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

by Tucker Carlson

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.

In 1970, the year after I was born, well over 60 percent of American adults ranked as middle class. That year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. By 2015, America’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more Latin American. Middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. Fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. A majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income. America was becoming a country of rich and poor, and the rich were richer than ever. People who once flew first class now took NetJets.

Over the same period in which manufacturing declined, making the middle class poorer, the finance economy boomed, making t...

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.

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 out, the poor in America are rich by international standards. They have iPhones and cable TV. How poor can they really be?

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.

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?

Instead they act like the problem doesn’t exist. Their predictions for the future are confident but faith-based: all will be well because it always has been. When confronted or pressed for details, they retreat into a familiar platitude, which they repeat like a Zen koan: Diversity is our strength. 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

wisdom and empathy are prerequisites for effective leadership. You’ve got to care about the people you govern. Would you be a good parent if you despised your children? Would you be a good officer if you didn’t care about the lives of your soldiers? 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 people. 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.

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.

Oligarchies posing as democracies will always be overthrown in the end.

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 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.

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.

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.

Employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated to Hillary over Trump by a margin of 60-to-1.

The main reason elites no longer talk about unfairness is that they don’t believe it exists. They’re successful because they deserve to be: that’s the message of the system they grew up in.

Starting in college, Zuckerberg has been repeatedly accused of unethical business practices. Evidence has mounted that Facebook is an addictive product that harms users, and that Zuckerberg knew that from the beginning but kept selling it to unknowing consumers.

Inspired by Harvard’s printed student directory “face books,” Zuckerberg and friends decided to create their own version online. Initially only available on campus, Facebook proved immensely popular and expanded to other elite colleges, then to all colleges, then to high school students, and finally to everyone thirteen or older.

From the beginning, Zuckerberg displayed contempt for his customers, even as he reveled in the power the company gave him. Just days after Facebook’s launch, Zuckerberg bragged to a friend online about how he held the personal information of virtually every student on campus and offered “info about anyone at Harvard.” They “trust me,” Zuckerberg explained. “Dumb fucks.”

Several years later, Zuckerberg assured users that they shouldn’t worry about Facebook’s power over them or be concerned about their lost privacy. As Zuckerberg explained, the “social norm” of privacy itself no longer existed. People no longer had any right to worry about strangers snooping on them.

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.

In the fall of 2017, Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, gave an interview to Axios in which he admitted that Facebook can override the free will of its users. The product is literally addictive. It was engineered to be that way.

When engineers designed Facebook, Parker explained, they asked themselves, “ ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ ” In order to achieve that, “we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you . . . more likes and comments.”

“Sometimes there’s nothing waiting for you, sometimes there’s a friend request or someone wrote on your wall,” Brown said. “Sometimes there’s just kind of like filler crap. It’s not pertinent to your life, but Facebook’s algorithms have figured out that showing it to you then is going to be slightly more surprising than not showing it to you at all or showing it to you later.”

Facebook] literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” he said. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

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.

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 is omnipresent. It is addictive, intentionally so. 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.

One place notably unaffected by demographic change is any neighborhood policy makers happen to live in. The people making immigration policy tend not to be affected by it. Los Angeles County, for example, is now overwhelmingly Hispanic. Upper-income Malibu, meanwhile, is still 87 percent white. New York is a diverse city, but former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s zip code isn’t. His neighborhood is 82 percent white, and less than 5 percent Hispanic. It’s still 1985 where Bloomberg lives, and will likely always be.

Barack Obama’s new zip code in Washington is less than 8 percent Hispanic. The suburbs across the river in Virginia become more Spanish-speaking every year. Obama approves of that. He sees it as a sign of progress. He doesn’t want to live near it. Diversity for thee, but not for me.

For employers, the best part of the new arrangement is that there’s no guilt attached. Let’s say you lived in an affluent household in Boston in 1910. You’ve got help at home; everyone in your neighborhood does. The problem is, your servants are Irish. They may do a fine job making breakfast and ironing the sheets, but you can never quite relax. These are people who speak your language and look like you. At some point you may wonder: why is someone who could be my cousin cleaning my toilet? It’s uncomfortable.

Third-world immigration solves this problem. When your housekeeper is a peasant from Honduras, there’s no reason to feel bad about it. You don’t have to wonder about the details of her life outside of work. You can barely communicate with her. 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 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.

The opposite is also true. 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 to suppress dissent. The modern establishment has done exactly that. Once they took over the institutions they formerly opposed, liberals abandoned their historic support for the First Amendment and became its enemies.

A large and growing proportion of Americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech. According to a Pew survey, 40 percent of millennials think the government should have the power to ban statements offensive to minority groups. A 2017 Cato Institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified Democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants. A growing percentage of the country endorses not only restrictions on the First Amendment, but also the use of extralegal violence in the face of offensive ideas. In the hours after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, white supremacist leader Richard Spencer was punched in the face by a stranger without provocation. The incident sparked a wave of debate, from the New York Times to Twitter, about whether it was okay to “punch a Nazi.” One survey found that the majority of people who described themselves as “strong liberals” approved.

Concerns about white racism reached levels of clinical hysteria in American media after Donald Trump was elected. In a single year, 2017, news organizations ran stories about how the following objects, icons, trends, or consumer products were effectively racist: Credit scores Ice cream truck songs Car insurance Halloween costumes Milk Disney movies Dr. Seuss books The antisegregation novel To Kill a Mockingbird Tanning Mathematics Makeup Science Shakespeare English grammar Facial recognition technology SAT test Bitcoin Wendy’s Pornography Military camouflage The nuclear family The song “Jingle Bells” Lucky Charms cereal Pumpkin spice latte Lacrosse Star Wars Legalized marijuana Being on time Coca-Cola White babies The Oscars Wal-Mart Background checks Art history Founding Fathers McDonald’s The Bible Craft beer There were many more. Some of these stories may have been sophisticated parodies that made it past sleepy editors. Most were deadly serious.

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 tens of millions of dollars and have free Secret Service protection for life. They could live safely in Harlem or East New York. Instead they bought a place in Chappaqua, which is less than 2 percent black.

Barack and Michelle Obama are also rich and surrounded by bodyguards. Their kids went to Sidwell Friends, so school zoning is irrelevant to them. Yet when they left the White House they still moved to the whitest neighborhood in Washington. Fewer than 4 percent of their neighbors are black, in a town that was known for generations as Chocolate City.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York is a tireless advocate for diversity, but not in his own neighborhood. Although he lives in Brooklyn, where one in three residents is African American, his own zip code is one of...

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, doesn’t really live on an Indian reservation. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard, as well as an enormous number of whit...

Even Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. Waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. She lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in Hancock Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. How did Waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? I asked once. She didn’t answer, but did call me a racist. But what’s more interesting are the demographics of the neighborhood where Waters lives. The district she represents in Congress has the second-highest percentage of African American reside...

“There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” Obama said to the cheering stadium. “We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” Before the decade was out, race baiter Al Sharpton would be a regular in the White House. Obama invited Sharpton more than seventy times to seek his advice on domestic policy.

Nobody in Barack Obama’s world even pretends there is still one America. There are now as many Americas as there are hyphenated identities. The 2016 Democratic platform includes the acronym “LGBT” nineteen times and “African” or “black” fifteen times. “Mexican,” “Latino,” or “Hispanic” together appear seven times, as does “transgender.” The word “Muslim” appears six times, “Asian” five. “Pacific Islanders” receives six mentions, while “Native Americans” and “Indians” get thirty-eight. And so on.

Another hyphenated category, “white-Americans,” made it into the Democratic platform, but only as the subject of hostility. There are four references to white people in the platform. The first describes it as “unacceptable” that whites earn more on average than African Americans and Latinos. The next points out that it’s also “unacceptable” that African American arrest rates are higher than those for whites. Interest...