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

by Tucker Carlson

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 retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: Ignore

voters for long enough and you get Donald Trump. Yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. Instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, America’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. Beginning on...

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. They tried everything: Gennifer Flowers, the draft-dodging letters, Whitewater, Hillary’s shady investments. All of Bill Clinton’s moral failings emerged during the campaign. Clinton turned out to be every bit as sleazy as conservatives claimed. It didn’t matter. He won anyway. Conservatives blamed the media. Twenty-five 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.

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.

Suddenly America has a new class system. 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, New York, and Silicon Valley.

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.

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.

Our political leaders ought to be concerned. Instead they work to make the country even less stable, by encouraging rapid demographic change. For decades, ever-increasing immigration has been the rule in the United States, endorsed by both political parties. In 1970, less than 5 percent of America’s population were immigrants. By 2018, that number had risen to nearly 14 percent. This is good news for the leadership of both political parties. Democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: You don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them. Republican donors want lower wages. Many of them

have employees. They know immigrants from the third world will work for less, and be grateful to do it. Minimum wage seems like a pittance to most Americans, something teenagers get for a summer job, but if you’ve just arrived from a slum in Tegucigalpa, it’s a huge improvement over what you’re used to.

With the enthusiastic consent of both parties, more than 15 million illegal immigrants have been allowed to enter the United States, get jobs, and use public services in a country they are not legally allowed to live...

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?

Excellent commentary

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.

Awesome explanation.

One of the most remarkable things about our immigration policy is how unpopular it is. Only the ruling class supports it.

When Americans are asked what their preferred level of annual immigration is, they almost always want less than the current norm of about one million new legal immigrants per year.

America was radically and permanently changed, against the will of its own population, by the people who run the country. Dare to complain about that and you’ll be shouted down as a bigot, as if demanding representation in a democracy were immoral. Not surprisingly, many voters have concluded that our democracy isn’t real. In important ways, it’s not.

America has embarked on repeated military adventures in the Middle East. None of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time.

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.

Absolute stupidity ..... and Americans have bought .... or your a bigot.

Pretty much every major foreign policy decision in recent years has been a disaster.

Our leaders seem less interested than ever in the country they actually govern. Consider the elite response to the opioid epidemic.

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. Outside the richest cities, life expectancy is falling for the first time in American history due to a combination of drug overdoses and suicides.

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.

There’s a reason for that. The path to the American elite has been well marked for decades: Perform well on standardized tests, win admission to an elite school, enter one of a handful of elite professions, settle in a handful of elite zip codes, marry a fellow elite, and reproduce. Repeat that cycle for a couple of generations and you wind up with a ruling class so insulated from the country it rules that failure goes unnoticed. A small group of people accumulates unimaginable wealth while the rest of the country becomes a desiccated husk. Yet everything seems fine.

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. 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

pe...

Increasingly our leaders work against the public’s interests. They view the concerns of middle-class America as superstitious and backward. They fantasize about replacing Americans who live here, with their antiquated attitudes and seemingly intractable problems, with a new population of more pliant immi...

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.

What went wrong? The disaster began when almost everyone in power joined the same team. You used to hear debates between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, on issues that mattered to the rest of the country. That’s over. 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.

Left and right are no longer meaningful categories in America. The rift is between those who benefit from the status quo, and those who don’t. That’s rarely acknowledged in public, which is convenient for those who are benefiting. The people in charge are free to pursue policies that are disconnected from the public good but that h...

The worst decisions always come from unquestioned bipartisan consensus, which over time is exactly what we got from the leaders of both

parties. I watched this convergence.

When the last liberal stopped sobbing about unfairness, American society became less fair. It’s hard to know exactly when this happened, though it became obvious during the tech boom of the 1990s.

The distinction between successful businessman and progressive political activist gets blurrier by the day.

The few sincere liberals left, the ones actually fighting corporate power, seem like bewildered relics from an earlier age. 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. Nader accused Detroit of knowingly selling...

By the summer of 2017, he’d turned his sights on the most powerful corporate leader of all, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

Nader went on to attack Bezos for crushing labor unions and creating a dangerous monopoly that hurts consumers. Every point Nader made was fair. Some were indisputably true. Nobody cared. By 2017, liberals and Jeff Bezos were playing for the same team. Bezos was now the owner of the Washington Post, the most aggressively anti-Trump newspaper in the United States. To liberals, Bezos wasn’t a corporate villain. He was a role model. Slate, the online newsletter of well-educated young progressives in New York and Washington, published stories with headlines like “The Peculiar Genius of Jeff Bezos.”

Nader is a living rebuke to modern liberalism. Not only did he once dare to run for president without permission, but he’s consistently refused to suck up to power. Modern progressives despise him for that above all.

"Where did all the flowers go, long time passing ........."

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 got 4 percent, a smaller proportion than third-party candidates and write-ins combined.

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. When the category was expanded to include “similar private investment funds,” the Journal found that seven financial firms alone donated $47.6 million to Hillary. Trump received a total of $19,000, about the price of a used pickup. Employees...

It now seems normal for businessmen to finance the activist left.

It’s also inevitable. In 1980, Yippie icon Jerry Rubin gave up protesting capitalism to work on Wall Street. Well-educated baby boom liberals began to join the establishment in droves. By the late 1990s, they were in charge. Thanks to the rise of the finance economy, they were getting richer than any previous generation ever had. 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.