“We don’t need better publics. We need better elites.”
So declared political scientist Nils Gilman in a talk on “institutional decay” at a conference I helped organize in 2017. Since then, it’s become something of a refrain of his. Gilman argued that elites—who had cordoned themselves off from the interests of the working classes and who had eroded trust in science, democracy, the academy, and other institutions—were a bigger problem than the general public that had recently voted for Brexit and Donald Trump.
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