I have always loved the opening lines of William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming – his words seem at once mystical, haunting, and as meaningful in our time as in his:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote those words in 1919, in the aftermath of The Great War, when it must have seemed that the whole world had lost its way. Americans have been spoiled because in our lifetime war has taken place “over there” instead of “over here.”  We know little of what it is like to watch the structures and institutions that provide order and meaning disintegrate overnight.

And yet, it may be just as hard to experience the slow death of institutions that we have grown up with and grown fond of – a political system that lifted our aspirations and our sense of national pride; a business community that we could entrust with our material wellbeing and our sense of worth in the world; a government that seemed to work for each of us and all of us all at the same time.

It seems fair to say that life in America is a good deal harder and meaner than it used to be. Our institutions have lost their sheen of benevolence and most of our good will. If we are to make it right again, it would help to know how and why it went wrong. An article from New Yorker columnist George Packer offers a big head start.

The Old Ruling Elite
Packer has penned a brilliant piece in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs (http://fam.ag/raulXS) on the demise of what he calls the Ruling Elite in America. Here is how he describes their role:

“At the same time, the country’s elites were playing a role that today is almost unrecognizable. They actually saw themselves as custodians of national institutions and interests. The heads of banks, corporations, universities, law firms, foundations, and media companies were neither more nor less venal, meretricious, and greedy than their counterparts today. But they rose to the top in a culture that put a brake on these traits and certainly did not glorify them…(They) did not act on behalf of a single, highly privileged point of view—that of the rich. Rather, they rose above the country’s conflicting interests and tried to unite them into an overarching idea of the national interest.”

I remember that world from when I was young. It was orderly, well-managed, hierarchical, and very autocratic. America was at the zenith of its worldwide power and influence. The changes of the 1960s and 1970s that would rock the foundations were yet to come. America the country felt much like a vast corporation that was closely held and tightly-managed by an all-powerful Board – what Packer calls the Ruling Elite.

Of course, it wasn’t terribly democratic. And it wasn’t exactly government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” either. It was an aristocracy of the elite with a public veneer of democracy. Although we got to vote for elected officials, the people we got to pick from had already been selected in advance. So mostly, we got to ratify choices that the Ruling Elite had already made.

But, so long as the ruling elite consensus held, it worked really well. Government functioned, business prospered, and wealth was increasingly shared. The country moved slowly towards a kind of single class society, but with enough variation to honor the uniquely American belief in moving up and moving out.

So what happened? Well, of course, the times changed, and the world changed. But mostly we changed. We wanted a lot more choice and a lot more personal power in our lives than the old system could afford us. So we set about dismantling the old elite power structures. To our great surprise, “power to the people” turned out to be way more doable than we ever dreamed.

But here’s what we never saw coming – the possibility that we might dump the old structures before we could find their right replacements. Having a governing consensus from the top down requires control by a benevolent elite. We are not up for that anymore, and neither are they. And building a governing consensus from the bottom up requires brand new mechanisms that we have only barely begun to put in place. So, out with the old, and oops – not quite ready with the new.

That “oops” should tell us two things. First, for the short term we had better be prepared for a lot of governing chaos but not a lot of good governance. Institutions reflect the consciousness that created them, and running old institutions with a new consciousness never really works. And second, we have to shorten up our sights. Building a governing consensus from the bottom up is almost by definition a purely local endeavor.

If Yeats’ Second Coming is really coming, it will emerge down here with us, and not up there with the “them” in Washington and New York.