More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.
Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety—they lost faith mainly in its globalizing part. They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights, and social responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border. Indeed, they believe that in order to preserve liberty and prosperity in Yorkshire or Kentucky, it is best to build a wall on the border and adopt illiberal policies toward foreigners.
“you can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realize this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realizing the truth.
The one dish that almost everybody wants, at least in theory, is peaceful international relations. This is the chocolate cake of the liberal buffet. In contrast, the one dish that almost nobody desires—the global celery—is immigration.
Donald Trump coupled his calls for American isolationism with a promise to “Make America Great Again”—as if the United States of the 1980s or 1950s was a perfect society that Americans should somehow recreate in the twenty-first century.
We don’t know of any third field of activity—beyond the physical and the cognitive—where humans
