James Kalb over at Crisis on the rise of a new "ruling class of experts"

Here's an excerpt of an interesting piece by James Kalb at Crisis Magazine:

The ‘60s claimed to be about liberation. In fact, they were much more about the rise of a new ruling class of experts, managers, and media people. That class, which is still with us, has some unusual qualities. The most notable is that it denies that it is a ruling class, and claims instead to be a neutral means through which expertise, rational administration, and the machinery of publicity help people attain their goals. Our rulers today tell us they are here to help us: to educate us, free us from the prejudices of the past, let us know what we really want, and make sure we all get it. They claim their power is liberating, and back up the claim by pointing to their suppression of authorities that compete with them, such as family, custom, religion, and traditional hierarchies. If we can go shopping, play video games, surf the Internet, and sleep around, and we don’t have to listen to Mom, Dad, or the Pope, we must be free. Aren’t suppression of incorrect thoughts and safeguards like the Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) mandate worth having to protect that?

A class that rules by claiming not to rule needs to hide what it is. Our new rulers deny their identity as a class while denouncing the influence of classes that remain identifiable as such. If the Supreme Court is all white or male, that’s domination by a particular class and something must be done about it. If it’s all graduates of Yale and Harvard Law School, and recent presidential elections have all been contests between various Yale and Harvard graduates, that’s not domination by a particular class, it’s just proof that Yale and Harvard are superior and the more power we give the Supreme Court and president the better.

-snip-

 The integration of the new ruling class with the news media, manned by Columbia J-School grads instead of the hard-drinking wise-cracking street-savvy reporters of yore, ensured that the official story would be accepted at face value. The result was a consensus that liberation meant stripping minority communities of leadership through affirmative action, and turning women from homemakers into single moms getting by on a waitress’s pay and the occasional welfare or child support check.

Something similar happened in the Church. Instead of tradition and hierarchical discipline the Church would be guided by expert committees and supervised by the news media. Vatican II gave the process a boost through the prominent role it gave academic experts, a role encouraged by its decision to issue lengthy pronouncements on the general nature and direction of the Church. The emphasis on formal expertise was then fortified by the creation of national bishops’ conferences, the need to interpret the Council and put together the new initiatives it seemed to call for, and the growth of bureaucracy at all levels. The occasional hierarch might resist the demands of the rising academic and bureaucratic magisterium, but if he kicked up too much of a fuss a media campaign would intervene, so it was easier to go along. And if faithful Catholics were more attached to rosaries than newly-composed songs of worship, they were told they were wrong and the People of God wanted the songs even if they didn’t know it. If the result was that the People of God dropped out altogether, that’s too bad but there are always growing pains and there’s no going back.