When I was young and inexperienced, with no money and no career, I nonetheless made a firm assumption about the people who had made it, who had risen to the top of their fields. They were daring individuals, I thought, outspoken and candid, willing to go against the crowd. Those were people with a skeptical eye on the conventional wisdom, ever ready to challenge and dispute whenever they sensed a stale assertion of it.
When I worked for Dana Gioia at the National Endowment for the Arts, he told me once that when he was in advertising, his team would meet at the end of the year to review themselves, and they spent five times as many minutes discussing what they did wrong as they spent discussing what they did right. That was the kind of toughness I imagined happened in every elite circle.
Look at the leaders of institutions today, however, and you witness a pageant of conformity and timidity, guardedness ever present, the most powerful people in politics, education, entertainment, media, and business speaking in well-rehearsed terms, mouthing standard pieties with an air of solemnity that’s one millimeter thick. Political correctness has turned them into cliche machines.
But after Richards was selected as the new host of “Jeopardy!,” some comments he'd made on his podcast between 2013 and 2014 surfaced and set him up for what’s now a familiar ritual: the high-profile cancellation. The ritual meant the loss of his post and also a confession/contrition/plea on the accused’s part that’s painful to read—not because of the sentiments themselves, but because of their dispiritingly banal expression.
Richards might have said, “Yeah, I made some dumb remarks just trying to get a laugh—I don’t regard them as cause for termination eight years later, though—let’s ease up, okay?”
No, instead we got the nauseatingly customary script:
“It is humbling to confront a terribly embarrassing moment of misjudgment, thoughtlessness, and insensitivity from nearly a decade ago,” he said.
It sounded like every other public apology we’ve heard in recent years, with studied humility and sober drama of self-confrontation. The words follow with all the formulaic layout of an algebraic equation. We have the expected family invocation as well, and role model talk: “My responsibilities today as a father, husband, and public personality who speaks to many people through my role on television means I have substantial and serious obligations as a role model, and I intend to live up to them.”
I don’t blame Richards for this, though. It’s the environment he’s in, a tiresome and phony place that the rest of America recognizes instantly for its mendacity. These declarations sound so sincere, but we know how calculating they are. To the material loss suffered by the penitent one, we have the pain of self-emasculation added in the most predictable language. Can’t any of these people think for themselves? Richards’ public career is over, at least for the near future, and maybe the distant one as well. What does he have to lose? Why go official and betray his own heart (which is precisely what a man who adopts the idiom of his executioners is doing), even when you know it won’t save you?
Again, these aren’t people beaten down by life, their egos crushed by poverty and disappointment. They have all the trappings of self-determination—money, education, worldliness, competitiveness, achievement—and yet the working-class guy and gal show a heckuva lot more independent spirit than Mr. Success ever does.
The willingness to cast an entire racial group as deficient in some way used to be called “stereotyping,” and enlightened folk universally rejected it. Here, however, it was offered as an enlightening observation. The condescension was thick and gleeful. The host wasn’t aware of how smug she sounded, but ordinary Americans have seen and heard such sentiments over and over, and they discern the contempt more acutely than the elites realize.
How irritating it is, then, for these judgmental elites to appear so weak and obedient and cookie-cut at times that call for bold presentation. They’re avid about their superiority, but feeble in their individuality. They profess to be the best and the brightest, but they sink into stupid politically correct truisms when the pressure’s on. Liberalism claims to honor the individual voice, the lone dissenter, but never does a prominent 21st-century liberal wish to fall out of step with his fellows. The guns of cancellation are always primed, and he knows it.
A country whose leadership class is fearful and wary is in trouble. Insecurity makes for bad decisions, and for bad symbolism, too. A leader who stands up and apologizes for the “systemic” sins of the institution he leads doesn’t come off as properly sensitive and constructively progressive. He’s just weak. The celebrity who gets down on his knees and apologizes for some “phobic” remark he made years earlier on the internet isn’t rightly repentant and newly enlightened. He’s just humiliating himself. Ordinary Americans draw a pat conclusion: These figureheads make a lot of money and they’re awfully full of themselves and down on us, but when you get down to it, they’re not so great, not at all.
This is the end of a great American tradition of rebelliousness. Ben Franklin ran away from Boston and struck out on his own as a mere teenager. Emerson praised self-reliance as the essence of genius. Thoreau headed to the woods because he couldn’t stand the copycat mentality of fellow citizens. Huck at the end aims to light out for the territory, knowing he’ll never fit in with civilized society.
Those figures are the opposite of today’s Americans aspiring to the realms of the elite. Ambitious ones sense at an early age that climbing the ladder means fitting in and filtering impulses. The pipeline has sensors attuned to pick up the maverick spirit and mark it as suspect. Our leaders are tame souls whose wills are triggered mainly by the appearance of a rogue in their midst.
Therein lies the aversion to Donald Trump. It wasn’t Trump’s politics or policies that disturbed the elite. Instead, it was his headstrong personality and outspoken words. The content of his thought and speech they might have opposed in the normal political ways, but the character of the man couldn’t be handled that way. His performances could be received by them only as an admonishment. He spoke his mind. They didn’t, and that made them feel bad about themselves—as it should. Let’s hope that more untamed figures surface and do the same thing.
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