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Started reading
October 25, 2018
Maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. You’re not sure. But it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane.
You look on in horror, helpless and desperate. You have nowhere to go. You’re trapped on a ship of fools.
starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. The people who did it don’t seem aware of what they’ve done.
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
Trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters. Trump won because Russian agents “hacked” the election. Trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links. Trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along. None of these explanations withstand scrutiny. They’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results.
At exactly the moment when America needed prudent, responsive leadership, the ruling class got 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.
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.
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.
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. The people who made the policies benefited from them.
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.
America was radically and permanently changed, against the will of its own population, by the people who run the country.
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.
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.
A small group of people accumulates unimaginable wealth while the rest of the country becomes a desiccated husk. Yet everything seems fine.
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 immigrants. Increasingly Americans have begun to understand this, and they resent it.
If our political and intellectual elites ran the NTSB, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming Vladimir Putin. They’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. If you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
Sound familiar? For all of his many faults, Donald Trump isn’t doing any of that. Our ruling class is.
The people in charge are free to pursue policies that are disconnected from the public good but that have, not coincidentally, made them richer, more powerful, and much more self-satisfied. But not more impressive. Our leaders are fools, unaware that they are captains of a sinking ship. This book is about them.
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.
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.
“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.”
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,
Employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated to Hillary over Trump by a margin of 60-to-1.
So young liberals grew up and became the establishment they once despised. That’s a familiar story. What’s new is that
those beneath them. The meritocracy convinced them that the existing order is the natural order.
The work at Foxconn is repetitive and hard, the pressure from management unrelenting. Some workers have reported being forced to stand for twenty-four hours at a time. Others say they are beaten by their supervisors. Starting around 2010, employees at Foxconn plants in China began to kill themselves in alarming numbers.
Never, of course. 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.
Today the ruling class is silent, indeed unconcerned. Liberals view Apple as the apex of tech chic. The company’s business practices aren’t merely tolerated, they’re
celebrated. College graduates compete to work in its sad, spare retail stores, wearing dopey matching T-shirts and selling laptops. This may all seem normal now, but it is a relatively new development.
If Working came out today, how many copies would it sell in Brookline or Marin County? Not enough to justify publishing it. Unless the machinist was transitioning to a new gender or fighting immigration authorities over an expired visa, modern elites wouldn’t care.
With a value greater than the gross domestic product of some African countries, Uber could have paid for all of that. Its owners didn’t want to. So instead, Uber maintained the conceit that its drivers weren’t employees, but “contractors,” independent small business owners who just happened to be using Uber as a way to find customers. It was a semantic trick of incalculable value to the company, but it didn’t change the fact that Uber was running an enormously valuable business on the backs of exploited workers.
Uber was lauded as a pioneer, a corporate John the Baptist heralding the arrival of a savior called the “gig economy.” Low pay, no benefits, unsteady hours? Whatever. An obedient business press focused instead on the “flexibility” Uber’s contractors supposedly enjoyed. Happy workers, cheerfully making America better.
The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history.
Marissa Mayer figured this out early. A longtime Google executive, Mayer spent five years running the tech giant Yahoo. During that time she became one of the most famous business leaders in America, and definitely one of the richest. How did Yahoo do?
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 has never lived outside the elite culture that produced him. Fortunately for him, neither have many of his coworkers, or for that matter many of the reporters who cover him, or the lawmakers charged with regulating him. They’re all from the same world.
Facebook knows more about its users than many spouses know about each other. Facebook sells this information to companies, which use it to make the most finely tuned advertising pitches in history. In effect, Facebook’s customers are its product, the commodity it offers for sale. The company’s success is based on how much time it can get users to spend staring at a screen, providing eyeballs for ads and data for the company’s algorithms.
Its product hurts people, including children. What have America’s elites done about it? Nothing. Congress has never held a hearing on social media addiction or how it’s harming society. No lawmakers are even considering legislation to address any of this. Reporters couldn’t be less interested.
By the 2016 election, Facebook itself was producing propaganda from its headquarters in Menlo Park. Former employees told Gizmodo they “routinely” suppressed right-leaning stories on the company’s breaking news platform. “News curators” kept stories they regarded as conservative from appearing among those trending on Facebook, even if actual share numbers indicated they were popular enough to be included.
was among the most talented and deserving people in the world. It’s also true that the chairman of IAC’s board was Barry Diller, a longtime Clinton family donor and friend.
Throughout Chelsea’s years in the public eye, there have been rare critics who’ve sniped that she is the beneficiary of cronyism and nepotism. Some accused her of playing through life on the lowest difficulty setting without even realizing it. The media were not among these critics. They celebrated Chelsea as the stunningly accomplished woman they considered her to be. A 2013 profile in Parade magazine is typical:
It was nothing readers hadn’t seen before. What’s interesting is what Chelsea didn’t say. She didn’t challenge the existing order, or even acknowledge its existence. She didn’t wonder why an ever-shrinking number of Americans control an ever-expanding share of the country’s wealth. She
didn’t ask why the middle class is dying, or why our society is fragmenting. She definitely didn’t pause to consider how someone so thoroughly ordinary as herself could become rich and famous in a country that claims to promote on the basis of achievement.
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.
hurt the members of his union, undercutting their wages and weakening their leverage in negotiations with management. Cesar Chavez believed in vigilantly defended borders. When government refused to protect them, Chavez did it himself.
Chavez’s men beat immigrants with chains, clubs, and whips made of barbed wire. Illegal aliens who dared to work as scabs had their houses bombed and cars burned. The union paid Mexican officials to keep quiet.
In the 2016 Democratic platform, the party reframed immigration from a debate about economics to the next frontier in the struggle for civil rights and social justice. Any references to the effect of immigration on American citizens were deleted.
According to the Democratic Party, the goal of immigration policy was to ensure the well-being of immigrants. “The current quota system,” the platform explained, “discriminates against certain immigrants, including immigrants of color.”
It was a stunning shift. It was now Democratic Party orthodoxy to give illegal immigrants, all of whom entered the country in defiance of U.S. law, the right to vote. If you had a problem with that, you were betraying the fundamental promise of the country.
In 2015, Ryan said it would be wrong for the United States to take any efforts to curb Muslim immigration into the United States, because “[t]hat’s not who we are.” He did not elaborate.
