Establishment

What Is the ‘Establishment’ Now?

In modern politics, running against this shadowy group is the quickest way to join it.

By Jack Shafer

No more sulfurous epithet has been sounded in our current presidential campaign than the charge that a candidate, media outlet, or party represents the “Establishment.” You knew what Bernie Sanders was feeling when he called Hillary Clinton the “candidate of the Democratic establishment”; you can taste his contempt in his brush-off of the Des Moines Register and the Concord Monitor’s endorsements of Clinton this weekend, calling it the work of the “media establishment.” So possessed with antiestablishmentarianist instincts is Sanders that for a short while he was even including Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign as part of an Establishment that is aligned against him.

Proving the plasticity and universality of the term, Hillary Clinton went on CNN last week to refute Sanders. “Are you the establishment?” Wolf Blitzer asked her. Unleashing her best verbal boomerang, Clinton responded that the true Establishment candidate is Sanders. “He’s been in Congress, he’s been elected to office a lot longer than I have,” Clinton said. “I was in the Senate for eight wonderful years representing New York. He’s been in the Congress for 25, and so I’ll let your viewers make their own judgment.”

And how about Martin O’Malley? How does the Establishment taxonomy sort him? “He’s an establishment candidate who wants to be seen as an insurgent, but Sanders has the insurgent vote and Clinton has the establishment vote, so there’s no room for O’Malley,” said political analyst Todd Eberly.

On the Republican side of the equation, there’s much, much more Establishment name-calling. Jeb Bush and the GOP’s pow-wowing party leaders are said to represent the Establishment. For the temerity of publishing its recent “Against Trump“ symposium, the National Review is now getting the Establishment treatment, too. “Who, me?” National Review Editor Rich Lowry responded to the charge, noting that if contributors to the dump Trump package—Brent Bozell, Dana Loesch, Katie Pavlich, Erick Erickson, et al.— “are the establishment, the world really has been turned upside down.” The genuine Republican establishment, Lowry wrote, is “currently negotiating the terms of their surrender to Trump.” Just days ago, Fox Entertainment News Channel Political Editor Chris Stirewalt concurred with this assessment in his “GOP Establishment Leaning Toward Trump Over Cruz” piece. Ted Cruz seconded this notion, telling reporters in New Hampshire, “We’re seeing the Washington establishment abandoning Marco Rubio and unifying behind Donald Trump.”

If you’re of a certain age, the invocation of the Establishment gives off the scent of the 1960s, when it was believed to be the invisible but ever-present forces of conformity and societal control. Depending on who you talked to, the Establishment was the force behind the war in Vietnam, the muscle that demanded the enforcement of the drug laws, the power behind racism, the reason college dorms were segregated into male and female. It was—and remains—the placeholder for the nameless but omnipotent “other side” of any power relationship. In short, the Establishment was your parents.

I don’t think kids still blame the Establishment for everything untoward, but politicians who grew up in that era can’t get enough of it as an all-purpose term of derision. Nor can members of the press. According to the Atlantic’s Molly Ball, most of the Republican candidates—except Trump and Cruz—represent the Establishment. The American Spectator’s Jeffrey Lord included South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley as a member in good standing for delivering what he described as the “GOP Establishment response” to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

But haven’t they gone overboard with the term? A bewildered David French just asked in the National Review, “How did Rubio morph—in the eyes of his critics—from tea party to ‘establishment’ in less than one election cycle?” [Emphasis in the original.] And is there anybody on the planet who is more Establishment than Cruz, his name-calling to the contrary? As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote last month, Cruz attended Princeton and Harvard Law, neither of which has much outsider status. He clerked at the Supreme Court, which almost defines the Establishment. He pumped bilge as a low-level deckhand for President George W. Bush’s administration, perhaps the most Establishment of all Establishments. He belongs to the U.S. Senate, which is practically an Establishment social club.

“The establishment, the media, the special interests, the lobbyists, the donors—they’re all against me,” Trump said today in an online ad. (This from a billionaire real-estate developer who himself is a donor, a special interest and a media brand.) Sarah Palin—a creation of the proto-Establishment Republican Sen. John McCain—took her own pre-emptive shot at the Establishment and when she bucked party elders to endorse Trump. Said Palin, “Oh my goodness gracious. What the heck would the establishment know about conservatism?”

What the heck is the Establishment? Like all systems of taxonomy, a perfectly consistent definition the Establishment cannot be found. The late political journalist Henry Fairlie took credit for coining the term in a 1968 New Yorker article in which he pointed back to a Sept. 23, 1955, Spectator article he wrote that defined the political “Establishment” as both the centers of “official power” and “the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.” Others might have mentioned the establishment in earlier contexts, but the Oxford English Dictionary gives Fairlie the nod for applying its mechanisms to politics.

The Establishment has been best understood as the primary source of power in a society, the implicit organization to which all politically minded people long to join but few will confess to being a member. While an eternal body, the Establishment is never static, collecting and expelling members like a societal ventricle to serve the whole organism. The Establishment cares more about its own continuance than it does its ideology, which makes it a malleable and adaptive beast. In fact, the best way to apply for membership is not to suck up to its leaders—they have all the allies they need—but to attack them and thereby pose a Counter-Establishment that must be placated or otherwise tamed. The person the Establishment needs, to follow Marxist logic, is somebody who wouldn’t want them as a member.

As we’ve seen this campaign cycle, the Establishment is not a monolith, but cleaved into at least two opposed organizations, the Democratic Establishment and the Republican Establishment. At least, it wears those faces in public. Behind the scenes, it can sneakily fuse back together. In a brilliant 1961 essay that appeared in the American Scholar, Richard H. Rovere cited no less an authority on the Establishment than John Kenneth Galbraith to note that the “perfect Establishment figure … would be the Republican called to service in a Democratic administration.” Nobody interpreted the Establishment’s tendencies toward duplicity with such fervor as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev. As Rovere wrote, Khrushchev told columnist Walter Lippmann in April 1961 that Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (R-N.Y.) was actually the power behind the Democratic President John F. Kennedy’s White House.

One advantage of calling out the Establishment for a political tongue-lashing is, of course, the Establishment rarely shows up to take its beating. Its fellows either decline to engage the attackers or, if pushed, deny membership or deny that any such thing exists. Although political reporters should know better than filling their pages with stories about the Establishment, they encourage the name calling as a useful hook for their coverage. The Establishment candidate is winning. The Establishment candidate is losing. The Establishment is switching candidates. The Establishment is being undermined by the Counter-Establishment! And so on.

One thing that hasn’t changed over time is the Establishment’s role as the universal enemy. Bernie denounces Hillary and her friends as the Establishment; she says, so’s your mother. With so many powerful notables from some many different walks of life and so many political persuasions denouncing the Establishment, can it really be said to exist as anything but a negative construct political types can define themselves against? Remember, the modern Republican Party’s great hero, Ronald Reagan, began his political career as a foe of the California Republican Establishment and then the Eastern Republican Establishment that opposed Barry Goldwater. Later, he defied the party’s Establishment to oppose a sitting GOP president for his party’s nomination, thereby weakening him and sending him to defeat. Four years later, he challenged and defeated the Washington Establishment that ran the nation to win the presidency.

On Jan. 20, 1981, he was inaugurated president and, by extension, crowned the Establishment’s new boss.