Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.
In retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: Ignore voters for long enough and you get Donald Trump. Yet the people at home the message was aimed never received it. Instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, America’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch.
If you were a conservative in 1992, Bill Clinton drove you insane. Here was a glib, inexperienced BS artist from nowhere running against an uninspiring but basically honorable incumbent and, for reasons that weren’t clear, winning. Clinton was shifty and dishonest. That was obvious to conservatives. Somehow voters couldn’t see it. They liked Clinton.
Conservatives believed they could win if they warned voters about the real Bill Clinton.
25 years later, it’s clear that conservatives were the delusional ones. Voters knew from the beginning exactly who Bill Clinton was. They knew because voters always know. In politics as in life, nothing is really hidden, only ignored. A candidate’s character is transparent. Voters understood Clinton’s weaknesses. They just didn’t care.
The secret to Clinton’s resilience was simple: he took positions that voters agreed with, on topics they cared about. At a time when many American cities were virtually uninhabitable because of high crime rates, Clinton ran against crime. In a period when a shrinking industrial economy had left millions without work, Clinton ran on jobs.
Clinton understood that as long as he stayed connected to the broad center of American public opinion, voters would overlook his personal shortcomings. It’s the oldest truth of electoral politics: give people what they want, and you win. That’s how democracy works.
Somehow, Bill Clinton’s heirs learned nothing from the experience. They mimicked his speaking style and his slickness. Some had similar personal lives. They forgot about paying attention to the public’s opinion about issues.
The first and most profound of these changes was the decline of the middle class. A vibrant, self-sustaining bourgeoisie is the backbone of most successful nations, but it is essential to a democracy. Democracies don’t work except in middle-class countries. In 2015, for the first time in its history, the US stopped being a predominantly middle-class country.
Over the same period in which manufacturing declined, making the middle class poorer, the finance economy boomed, making the rich wealthier than ever before. This happened over decades, but the recession of 2008 accelerated the disparities. During the crash of the housing market, more than a quarter of all household wealth in America evaporated. When the smoke cleared and the recovery began, the richest American families controlled a larger share of the economy than they did before the recession.
Neither party is comfortable talking about this. Traditionally, income inequality was a core Democratic concern. But the party, long the standard-bearer for the working class, has reoriented completely. The party’s base has shifted to the affluent, and its priorities now mirror those of progressive professionals in Washington, NY, and SV.
40 years ago, Democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. Now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
Republicans, meanwhile, have never wanted to talk about the gap between rich and poor. The party of business rejected the very idea of income inequality, in part because it sounded like a theory concocted by French intellectuals to discredit capitalism. When pressed, Republicans tended to dismiss reports of inequality with a shrug. They assume the American economy is basically just: Rich people have earned their wealth; the poor have earned their poverty. If anything, conservatives pointed, the poor in America are rich by international standards. They have iPhones and cable TV. How poor can they really be?
This misses the point. Prosperity is a relative measure. It doesn’t matter how much brightly colored plastic crap I can buy from China. If you can buy more, you’re the rich one. I’m poor by comparison.
Poverty doesn’t cause instability. Envy does.
How did this happen? Simple: a small number of families took control of most of the Venezuelan economy. Wealth distribution this lopsided would work under many forms of government. It doesn’t work in a democracy. Voters deeply resented it. They elected a demagogic populist named Hugo Chavez to show their displeasure. 20 years later, Venezuela is no longer a democracy at all. Its economy has all but evaporated.
Again and again, we are told these changes are entirely good. Change itself is inherently virtuous, our leaders explain. Those who oppose it are bigots. We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking 50 years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language. It’s called diversity. It’s our highest value.
In fact diversity is not a value. It’s a neutral fact, inherently neither good nor bad. Lost in the mindless celebration of change is an obvious question: why should a country with no shared language, ethnicity, religion, culture, or history remain a country? Countries don’t hang together simply because. They need a reason. What’s ours?
But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true for America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question.
Instead, Americans are told to shut up and be grateful. Immigrants are doing the jobs you won’t do. There’s some truth in this, depending upon what the jobs are and what they pay. But what would happen if those jobs disappeared?
None of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time.
The meritocracy, it turns out, creates its own kind of stratification, a kind more rigid than the aristocracy it replaced. Meanwhile, the meritocratic system fails to inculcate the leadership qualities that generational rule requires. Acing the SAT doesn’t make you wise. Ascending from McKinsey to Goldman Sachs doesn’t confer empathy.
Our new ruling class doesn’t care, not simply about American citizens, but about the future of the country itself. They view America the way a private equity firm sizes up an aging industrial conglomerate: as something outdated they can profit from. When it fails, they’re gone. They’ve got money offshore and foreign passports at home.
Historically, rulers derive legitimacy from one of two sources: God or voters. Rulers are in charge either because they claim some higher power put them there, or because a majority of people voted for them. Both systems have been tried for centuries. Both can work. The one system that absolutely does not work and never will is ersatz democracy. If you tell people they’re in charge, but then act as if they’re not, you’ll infuriate them. It’s too dishonest. They’ll go crazy.
Mrs. Raymond was obviously political, but she never said so directly. Most of her statements came in the form of questions: “Why do you think the settlers did that?” “Is watering your lawn really a good idea?” Or, most commonly, “Do you think [this or that example of capitalism] seems fair?” She had the gold medal in passive aggression.
Conservatives accepted the basic unfairness of life. Liberals raged against it. As a conservative, I had contempt for the whiny mawkishness of liberals.
And then one day they stopped. I remember picking up Newsweek and seeing America’s new corporate chieftains described as heroes. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the Google guys — nobody was accusing them of exploiting workers or getting too rich. Just the opposite. Liberals were celebrating their wealth and assuring us their products would liberate the world. Conservatives didn’t complain. They’d always celebrated business. Suddenly both sides were aligned on the virtues of unrestrained market capitalism.
Washington isn’t worried. Democrats assure doubters that those truck drivers will be just fine. They’ll find something else to do, something better, with higher pay. That’s almost exactly what corporate Republicans said about manufacturing jobs 30 years ago.
The difference is, 30 years ago there were pro-labor Democrats to push back.
Nothing changes a person’s attitude toward money like earning a lot of it. It’s hard to feel rage toward the Man when you’re buying a ski house in Sun Valley.
So young liberals grew up and became the establishment they once despise. That’s a familiar story. What’s new in this is that this new class felt little responsibility to those beneath them. The meritocracy convinced them that the existing order is the natural order.
I went to Yale and live on 10 acres in Greenwich because I worked hard and made wise choices. You’re unemployed and live in an apartment in Cleveland because you didn’t. The system doesn’t produce equal results, yet it’s still basically fair because the best people inevitably rise to the top. The affluent now believe that. It’s a kind of secular Calvinism.
A resolute lack of self-awareness makes this arrangement possible. Earlier ruling classes understood they were in charge. They admitted it and faced the consequences, including a responsibility to those beneath them. Noblesse oblige means “obligations of the nobility.” Every functioning aristocracy has taken that obligation seriously.
The modern rich, by contrast, don’t acknowledge that they’re at the top of the economic heap, or even that a heap exist. They pretend they’re like everyone else, just more impressive.
At the same time, Facebook employees artificially promoted stories they agreed with. In one case, the company boosted coverage of the BLM movement, even though it wasn’t trending among actual FB users. The cause was popular enough inside the building.
The Clintons no longer have those views, to put it mildly, and not just because they’re older. After decades in power, Bill and Hilary have become arch-defenders of the status quo, political and economic.
Senator Joe Biden of Delaware agreed; he introduced legislation to curb the arrival of Vietnamese immigrants, accusing the Ford administration of not being honest about how many refugees would be arriving.
Jordan didn’t oppose all immigration, but she demanded “Americanization,” which she described as uniting “immigrants and their descendants around a commitment to democratic ideals and constitutional principles.” For immigrants who refuse to participate, Jordan supported swift deportation. Today, Jordan’s views would be dismissed as racist, but they were unremarkable at the time.
Thanks almost entirely to immigration, the population of the country had gone from 84% in 1965, to 62% in 2015.
The change was purely a product of political calculation. Democrats understood that the overwhelming majority of immigrant voters would vote Democrat. Surveys showed they were right.
Newspapers used to write stories like that, back before American elites decided that criticizing immigration was worse than hurting workers. Now complaints about demographic change, when they’re even reported, are always dismissed as products of irrational racial fear. White anxiety. Suburban racism.
By redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. That’s helpful for them, since for the affluent, immigration has few costs and many upsides. Low-skilled immigrants don’t compete in upscale job markets. Mass immigration makes household help affordable.
She may be cleaning your floors for minimum wage (or less) while your children travel abroad, but you’re not exploiting her. Just the opposite. You’re giving her a hand up, allowing her to participate in the American dream.
If she’s here illegally, maybe you help her get a green card. Yes, you’ve got an awful lot of power over her, but you’re doing the right thing and you can tell your friends about it at dinner. You’re not taking advantage of a helpless person for your own comfort. You’re compassionate. You’re the hero of this story.
For Americans in the top 20% of income distribution, mass immigration is one of the best things that ever happened — cheap help, obedient employees, more interesting restaurants, and all without guilt. There’s no downside, at least none that you personally experience.
Over time, you find your attitudes about the working class changing. You think of yourself as a champion of the little guy, but who’s really the underdog here? The unemployed machinist in Toledo? He’s fat, smokes cigarettes, and gets by on disability payments for a back injury that may or may not be legitimate. He likely voted for Trump. You don’t even want to know his views on gay marriage.
Compare him to your gardener. There’s a guy you can admire. He somehow made it from Oaxaca to your front yard, enduring risks and privations you can only imagine, and yet he never complains, at least not in a language you can speak. He shows up on time, does a fine job, and doesn’t charge much. Every month he sends money back to his family in Mexico. Why is he not more impressive than the reactionary machinist in Ohio?
He is, of course. Once you recognize that, your perspectives change. America’s lower classes look less like fellow citizens, in need of uplift, and more like damaged raw materials, worthy of replacement if they aren’t measuring up. Your support for social improvement efforts, the ones that previous generations of elites devoted their lives to, begins to wane.
Even at the higher end of the income scale this is true. You love the idea of retraining out-of-work Michigan autoworkers to code software, but let’s be realistic. Are they actually capable of that? It might be easier just to hire coders in Bangalore and bring them here. They’d be grateful for the chance.
Once you start thinking like this, it doesn’t take long to run out of empathy for your fellow Americans.
Suddenly the liberal position and the conservative position were indistinguishable. It was the beneficiaries of cheap labor against everyone else. Rulers versus serfs.
One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans.
In retrospect, Boot’s words are painful to read, like love letters from a marriage that ended in divorce.
Things haven’t gone as planned. What’s remarkable is that despite all the failure and waste and deflated expectations, defeats that have stirred self-doubt in the heartiest of men, Boot has remained utterly convinced of the virtue of his original predictions.
Unlike any American war before or since, Vietnam demonstrated the horror, futility, and ruin wrought by a conflict begun without domestic consensus or clear objectives. Americans were horrified by tens of thousands of military deaths and by the sight of young men drafted to go fight in a poor, distant country that posed no obvious threat to the US. Though military leaders promised the final victory was imminent, the war dragged on for more than a decade. Worst of all, it wasn’t always clear that America held the moral high ground.
Depending on how you measure it, Carter may have been the only president in American history not to preside over a war. Only 8 American servicemen died in action during his administration, killed accidentally during a failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran.
Personally, Carter was an unappealing figure, sanctimonious and nasty. As an executive, he conveyed indecision and incompetence. Even his strengths looked like weakness. When Carter bragged about keeping America out of war, it seemed his real motive was self-doubt. He was hesitant to use force because he didn’t trust American power.
Liberals didn’t hate all wars, just those in which the US projected its will abroad.
Politically, the decision to become a prewar party paid huge dividends for Democrats. From 1968-88, Democrats decisively lost 5 presidential elections and narrowly won another. Since Clinton took the party back in a hawkish direction, the Democrats have lost the popular vote only once, in 2004.
For the country, however, there was a downside. With both parties aligned on the wisdom of frequent military intervention abroad, no one was left to make the counter case. As a result, America has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
In 2002, the NYT gave the case for war a sizable boost with a series of stories on Iraq’s supposedly vibrant chemical and biological weapons programs. The articles cited anonymous Bush administration sources, who later went on TV and cited the Times as evidence that what they had already told the paper on background was true. It was an airtight loop.
While the initial invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam from power almost effortlessly, the war quickly became an expensive, bloody quagmire with no clear end objective in sight.
Less than a year into his 1st term, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently for the transcendent achievement of not being George W. Bush.
Gaddafi was an unsavory autocrat. But there were far more dangerous and more repressive regimes out there, and there was no clear replacement for him within Libya. If there’s a single lesson of the Iraq War, it’s that chaos is worse than dictatorship.
Rather than marginalizing radical Islam, Gaddafi’s fall empowered it, and by 2014 the country was in another civil war that killed thousands. ISIS militants have found a haven in the lawless country. While Gaddafi had blocked illegal migration to Europe, the new Libya has been powerless to stop it.
Things got so bad that even the Times hat to acknowledge it might be some time before the country could become “a productive partner with the West.”
When you’re pulling the trigger, the spirit is always pure. Liberals believed that Curtis LeMay dropped bombs because he was a crazed warmonger who took pleasure in hurting people. Liberals believe they bomb countries for the same reason they once opposed bombing countries, because they want to make the world a better. Intent is what matters.
When moral certainty meets indifference to detail, anything can happen. You can overthrow a secular dictator, watch as he’s replaced by blood-thirsty religious nuts who make everything worse, and then attempt the very same thing somewhere else, expecting different results. And never feel bad about it.
The most dangerous force of all turns out to be an activist establishment that believes its heart is in the right place.
Washington isn’t like everywhere else. The city’s economy is tied directly to the size of the federal budget, which has grown virtually without pause since the attack on Pearl Harbor. The District of Columbia and its surrounding suburbs are now the wealthiest metro region in the country.
Like most early neoconservatives, Irving Kristol was a former leftist, a childhood Trotskyite who became progressively disillusioned with failures and government social policy, and with the left’s infatuation with the Soviet Union.
Kristol made the case for why immigrants are more impressive than native-born Americans. “Basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after 2, 3, 4 generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever.”
If you’re going to run a country for the benefit of a few, it’s dangerous to let people complain about it. The only way to impose unpopular policies on a population is through fear and silence. Free speech is the enemy of authoritarian rule. That’s why the Framers put it at the top of the Bill of Rights. That’s also why our ruling class seeks to crush it.
How could a decent person voluntarily represent Nazis? It was horrifying, but also revealing. You’d really have to believe in free speech to represent someone whose speech you despised, especially if it meant losing donors and being criticized by your neighbors.
There was a time when the First Amendment qualified as secular scripture for educated Americans. They might abhor your views, but they’d die for your right to express them. That’s what they always said, and there was clearly truth in it. Freedom of speech was vital not just because it’s inherently gratifying to say what you think, but because speech is the foundational right of an open society. Free speech makes free thought possible. All other rights derive from it. The right to express your views is the final bulwark that shields the individual from the mob that disagrees with him. Without freedom of speech, we are not free.
In the opinion of Justice Douglas, “government has no power to invade the sanctuary of belief and conscience.”
Lots of places have market economies and democratic forms of government. Only the US has the guarantee of free expression. Almost every other country prosecutes its citizens for having unpopular views, even peaceful Canada. We don’t. It’s what sets America apart. This isn’t just a free country, it’s the freest.
Radicals cared about the First Amendment because they knew they benefited from its protection. Freedom of speech doesn’t exist for the sake of those in power. It exists to safeguard the rights of the unpopular and out of step. Radicals knew free speech mattered. When you’re in the despised minority, being able to say what you think is the only real power you have.
The opposite is also. There’s nothing more infuriating to a ruling class than contrary opinions. They’re inconvenient and annoying. They’re evidence of an ungrateful population. They impede the progress of your programs. Above all, they constitute a threat to your authority; disagreement is the first step toward insurrection. When you’re in charge, you’ll do what you can do to suppress dissent.
Students were still willing to commit acts of civil disobedience, but this time they protested in order to silence a speaker.
The justification for attacks like this, ironically, was that certain ideas are so dangerous, they constitute violence and must therefore be squelched by force. Punching a speaker you disagree with isn’t assault; it’s self-defense. To many student activists, sticks and stones may break bones, but words can be lethal, and require a violent first strike.
When you sincerely believe you possess the truth, all disagreement looks like apostasy. For the greater good, it must be silenced. It’s distressing when academics take this view. It’s terrifying when prosecutors do.
Fellow tech investors immediately demanded that Thiel lose his seat on the board of FB, on the grounds that supporting Trump was tantamount to committing violence. “Giving more power to someone whose ascension and behavior strike fear into so many people is unacceptable,” explained Ellen Pao, the former head of Reddit. “Trump’s views are more than just political speech; fueled by hate and encouraging violence, they make each of us feel unsafe.”
If tech executives will say things like this in public, it’s fair to wonder how their political views affect the products they sell.
It raises the most basic civic question of all: what kind of society do we want to live in?
Among intellectuals, the answer used to be obvious and widely agreed upon: the goal is a free society. You knew what that meant because all free societies share the same features: They tolerate dissent. They prize reason and encourage civility. They discourage witch hunts and groupthink. They try to ensure that people aren’t punished for saying what they think. They recognize that truth is always a defense.
Every nation tries to influence how its citizens behave, but a free society never presumes to control what people believe. That’s for the individual alone to decide.
White men now kill themselves at about 10 times the rate of black and Hispanic women. Yet white men are consistently framed as the oppressors, particularly blue-collar white men.
You no longer hear much from our leaders about the importance of racial harmony. Almost nobody claims we’re really all the same beneath the skin. The emphasis is on our differences. That’s the essence of the diversity agenda.
Despite the length of the essay, Coates never describes a mechanism for redistributing tax dollars to the descendants of slaves. Nor does he describe how much it cost. He suggests the amount might be infinite. “We may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans.”
Elites feel like good people when they read Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s exact the kind of book you’d like to be seen bringing to the beach. What they don’t want is to change their lives in any meaningful way. Coates doesn’t ask them to. Admit you’re bad, Coates says. Gladly, they reply. Nothing changes except how elites feel about themselves. Coates is their confessor. His books are their penance.
Supporting people like Keith Ellison is the price the establishment pays for leaving the economic status quo untouched. If you can convince voters that white supremacy in the heartland is the real problem, it’s possible they may ignore that you and your family live in a rarified white enclave and are far richer now than you were 10 years ago.
If you want to know what people really care about, take a look at where they live, especially if they could live anywhere. Hillary and Bill Clinton are worth 10s of millions of dollars and have free Secret Service protection for life. They could live safely in Harlem or East NY. Instead they bought a place in Chappaqua, which is less than 2% black.
Meanwhile the identity politics they espouse makes the country easier to govern, even as it makes it much harder to live in. Identity politics is based on the premise that every American is a member of a subgroup, usually a racial category. The point of achieving political power is to divert resources to your group. Another word for this is tribalism.
This is the most divisive possible way to run a country. Because they are not about ideas, and instead based on inborn characteristics, tribalism and identity politics are inherently unreasonable. There’s no winning arguments, or even having them. There is only victory or defeat for the group. Your gain is my loss, by definition. It’s zero-sum.
In the end, the whole event was poisoned by the toxin of interest group politics. Legitimate scientists dropped out or decided not to go. As one put it, the March of Science had been “hijacked by the kind of political partisanship it should instead be concerned about.”
Nobody in Obama’s world even pretends there is still one America. There are now as many Americas as there are hyphenated identities.
In a country where virtually every nonwhite group reaps advantages from being racially conscious and politically organized, how long before someone asks the obvious question: why can’t white people organic and agitate along racial lines, too?
If you were looking for someone to tell you how to live, you’d screen candidates based on the success of their own lives. You’d be looking for people who were happily married over a long period, with well-adjusted children who respected them. You’d want to know if they had stable, honest friendships. Sanity would be a key requirement. A cheerfully self-deprecating sense of humor might be one sign of emotional health. Calm self-confidence might be another. If you found a person like that, you’d have a role model.
Have you ever met a professional feminist who fit that description? That’s a serious question, not a dig.
The people who are might be the single unhappiest group in America. Not one of them has a personal life you’d care to emulate. You wouldn’t want to have dinner with them. They’re neurotic, miserable people. Yet somehow they presume to set the standards for the most intimate and elemental questions of human existence.
Feminism was created to open up opportunities for women, and it did. But how do the beneficiaries feel about it? Did feminism make women happy?
When motherhood is less valuable to society, so are women.
Yet modern feminists behave as if fertility is a threat to be feared and conquered. They devalue the one irreplaceable thing women do. They clearly believe that having children is less impressive than working at an investment bank.
Competition from lower-priced foreign labor crushed America’s manufacturing sector. China’s entry into the WTO alone destroyed more than 2M American jobs. Automation is killing many more.
When men’s wages fell relative to women’s, young people stopped getting married. A falling male wage reduced “the attractiveness of men as potential spouses, thus reducing fertility and especially marriage rates.”
A society filled with idle men is an unstable society. At best, it’s a sad place. Men need to work or they fall apart. Work is central to a man’s identity in a way that it is not for the average woman. Terrified of violating feminist orthodoxy, policy makers can’t say this out loud, or respond accordingly.
An international agreement designed to curb carbon emissions, negotiated next to Europe’s busiest private airport. Nobody in attendance flew commercial. Nobody seemed to feel bad about it, either.
This isn’t strange. It’s the story of all human history. Very few civilizations have operated in any other way. People naturally sort themselves into hierarchies. Those who have power defend it from those who don’t. Rulers rule, serfs obey. It’s a familiar system. We know it works, because it has for thousands of years.
The new ingredients, what makes our current moment so unstable, is democracy. Massive inequality can’t be sustained in societies where everyone can vote. In order to survive, democracies must remain egalitarian. When all the spoils seem to flow upward, the majority will revolt in protest. Voters will become vengeful and reckless. They will elect politicians like Donald Trump as a sign of displeasure. If they continue to feel ignored, they will support increasingly radical leaders, who over time will destroy the ruling class, along with everything that made it prosperous. Left untended, democracies self-destruct.
The other solution to the crisis is simpler: attend to the population. Think about what they want.
If they have strong feelings about an issue, don’t overrule them, even if (maybe especially if) their views seem reactionary.
You can’t force enlightenment by fiat. In a democracy, you can only persuade.