Ivy League professors claim that recent Supreme Court judgments ending racial gerrymandering undermine democracy. But what they truly mean by “democracy” is the preservation of their own influence. If we actually want to enhance the popular voice, no reform would do that as effectively as the simple measure of depriving elite university graduates and faculty of the right to vote in what are supposed to be popular elections.
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William F. Buckley once confessed that he would sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in one governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University. He did not doubt their intelligence or even their good intentions. He feared most of all their intellectual arrogance, combined with their refusal to accept any common premise with the broader public they presumed to lead.
Graduates of elite universities and their close peers do not merely succeed as individuals. They dominate the institutions that actually administer our lives: finance and corporate leadership pipelines, the federal bureaucracy and congressional staff, the federal judiciary and white-shoe law firms, and, perhaps most thoroughly and consequentially, the vast network of large nonprofits, foundations, advocacy groups, and universities themselves that function as a parallel government. These monster nonprofits shape policy, culture, education, and even foreign affairs with media reach and insulation that even elected officials envy. They operate with tax advantages and private resources to advance priorities often incubated in the elite academic environments. The largest and most prestigious of those foundations are shielded by untaxed endowments from direct accountability to voters or to any other living being.
American elite higher education today is a mechanism for reproducing a self-reinforcing worldview that treats the American people, their history, their borders, and their common sense as belchings to be ignored or, at best, as poorly informed whims requiring expert “nudges.” Since that class controls the institutions that write the rules, interpret the Constitution, allocate philanthropic capital, and staff the permanent government, democracy becomes a ritual rather than a mode of ensuring that the concerns and welfare of the people at large are decisive.
This is the predictable outcome of a credentialing system that funnels ambitious talent into a narrow set of high-status paths, immerses them in a distinctive worldview, and then multiplies their influence through networks and institutional control. One person, one vote on Election Day becomes one person, many thousands of votes in regulatory drafting, judicial interpretation, grantmaking, media framing, corporate compliance regimes, and the administrative state. The average citizen’s preferences on borders, energy costs, education content, family policy, or national sovereignty are routinely treated as grumblings to be managed rather than democratic signals to be respected. We have permitted the emergence of a de facto ruling class whose authority rests less on ongoing popular consent than on credentials, networks, and capture of the commanding heights of law, administration, culture, and philanthropy.
Back in 1861, when universities were the preserve of the very few, the British thinker and sometime MP John Stuart Mill proposed “plural voting,” which included granting additional votes to university graduates. Nowadays, a proper respect for the balance of class interests and class power in America would require denying the franchise to graduates of elite universities. If this class already exercises power vastly disproportionate to its numbers through poorly accountable institutions, stripping them of the ballot, as Britain still strips members of the House of Lords, would force our own lordlings and ladylings to actually persuade their fellow citizens rather than rule them by decree. It would acknowledge that the “merit” American elite educational institutions certify has become decoupled from the common sense, practical experience, and attachment to place and tradition that once characterized American leadership. Buckley’s citizens are chosen according to the alphabet rather than grades, recommendations, and extracurriculars—plumbers, shopkeepers, nurses, veterans, and parents possess forms of knowledge that seminar rooms often disdain.
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Some—more utopian—might argue that the remedy is not to disenfranchise anyone but to dismantle the structures that grant any single class such concentrated and unaccountable leverage. Shrink the administrative state and the scope of federal power so fewer decisions are made by people insulated from ordinary consequences. Reform higher education by ending the federal student-loan regime that subsidizes ideological monocultures and inflates costs. Strengthen the constitutional mechanisms that tie power to popular will through vigorous separation of powers and appointing judges who interpret rather than legislate. Above all, recover a cultural prejudice in favor of practical wisdom, local knowledge, and loyalty to the actual communities that make up the republic over abstract theorizing and credentialed cosmopolitanism. And, as Buckley himself suggested, require that all young men and women prove their love of country and of others by a term of compulsory national service—in my view, preferably military.
Realistically, though, this elite class is far too entrenched to ever allow elected officials to shrink the administrative state, subordinate judges to written law and the law of the Constitution, or allow their foundations to be taxed into oblivion. They are too globalist ever to dedicate years of their lives or years of their children’s lives to serving America’s great unwashed, as those ignorant masses wish to be served. Thus, the only workable solution left is to strip the teachers and the products of America’s elite universities of the vote.
Buckley’s preference to be ruled by names drawn out of the phone book was never anti-intellectual. Buckley’s wish was in service of the proposition that self-government requires leaders who share fundamental understandings and commitments with the governed. When elite institutions systematically produce leaders who do not, the corrective is not more expert insulation but a deliberate rebalancing toward the common sense of the broader public. The first two thousand names in any American city directory still contain more collective wisdom about what sustains families, communities, and a free society than the faculty clubs of our most prestigious universities. Restoring that balance is not a rejection of excellence. It is a requirement of popular sovereignty and self-government.
If your alma mater’s president makes more than her football coach, if it has more graduates who are Mellon grantees than hold ROTC commissions, it is time for you to give something up for your country and for its civic equality. Given the present disproportionate cultural, social, and political power of elite university graduates—and their alienation from the country from which they are supposed to be drawn—it should be “Brown or the Ballot.” Nobody should be able to access both.
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