Elites are under fire, and not without reason. Over the past decade, nearly every pillar of the modern elite has revealed its hollowness.
Public health officials told us masks didn’t work, until they did, then closed playgrounds while leaving big-box stores open. Major news outlets pushed narratives they later quietly retracted, from the viability of the lab leak hypothesis to the Hunter Biden laptop.
University presidents couldn’t say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their own codes of conduct. Tech CEOs promised to protect speech, then blacklisted dissenters at the government’s request. Hollywood gave up on storytelling to produce lectures in costume.
Economists and policymakers dismissed inflation as a passing concern, then watched it gut household budgets. They insisted mass immigration was an unqualified good, even as housing costs soared, services strained and social cohesion frayed. From COVID mandates to campus mobs, from censorship to cultural decay, the people in charge have not just failed, they’ve discredited themselves.
In response, a populist revolt has gained steam throughout the West. Many now say the problem is elites themselves, that leadership is a lie, hierarchy a con and that the wisdom of the people should rule unfiltered.
This is where conservatives must draw a line. There is nothing inherently wrong with elites. The problem is simply that ours have failed us.
Conservatism, in its truest and most dignified form, has never been anti-elitist. It’s anti-revolutionary. It distrusts mob rule not because it holds the people in contempt, but because it understands human nature too well to entrust civilization to the whims of the masses. That’s not cynicism, it’s wisdom.
The conservative tradition has always accepted hierarchy as a fact of life — and often a necessary good. There will always be leaders and followers, the cultivated and the crude, the strong and the weak. The question is not whether hierarchies exist, but whether they are just and capable.
Since the French Revolution, the West has been haunted by the spectre of egalitarianism elevated to a fanatic creed. The guillotine didn’t merely decapitate a king — it aimed to destroy the very concept of natural order. In its place came Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naive worship of the “general will,” a cult of popular sovereignty that mistook numbers for wisdom and emotion for truth.
But crowds do not think. They react. They surge, scream and stampede. As the crowd grows, the mind shrinks. That is the enduring lesson of the revolution: when the mob is sovereign, civilization burns.
The conservative does not idolize the mob. He fears it. He respects the people but insists they deserve more than flattery. They deserve leadership. Real leadership — wise, learned, prudent and self-restrained. The kind that builds cathedrals rather than chasing hashtags. The kind that governs with duty rather than ruling for applause.
Our problem today is not that we have elites. It’s that they are unworthy of the station they hold. They sneer at tradition, mock virtue and outsource their conscience to PR firms and DEI consultants. They lack the moral formation, the historical consciousness and the sense of stewardship that once defined true aristocracy — not of blood, but of character.
What we need is not to abolish elites, but to demand better ones. We need statesmen, not managers; custodians, not careerists; a ruling class that sees its role not as a license to exploit, but as a duty to preserve — to pass on the best of what came before, and to elevate what lies ahead.
That is the conservative vision: a society not of rigid castes or phony egalitarianism, but of ordered liberty, guided by a moral elite that’s worthy of its name. A society where hierarchy is not oppression but harmony; where authority is earned, and exercised with humility.
Revolution flatters the masses and devours them. Conservatism respects the people enough to guide them. That’s not elitism. That’s responsibility. And it’s long overdue.
National Post
