Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution

by Tucker Carlson

unsustainable. 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.

In politics as in life, nothing is really hidden, only ignored.

dumber and more insular. 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.

Poverty doesn’t cause instability. Envy does.

society. In Venezuela, the opposite happened. Venezuela used to be a prosperous country. 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.

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.

Democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. 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. Wise leaders understand this. They’re self-reflective and self-critical. When they lose elections, they think about why.

Our leaders understood Trump’s election as a direct challenge to their power. They’ve been fretting about his authoritarian tendencies ever since. Because they lack self-awareness, they don’t perceive this as projection. They can’t see that they’re actually talking about themselves. 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.

Think migrant farmworkers have it bad? Talk to anyone who works in an Amazon fulfillment center, where every step an employee takes is tracked electronically by management; fail to account for a five-minute period and you’re punished. No textile mill ever dehumanized its workers more thoroughly.

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. Nader accused Detroit of knowingly selling dangerous cars. The charge was basically true. General Motors responded by discontinuing the Chevrolet Corvair. The company also tapped Nader’s phones and, it later admitted, hired prostitutes to seduce him.

By the summer of 2017, he’d turned his sights on the most powerful corporate leader of all, Jeff Bezos of Amazon. “As Amazon spreads around the world selling everything and squeezing other businesses that use its platform,” Nader wrote, “is Bezos laughing at humanity? His ultimate objective seems to preside over a mega-trillion dollar global juggernaut that is largely automated, except for that man at the top with the booming laugh who rules over the means by which we consume everything from goods, to media, to groceries.”

A 2017 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that the use of Facebook correlated with declining psychological and even physical health. The more time people spent liking posts or updating their Facebook status, the less happy they felt. Plenty of other research discovered the same thing. One study from 2014 found heavy Facebook use was associated with eating disorders. A 2015 University of Missouri study found that Facebook made people depressed and envious from viewing the carefully curated lives of their friends. In 2016, a study found that quitting Facebook improved psychological health. Facebook’s photo-sharing site Instagram may be even worse for human well-being. A 2017 survey by the British Royal Society for Public Health found that Instagram was the most harmful of all the major social networks. Use of the app caused loneliness, anxiety over body image, and other maladies. Facebook knows all this. It uses the knowledge to boost revenue.