Automation Will Crash Democracy. Debate with Yascha Mounk, Ian Bremmer, Andrew Keen, and Alina Polyakova. Video. Intelligence Squared, May 16, 2018. YouTube.
Tucker Carlson: You
hear a lot in America about the “war on women,” but it’s men in America who are
failing. We have some shocking statistics:
The
signs are everywhere. If you’re a middle aged man, you probably know a peer who
has killed himself in recent years. At least one. If you’re a parent, you may
have noticed that your daughter’s friends seem a little more on the ball than
your son’s. They get better grades. They smoke less weed. They go to more
prestigious colleges. If you’re an employer, you may have noticed that your
female employees show up on time, whereas the young men often don’t. And of
course if you live in this country, you’ve just seen a horrifying series of
mass shootings, far more than we’ve ever had. Women didn’t do that. In every
case, the shooter was a man.
Something
ominous is happening to men in America. Everyone who pays attention knows that.
What’s odd is how rarely you hear it publicly acknowledged. Our leaders pledge
to create more opportunities for women and girls, whom they imply are failing.
Men don’t need help. They’re the patriarchy. They’re fine. More than fine.
But are
they fine? Here are the numbers:
Start
with the most basic, life and death. The average American man will die five
years before the average American woman. One of the reasons for this is
addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics.
They’re also twice as likely to die of a drug OD. In New Hampshire, one of the
states hit hardest by the opioid crisis, 73 percent of overdose deaths were
men.
But the
saddest reason for shortened life spans is suicide. Seventy-seven percent of
all suicides are committed by men. The overall rate is increasing at a dramatic
pace. Between 1997 and 2014, there was a 43 percent rise in suicide deaths
among middle aged American men. The rates are highest among American Indian and
white men, who kill themselves at about ten times the rate of Hispanic and
black women.
You
often hear of America’s incarceration crisis. That’s almost exclusively a male
problem too. Over 90 percent of inmates are male.
These
problems are complex, and they start young. Relative to girls, boys are failing
in school. More girls than boys graduate high school. Considerably more go to
and graduate from college. Boys account for the overwhelming majority of school
discipline cases. One study found that fully one in five high school boys had
been diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder, compared with just one in 11 girls.
Many were medicated for it. The long term health effects of those medications
aren’t fully understood, but they appear to include depression in later life.
Women
decisively outnumber men in graduate school. They earn the majority of doctoral
degrees. They are now the majority of new enrollees in both law and medical
schools.
For
men, the consequences of failing in school are profound. Between 1979-2010,
working age men with only high school degrees saw their real hourly wages drop
about 20 percent. Over the same period, high school educated women saw their
wages rise. The decline of the industrial economy disproportionately hurt men.
There
are now seven million working age American men who are no longer in the labor
force. They’ve dropped out. Nearly half of them take pain medication on any
given day. That’s the highest rate in the world.
Far
fewer young men get married than did just a few decades ago, and fewer stay
married. About one in five American children live with only their mothers.
That’s double the rate in 1970. Millions more boys are growing up without
fathers. Young adult men are now more likely to live with a parent than with a
spouse or partner. That is not the case for young women. Single women buy their
own homes at more than twice the rate of single men. More women than men now
have drivers licenses.
Whenever
gender differences come up in public debate, the so-called wage gap dominates
the conversation. A woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s
the statistic you’ll hear. It’s repeated everywhere. But that number compares
all American men to all American women across all professions. No legitimate
social scientist would consider that a valid measure. The number is both
meaningless and intentionally misleading. It’s a talking point.
Once
you compare men and women with similar experience working the same hours in
similar jobs for the same period of time — and that’s the only way you can
measure it — the gap all but disappears. In fact it may invert. One study using
census data found that single women in their 20s living in metropolitan areas
now earn eight percent more on average than their male counterparts. By the
way, the majority of managers are now women. Women on average are scoring
higher on IQ tests than men are.
Men are
even falling behind physically. A recent study found that almost half of young
men failed the Army's entry-level physical fitness test during basic training.
Fully seventy percent of American men are overweight or obese, as compared to
59 percent of American women.
Perhaps
most terrifyingly, men seem to be becoming less male. Sperm counts across the
west have plummeted, down almost 60 percent since the early 1970s. Scientists
don’t know why. Testosterone levels in men have also fallen precipitously. One
study found that the average levels of male testosterone dropped by one percent
every year after 1987. This is unrelated to age. The average 40-year-old-man in
2017 would have testosterone levels 30 percent lower than the average
40-year-old man in 1987.
There
is no upside to this. Lower testosterone levels in men are associated with depression,
lethargy, weight gain and decreased cognitive ability. Nothing like this has
ever happened. You’d think we’d want to know what exactly is going on and how
to fix it. But the media ignore the story. It’s considered a fringe topic.
Nor is
it a priority in the scientific research establishment. We checked and couldn’t
find a single NIH-funded study on why testosterone levels are falling. We did
find a study on, quote, “Pubic Hair Grooming Prevalence and Motivation Among
Women in the United States.”
Those
are the numbers. They paint a very clear picture: American men are failing, in
body, mind and spirit. This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not
happening. They tell us the opposite is true: Women are victims, men are
oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women
far outpace men in higher education, virtually every college campus supports a
women’s studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our
politicians and business leaders internalize and amplify that message. Men are
privileged. Women are oppressed. Hire and promote and reward accordingly.
That
would be fine if it were true. But it’s not true. At best, it’s an outdated
view of an America that no longer exists. At worst, it’s a pernicious lie.
Either
way, ignoring the decline of men doesn’t help anyone. Men and women need each
other. One cannot exist without the other. That’s elemental biology, but it’s
also the reality each of us has lived, with our parents and siblings and
friends. When men fail, all of us suffer. How did this happen? How can we fix
it? We hope this series answers those questions.
Tyrannosaurus Rex. Simon
Stålenhag/Swedish Natural History Museum.
Tyrannosaurus rex
tearing apart a carcass while a flock of nervous herbivores skitter by in the
foreground. Tyrannosaurs were mostly small and unimportant for the better part
of their 100-million-year history. But in the final 20 million years of the
Cretaceous before the mass extinction, some species like T. rex reached outrageous size and fearsomeness.
Tyrannosaurus rex with
the Chicxulub asteroid hovering in the sky, moments before the catastrophic
impact that would have released, all at once, far more energy than all the
nuclear weapons ever detonated.
Transcript excerpt at Axios: There
is a sense that society is collapsing — the culture is collapsing. We’re
collapsing in crime. The world is collapsing. Crazy people with bad haircuts
have nukes. Everything is going bad — terrorism, etc. They want to be fully
armed on their hill, at home. . . . They’re Americans, and they want to go down
fighting.
The Liberal Crackup. By Mark Lilla. Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2017. Lilla: Liberals should reject the divisive,
zero-sum politics of identity and find their way back to a unifying vision of
the common good
Donald
Trump’s surprise victory in last year’s presidential election has finally energized
my fellow liberals, who are networking, marching and showing up at town-hall
meetings across the country. There is excited talk about winning back the White
House in 2020 and maybe even the House of Representatives in the interim.
But we
are way ahead of ourselves—dangerously so. For a start, the presidency just
isn’t what it used to be, certainly not for Democrats. In the last generation,
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won the office with comfortable margins, but they
were repeatedly stymied by assertive Republicans in Congress, a right-leaning
Supreme Court and—what should be the most worrisome development for Democrats—a
steadily growing majority of state governments in Republican hands.
What’s
more, nothing those presidents did while in office did much to reverse the
rightward drift of American public opinion. Even when they vote for Democrats
or support some of their policies, most Americans—including young people, women
and minorities—reject the term “liberal.” And it isn’t hard to see why. They
see us as aloof, elitist, out of touch.
It is
time to admit that American liberalism is in deep crisis: a crisis of
imagination and ambition on our side, a crisis of attachment and trust on the
side of the wider public. The question is, why? Why would those who claim to
speak for and defend the great American demos
be so indifferent to stirring its feelings and gaining its trust? Why, in the
contest for the American imagination, have liberals simply abdicated?
Ronald
Reagan almost single-handedly destroyed the New Deal vision of America that
used to guide us. Franklin Roosevelt had pictured a place where citizens were
joined in a collective enterprise to build a strong nation and protect each
other. The watchwords of that effort were solidarity, opportunity and public
duty. Reagan pictured a more individualistic America where everyone would
flourish once freed from the shackles of the state, and so the watchwords
became self-reliance and small government.
To meet
the Reagan challenge, we liberals needed to develop an ambitious new vision of
America and its future that would again inspire people of every walk of life
and in every region of the country to come together as citizens. Instead we got
tangled up in the divisive, zero-sum world of identity politics, losing a sense
of what binds us together as a nation. What went missing in the Reagan years
was the great liberal-democratic We.
Little wonder that so few now wish to join us.
There
is a mystery at the core of every suicide, and the story of how a once-successful
liberal politics of solidarity became a failed liberal politics of “difference”
is not a simple one. Perhaps the best place to begin it is with a slogan: The personal is the political.
This
phrase was coined by feminists in the 1960s and captured perfectly the mind-set
of the New Left at the time. Originally, it was interpreted to mean that
everything that seems strictly private—sexuality, the family, the workplace—is
in fact political and that there are no spheres of life exempt from the struggle
for power. That is what made it so radical, electrifying sympathizers and
disturbing everyone else.
But the
phrase could also be taken in a more romantic sense: that what we think of as
political action is in fact nothing but personal activity, an expression of me
and how I define myself. As we would put it today, my political life is a
reflection of my identity.
Over
time, the romantic view won out over the radical one, and the idea got rooted
on the left that, to reverse the formula, the
political is the personal. Liberals and progressives continued to fight for
social justice out in the world. But now they also wanted there to be no space
between what they felt inside and what they did in that world. They wanted
their political engagements to mirror how they understood and defined
themselves as individuals. And they wanted their self-definition to be
recognized.
This
was an innovation on the left. Socialism had no time for individual
recognition. Rushing toward the revolution, it divided the world into
exploiting capitalists and exploited workers of every background. New Deal
liberals were just as indifferent to individual identity; they thought and
spoke in terms of equal rights and equal social protections for all. Even the
early movements of the 1950s and ’60s to secure the rights of African-Americans,
women and gays appealed to our shared humanity and citizenship, not our
differences. They drew people together rather than setting them against each
other.
All
that began to change when the New Left shattered in the 1970s, in no small part
due to identity issues. Blacks complained that white movement leaders were
racist, feminists complained that they were sexist, and lesbians complained
that straight feminists were homophobic. The main enemies were no longer
capitalism and the military-industrial complex; they were fellow movement
members who were not, as we would say today, sufficiently “woke.”
It was
then that less radical liberal and progressive activists also began redirecting
their energies away from party politics and toward a wide range of single-issue
social movements. The forces at work in healthy party politics are centripetal;
they encourage factions and interests to come together to work out common goals
and strategies. They oblige everyone to think, or at least to speak, about the
common good.
In
movement politics, the forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits into
smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and practicing rituals
of ideological one-upmanship. Symbols take on outsize significance, especially
in identity-based movements.
The
results of this shift are now plain to see. The classic Democratic goal of bringing
people from different backgrounds together for a single common project has
given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and
exclusionary self-definition. And what keeps this approach to politics alive is
that it is cultivated in the colleges and universities where liberal elites are
formed. Here again, we must look to the history of the New Left to understand
how this happened.
After
Reagan’s election in 1980, conservative activists hit the road to spread the
new individualist gospel of small government and free markets and poured their
energies into winning out-of-the-way county, state and congressional elections.
Also on the road, though taking a different exit on the interstate, were former
New Left activists heading for college towns all over America.
Conservatives
concentrated on attracting working people once attached to the Democratic
Party—a populist, bottom-up strategy. The left concentrated on transforming the
outlook of professional and party elites—a top-down strategy. Both groups were
successful, and both left their mark on the country.
Up
until the 1960s, those active in the Democratic Party were largely drawn from
the working class or farm communities and were formed in local political clubs
or on union-dominated shop floors. That world is gone. Today they are formed
primarily in our colleges and universities, as are members of the
overwhelmingly liberal-dominated professions of law, journalism and education.
Liberal
political education, such as it is, now takes place on campuses that are far
removed, socially and geographically, from the rest of the country—and
particularly from the sorts of people who once were the foundation of the
Democratic Party. And the political catechism that is taught is a historical
artifact, reflecting more the idiosyncratic experience of the ’60s generation
than the realities of power politics today.
The
experience of that era taught the New Left two lessons. The first was that
movement politics was the only mode of engagement that actually changes things;
the second was that political activity must have some authentic meaning for the
self, making compromise seem like a self-betrayal.
These
lessons, though, have little bearing on liberalism’s present crisis, which is
that of being defeated time and again by a well-organized Republican Party that
keeps tightening its grip on our institutions. Where those lessons do resonate
is with young people in our highly individualistic bourgeois society—a society
that keeps them focused on themselves and teaches them that personal choice,
individual rights and self-definition are all that is sacred.
It is
little wonder that students of the Facebook age are drawn to courses focused on
their identities and movements related to them. Nor is it surprising that many
join campus groups that engage in identity movement work. But the costs need to
be tallied.
For
those students who will soon become liberal and progressive elites, the line
between self-discovery and political action has become blurred. Their political
commitments are genuine but are circumscribed by the confines of their
self-definitions. Issues that penetrate those confines take on looming
importance, and since politics for them is personal, their positions tend to be
absolutist and nonnegotiable. Those issues that don’t touch on their identities
or affect people like themselves are hardly perceived. And classic liberal
ideas like citizenship, solidarity and the common good have little meaning for
them.
As a
teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and
progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far
more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and
principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they
are engaged in politics as an X,
concerned about other Xs and those
issues touching on X-ness. And they
are less and less comfortable with debate.
Over
the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our
universities into the media mainstream: Speaking
as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any
questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once
might have begun, I think A, and here is
my argument, now take the form, Speaking
as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are
taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.
Conservatives
complain loudest about today’s campus follies, but it is really liberals who
should be angry. The big story is not that leftist professors successfully turn
millions of young people into dangerous political radicals every year. It is
that they have gotten students so obsessed with their personal identities that,
by the time they graduate, they have much less interest in, and even less
engagement with, the wider political world outside their heads.
There
is a great irony in this. The supposedly bland, conventional universities of
the 1950s and early ’60s incubated the most radical generation of American
citizens perhaps since our founding. Young people were incensed by the denial
of voting rights out there, the Vietnam War out there, nuclear proliferation
out there, capitalism out there, colonialism out there. Yet once that
generation took power in the universities, it proceeded to depoliticize the
liberal elite, rendering its members unprepared to think about the common good
and what must be done practically to secure it—especially the hard and
unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a
common effort.
Every
advance of liberal identity consciousness has marked a retreat of liberal
political consciousness. There can be no liberal politics without a sense of We—of what we are as citizens and what
we owe each other. If liberals hope ever to recapture America’s imagination and
become a dominant force across the country, it will not be enough to beat the
Republicans at flattering the vanity of the mythical Joe Sixpack. They must
offer a vision of our common destiny based on one thing that all Americans, of
every background, share.
And
that is citizenship. We must relearn how to speak to citizens as citizens and
to frame our appeals for solidarity—including ones to benefit particular
groups—in terms of principles that everyone can affirm.
Black
Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity. By
publicizing and protesting police mistreatment of African-Americans, the
movement delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. But its
decision to use this mistreatment to build a general indictment of American
society and demand a confession of white sins and public penitence only played
into the hands of the Republican right.
I am
not a black male motorist and will never know what it is like to be one. If I
am going to be affected by his experience, I need some way to identify with
him, and citizenship is the only thing I know that we share. The more the
differences between us are emphasized, the less likely I will be to feel
outrage at his mistreatment.
The
politics of identity has done nothing but strengthen the grip of the American
right on our institutions. It is the gift that keeps on taking. Now is the time
for liberals to do an immediate about-face and return to articulating their
core principles of solidarity and equal protection for all. Never has the
country needed it more.
Zakaria: The
real question of the 2016 presidential election isn’t so much why did Donald
Trump win, as why did he even get close?
After
all, Trump was a totally unconventional candidate who broke all the rules and
did things that would have destroyed anyone else running for president. So why
did he break through?
Here’s
the answer: America is now divided along four lines, each one reinforcing the
others. Call them the four Cs.
The
first is capitalism. There was a time when the American economy moved in tandem
with its middle class. As the economy grew, so did middle class employment and
wages. But over the last few decades that link has been broken. The economy has
been humming along, but it now enriches mostly those with education, training,
and capital. The other Americans have been left behind.
The
second divide is about culture. In recent decades, we’ve seen large scale
immigration; African-Americans and Hispanics rising to a more central place in
society; and gays being accorded equal rights. All of this has meant new
cultures and narratives have received national attention. And it’s worried a
segment of the older, white population, which fears that the national culture
they grew up with is fading. One comprehensive study found that after party
loyalty, the second strongest predictor of a Trump voter was “fears of cultural
displacement.”
The
third divide in America today is about class. The Trump vote is in large part
an act of class rebellion, a working class revolt against know-it-all elites
who run the country. These voters will stick with Donald Trump even as he
flails, rather than vindicate the elite, urban view of him.
The
final C in this story is communication. We have gone from an America where
people watched three networks that provided a uniform view of the world to one
where everyone can pick their own channel, message, and now even their own
facts.
All
these forces have been at work for decades, but in recent years, the Republican
Party has been better able to exploit them and identify with those Americans
who feel frustrated, anxious, angry – even desperate about the direction that
the country is headed in. Donald Trump capitalized on these trends even more
thoroughly, speaking openly to people's economic anxieties, cultural fears, and
class rebellion. He promised simple solutions, mostly aimed at others –
Mexicans, Muslims, Chinese people and, of course, the elites and the media.
It
worked. He won. Whether his solutions are even enacted is another matter. But
the real victory will come for this country when someone looks at these deep
forces that are dividing it and tries to construct a politics that will bridge
them. Rather than accept that America must remain a country split between two
tribes – each uncomprehending of the other, both bitter and hostile – he or she
would speak in a language that unites them.
That
kind of leadership would win not just elections -- but a place of honor in
American history.
Brooks, GPS Transcript: ZAKARIA:
Ronald Reagan: In the minds of many on the right, he will forever be the king
of conservatism, his presidency the high point of that movement.
So what
does Donald Trump’s presidency represent? Where does conservatism go from here?
Where does the Republican Party go from here?
Early
in the week, I had the opportunity to talk to a man who thinks a lot about
these issues, the New York Times
columnist David Brooks.
(BEGIN
VIDEOTAPE)
ZAKARIA:
David Brooks, pleasure to have you on.
BROOKS:
Good to be with you.
ZAKARIA:
When you look at Trump and the way he’s been governing, the things he’s passed,
it’s, kind of, a hodgepodge of some things that seem hardcore Republican
economic agenda, the repeal of Obamacare. Some of it is the trade protectionism
he’s always promised. Is there a new conservatism developing?
BROOKS:
No, I don’t think so, not – not in this administration. I think we saw glimmers
of it in the campaign. And what Trump understood but a lot of us didn’t
understand, what debate we were having. We grew up in the debate of big
government versus small government, whether you wanted to use government to
enhance equality, as Democrats did, or reduce government to enhance freedom, as
Republicans did. But in the campaign, Trump said “That’s not our debate.” As
many people, including you, have said, it’s open-closed. It’s between those who
feel the headwinds of globalization blasting in their faces and they want
closed borders, closed trade, security, and those who feel it’s pushing at
their backs, and they want open trade, open opportunity and open social mores.
And he
identified that we’re having a new debate now. And what's central to his
administration is he hasn't delivered on that.
And
that’s because there are not a lot of Trumpians in the world of policy. And so
he hasn’t exactly helped the people who got him into office. He’s staffed his
administration, to the extent it is staffed, with people who basically believed
in the Reagan bargain of 1984, which is, you know, cut tax rates, reduce
government regulation. And so I think he opened the door for a new kind of
conservatism but has not fulfilled it. That’s for somebody in the future.
ZAKARIA:
So where do Republicans go?
When
you look at Republican congressmen, politicians, have they looked at that
campaign and said, “We need to become more populist conservatives?” Is that
where the party is heading?
BROOKS:
Yeah, there was a book that was really useful to read, a short book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas Kuhn. And he said what happens in science – but it’s also true in
politics – is you get a paradigm; you get a way of looking at the world,
Reaganism. That was a paradigm. It works for a little while and then slowly it
detaches from reality and it’s hollow, but nobody knows it. Somebody comes
along, punctures it and it collapses.
And
that’s what Trump did to Reaganism. But then you get this period of chaos,
where people really haven’t released the old paradigm but they haven’t – don’t
know what the new one is. And then you get a period of competition of
paradigms.
And so,
in the Republican Party, you’re going to get a libertarian paradigm; you’re
going to get a paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan paradigm. You’re going to get a
whole bunch of different ones and they will fight it out.
And if
I had to bet, I would like an Alexander Hamilton, open trade, a lot of
immigration, a lot of economic dynamism. But frankly, when I look at the polls,
there are not a lot of people who want what I want. The Steve Bannons of the
world – that’s where a lot of the people are. If you – they’re older; they’re
economically disadvantaged, and they want a national conservatism that will
protect them.
ZAKARIA:
And if that is what they want, the party, you think, will – will fold. Because,
to me, what’s been really interesting to watch is conservative intellectuals
have, by and large, particularly the more prominent ones like you, have stuck
true to their ideas and ideals and, you know, been very critical of Trump. I
think somebody like George Will essentially got fired from Fox for that reason.
BROOKS:
Yeah, right.
ZAKARIA:
But the Republican politicians have not. They have all caved and, in some way
or the other, have accommodated themselves to Trump?
BROOKS:
Yeah. And either those of us in the intellectual class are hidebound and rigid
and we’re stuck with our ideas and we’re not reflecting reality, or the
politicians are craven and they just don’t want to lose their jobs, so they’ll
go wherever the people are. And that’s basically where they are.
I think
one of the things we’ve learned and Trump has demonstrated is that parties are
not that ideological. Trump ran against a lot of Republican positions and
Republicans signed on.
What
parties are these days are cultural signifiers, social identity markers and
just teams. And people think, “What team has people like me on it? What fits my
social identity?”
A lot
of people looked around; a lot of suburban women in Missouri looked around and
said “Sarah Palin, she’s, kind of, like me.” And whether Sarah Palin believed
in high tax rates or low tax rates or health insurance markets or some other
health care policy, that’s not what they were thinking about. They were
thinking about, “Who’s like me?”
And for
a lot of people in the Republican Party, which is older, whiter and less
educated at the core, Trump was like that.
ZAKARIA:
Does that tell you that they will be loyal to him to the end, if there – if
these investigations go – go badly for the president?
BROOKS:
Yeah, pretty much. One of the things I think we’ve learned in spades over the
last 20 years is that we in the political class get super-excited about
scandal, and we think, “Oh, it’s about to tear that person down.” But, time and
time again, when you actually go out to districts where people are voting, it’s,
sort of, just a noise in the background, and they’re voting the things that
they care about, their economics, their health care, their education, or they
like the person.
And so,
in my conversations with Trump voters, the scandals just don’t come up. They
think – always, he’s kind of a buffoon or whatever, but at least he’s still
basically trying to say the right things. And so I don’t think it will have any
difference.
ZAKARIA:
And is part of Trump's support that that – you know, that core 35 percent or so
of the country strengthened every time the media criticizes him?
BROOKS:
Yeah...
ZAKARIA:
Because the last thing they want to do is to give you the satisfaction...
(LAUGHTER)
BROOKS:
Correct.
ZAKARIA:
... of having been right about Donald Trump?
BROOKS:
Correct. Yeah, one of the things we learned about the class structure in this
country is that people in the lower middle class or people in the working class
or people who voted for Trump don’t mind billionaires; they do not mind rich
people. What they mind are bossy professionals, teachers, lawyers, journalists
who seem to want to tell them what to do or seem to want to tell them how to
act.
And if
you had to pick the classic epitome of that person who most offends them, that
would be Hillary Clinton. And so she was exactly the wrong person.
And so
I find them remarkably stable in their support. There’s been some seepage
around the edge for Donald Trump, but so far it’s just seepage.
ZAKARIA:
David Brooks, pleasure to have you on.
BROOKS:
Thank you. Steinhorn (excerpt):
But
populism has always been about more than a loss of jobs, status and prestige.
It’s also about who they blame for that loss. And typically they train their
fire on those they view as elites.
Notwithstanding
the threads of nativism and xenophobia woven into the early populist rhetoric,
their targets were clear: monopolies, banks, industrialists and those who
controlled the levers of capital in America. To them, they traced their loss of
livelihood and status directly to the economic barons who constituted the
elites of their time.
But
today’s populists — with the notable exception of the Bernie Sanders wing —
don’t rage against the capitalist elites and corporate boards and CEOs and
financiers for outsourcing their jobs, closing their plants, squeezing their
incomes and soaking up much of the nation’s wealth.
Rather,
they aim their anger at those who they believe have deprived them of their
cultural capital. To them, it’s the liberal, intellectual and media elites that
have redefined who and what America values. On the cultural pedestal is now a
rainbow flag, not the American flag. The masculinity of old is now declassé. We
elevate diversity and multiculturalism, not the hard hat, cop and white picket
fence.
In the
white working-class worldview, these elites have hijacked what Sarah Palin once
called the “real America” — through globalization that stole their jobs,
dispensations and benefits for those that haven’t earned it, and a politically
correct hierarchy that privileges gays, minorities, immigrants and now the
transgendered, but not the white working class even though, to them, they’re
the ones who built the country and deserve respect.
From
their perspective, all these elites seem to hand them is disdain and
condescension. So they see themselves, in the words of President Trump, as the
“forgotten Americans.”
Trump
understood all of that from the very beginning of his campaign. Sporting his
trademark “Make America Great Again” red baseball cap signaling white
working-class solidarity, he vowed to stomp on the elites that his supporters
believed were putting them down.
