In 2026, public trust in the institutions run by the West's educated elite sits at historic lows. Gallup reports just 28% of Americans trust mass media "a great deal" or "a fair amount" — the lowest ever recorded. Confidence in higher education hovers around 42%, rebounding slightly from rock-bottom but still far below 1990s levels. Pew finds only 17% trust the US federal government to do what is right most of the time. A YouGov/Economist poll shows 82% of Americans believe elites are "out of touch with everyday life" and 80% say political institutions have been "captured by the rich and powerful." The Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 paints developed Western nations at the bottom of the global trust index, with widespread insularity and collapsing optimism about the future.
This is not random discontent. It targets a specific stratum: the Western intellectual and managerial class — the credentialed professionals who staff universities, media, NGOs, corporate bureaucracies, government agencies, law, consulting, tech policy, and finance. Often called the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC), the "laptop class," or the "new class elite," they number perhaps 20–30% of the population in advanced economies yet dominate the production and enforcement of culture, policy, and narrative. Many observers — from across the political spectrum — argue this class is the most deeply corrupted in the contemporary West. Not because its members are uniquely venal or bribe-prone (they are not), but because their corruption is epistemic, moral, and structural: a betrayal of the very truth-seeking and stewardship roles they claim.
What "Corrupted" Means Here
Corruption in this context is not primarily financial kickbacks, though regulatory capture and revolving doors exist. It is the systematic subordination of reality, competence, and public duty to status, ideology, and self-preservation. Evidence includes:
Ideological monoculture: Surveys of faculty consistently show 60–90% self-identifying as liberal or very liberal in humanities and social sciences (Harvard FAS faculty: ~63% liberal in 2025; similar patterns at Duke and beyond). Viewpoint diversity has collapsed; dissenting scholars face disinvitation, denial of tenure, or social ostracism.
Institutional failure cascades: The replication crisis in psychology and social sciences (roughly 50% of studies fail to replicate), the mishandling of COVID origins and policy debates, the post-2023 campus wave of antisemitism tolerated under "decolonisation" frameworks, and repeated foreign-policy disasters (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) managed by the same elite networks.
Hypocrisy at scale: Advocacy for open borders or defund-the-police while living in low-crime, high-cost enclaves; climate alarmism paired with private jets and multiple homes; DEI mandates that never seem to reduce the class's own overrepresentation at the top.
Epistemic closure: Media and academic gatekeeping that labelled the lab-leak hypothesis "racist" for years, suppressed Hunter Biden laptop stories, or reframed riots as "mostly peaceful" while pathologising parental concerns at school boards.
These patterns are not universal — plenty of honest doctors, engineers, journalists, and civil servants exist — but they are concentrated and self-reinforcing within this class.
The Structural Reasons
Four interlocking factors explain why this class appears uniquely corrupted.
1. Radical Insulation from Consequences: Christopher Lasch diagnosed this in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995): the new meritocratic elite has become cosmopolitan, mobile, and detached. They live in global cities, send children to private or elite public schools, and enjoy the upside of globalisation, mass immigration, and financialisation while the costs fall on the working and middle classes. When policies fail — energy shortages from rushed net-zero targets, housing crises from zoning captured by NIMBY professionals, or crime spikes after progressive prosecutorial experiments — the managerial class rarely suffers directly. They can always move, insource labour, or pivot to new consulting gigs. This insulation breeds arrogance and moral grandstanding without skin in the game.
2. Perverse Incentive Structures: James Burnham foresaw the rise of the managerial class in The Managerial Revolution (1941). Power shifted from capital owners to credentialed administrators who control large organisations. Today, advancement in academia, media, NGOs, and large corporations rewards signalling loyalty to prevailing orthodoxies far more than measurable results or dissent. Publish-or-perish favours niche activism over rigorous falsification. Corporate ESG and DEI departments create entire careers based on expanding the bureaucracy itself. The result is a class optimised for internal status games rather than external truth or value creation.
3. Cultural and Ideological Capture Post-1960s: Western universities became the primary site of elite formation. The long march through the institutions succeeded not through conspiracy, but through self-selection and conformity pressures. Once a critical mass of faculty and administrators shared a worldview blending postmodern relativism ("truth is power"), therapeutic moralism, and identity-based redistribution, dissent became career suicide. This is amplified by social media and HR bureaucracies that police speech. The class's defining ideology — often called "woke" or "successor ideology" — reframes disagreement as harm, turning institutions away from liberal inquiry toward enforcement of sacred narratives.
4. Monopoly on Sensemaking: This class controls the commanding heights of knowledge production and dissemination. When the people who teach the teachers, write the news, staff the regulators, and advise the politicians all emerge from the same narrow pipeline, feedback loops turn vicious. Public scepticism is then pathologised as "populism," "misinformation," or "threat to democracy," further entrenching the divide.
Why "Most Deeply" and Why "Western"?
Compare to other elites: Chinese Communist Party cadres engage in blatant financial corruption and authoritarian control, but they do not pretend their system is the vanguard of universal human emancipation while undermining their own society's cohesion. Russian oligarchs are predatory, yet few claim moral superiority over the masses. The Western managerial class is distinctive because it wields soft power through institutions explicitly dedicated to truth, expertise, and the common good — then systematically subverts those ideals. Its corruption feels deeper precisely because the betrayal is of a higher claimed standard.
The West's openness and prosperity also make the rot visible. Authoritarian systems hide failures behind coercion; liberal ones expose them through elections, leaks, and declining trust metrics. High education levels plus post-industrial abundance created a large, articulate class with time and incentive to theorise its own dominance as moral progress.
Counterpoints
Not every manager or professor is corrupt, but most are. Many quietly dissent or focus on genuine competence (especially in hard sciences, engineering, and trades-adjacent professions). Tech entrepreneurs and heterodox thinkers have begun building parallel institutions — new universities, independent media, think tanks — precisely to restore accountability. Public backlash, falling enrolments at elite colleges, and electoral revolts show the system is not invincible.
Still, the pattern is unmistakable and dangerous. A managerial-intellectual class that loses legitimacy cannot indefinitely rule a sceptical populace. Restoring health requires competition: viewpoint diversity mandates in publicly funded universities, sunset clauses on bureaucratic empires, genuine accountability for policy failure, and a cultural recommitment to truth over narrative. The alternative is accelerating distrust, institutional decay, and the very populist surges the class most fears.
The Western intellectual and managerial elite is not evil. It is human — and humans in positions of unaccountable power, surrounded by mirrors of agreement, inevitably corrupt. The question for 2026 and beyond is whether the class can reform itself before the broader society forces the issue. History suggests the latter is more likely.
A Great Reckoning with the morally corrupt universities will come!