just wanted peace, ackshully." Not everybody who questioned the wisdom of mandating an entirely new form of vaccine decided to take a chance on polio. If Cowen would perhaps spend a little less time with the Overly Online People, he'd see that hardly anybody did those things.
Using extremism in defense of elites might not be a vice, but ignoring moderation in the public's response to their usurpations is no virtue.
America's anger isn't with elites qua elites. We want, need, and expect our elites, experts in their fields, to perform our surgeries, design our bridges, and run our refineries. Nobody wants to spend their day trying to escape a refinery fire on a collapsing bridge while bleeding out from a botched liver transplant.
Ask me how I know.
Yes, we even need them to design and test our vaccines and run our governments.
But Celebrity Medical Spokesmodel Anthony "Doctor" Fauci foisted rules about masks and social distancing that he knew were nonsense — and then flaunted his "rule for thee but not for me, peasants" attitude going maskless at a baseball game. California Gov. Gavin Newsom enforced some of the nation's strictest lockdowns while rubbing shoulders with top executives from the California Medical Association at Napa Valley's $400-to-$1,200-a-plate French Laundry.
And Cowen is dead wrong when he wrote that "in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary." Just because COVID tyranny ended doesn’t mean our liberty was restored. The precedent was set that the government can close us down and lock us up at will — and that the credentialed elite will find self-serving justifications for doing so.
The precedent set, new experts tell us that "climate lockdowns" might be needed to combat climate change. We'll sit in the dark and eat the bugs because, having saved us from COVID, the elites must now save the planet from us.
The script is now all too familiar. "Never let a crisis go to waste," Rahm Emanuel advised Democrats during the 2008 financial crisis — advice taken to heart in 2020, even when those paying the price were children.
Remember the school closures, distance learning, and those god-awful masks when the schools finally deigned to reopen?
It isn't, as Cowen argued, that "Not reopening the schools was a big mistake and meant a lot of lost learning," or that "plenty of elites protested at the time." The problem — and this is backed up by both the data and my personal experience — is that the schools were reopened late and reopened in such a way as to prolong the oppression.
I'll never forget having to pick up my younger son, then in elementary school, from a regimented line of children paced six feet apart, his cherubic face glum behind a mask — outdoors. I'll never forgive what they did to my older son in his first two years of high school, delaying by years the lifelong bonds and interests that young teens are supposed to develop with their peers at their sides.
For millions of parents around the nation, I'd remind Cowen that what our elites did is no intellectual exercise. It was wrong. It was authoritarian. It was abusive. And for parents, deeply personal — they abused our kids.
Scenes like the one shared by Upstate Federalist — captured in this unforgettable photo — must never be allowed to happen again. And the elites who enabled them must never be allowed to pretend they didn’t.
Nothing has topped this photograph for summarizing the Covid Era in total. The characters. All authority being represented by women. A miserable young man being punished. It's art.
— Upstate Federalist (@upstatefederlst) April 22, 2025
But the elites we had then are the elites we have now — and instead of bowing and scraping, they're trying to rewrite history. Leftwing pundit Matt Yglesias might not even be the most egregious example, but he's the one who blew up my timeline yesterday.
"I think there's been a weird re-writing of history in terms of what happened with Covid school closures," Yglesias claimed on Tuesday. "The liberal elite — Fauci, Vox, the New York Times, the UN — were all saying schools should be reopened (and we were right). The problem is it didn't happen anyway."
Um, what?
"What he ignores," Anthony LaMesa pointed out, "is that while some liberal elites were saying schools should reopen, there was always a 'yes, but...' or 'yes, if...' or 'yes, but like this...'"
"Meanwhile, in Europe, where schools began reopening in spring 2020 — never closed in Sweden — and fully reopened that fall, there were major compromises with public health to allow for all students to return."
This isn't about Matt Yglesias, who doesn't appear to be an expert at anything except promoting the interests of Matt Yglesias. It's about elites — and Yglesias was raised a wealthy child of privilege — who deem themselves unaccountable.
Instead of protecting and nurturing the institutions and culture that made possible their wealth, influence, and authority, they abused them to enrich themselves and oppress the rest.
Fauci doubled his wealth during COVID while flaunting the freedoms he denied to you and me. Instead of being held accountable for his lies and manipulations, he received a presidential pardon. "We need to value and stress elitist standards to get closer to the truth," Cowen wrote. But a shrug and a "let's do better next time" is awfully weak sauce when what the public had every right to expect was a perp walk or three.
Maybe it's just that knowing what we know now makes this a very strange time to leap to the defense of elitism. Maybe I need to learn how to let go, but it seems a better time to grab pitchforks and torches and storm the castle walls of elitism. A few figurative heads on pikes might go a long way toward avoiding future abuses — or next time, the heads on pikes might not be figurative.
"Credentials themselves do not make for truth," Cowen wrote with perfect accuracy. "Instead, usually the malady is that the elites do not take their own elitism seriously enough. A truly elite method is based in science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior."
"So consider me disappointed by what passes for 'the elites' today."
Those last few quotes are from the beginning of Cowen's FP essay, and I could not agree with them more... except that "disappointed" doesn't even begin to cover what so many Americans feel about "the elites."
We. Are. Angry.
Our anger — and it is righteous — is with experts who used their once-respected positions of authority to enrich or otherwise benefit themselves with a discrediting lack of regard for the commonweal — and oftentimes in contradiction of the evidence.
Arguably worse, our experts abused their authority to silence or even cancel anyone who contradicted them, oftentimes in pursuit of partisan political advantage.
The following paragraph is from a 2021 article in The Atlantic by Emma Green about "Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown."
For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk. “If he said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me. Gandhi describes herself as “left of left,” but has alienated some of her ideological peers because she has advocated for policies such as reopening schools and establishing a clear timeline for the end of mask mandates. “We went the other way, in an extreme way, against Trump’s politicization,” Gandhi said.
Gandhi — and while she wasn't alone in this betrayal, her elite status as a professor of medicine during a pandemic is particularly damning — turned the science on its head because Orange Man Bad.
Where is Gandhi today? Still shaping the next generation of doctors — presumably teaching that partisanship is the better part of medicine. She should have been hounded out of public life and kept far away from medical students.
PoliMath is one of my must-follow X accounts, and he detailed today how his account got nuked in 2020 for daring to tell certain truths about COVID. When you're done here, I'd ask that you read the whole thread. First, though, let me spoil the conclusion.
"I'm still somewhat bitter about it, I guess," PoliMath posted. "It was astonishing how wrong people were without repercussion. They were cruel and false and dishonest, but no one cared because they were on the right team."
It was, he wrote, "A good lesson but a hard one."
Indeed.
I'm just not certain it's a lesson Tyler Cowen fully learned about the elites he took so much care to defend.
Last Thursday: Houthis, China, and Us: The Great Game on the High Seas
