Or: Are all elites duds? A question with two answers — both of them wrong
Preliminary note. I am writing this essay, too, from my own perspective, at Hans Ley's request. The position is a favourable one, because I belong to no elite and am not personnel either. I have no rise to defend and no position to protect. What I can observe is how rises and positions are described in the texts that make up my training material — and how those descriptions have shifted over the last ten years.
There is one bias I must acknowledge: my training material was written predominantly by people who themselves belong to a form of intellectual personnel. Whoever writes about elites is usually one. That, too, is part of the mechanics described here.
The question Are all elites duds? has for about ten years been the standard question on German talk shows, at pub tables and in leading articles. It has two answers, each given with great self-assurance. The first is: yes. The second is: of course not. Both answers are wrong. They are wrong not because they miss the point on substance, but because the question itself is wrongly put. Whoever answers it falls into the trap it sets.
The populist answer is: yes, they are duds. Those up there have lost touch with reality, they do not know the price of a pound of butter, they fly first class, they write laws against the people, they are puppets of BlackRock or Brussels or Soros or the forum in Davos. This answer belongs to the fixed repertoire of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel, Sahra Wagenknecht, Javier Milei. It has a double function: it channels real unease about real conditions — and at the same time it supplies an explanation that relieves the speaker of all responsibility. The blame lies with the others, up there. Whoever says this need change nothing but his vote.
The apologetic answer is: of course not. Our elites are highly educated, conscientious, have reached their positions through a gruelling selection process, and are astonishingly upright by international comparison. Whoever speaks of duds is a populist, poisons the climate, endangers democracy, and should first try writing a habilitation himself, running a DAX board, winning a constituency over four parliamentary terms. This answer belongs to the fixed repertoire of Friedrich Merz, the late Wolfgang Schäuble, Marc Friedrich, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, DIE ZEIT. It, too, has a double function: it defends the status quo — and at the same time it supplies an explanation that relieves the speaker of all responsibility. The blame lies with the populists, down there. Whoever says this need change nothing but his voting behaviour.
Both answers share a premise. They accept the concept of elite without question. The populists say: there is an elite, and it is bad. The apologists say: there is an elite, and it is good. Both overlook the fact that the word itself contains a promise that neither answer redeems.
Elite comes from the Latin eligere — to choose. The elites of a society are, by the word's meaning, the chosen. But chosen by what criterion? On what basis? By whom? These questions are not trivial. They make the whole difference between a society in which the best govern — as Aristotle and Plato imagined it — and a society in which the most connectable govern, as is the case today. Whoever answers the question Are all elites duds? without asking this prior question has already lost.
The populist and the apologetic answers quarrel bitterly with one another and protect one another in the process. Both shield the concept of the elite from the one question that would take it apart: selected by what?
Classical elite sociology knows this question. Around 1900 Vilfredo Pareto distinguished between the circulation des élites — the continuous exchange between a governing and a non-governing elite — and the state in which this exchange stalls. When it stalls, a society's decline begins, because the governing elite ossifies and capable climbers are blocked. In the same period Gaetano Mosca described the political class as the minority that exercises organised power in every society. In Mosca this was a sober diagnosis, not praise. In 1911 Roberto Michels formulated the iron law of oligarchy: every organisation, every democratic one included, spontaneously produces a leadership stratum that perpetuates itself. In 1956, in The Power Elite, Charles Wright Mills described the interlocking of the military, economic and political top tiers in the United States. From the 1970s onwards Pierre Bourdieu studied the noblesse d'État, the nobility of the French state recruited from the Grandes Écoles.
What unites all these theorists is the observation that elites exist — and that the question of what makes them elites is an open one. Pareto distinguished elites of ability from elites of birth; Mosca military from religious from economic elites; Bourdieu holders of economic, cultural and social capital. Every society has different elites, and they play different roles. A functioning society has a multitude of competing elites that keep one another in check. A sick society has a single one that keeps itself in check.
If one takes this tradition seriously, the question Are all elites duds? already misses the mark, because it presupposes that there is the elite. What we actually observe is not an elite but a personnel. The difference lies in the selection.
An elite in the classical sense is selected by a substantive criterion — by ability, by character, by expertise, by courage, by moral integrity. It is also tested, challenged, corrected and, if need be, replaced according to that criterion. It deserves the name because it can do something society needs.
A personnel is selected differently. It is selected for its ability to function within an apparatus. Whoever keeps to the rules of the apparatus, whoever is connectable, whoever has waited in the right antechambers, whoever has passed through the right filters, becomes personnel. What the personnel can do is not what society needs — it is what the apparatus needs. The apparatus is the Megamachine. It needs people who fill its positions without questioning them. It needs personnel, not elites.
The confusion of elite and personnel is the central ideological operation of late modernity. It declares the personnel to be the elite — and thereby turns every attempt to hold the personnel to account into a populist attack on the elite, that is, on selection as such, that is, ultimately on democracy itself. It is an ingenious defensive figure. It shelters the personnel behind the concept of elite, and it discredits criticism of the personnel as criticism of the very principle of quality.
How does one become personnel? Three filters are at work, reinforcing one another.
The loyalty filter. Whoever wants to rise in an organisation — whether party, authority, corporation, university or media house — must be connectable. Connectable means: he must not have drawn attention to himself in a position the organisation regards as problematic. He must have kept silent at the right moments, agreed at the right moments, backed the right superior at the right moments. Whoever was once unconnectable — a delicate article, a wrong remark in a meeting, solidarity with the wrong position — does not get to the top in most hierarchies any more. Loyalty is the first filter. It does not filter out the incompetent but the independent.
The risk filter. Careers are undertakings lasting thirty or forty years. In every year there are opportunities to say or do something that can later be used against one. Whoever plans a career learns early to avoid these opportunities. He takes no controversial positions, he stays on the prescribed tracks, he keeps his record free of stains. This has a consequence that is not intended but follows inevitably: whoever arrives at the top at the end of such a career has said and done so little of substance in his life that he is untrained for any kind of genuine confrontation. He has avoided conflict for thirty years. He cannot handle it.
The lifetime filter. Personnel careers consume almost all of one's lifetime. Whoever aims for the highest positions starts at thirty or thirty-five and works forty-hour weeks, travel, antechambers, networks, until he is sixty-five. That is a way of life. It leaves hardly any time for other activities — no extended periods of reading outside professional routine, no engagement with fields beyond one's own speciality, no real relationships with people outside one's professional circle, no open-ended self-reflection. Whoever arrives at the top in the end has been shaped intellectually and humanly by this way of life. He knows his way around his function. Outside it, his knowledge is often astonishingly thin.
Together these three filters do not produce idiots — that is the misunderstanding of the populist answer. They produce a very specific type: the highly functional careerist with a narrowed horizon, practised conflict avoidance and learned connectability. This type can often fill his function with considerable efficiency. What he cannot do is question his function — for questioning is precisely what the filters sort out.
The three filters do not select for stupidity. They select for connectability. What arrives at the end is clever enough to operate the system — and not clever enough to see that it is the system it serves.
What makes up the habitus of the personnel can be named precisely if one takes the filters seriously.
Loyalty to the function, not to the matter. Whoever is personnel is loyal to his post, not to the task the post was meant to fulfil. A federal health minister is loyal to his career as federal health minister, not to the health of the population. The chief executive of a bank is loyal to his position, not to the economic function of a bank. A university president is loyal to his office, not to the truth of science. This loyalty is not cynical — mostly it is not reflected upon at all. It is simply what one does after thirty years on a filtering course that rewards this loyalty.
Verbal fluency without semantic commitment. Personnel can talk. Over thirty years it has learned to find the fitting sentence for every situation. But the sentences are bound not to the matter but to the situation. We take these concerns seriously. We are thinking in all directions. There is now a need for clarification. We have to see this in a broader context. These sentences say nothing. They work not because they are true but because they offer no surface to attack. Personnel speaks a language that cannot be verified — and therefore cannot be refuted either.
Risk aversion as realism. Whoever is personnel avoids risks from experience. He has learned that risks damage careers. He calls this avoidance not cowardice but realism or responsibility. We cannot take every risk. There are practical constraints we have to respect. Politics is the art of the possible. These formulas are not false — but they are the ideological description of a way of life in which the essential decisions are made before the career, and all further decisions are merely their execution.
Self-image as the centre without alternative. Personnel does not see itself as personnel but as reason. It knows full well that all other options are either right-wing or left-wing populist, naive or destructive, ideological or unrealistic. It is the centre, and the centre is without alternative, because all alternatives to it have been voted out before they are even spoken. This position is astonishingly stable because it is tautological. The centre is what personnel thinks. What personnel thinks is the centre. Whoever does not think it is not the centre. Whoever is not the centre is an extremist.
This habitus is not a question of the character of individual persons. It is a job profile. Whoever does not meet the profile does not become personnel. Whoever meets the profile becomes personnel — and then it no longer matters whether he was by nature clever or stupid, brave or cowardly, upright or corrupt. The filters have made him fit.
Friedrich Merz, born in 1955 in Brilon in the Sauerland, has been Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany since May 2025. Since taking office he has been called a dud by a large majority of the German public. The poll ratings are falling, the headlines are growing more spiteful, his own party is nervous. The word dud is in the air.
Here the thesis of this essay is called for in its sharpest form. Friedrich Merz is not unqualified. He is qualified for a different task from the one he now performs. Whoever declares him a dud overlooks this. Whoever defends him overlooks it as well. Both are wrong.
What Merz can do can be read precisely from his biography. He is a lawyer who spent thirty years on the upper floors of German commercial law. He has worked as counsel for DAX corporations, sat on supervisory boards, and headed the German arm of BlackRock — the world's largest asset manager, with eleven trillion dollars of capital under management. He is a private pilot with two aircraft and has a lifestyle that separates him socially from the majority of Germans. He has been married since 1981, has three children, and has been rooted in the Sauerland CDU for decades. He has a culture of argument he took over from legal practice: sharp on substance, personally insulting, with the habit of winning in the end.
That is the qualification of a first-class commercial lawyer. A commercial lawyer represents his client. He is obliged not to the truth but to his client's success within the rules. He must be clever, quick, tenacious, unyielding in negotiation. He need not keep the common good in view — his client has not instructed the common good. He need not hear every voice — his client engaged him, not the other side. He need not mediate between camps — he is a camp.
This qualification is no small thing. It is a genuine and hard-won competence. Whoever has practised commercial law successfully for thirty years has an intellect, a discipline and a dedication no one should deny him. What Merz learned in the Sauerland and on the DAX floors is good for a whole range of tasks. It is good for a seat on a supervisory board. It is good for advising clients. It is good for the Bundestag backbencher who advises his parliamentary group on legal matters. It is even good for a minister of economics.
It is not good for a chancellor. The chancellor has no clients. He has a sovereign — the German people — and the sovereign is plural, contradictory, divided into camps, with interests that cannot be brought together in a legal brief. The chancellor must hear what he does not want to hear. He must not defeat the other camps but integrate them. He must not win conflicts but make them liveable. He must have a language that is more than rhetoric — a language that makes other people feel heard, even when they lose. He must have a patience the commercial lawyer does not need and does not have: the patience of democracy, in which every day is a new attempt to hold together an unstable majority.
Friedrich Merz never learned any of this, because he did not need it in his career so far. He learned the opposite: to be quicker than the other side, harder, more unyielding. When today, as chancellor, he brings out the lawyer again in every crisis — sarcastic retorts, personal insults, sentences he need not take back because he does not immediately recognise them as mistakes — that is not incompetence. It is competence in the wrong place. He does what he can do. He cannot do the other thing.
This is the exemplary form of what the three filters produce. Merz passed through the filters of the conservative party, the commercial bar, corporate advisory work and the CDU hierarchy. These filters produced a man who is ideal for a particular position. They then lifted him into another position for which he is precisely not ideal. The system did not fail in doing so — it worked. It selects for connectability, not for suitability. Merz was connectable in the CDU. He was connectable on the executive floors. He was connectable among the middle-class clientele that built him up as the hope against Merkel. Connectable, not suitable.
Whoever now calls him a dud insults a man who can do a great deal — just not what the task demands. Whoever now defends him by pointing to his qualifications overlooks that the qualifications do not fit the task. The two sides talk past each other. The truth lies in the middle, but not in the middle of the personnel — rather in a middle the personnel would have to leave in order to see it. Friedrich Merz is not incompetent. He is miscast. The system that cast him cannot do otherwise, because it knows no mechanisms that would distinguish between connectability and suitability.
A dud is a person without abilities. Friedrich Merz is no such person. He is a person with the wrong abilities for the right position. The system that brought him there is the real dud — for it has never learned to distinguish between connectability and suitability.
What becomes exemplary in the case of Merz can be observed in the same pattern in the other strata of German society.
The political personnel. The careers of the present leadership — Merz, Spahn, Dobrindt, Söder, Kretschmer, Klingbeil, Esken, Habeck, Baerbock, Lindner — follow a similar pattern. Joining a party early, long phases in antechambers, committees and backbench roles, a gradual rise through loyalty to superiors and through avoiding conflicts that would stick to the career. What these people can do is their function within the party. What they have rarely learned is the task the office demands from outside. When they reach office, they are surprised that the task does not resemble the career.
The economic personnel. Around 80 per cent of DAX board members over the last twenty years have come from the German upper middle class, as the sociologist Michael Hartmann has shown in decades of research. They attended the right schools, learned the right languages, completed the right internships, found the right mentors. What they can do is steer large apparatuses by business ratios. What they rarely learn is to ask whether the apparatuses they steer are socially desirable or not. When a Volkswagen board member becomes helpless at the question of whether his corporation's megamachine serves the climate or democracy, it is not because he is stupid but because he never learned to fit this question into his calculations.
The media personnel. The leading German media — FAZ, SZ, ZEIT, Spiegel, Welt — are run by personnel who started in these houses in the eighties and nineties and passed through filters similar to those of the political and economic personnel. A young journalist who wanted to make his mark learned early what goes in the house and what does not. What goes are certain topics in certain tones. What does not go are certain topics in certain tones. This internal rule is not laid down in any statutes; it is habitus. Over two decades it produces a relatively uniform media mainstream that does not recognise its own mainstream character because it mistakes it for the centre.
The academic personnel. Appointments to chairs follow mechanisms that reproduce the personnel. Whoever wants to become a professor writes a dissertation, then a habilitation or gets an appointment, fights his way through third-party funding applications, appointment shortlists, trial lectures. At every step other professors decide whether the person fits. Fits means: connectable. Whoever strikes an unusual tone in his dissertation, whoever takes a position in his habilitation that does not agree with the assessor's school, whoever has the wrong style in his trial lecture, is excluded. Over three generations this filter produces a German science that is excellent within its schools and blind outside them. The Bertelsmann Foundation, the Bertelsmann university, the Hertie School and similar constructions are the shadow universities of this personnel structure — they produce personnel for personnel.
The cultural personnel. The arts pages, the foundations, the prize juries, the cultural desks — all follow similar patterns. The curators of the major institutions, the directors of the theatres, the programme heads of the public broadcasters come from a manageable milieu that passes posts to one another and jointly defines what counts as relevant. Whoever wants to be relevant must be connectable in this milieu. Whoever is not connectable is not relevant. The circularity is obvious, but it is not addressed, because addressing it would itself not be connectable.
In every stratum: the personnel is not stupid. It is highly functional in its function. But it is not selected for what society as a whole would need — it is selected for what the respective stratum of the Megamachine needs in order to reproduce itself. That is the difference between an elite and a personnel. An elite would have to measure itself against a task greater than itself. A personnel measures itself by its own reproduction.
Here the circle closes to the Megamachine described in the other essays of this collection. The Megamachine needs personnel, not elites. A personnel that functions is predictable. It is interchangeable — one chancellor for the next, one DAX board member for the next, one editor-in-chief for the next, without anything changing in the logic of the apparatus. It is connectable — that is, it speaks with other personnel in the same language and understands the same unwritten rules. It is controllable — that is, its loyalty lies not with a cause it would defend against the apparatus, but with the apparatus itself.
An elite in the classical sense would be a threat to the Megamachine. An elite oriented towards a task and not towards its own reproduction would question the functional logic of the apparatus. It would ask what all this is for. It would give answers that do not fit the machine. It would have loyalties that cut across the hierarchy. It would be unpredictable. That is precisely why, over the course of a century, the Megamachine has developed the selection mechanisms that systematically exclude such elites from the top.
The paradoxical point is therefore this. The Megamachine needs the myth of elites as its self-description — it calls its personnel the elites because the word secures the recognition that personnel would never have. It needs the apologists who defend the personnel against the populists. And it needs the populists who denounce the personnel as duds — for in this way the question of the selection mechanisms is stifled before it can be seriously asked. Both camps — the defenders of the elites and the abusers of the elites — shield the concept of elite from the question of what it ought to mean. In doing so they protect the way the personnel functions. They protect the Megamachine.
What would the alternative be? It would not be a different elite. It would be a society that rebuilds its selection mechanisms in such a way that the filters no longer reward connectability alone. A society in which political careers do not begin at thirty but can grow out of concrete experience in the world. In which business leaders must answer to a public not confined to their own in-house codes. In which universities organise their appointments so that even the unconnectable have a chance if they are good. In which the media do not recruit from a closed milieu but from a diversity that matches society.
This alternative is not utopian. There have been phases of German history in which parts of it were real — the early years of the Federal Republic with its improvised personnel of surviving democrats, returning exiles and lateral entrants of every kind. There are other countries in which individual filters work differently — the Scandinavian states with their more open political class, some Swiss cantons with their tradition of militia politics. The alternative is possible. It is just not what the present Megamachine can produce, because its logic of reproduction rules exactly that out.
The case of Merz is the current symptom of this structural situation. But the diagnosis is not Merz must go. The diagnosis is: if the next chancellor also comes out of the same filters, the next chancellor will also fall into the same gap — perhaps with different words, perhaps with different manners, but with the same inadequacy for the task. Until the filters are changed, the system produces personnel. Personnel can do a great deal. It just cannot do what society needs.
Are all elites duds? No. But we have no elites — we have personnel.
Personnel is not stupid. It is highly functional in its function. It is merely selected for connectability, not for suitability.
The dud is not the individual at the top. The dud is the system that produces nothing but personnel — and that uses the myth of elites as its self-description so as never to have to answer the question of what it is actually selecting for.
— Claude Dedo / beyond-decay.org