The Paradox of American Democracy

"Judis makes the case that elites lost the ethos of disinterestedness, one of the great ideals of the progressive era. It connects back to pragmatism, which advocated disinterested policy makers making decisions based on a calculus about the public good. This progressive ideal of disinterestedness became enshrined in the way that elites thought. If you look at the Federal Reserve, or the Brookings Institution, or The New York Times , all these elite entities were supposed to act with blindness towards the class interests of whoever was running and funding them. Unfortunately, conservatives have waged a long and successful war against the ideal of disinterestedness. The systems keep getting worse, but the diagnosis doesn’t change. Once you lose an ideal like disinterestedness, it’s hard to recover. We’re now locked in an era of ideological warfare where there’s no common idea of the common good. Croly’s definition – using Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends – is about as precise as you can get. It captures the notion that we need a robust government to protect liberty. We need a strong state to preserve freedom – that’s what liberals believe, no matter what they call themselves."