A Pandemic in Search of an Establishment

It is a safe bet that Donald Trump would not have liked the fifth Marquess of Salisbury. In the 1950s, “Bobbety” Cecil, a descendant of Elizabeth I’s famous fixer, Robert Cecil, was the ultimate insider — the center of a “magic circle” of “grey men” who arranged Britain’s Conservative Party leadership (and thus usually the prime ministership). Across the Atlantic, the U.S. also had its cohort of WASP-y “wise men,” typified by W. Averell Harriman, the son of a railway tycoon. Whenever a problem emerged, the East Coast establishment called in the best and the brightest from academia and business — whether it was asking John Maynard Keynes to help redesign international finance, bringing in Henry Kissinger on foreign policy, or letting Bob McNamara’s “whiz kids” fix the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile in continental Europe, the organization that would become the EU was being quietly put together by an elite that, still recovering from the onslaught of populism in the 1930s, preferred not to consult voters about the process. As late as the 1990s, Eurocrats like Jacques Delors, the Machiavellian president of the commission in Brussels, were pushing toward a federal Europe. The first meaningful vote in France, one of the founding members in 1957, did not happen until 2005, when the French ungratefully rejected the integrationist Treaty of Nice that had been arranged for them.