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You’re trapped on a ship of fools. Plato imagined this scene in The Republic.
Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.
They knew because voters always know. In politics as in life, nothing is really hidden, only ignored. A candidate’s character is transparent.
It’s the oldest truth of electoral politics: give people what they want, and you win. That’s how democracy works.
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 United States stopped being a predominantly middle-class country.
Forty 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.
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.
This is why grossly unequal societies tend to collapse, while egalitarian ones endure. America thrived for 250 years mostly because of its political stability. The country had no immense underclass plotting to smash the system. There was not a dominant cabal of the ultrawealthy capable of overpowering the majority. The country was fundamentally stable. On the strata of that stability its citizens built a remarkable society.
Its middle class was large by regional standards, and well educated. The country had one of the biggest oil reserves in the world. The capital was a clean, modern city. Now there are toilet paper shortages in Caracas. Venezuela has the highest murder rate in the Western Hemisphere. Virtually everyone who can leave already has. 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
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named Hugo Chavez to show their displeasure. Twenty years later, Venezuela is no longer a democracy at all. Its economy has all but evaporated.
If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace. It disorients them.
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 of America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question.
Have these wars against terrorism even made America safer from terrorism? It’s debatable. One of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight Islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for Islamic extremism.
From 1999 to 2016, the death rate from opioid drugs has risen more than 400 percent. Drug overdoses are killing more Americans every year than died during the entire Vietnam War.
America now has not only one of the least impressive ruling classes in history, but also the least self-aware. They have no idea how bad they are.
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. Our rulers have no intention of staying for the finale. Countries can survive war and famines and disease. They cannot survive leaders who despise their own people.
What message do voters take from this? All your fears are real. You may have suspected our democracy was actually an oligarchy. Now you know for sure. You can vote all you want, but voting is a charade. Your leaders don’t care what you think. Shut up and obey.
In a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the Bastille; they can vote. Once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen.
Maybe America’s most effective government agency is the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes. Any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the NTSB combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. Its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. The NTSB is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
Let’s say you were an authoritarian who sought to weaken American democracy. How would you go about doing that? You’d probably start by trying to control what people say and think. If citizens dissented from the mandated orthodoxy, or dared to consider unauthorized ideas, you’d hurt them. You’d shame them on social media. You’d shout them down in public. You’d get them fired from their jobs. You’d make sure everyone was afraid to disagree with you.
Our public debates are mostly symbolic. They are sideshows designed to divert attention from the fact that those who make the essential decisions, about the economy and the government and war, have reached consensus on the fundamentals. They agree with each other. They just don’t agree with the population they govern.
The rift is between those who benefit from the status quo, and those who don’t.
For generations, there was no more famous activist on the left than Ralph Nader. Nader became a national figure in 1965, when he published his book Unsafe at Any Speed.
The Democratic Party is now the party of the rich. Eight of America’s ten most affluent counties voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, in most cases by a large margin. In Fairfield County, Connecticut, the hedge fund capital of the world, Hillary won by nearly 20 points. In Nantucket, she won by more than 30 points. In Aspen, Hillary won by more than 45 points. In Marin County, the privileged enclave across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, Hillary Clinton’s margin was greater than 50 points. In Manhattan, by contrast, Trump won less than 10 percent of the vote. In the District of Columbia, he
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Historically, most highly paid executives voted Republican. No more. In the weeks before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton outraised Donald Trump 20-to-1 among people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that hedge fund owners and employees donated a total of $27.6 million to the Hillary Clinton campaign and affiliated groups.
Soros was considered such a rapacious and unethical practitioner of vulture capitalism that liberal economist Paul Krugman once accused him of intentionally trying to provoke currency crises in order to profit from them.
In 1980, Yippie icon Jerry Rubin gave up protesting capitalism to work on Wall Street.
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 despised. That’s a familiar story. What’s new is that this new class felt little responsibility to those beneath them. The meritocracy convinced them that the existing order is the natural order.
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.
That’s because Apple, like virtually every other big employer in American life, has purchased indulgences from the church of cultural liberalism. Apple has a gay CEO with fashionable social views. The company issues statements about green energy and has generous domestic partner benefits. Apple publicly protested the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The company is progressive in ways that matter in Brooklyn. That’s enough to stop any conversation about working conditions in Foxconn factories.
Corporations embrace a progressive agenda that from an accounting perspective costs them nothing. In exchange, they get to maintain the economic status quo that has made them billions. The company’s affluent customers get to imagine they’re fighting the power by purchasing the products, even as they make a tiny group of people richer and more powerful. There’s never been a more brilliant marketing strategy.
The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history.
Yet somehow, in return for presiding over Yahoo’s destruction, Mayer became richer than ever. She collected a total of $239 million in compensation from the company, $900,000 for every week she spent destroying it.
She currently serves on the board of Wal-Mart. Identity politics protected Mayer. As a progressive member of a protected group, her threshold for failure was adjusted radically upward. But that’s not the only reason Mayer dodged the criticism she deserved. Liberals don’t scrutinize power like they used to, probably because they now wield it.
Zuckerberg maintained a different standard for himself. One of the first things he did with his Facebook wealth was buy a secluded 750-acre estate in Hawaii, and then surround it with a six-foot wall. To create a privacy buffer around his house in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg bought four adjacent properties for a total of more than $30 million. Pictures show that Zuckerberg covers the webcam on his personal laptop with masking tape, for privacy reasons. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t trust tech companies. Meanwhile, Facebook continues to gather ever-growing amounts of intimate information about its
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Facebook stimulated the brain in a way similar to cocaine. Ramsay Brown, cofounder of a firm called Dopamine Labs, which uses neuroscience to makes apps more compelling, explained to a Bay Area television station that Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram use precise algorithms to time notifications and alerts to give users a maximally addictive dopamine hit.
Palihapitiya conceded the company had gravely injured humanity itself: “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he said.
Perhaps in order to inoculate himself against elite criticism, Zuckerberg has immersed himself in fashionable political causes. In 2013, he launched a nonprofit called FWD.us to advocate for mass immigration. The group lobbied against immigration enforcement and pushed for amnesty for the more than 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, complete with citizenship and voting rights.
In just six months in 2015, Facebook blocked 55,000 pieces of politically sensitive content in twenty different countries at the request of foreign governments.
In February 2018, Instagram caved to Russia’s demands and censored a video made by Alexei Navalny, the most prominent anti-Putin opposition leader.
There was a time when Bill and Hillary Clinton would have been deeply suspicious of Facebook and its appeasement of authoritarian regimes.
The Clintons no longer have these views, to put it mildly, and not just because they’re older. After decades in power, Bill and Hillary have become archdefenders of the status quo, political and economic.
To signify her commitment to a simpler existence, Chelsea and her husband bought a five-thousand-square-foot, $10 million apartment in New York City’s Flatiron District. The unit was reported to be the widest apartment in New York. It stretched an entire city block.
The seat was created for her. It paid $45,000 a year, plus an annual $250,000 in stock. Not bad for someone who rejects the principle of money. Apparently good things come to those who don’t seek them. Deepak’s law of detachment in action.
The New York Times treated exchanges like this like the discovery of an unpublished Proust novel. The paper ran a feature on Chelsea’s reading habits and book recommendations.
In the American West, no populist figure was more revered than Cesar Chavez. Chavez, an itinerant farmworker with a seventh-grade education, founded and led the United Farm Workers union. In the 1960s, Chavez led the legendary Delano grape strike, which lasted for five years and inspired college students across the country to wear “Boycott Grapes” pins.
Cesar Chavez didn’t support illegal aliens. Chavez didn’t like immigration at all, generally, especially the low-skilled kind. Chavez understood that new arrivals from poor countries will always work for less than Americans. Immigration hurt the members of his union, undercutting their wages and weakening their leverage in negotiations with management. Cesar Chavez believed in vigilantly defended borders.
“All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by U.S. citizens or immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.” The speaker? President Bill Clinton, addressing Congress in his State of the Union speech.
