"I Know Things, Make Me Your Leader"

Are the best educated among us entitled to rule?

Marble statue of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. (Credit: Panasevich; iStock / Getty Images Plus)

My good friend (and fellow Substacker) Noah Millman wrote an excellent post last week about the deepest sources, and consequences, of our political polarization. His argument unfolded like this:

Many left-leaning critics of the GOP’s Trumpian turn have argued that the rise of right-wing populism flows from racial polarization, with reactionary white voters supporting a racist, xenophobic candidate against the ascendant multiracial pluralism of the Democratic Party.

In response, Republicans have told a very different story—one in which the Democrats have become an elite party of the well-paid professional-managerial class, while the GOP has become a home for a cross-racial coalition of working-class voters.

In truth, though, what ultimately drives the divide between the parties is education. The Democrats are increasingly the party of people who have graduated from four-year colleges, while the GOP is the party of those who have not. The former therefore work in fields requiring skills and credentials conferred by universities, and the latter work in fields that have no such requirements.   

Millman’s main argument is that, while both racial and class-based polarization have their own problems and dangers, educational polarization may be worse. That’s because once those who earn college (and graduate) degrees begin to think of themselves in meritocratic terms, they presume themselves entitled to political rule and the honors it confers. Those lacking such degrees, meanwhile, come to resent the presumption that educational attainment should serve as a gateway to political power and public honors—and, guided or goaded by conman demagogues out to exploit this resentment, they respond by dismissing higher education and the views of people who complete it.

Many go further to flatter themselves and their own untutored convictions, turning their lack of a higher education into a virtue that opens them to a more reliable form of folk wisdom possessed by the common man. The epistemological chasm that has opened up over the past decade or so between Democrats and Republicans is in large part a function of this dynamic, which follows from educational polarization.

There’s a lot more going on in Millman’s essay than this brief summary can convey, so I hope you will read it for yourself. In this post, I merely want to elaborate on the points I’ve just summarized, adding a philosophical perspective on them drawn from Plato, the thinker who infamously proposed that in a perfectly just political community, those possessing the greatest education, knowledge, and wisdom would rule.

I think Plato was largely right about that—at least in theory. In practice, however, the attempt to institute the rule of philosopher kings is bound to end in disaster. I think many of our own political tensions and conflicts follow from our society’s ill-advised (but to some extent unavoidable) efforts to construct a political culture that approximates Plato’s utopia.  

Plato’s Case for Philosophic Rule

Think of any collective enterprise—a business corporation, an army, a sports team, a church, a nation. Isn’t it reasonable to think it would be best for the venture to be guided by those possessing the greatest knowledge and wisdom concerning its goals—including what those goals should be and how to achieve them? That’s the simple insight behind Plato’s suggestion in The Republic that philosophers should rule the political community. The community should want them to rule because they would be the best at ruling—and in ruling well, they would justly earn the public honors bestowed on those who do the most to benefit the community.

Now, as with most topics discussed by Socrates and his interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues, determining the author’s final position is more elusive than first appears. For one thing, it’s not clear that philosophers actually value the public honors that are the primary reward of political rule; it’s therefore unclear if they would even want to rule. For another, determining who actually possesses knowledge and wisdom in political matters is tricky, since it’s not clear who is qualified to make that determination other than a fellow philosopher. That slipperiness can also make it possible for well-spoken non-philosophers convincingly to manipulate the multitude into supporting their own self-interested bids for political power.

But there is an additional and more fundamental problem with the rule of philosopher kings: The claim that certain members of the political community have qualities (the possession of knowledge and wisdom) that entitle them to political rule offends the pride of non-philosophers, who want to believe they are entitled to a share in ruling as well, despite their comparative lack of knowledge and wisdom.

(In the dialogue, the ideal city avoids this problem, in part, by inculcating a “noble lie” in its citizens, teaching them that members of the city’s philosophic ruling class are born with gold in their bodies, while members of the lower classes are mixed with less precious metals—silver and bronze. That would seem to solve the problem—except that it’s unclear who would institute such a myth in the first place, since it’s the myth that justifies the rule of philosophers and philosophers alone who recognize the need for such a myth.)

It's this demand for a say in rule on the part of the multitude that led Plato’s student Aristotle to suggest in his Politics that in most circumstances the best achievable political arrangement is one in which the many and the few share rule and its resulting honors. But in the Republic, a dialogue devoted to exploring the highest demands of (and aporias embedded in) the idea of justice, the rule of philosopher kings is held out as the key to achieving perfect justice and a thriving community, with less perfect alternatives mostly left unexplored.

In sum, Plato shows that for a polity to thrive, it must be ruled by philosophers. But he also shows that most people would refuse to accept the legitimacy of such a system, in part because they pridefully reject the presumption that some people are more entitled to rule than they are.

The Place of Knowledge in Modern Politics

In constructing his thought experiment about justice and its limits, Plato didn’t envision the eventual creation of a political community and economy so large and complex that it explicitly requires large numbers of educated “experts” to function effectively. Neither did he envision that such a (or any) community would be founded on the idea of natural human equality, implying that a democratic republic based on presumed universal consent is the only legitimate form of government.

Yet this is the (modern) world in which we live. We live in nation states with advanced and highly dynamic capitalist economies and complex welfare states that provide minimal support for the poor, a range of benefits for the middle class, and numerous other forms of taxation, regulation, and redistribution of resources across the polity. Cutting-edge science and technology, along with bureaucratized forms of rationalized institutional organization, make much of this possible and is in turn fostered by state. Put all of it together, and it quickly becomes clear that, far more than the ancient polis, the modern nation state requires rule by those who are knowledgeable and wise—and that we’ve come to view higher education (especially elite forms of it) as a path to acquiring the requisite knowledge and wisdom.  

At the same time, we remain a community devoted to the baseline fact of human equality. Every citizen gets a single vote, and elected and appointed offices are open to all. This implies that anyone and everyone is potentially fit to rule.

The tension between these competing visions—one a hierarchy topped by those who attend and graduate from the most elite educational institutions, the other a presumption of citizenship among equals—defines our politics today. It would be one thing if both major parties affirmed aspects of each vision. That was the case forty years ago, when Republicans still valued higher education and Democrats were less likely to defer reflexively to those holding elite educational credentials. But today, with our politics defined in large part by educational polarization, we have one party that highly values and rewards those who have acquired specialized knowledge through higher education, and another that actively disdains these same people.

That’s dangerous, since it risks creating a political culture in which only one party produces potential officeholders who possess the knowledge required to craft wise and effective policies. It also risks turning the other party into a movement of Know Nothings whose members proudly drape themselves in symbols of small-d democratic patriotism. Once that happens, the first party will be tempted by arrogance, viewing itself as the natural home for members of the community who are truly fit to rule. And that conviction will only confirm the second party in its sense of grievance and wounded pride.

A Call to Greater Modesty and Honesty

In what I’ve just schematically sketched, I left out one crucial detail—the fact that our well-educated credentialized experts often make mistakes, and that those mistakes severely undermine their claim to possess a special fitness to rule our highly dynamic and complex communities. My own view is that these elites do a worse job than they believe about themselves, but not as poor a job as their right-populist, muckraking critics contend. (Because of educational polarization, the right has a powerful political incentive to hype the ineptitude of self-proclaimed experts.)

But what is the alternative? We do need knowledgeable and wise leadership. If we no longer trust elite educational credentials to serve as a reliable proxy for knowledge and wisdom, what are some other options? I can’t readily think of any—and certainly don’t think the Republican willingness to treat personal loyalty to Donald Trump as a precondition for public service and guarantee of its attendant honors shows much promise.

I’d suggest, instead, that we encourage our elites (and their critics) to lower their expectations, acknowledge uncertainty, treat proposals for new programs or reforms of old ones as experiments, and acknowledge failure when it happens (as it inevitably will). The way it is now, those who rule in the name of expertise don’t want to concede errors for fear of losing their power and the honors that go with it, while those who criticize these experts gain political advantage by exaggerating the scope of elite errors, treating them as revelatory of the entire system’s rottenness. We would be much better off if both sides displayed quite a bit more modesty and honesty.

Would such a change contribute to a decrease in educational polarization? I’m not at all sure. But I do think it could help to lower the political temperature by a few degrees. Even if getting there proves impossible, there’s nothing to be lost from the trying.