The Free Press
Readers of The Free Press are smart, opinionated, and ideologically diverse. That means we get a lot of really fascinating letters. We can’t publish all of them, but every month we print a handful that have us talking in the office.
First up this month, Rob Henderson responds to Tyler Cowen’s recent column defending intellectual elitism. “Too many who despise ‘the elites’ do not look closely enough at the dissidents—or assess what they get right and wrong, and how they got there,” Cowen wrote. Henderson, on the other hand, says that mistrust in elites arises more out of a disconnect between “experts” and elites:
In reflecting on the collapse of institutional trust during the pandemic, one moment stands out: The summer of 2020, when many officials and media figures who had urged strict lockdowns pivoted to endorsing mass gatherings for Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
This sudden shift created widespread confusion and suspicion. If Covid was so dangerous that funerals and family visits had to be canceled, why were mass protests permitted? It seemed as though the rules weren’t grounded in science but in politics. Many interpreted this double standard not just as hypocrisy but as a revelation: If the cause was fashionable, restrictions were negotiable. Some people refused the Covid vaccine not out of ignorance, but as a way to object to what they saw as a double standard. If mass gatherings were permissible for political causes, then perhaps the threat wasn’t as grave as claimed.
Tyler Cowen recently argued that the “real elites”—the expert scientists—remained closer to the truth and that critics of elites aren’t looking far enough up the hierarchy with regard to Covid transmission and vaccinations. But this misses a crucial point. People too often conflate experts and elites. They are not interchangeable. When elites don’t care about a topic, the experts rule. But once elites turn their attention to an issue—especially when it carries strong moral overtones—elite opinion usually overrides expert consensus.
Elites like to portray their views as aligned with expert analysis, but this is often a mirage. Elite opinion is shaped more by prestige than by technical knowledge. And when moral righteousness enters the mix, it often supplants reasoned, evidence-based guidance.
This disconnect—between what the experts recommended and what the elites declared—helps explain why trust eroded. Many Americans weren’t rejecting science. They were rejecting what looked like elite political manipulation dressed up as science.
Similarly, Christopher Rufo makes a distinction between technological and political issues. America’s elites did well with the former but utterly failed at the latter, he says:
I admire Tyler Cowen, but his recent column on elites in the Covid era has a major blind spot: the failure to separate the technological from the political. On technological questions, America’s educated class performed ably, developing a novel vaccine, maintaining medical systems, and keeping essential goods flowing through the supply chain. But on the political questions, the elites were a disaster.
There still has not been an accounting for some of the most egregious policies of the era. During the pandemic, elites continued the lockdowns beyond the evidence, used heavy-handed censorship of dissent, forced vaccinations on populations that did not need them, and published a steady stream of lies about lockdown duration, post-vaccination transmission, and the origins of the coronavirus.
We all remember the slogans: “Two weeks to stop the spread,” “You can’t transmit the virus after vaccination,” and “the lab leak theory is a racist conspiracy.”
Moreover, the elites revealed that they are not driven by “science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking,” but by a pernicious form of left-wing racialism. During the lockdowns, virtually all of the elite institutions submitted to Black Lives Matter ideologies and encouraged mass protests while simultaneously shutting down churches and small businesses. Some states even considered distributing vaccines according to a racial hierarchy, with “oppressors” at the bottom of the list.
Whatever their technological virtues, American elites caused—and deserved—the collapse in institutional trust. You can’t punish, censor, lie, scold, ideologize, and lock down Americans, a freedom-loving people, without creating a reaction. And this loss of trust cannot be rebuilt by concluding, after the disasters of the past five years, that elites did a pretty good job after all.
Two weeks ago, we launched “This Week in Canada,” a weekly newsletter from Rupa Subramanya dedicated to covering the most important reporting from our northern neighbor.
“All of my stories,” Rupa wrote, “share the same DNA: They speak to the steady growth of the state’s role in daily life, and the slow erosion of our individual liberties in the West.” Some topics mentioned in her first installment reflect that theme, such as the 2022 truckers protest and the rise of assisted suicide in Canada.
Mardi Burton, a reader from Canada, wrote in to remind us that Canadians vary widely in their beliefs on these issues. She also argues that Mark Carney, the Liberal prime minister, won the election because Canadians believe he has the expertise to handle the nation’s economy amid Trump’s tariffs:
I am a Canadian living in Canada who listens regularly to Honestly with Bari Weiss and reads The Free Press. I appreciate the diverse points of view, the straightforward discussion, and the respect for challenging dialogue. I caution The Free Press and Rupa in particular to avoid presenting her perception of events in Canada as the predominant perception of Canadians. For example, the self-identified Freedom Convoy folks were experienced by many of us as detrimental to our freedom to get to work, get our kids to school, and make autonomous choices about healthcare and vaccines.
In some provinces, medical officers of health did acknowledge the mistakes that were made during Covid, most significantly closing schools for too long. Disagreements and discussions occurred in my province at various levels, and I was able to make my own decisions about the Covid vaccine and the associated consequences.
I totally support the right of the Freedom Convoy folks to protest, but please do not present them as effective representatives of the concerns most Canadians experienced during the pandemic. I don’t think it was our finest hour.
Rupa also uses the phrase “alarming normalization of euthanasia.” This debate is ongoing and very important. Many Canadians of good moral conscience want the freedom to end their own lives in the case of untenable suffering that cannot be managed by the health and social services that people in Canada expect. We must be vigilant against the use of euthanasia to hasten the deaths of people who should get better health and social care. This value is not in conflict with the freedom many of us want to have at the end of our lives.
As for our election, I submit that Rupa’s message is a bit misrepresentative of the situation. Yes, many of us, as Canadians, support the Conservatives and the policies they proposed. However, writing that Carney “saw an opening” in Donald Trump “and exploited it” is odd. She could have as easily said, “saw an opening and stepped up.”
The biggest factor in the election outcome likely was Trudeau’s resignation and replacement by someone, Carney, who is perceived to have commitment and expertise in strengthening the Canadian economy. The Trump factor is key, but primarily in the context of who would best manage the Canadian economy.
—Mardi Burton
Every so often, we publish reader suggestions for Things Worth Remembering. Douglas Murray, the column’s original author, wrote about the work of British American poet W.H. Auden on several occasions. We received a submission from Anneliese Renck—a former college professor who now lives with her husband, her kids, and their chickens in Montana—about another Auden poem, his 1938 “Musée des Beaux Arts”:
The morning of 9/11, my high school English teacher read W.H. Auden’s poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts.” We sat in a semicircle at her feet, the desks at our backs closed in around us like spiders in a dark forest. At the time, I was struck by how perfectly the poem interweaves art and myth with simple language and imagery.
Auden wrote his poem after a visit to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Auden presents us with his interpretation of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and reading the poem in tandem with an examination of the painting proves helpful.
What strikes Bruegel’s viewer first is the same thing that struck Auden in his description of it: For a poem whose title implies it will be about Icarus—the Greek figure who built wings of wax and fell after flying too close to the sun, now a fairly universal Western metonym for hubris—the painting’s central figure is strikingly absent from all emphasis. While Icarus does appear in the work’s bottom right-hand corner, as a barely perceptible pair of legs disappearing into the sea, Bruegel chooses as his dual focal points a farmer plowing a field in the foreground and a ship under sail further back to the right. Bruegel paints tranquility and industry, not tragedy.
Auden’s word for this scene is leisurely. His images are those of the plowman, the ship, and the sun. Indeed, he is right: The painting may gesture at Icarus’s death, the myth’s denouement, but Bruegel has chosen to depict this tragedy as part of a larger whole, on a sunny afternoon, in a society whose wheels continue to turn—not even in spite of Icarus’s fate, but likely completely oblivious of it.
Auden wrote his poem in the lead-up to World War II and published it in the spring issue of a magazine. All around him, the human world dealt in bleak grays and shadows, and yet daffodils and snowdrops were appearing all the same, pushing shoots out of the sun-warmed ground and unfurling green, white, and yellow. It is that juxtaposition of emotional depth with the mundane that makes the poem so successful.
I spent many years thinking that “Musée des Beaux Arts” was an odd choice for a poem on 9/11. Hadn’t the whole world, in fact, watched, and not at all “turn[ed] away” and “sailed calmly on”?
Now I think I understand what my English teacher was trying to tell us: that grief, like Icarus falling from the sky at his failure, or like the “dreadful martyrdom” that must “run its course / Anyhow in a corner,” is never as important to the onlooker as it is to those in the throes of it. The poem, I think, was not for me, but for a classmate whose uncle was in one of the towers, or for a friend whose husband in New York wasn’t returning her calls.
How to put a number or measure on loss? The fact is that these experiences are part of life, integral to its very fabric. That, ultimately, is what Auden is telling us in his poem.
I’ve heard some say that “Musée des Beaux Arts” is a callous poem, curmudgeonly at best, to point out that your suffering or mine means very little to others who blithely continue with their lives. On the contrary, I think Auden offers us a hopeful message as his entire world hovers on the edge of a knife blade. He is saying that the ordinary, everyday parts of life—cups of tea, daffodils in spring, children playing—can do nothing other than coexist with the zeniths and nadirs, and that even at our lowest, most desperate moments, life will continue, as it always has, for others. And for us.
Except, of course, for Icarus. Was Auden gesturing at the cost of peace, writing just after Chamberlain’s famous and fateful “peace in our time” that sacrificed Czechoslovakia to the hands of Hitler? Or was he looking further into the future, as Churchill did even then, to the other side of a war where evil is beaten back, but at an immeasurable and immense cost, counted in but not truly measured by human lives? We’ll never know, and that is another thing offered by great writing and art: the chance to reflect on questions with no easy answers and, sometimes, to fill in the gaps left to us with experiences and interpretations that are entirely our own.
—Anneliese Renck
Do you have a unique perspective on a Free Press story? Can you bring your personal experience or expertise to bear on an issue we cover? We want to hear from you. Send us a letter to the editor: letters@TheFP.com.
