How public health's ideological capture by left-wing ideology systematically undermined the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic

On the wokification of America's professional elite: an historical perspective

Wokeness in medicine creates worse medicine—and worse science

“It is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled. Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is. It lets loose effects which no man wants and no man can stop.” 

- Carl Jung

To understand the ideological capture that led to the supersession of science and good judgment by a deranged ideology that led to the West’s catastrophic pandemic response, it is necessary to understand the revolutionary ideological transformation that has taken place in America’s institutions over the past two decades. This story provides an understanding of the background, context, and basic mechanics of the required derangements that we will build upon in subsequent parts. I have briefly alluded to this story elsewhere.

We will start in journalism and extend our analysis from there.

In a new essay in the Economist, James Bennet–veteran reporter, senior editor for The Economist, former editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and former editorial page editor of the New York Times–tells the tragic story about the internal revolution in the New York Times in the 2010s that, according to his account, led it to abandon journalistic impartiality and embrace an illiberal progressivism. In the wake of the financial crisis, the Times hired new journalists and editors from competitor publications to overhaul its business model. Young, new talent entered the ranks of the newspaper’s staff. But with new talent came new values. And justice replaced truth. Activism replaced impartiality. Starting as Opinion editor in 2016, Bennet did what he could to bring balance to these new forces and diversify opinions at the Times. “We owe it to our readers to help them hear the voices that were supportive of Trump,” he told the Washington Post in December of 2016. Under his leadership, his pages won as many Pulitzers in four years as in the previous twenty.

But Bennet, a liberal who believed that Times readers should be familiar with viewpoints outside of the progressive orthodoxy, was seen as behind the times by the younger crowd. They believed that mainstream conservative viewpoints were violent, dangerous, and harmful, and they wanted to hold Bennet accountable for giving these views a platform. Everything came to a head after, under his leadership, the Times published Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s editorial calling for the suppression of the 2020 Black Lives Matters riots. A cancel mob within the Times stoked a spiral of outrage about Bennet’s decision through internal Slack channels and over Twitter. Bennet, a veteran at the newspaper since 1991, was forced to resign.

The left-ward swing of media over the 2010s was not limited to the Times. In her 2021 book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon, a journalist and Newsweek’s Opinion Editor, explains that journalism was a blue collar profession in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But in the second half of the 20th century, it became a profession of the educated elite.

And by 2022, 97% of journalists had a college degree, while only a third of Americans had one, and the overwhelming majority of journalists were on the political Left. And just as the Left of the New York Times turned increasingly intolerant in the 2010s, Ungar-Sargon relates that the same process took place concurrently in virtually all major news organizations. A new guard took over. One by one, those who voiced dissent against the new intolerance were shown the door. Today, the percentage of journalists who identify as Republican is just 3.4%, down from 18% in 2002 and 25.7% in 1971.

This ideological capture, what some have called “the long march through the institutions”, revolutionized every professional occupation in America from 2000 to 2020. A 2020 Bloomberg analysis shows that workers in virtually every single white collar occupation–professors, scientists, doctors, nurses, lawyers, journalists, writers, artists, bankers, engineers, etc.–overwhelmingly contributed to Democrats.

I have confirmed and extended the Bloomberg analysis using a database available at Stanford called DIME. My analysis shows a trend toward “wokification”--a hard and rapid swing to the far-left–within all white collar, professional occupations over the course of the past two decades. In 2000, these professions had been politically balanced, with a left-right split that was roughly representative of the general population. But starting around 2004 and completing by 2016, the professional classes swung dramatically to the left, such that conservatives were becoming an endangered species within the professions, as low as just 5% of professors.

This can be seen most clearly by comparing the percentage of left-leaning individuals in various professions in 2000 and 2020:

Accountants, 35% to 73%.
Attorneys, 58% to 84%.
Creatives, 75% to 92%.
Engineers, 33% to 78%.
Entertainers, 39% to 71%.
Executives, 39% to 78%.
Journalists, 52% to 84%.
Nurses, 52% to 80%.
Professors, 78% to 95%.
Teachers, 68% to 90%.
Tech professionals, 45% to 88%.

While white color professionals tended to be quite mixed ideologically in the year 2000, today the ideology of the political left dominates the professional class.

And physicians saw the largest shift of any of the professions: from 33% to 78%. Scholars and journalists have taken note, calling this an unprecedented political transformation. Among the most liberal of physician specialties are infectious disease physicians, nearly 80% of whom are registered Democrats, as well as public health scholars, of whom only 5% are registered Republicans.

I was told by one participant that when these data were presented at a major public health conference, the attitude was not consternation; it was laughter.

Over the same period of time, the Democratic party has become the party of wealthy educated elites. Today, even the very wealthy tend to vote Democrat. The shift within the Democratic party from less educated and poor, into a wealthy and self-styled enlightened elite has been referred to by Thomas Piketty as the Brahminization of the Left. And it has taken place among left-leaning parties worldwide. These are now preferred parties of the 21st century’s global wealthy, educated, administrative elite.

As the economist Thomas Piketty pointed out in 2018:

“In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher education voters, giving rise to a “multiple-elite” party system in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the “left”, while high income/high-wealth elites still vote for the “right” (though less and less so).”

Thus, not only are physicians now overwhelmingly left-leaning, so too is the broader professional class of which their occupation is a part. And not only is that class left-leaning, but the Democratic party itself, in tandem, has been taken over by that class.

The professional class is the Democratic class, and the Democratic party in turn is the party of the professionals.

Now, public health experts are characterized by two things: their expertise, and their being part of the field of public health and thus part of the professional class. Public health experts therefore have at least two loyalties: one loyalty to science and the other loyalty to the outlook of their class.

While it is true that the policy decisions made during the pandemic contradicted the scientific expertise of public health elites, these decisions nonetheless conformed to the ideology of the professional class.

The professional class is increasingly ideologically uniform; this increasing ideological uniformity is leading to a progressive concentration of power at the class level, which is increasingly overriding the domain-specific knowledge in each profession.

That ideology, in turn, trumped science during the pandemic.

Pandemic “science” was not formulated according to the principles of classical public health, but according to contemporary professional class ideology. Moral zealotry and groupthink overrode science, and science became a heresy.

I will explain the social psychological mechanics about how precisely this occurred in a later post.