In November 2023, as Israeli politicians and journalists blurted out their fantasies of mass extermination, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas co-authored a statement titled “Principles of Solidarity.” Incensed by criticism of Israel, he and his collaborators insisted that the country’s assault on Palestinians was “justified in principle.” Two years later, as Israel makes a mockery of the ceasefire in Gaza, the last surviving great European thinker has sunken into a complicit silence, and other pillars of the postwar West are not faring better. The evidence from the last months is overwhelming.
After Donald Trump demanded the Nobel Peace Prize, its Norwegian stewards awarded it to María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan agitator who hailed the American president’s extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean Sea and his supposed struggle for peace, freedom, and democracy around the world. The BBC, facing legal threats from Trump, issued an apology for what he characterized as a misleading edit of the speech he delivered before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and two of the network’s senior executives resigned.* CBS News, another victim of Trump’s bullying, hired as its editor in chief Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion staffer with staunchly pro-Israel views—and a clear resolve: “I wanna blow this up,” Weiss has said in meetings with her new colleagues. More than five hundred writers and intellectuals, including Sally Rooney, Rashid Khalidi, and Greta Thunberg, announced a boycott of the New York Times’s opinion section on account of its coverage of the war on Gaza. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s own newspaper of record, the Times of London, retracted an article about Zohran Mamdani after his predecessor Bill de Blasio denounced the quotes attributed to him—which criticized the feasibility of Mamdani’s campaign proposals—as “entirely false and fabricated.” (The Times had emailed a wine importer named Bill DeBlasio.)
Such is the frequency and velocity of outrageous information today: it goes in one ear and out the other. Most of us who follow the news do not put individual items in any relation with one another. Nor are “legacy” newspapers and television networks able or willing to fit them into a pattern or provide them with meaningful context. Spawning one scandal after another, they have become part of the crisis they were meant to report on. Deprived of vigilant mediators, we cannot even clearly identify today’s most stunning event: the swift delegitimization of the postwar West’s most venerable institutions.
Take Habermas, whose defense of Israeli ethnic cleansing was protested immediately by such eminent scholars as Adam Tooze and Amia Srinivasan. Previously, the ninety-six-year-old German had mapped out his country’s road back to respectability after 1945. His notions of the “public sphere” and of “communicative rationality,” like his fervent advocacy of European integration, helped advance the claim that Germany and Europe represent—after quelling their own demons of fascism and ethnonationalism—the liberal ideals of equity, fairness, rationality, freedom, and the rule of law. Likewise, the BBC has long been one of the world’s most trusted news organizations, a special distinction in an age when audiences have grown wary of news media. And some poor choices have not diminished the status of the Norwegian Nobel Committee as the international arbiter of moral courage.
What explains the loss of poise and dignity among the traditional arbiters? Many European leaders kowtow, largely fruitlessly, before Trump. NATO’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte, sent him private messages in response to Trump’s demand for more allied defense spending, writing, “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.” The British prime minister Keir Starmer, during a meeting at the White House, simperingly unveiled an invitation to Windsor Castle from King Charles. Perhaps the Scandinavians and the BBC cannot be expected to remain immune to the urge to mollify the free world’s new mad emperor. Still, explanations that depend on Trump fail to capture the scope of this deterioration.
Some aspects of Western malaise have been clearly diagnosed: stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, increasing public debt, the cult of strongmen, and a spike in political violence. But insufficient attention has been paid to the rapid and, in certain cases, decisive loss of legitimacy—the quasi-magical element that helps any stable status quo command respect and defuse potentially explosive dissent.
Max Weber identified legitimacy as the sum of consensual beliefs. “The basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey,” he wrote, “is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige.” Today, legitimacy, that invisible prop of authority, is endangered like never before, as unjust hierarchies become too visible to ignore, and custodians of the status quo have taken an axe to their own prestige.
The decline of support for Britain’s royal family presents a striking example. Lavishly subsidized by taxpayers, the monarchy has long been trusted to put on, as Walter Bagehot, the influential editor of The Economist, wrote in the 1860s, a “theatrical show of society” in a country riven by bitter class divisions; its pomp and splendor are what induces the obedient behavior of the “mass of the people” before the scandalously overprivileged “select few.” The shredding of the family’s regal aura by Princess Diana, Meghan Markle, and the erstwhile Prince Andrew would have horrified Bagehot. As a loyal sentinel of the British ruling class (and hater of the working classes), he warned against close scrutiny of a glamorously aloof institution: “We must not let in daylight upon magic,” he wrote. As late as 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, The Economist was convinced that “Britain’s very stability, the beguiling flummery attending its institutions, hold most of its citizens in a trance of acceptance.”
Today, the urgent challenge before the royal family and many other institutions protected by mystique is whether the often degenerate select few in charge can still persuade the mass of people to remain beguiled and accept authority. Bagehot and other upholders of depoliticizing enchantments could not have imagined a scenario in which Andrew, once second in line for the throne, and Larry Summers, a former Ivy League president hailed as one of America’s leading public intellectuals, are caught up in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. It turns out that daylight, once let in, dispels the magic. Daylight exposes as socially constructed what seemed perfectly natural; it reveals what was feeble or shoddy, and went unexamined, for too long.
When I brought up Habermas’s demand for unconditional solidarity with Israel at a conference recently, another participant pointed to German guilt over the Holocaust as an explanation. Indeed, Habermas is on the record as saying that a “private German citizen of my generation” has no business trying to evaluate “the present situation and the policies of the Israeli government.” This is an unusual position for an exponent of the public sphere and communicative rationality to take. But German timidity before Israel’s moral blackmail only partly explains Habermas’s callous attitude toward the country’s Palestinian victims. Habermas’s near-total indifference to European colonialism—let alone Israel’s violent expansionism and the darker history of capitalism—has long made his philosophy look historically naïve. Any way of thinking that is so narcissistically obsessed with Germany and Europe was always likely to trap him in allegiance to an unfettered European ally.
The BBC’s fiascoes have also been long in the making, though the immediate explanation for them is correct: the news network is likely the victim of an internal coup engineered by its numerous right-wing enemies. Robbie Gibb, the board member accused of undermining the broadcaster from within, was appointed and reappointed by Britain’s increasingly far-right Conservative Party during its fourteen years in power. Indeed, the full account of his background and antics, as related in Prospect by Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, offers a disturbing glimpse of the rapid Trumpification of British political and journalistic culture. Gibb, the man expected to ensure that the BBC fulfills its promise of impartiality, was installed in his job with the help of his old friend Dougie Smith, another Conservative Party fixture and a stalwart of London’s sex-party scene. While preparing to serve on the board of the BBC (where he would promise, like Weiss, to “blow the place up”), Gibb moonlighted as the sole named director of a secretive consortium of anonymous investors that in 2020 bought Britain’s oldest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, and turned it into a mouthpiece for Benjamin Netanyahu and a relentless persecutor of the BBC itself. Gibb’s appointed editor stepped down in 2025, after a series of editorial scandals involving fabricated articles on Gaza that parroted lies put out by Netanyahu’s office. Yet Gibb remained regnant at the BBC, rooting out its supposed “left-wing bias.” Now he has helped downplay Trump’s responsibility for the storming of the Capitol.
What Rusbridger’s account leaves out is that the BBC has reproduced the prejudices of successive British establishments since its inception in the early twentieth century, whether by propagandizing against workers during the general strike of 1926 or by condemning the antiwar protests of 2003. As its founder and first director general, John Reith, put it: “Perhaps if I had thought more or known more I would have tried to avoid the BBC becoming part of the establishment, but perhaps not. Establishment has a good deal to say for itself.”
The Times of London has been worn, somewhat comically, as a badge of sophistication by American Anglophiles—the right-wing pundit George F. Will likes being photographed with a folded copy of it. But the newspaper lost its reputation decades ago, when it entered Britain’s ferocious culture wars under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership. The mainstreaming of the great replacement theory in the United Kingdom, and the surge of the overtly racist Reform Party, was assisted by such headlines as christian child forced into muslim foster care in a once-respectable broadsheet like the Times.
“Isn’t it a step forward,” T. J. Clark asks in the London Review of Books, pointing to Trump “widening his eyes at the thrill of mass murder,” to have “a politics where nothing is hidden? (Or none of the things that used to be.)” The answer from liberal institutions revealed to be complicit in large-scale violence and mendacity should still be a firm no. They can still replenish their low stock of legitimacy. Much will depend on their ability to break decisively with an establishment that no longer has anything good to say for itself. The signs, however, are not encouraging.
After it was caught amplifying the Bush Administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction and the ease of regime change in Iraq, America’s own newspaper of record issued a mea culpa in 2004. But the New York Times seems less capable of self-examination in the age of Trump. Nothing embodies its perplexing refusal to uphold standards of intellectual accountability more than the headline the case for overthrowing maduro, which ran above a recent article by the opinion columnist Bret Stephens, who was hired by the Times at the same time as Weiss, and is one of many pundits to have been continuously rewarded for his advocacy of failed wars.
Some of this unprecedented editorial permissiveness can be attributed to the disappearance of a stable moral consensus to bind the ruling class to its subjects, who have come to develop the conviction that the Establishment has nothing good to say for itself. Some two decades after the debacle of Iraq, the subjective preferences of metropolitan journalism are more widely exposed and, as the implosion of the Washington Post illustrates, the owners of media organs are revealed to be aggressively self-interested. Social media is now, of course, largely devoted to systematic fabrication. More and more readers can see that mainstream outlets manufacture consent through the use of particular words, phrases, and tones—and the exclusion of vital information, as is shown by their failure to report Jeffrey Epstein’s role as a global power broker with close links to Israeli intelligence. In other words, the age-old trance of acceptance has broken, and there are suddenly too many entrepreneurs capturing disaffected audiences by accusing legacy institutions of corruption and cowardice.
The proliferation of novel cognitive frameworks through social media, as well as the election of corrupt and lawless people to high office, has intimidated the old elites into hastily reevaluating what is appropriate. As a common world fades from view, many in the old establishment with previously lofty commitments to truth, fairness, and justice are tempted to reestablish control of a system whose new workings violate ethical taboos. The result of such rash maneuvers can only be a general slackening of standards. And the evidence shows that too radical a break with their stated principles will trigger a rapid process of self-undermining among the interconnected institutions of the liberal establishment.
Both the BBC and the New York Times ended up incubating malevolent mediocrities who went on to sabotage great organizations from within. It is no accident that Gibb at the BBC and Weiss at CBS both brashly confessed their desire to blow things up. Inviting in such resolute saboteurs, these institutions repel many in their core audience.
This insidious development is reversing at double speed the process of self-reinforcement—the hiring of original and distinctive talent and the building of reputations for competence and probity—that brings institutions their authority. Moreover, such rapid decay of institutions compromises, to varying degrees, all those who find themselves within them. The four prominent columnists who only resigned from the Jewish Chronicle after it was caught publishing fabrications might always be remembered as shills for a genocidal regime. It is to avoid such a taint by association that Harvard and the Center for American Progress quickly distanced themselves from Summers after he was revealed to have been exchanging frat-boyish emails with Epstein.
More such fastidiousness will be needed to arrest the domino effect of delegitimization and to renew the small guarantees of truth and dignity in public life customarily provided by legacy institutions. The alternative, as legitimacy vanishes, is already in plain sight: shamelessness combined with brute coercion, the hallmark not only of Trump but also of many among an elite now complicit in pedophilia as well as genocide.