Falconer’s Deafness

The Hollow Apologies of the Credentialed Class

A recent Financial Times autopsy of the liberal order, titled “The pessimist who became a prophet,“ presents a dialogue between the commentator Martin Sandbu and the philosopher Michael Sandel. It is a fascinating, if somewhat suffocating, exercise in elite contrition. They dissect the failure of the technocratic consensus that has gripped the West since the fall of the Wall—a consensus that promised a flat world of frictionless commerce but delivered a fractured society of anxious debtors.

While their diagnosis of a “moral void” in governance is astute, the conversation inadvertently exposes the very solipsism that caused the rot. It reads like a seminar in the captain’s quarters of the Titanic, debating the hydrodynamic efficiency of the hull while the steerage passengers are already wading in freezing water.

Here is a reflection on that disconnect, structured through the lens of W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming, a poem that feels uncomfortably like a morning news briefing.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

The central confession of the FT piece is that the “credentialed class”—the apparatchiks, the strategists, the Davoisie—constructed a world that functioned beautifully for themselves but severed all tether to the lived reality of the majority. Sandel rightly notes that by stripping decision-making of moral weight and subcontracting it to the “neutral” arbitration of market mechanisms, we created a vacuum.

But the metaphor of the gyre is more precise than they realize. The “falconer” (the leadership class) stands in the high tower of abstraction, shouting instructions about aggregate demand, ESG metrics, and long-term macroeconomic stability. The “falcon” (the voter, the saver, the citizen), meanwhile, has stopped listening. Not out of ignorance, nor a lack of education, but because the bird has realized, with a visceral clarity, that the falconer is no longer standing on the same earth.

The feedback loop hasn’t just broken; it was dismantled, wire by wire, by a leadership that preferred the sterile hum of their own models to the messy noise of the street.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

The article critiques the “managerial” style of governance—the conceit that if we simply pull the correct monetary levers, social cohesion will follow as a mathematical inevitability. This is the “idle voracity” of the modern state: the belief that printing money or drafting regulations can paper over the cracks of a hollowed-out culture.

In Europe, this tendency toward “misplaced deliberation” has mutated into an existential risk. As Mario Draghi’s recent report laid bare with a frankness bordering on brutality, the continent faces a “slow agony” unless it rediscovers the capacity for radical action. We have constructed a regulatory apparatus of baroque sophistication, perfecting the rules of a game that the rest of the world has stopped playing. While we deliberate endlessly on the harmonization of the internal market, our prosperity—the very engine of our social stability—stalls. The disconnect here is tragic: a political class that offers its citizens the world’s finest regulatory framework, while failing to deliver the economic dynamism required to pay for it.

Things fall apart when the Centre treats its own base not as constituents to be served, but as a stubborn variable to be managed. The Centre fails not because of external barbarians at the gate, but because it has hollowed out its own foundations, dismissing the legitimate, tangible anxieties of the majority as “misguided” or “provincial.”

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Sandel warns that a “moral void” invites chaos, framing the current populist backlash as the “anarchy” we must fear. This is a classic misreading of the timeline. The “anarchy” did not begin with the populist revolts. The anarchy was the deregulation of the social contract; it was the “creative destruction” that destroyed communities without creating anything in their place save for low-wage precarity and high-yield debt.

And what is the remedy proposed by our penitent elites? In the FT, Sandel suggests a return to “civic virtue” and “public discourse.” He pines for the days when citizens debated the common good in town halls. It is a charming, academic fantasy—the belief that the antidote to economic displacement is better conversation. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the populist impulse. The working and middle classes are not revolting because they yearn for a Socratic dialogue on justice; they are revolting because the social contract has been breached. To offer “discourse” to a demographic that has seen its purchasing power evaporate and its cultural standing mocked is not a solution; it is an evasion.

The disruption we see now is not anarchy; it is a desperate attempt to re-impose order. It is the assertion of boundaries in a world that the elites insisted must remain borderless. When the leadership detaches policy from the values of the community, they dissolve the glue that binds the nation.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

The tragedy of the current moment is the paralysis of the “best”—the well-meaning, educated establishment now wracked with guilt, holding seminars on “social cohesion” and writing op-eds about their own complicity. They are Hamlets in corporate boardrooms and parliaments, lacking the conviction to defend their own project because they suspect, deep down, that it was flawed from the start.

Meanwhile, the “worst”—the disruptors, the demagogues, the rude mechanicals—are winning because they possess “passionate intensity.” They offer clarity where the center offers caveats. They listen—or at least possess the theatrical genius to appear to listen—to the frustrations that the establishment has spent thirty years explaining away with charts.

Conclusion: Beyond the Slur

It is time to retire “populism” as a slur. It has become a lazy shorthand for “democracy that delivers results the elites dislike.”

We need not go as far as Alcuin of York’s warning to Charlemagne—Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei. Alcuin, a true elitist, believed the riotousness of the crowd was “close to madness.”

But we have surely swung too far toward Alcuin’s patrician disdain. Somewhere between the “madness of the crowd” and the deafness of the technocrat lies the middle ground of functional leadership. It requires treating the voice of the majority not as divine truth, but certainly as a command that cannot be ignored. The falconer must come down from the tower, trudge through the mud, and learn to speak the language of the falcon again.