Hollywood, ESPN and other debacles

Elites care more about what peers think than doing their jobs well

Even New York Times columnist David Brooks admits it: “Our elites really do stink.” He’s right. But why? In part because they’re inbred, and care too much about each other’s opinions.

I’ve been watching a lot of institutions fail lately, from Hollywood, to the news media, to the NFL and ESPN, to political parties and academia, and I see a common factor: Whatever jobs its members are supposed to be doing, our ruling class cares more about what the rest of the ruling class thinks than about the jobs it’s entrusted to do. The result, quite often, is a debacle.

Take the NFL protests. These have played badly with fans — you know, the people who actually attend the games and watch them on TV. But to Roger Goodell and the people who run the NFL, “social justice” and progressive views on race take a priority. So even though the player protests have been poison for ratings, the NFL has been unwilling to stop them.

And look at ESPN. As a sports network, its primary audience is white, often working-class men who want to watch and talk about sports. But ESPN’s on-air talent seems determined to pretend that they’re on MSNBC, delivering “woke” lessons about politics to an audience that wants to hear sports news.

Again, the on-air talent and the management are heavily invested in looking progressive to other folks in broadcasting. The audience? They’re an afterthought. (ESPN finally suspended Jemele Hill for suggesting that people supporting the players start a boycott, but the network was OK when she called President Trump a “white supremacist.”) The fans aren’t so hot on being lectured, apparently; ESPN’s ratings are falling.

Hollywood was happy to talk about politics, too, and lecture the rest of America about how morally inferior we are compared with our show business betters — Hollywood is America’s moral conscience, according to former Harvey Weinstein pal George Clooney. Everyone in Hollywood posed and preened in support of various progressive causes even as they were, in fact, covering for all sorts of sexual predators. On top of that, most of the films they’ve been making are terrible. (Mostly remakes, comic-book movies and, for variety, remakes of comic-book movies. When it’s something new, it’s often a preachy bomb such as Clooney’s Suburbicon.)

In my own field of higher education, it’s the same. When students went from simply protesting to disrupting events and mobbing speakers (and fellow students), the leaders of higher education didn’t respond appropriately. Part of it is cowardice on their part, but that cowardice stemmed largely from an agreement with the protesters, because they shared the values of higher education administrators. I’m betting pro-Trump student groups who shut down classes or assaulted speakers, if such incidents existed, would have been given far less leeway.

Now the schools where those protesters ruled, from the University of Missouri to Evergreen State to Reed College to Oberlin College, are in trouble. Had the leaders done their jobs instead of trying to look good for their peers, their institutions would be doing better.

The current hip term for this behavior is “virtue signaling” — the effort to demonstrate to one’s peer groups that one holds all the right views and positions. Of course, all humans virtue-signal to a degree. What makes it worse today is that our ruling class is such a monoculture. And it’s an intensely tribal group, one with great fear of ostracism.

A century ago, America had different, overlapping ruling classes with different values: Corporate moguls seldom sought the approval of press barons who seldom cared what academics thought about them and vice versa. Now they’re all cut from the same cloth, which makes this phenomenon much more pronounced, and much more dangerous.

Our ruling class has a diversity problem. But I think it’s about to get more diverse.

Which is good. Because the current one, as Brooks says, stinks.