14 THINGS FALL APART

The American Experiment at Risk

For many Americans, including most liberals but also a good number of conservatives, libertarians, and others, Donald Trump’s sudden emergence as a political force raised the question: Where did this monster come from?

Of course, that’s not entirely fair to Trump and many of his supporters. For many voters, Donald Trump was not the monster but the savior, the heroic—albeit flawed—champion called forth by the times. He was the Shin Godzilla of our moment, rising up to destroy the establishment and awaken the true spirit of the American nation. For others, he was simply the preferable option between two bad choices. Ample polling during the campaign showed that more Trump voters thought of their vote as against Clinton than for Trump.1 And if, for example, as a conservative, your overriding concern is the future of the Supreme Court, Trump was the right choice at the time.

Whichever perspective you subscribe to, the real point is that Trump was not a creature out of the blue. Both his election and his presidency were symptoms of trends long in the making. Any exhaustive attempt to explain how Donald Trump succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Republican Party would require a whole book—at least. So I will simply focus on what I believe are the most important factors and the ones that most directly touch on the themes of this book.

As I have labored to illustrate, human nature holds constant. The world changed over the last three hundred years, not because we evolved into more enlightened beings, but because we stumbled into a new way of talking and thinking about how society should be organized. That changed way of thinking was the revolutionary event, but the revolution was sustained and secured by a host of institutions, both in terms of rules but also in the more concrete sense of actual associations and organizations. Those associations and organizations are commonly lumped into the term “civil society.” It comprises everything from churches and schools to bowling leagues and 4-H clubs. The old form of civil society is not dead, but it is everywhere retreating, like a once great reef bleached by acidic waters.

That simile is intentional. I’ve always thought of civil society to be like a great reef in the ocean. The coral provides a rich ecosystem in which a vast variety of life resides, which is why they are sometimes called “the rain forests of the sea.” They constitute less than 0.1 percent of the worldwide ocean surface but account for a staggering 25 percent of all marine species.2

For most of human prehistory, there was really only one institution: the tribe or band. It may have been subdivided into some smaller units: the family, the hunters versus the gatherers, etc. But they were all subsumed into the tribe itself.

After the agricultural revolution, the division of labor created space for more institutions, some of which could even be in conflict with one another. There was “space” outside the state. And in that space, institutions grew over time, at coral pace. This ecosystem changed little, and when it did, it did so very slowly, allowing humans to adapt. The reef was made up of only a few distinct colonies of coral: the family, the local community, the church, a relative handful of occupations, usually supervised by guilds of one sort or another, and, of course, the state, including the military. Then, for reasons discussed at length earlier, there was the miraculous explosion of institutions. And with that explosion came a staggering burst of human prosperity and creative genius, which only expanded and extended the whole process.

Creating a nurturing environment for mediating institutions is a form of social engineering, arguably the greatest feat of social engineering in human history, but not in the way we normally define the term. It is social engineering of the sort I described when discussing the differences between English gardens and French ones. English gardens create a zone of liberty where people and institutions are free to prosper. Humans serve as pollinators, moving from one institution to another, gaining sustenance and providing it at the same time. It is social engineering without any intended goal other than the flourishing of the garden itself.

If you can forgive the whiplash of going back and forth between metaphors, civil society in the modern era is akin to creating artificial reefs. Drop a pile of concrete or sink an oil rig to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and wait. Soon coral, algae, barnacles, oysters, and other creatures attach themselves to it. As they accumulate, fish take up residence in the new shelter. (Oil rigs in Southern California host up to twenty-seven times more fish than natural rocky reefs in the same area.)3 I hate the expression “If you build it, they will come,” but in this case it’s apt. And when they do come, they flourish.

The hitch to this metaphor is that the state cannot build the reefs; it can only protect them. If you’ve ever been scuba diving or snorkeling, you probably know that swimmers aren’t supposed to touch the coral with their bare hands. We have oils in our skin that disrupt the membranes of coral and can even kill a whole colony. The state is a greasy-handed tourist in civil society. Except when it is extremely careful—which it usually is not—when it intervenes in institutions, it harms them and often kills them.

Civil society has a different currency from the market economy and the state. Voluntary associations operate on the economy of love and community, charity and reciprocity. The Salvation Army, the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, garden clubs, and Civil War reenactment societies operate based on shared values and different principles from a welfare agency or jobs program. When the state stomps its way in and tells these groups how they must operate, it is usually harmful. When the state takes over the functions being performed by civil society, it is toxic.

That is not the intent, of course. The government is usually “here to help.” The government does many good and important things. But what it cannot do is love you.

Politicians delight in likening the country to a family. This is a dangerous analogy. Welfare programs—including numerous middle-class entitlements—are justified on the grounds that we all belong to the same American family, families take care of their own, and in the family there is no shame in asking for help. The problem here is twofold. Anyone who has asked a family member—particularly the wrong family member—for money knows that shame often plays a big role in the experience, particularly if you ask more than once. Family generosity has its limits, and it comes with strings attached. This is because generosity is different from entitlement, and familial assistance brings with it complex forms of reciprocity, guilt, expectations, etc.

My brother, Josh, was plagued by addiction. My parents aided him many times before he died. All of their help—financial, emotional, and every other kind imaginable—came with conditions, lectures, hugs, tears, guilt, encouragement, and ultimatums. The government cannot play that role. None of these psychological factors is at work with a government check. Can a bureaucrat call you at ten o’clock at night, like your uncle Irving, and hock you about the money you owe him?

Former Texas senator Phil Gramm tells a story about talking to a group of voters. He was asked what his policy on children was. He said something like “My policy derives from the fact that no one can love my children as much my wife and I do.”

A woman in the audience interrupted him and said, “No, that’s not true: I love your children as much as you do.”

Graham shot back his answer: “Oh, really? What are their names?”

The second problem is that welfare is not received as charity; it is seen as an entitlement. When you tell people—particularly strangers—they are entitled to something they did not earn or work for, you are teaching a profound—and often profoundly pernicious—lesson about how life itself works. For instance, when societies assume that the government is there to provide all of the wants and needs for the poor, not only do the poor become less motivated to help themselves, but the affluent also become less motivated to help them. European countries, the imagined better models for social organization, have seen their civil societies atrophy. The churches are subsidized, but the pews are empty. The prevailing attitude is that the state is there to help those in need, so why should people give any more? “That’s what I pay taxes for.” Meanwhile, in America, the most charitable developed country in the world, religion is privatized and the source of immeasurable social generosity.

“Studies of charitable giving in the United States show that people in the least religious fifth of the population give just 1.5 percent of their money to charity,” writes Jonathan Haidt. “People in the most religious fifth (based on church attendance, not belief) give a whopping 7 percent of their income to charity, and the majority of that giving is to religious organizations.” Haidt adds that “it’s the same story for volunteer work: religious people do far more than secular folk, and the bulk of that work is done for, or at least through, their religious organizations.”4 Civil society encourages people to be other-directed, to help not for a check but for the psychic or spiritual reward of being needed. That kind of participation is a source of values and virtues that sustain democracy and capitalism.

Mediating institutions also provide a sense of meaning, community, and even identity that gives people a sense of belonging and fulfillment.

Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute (where I am a Fellow), has written extensively on the importance of “earned success.” Earning success is not synonymous with making money or becoming famous. The essence of earned success, which Brooks says is the very essence of American exceptionalism, is the sense of personal satisfaction that comes from hard work and achievement. It can take the form of money, but money isn’t what purchases a sense of earned success. People who are simply given money—from the lottery or an inheritance—get a brief psychological sugar high from the windfall, but that wears off rapidly. What generates lasting happiness is the conviction that your labors are valued, that you have made a meaningful contribution, that you are needed. A stay-at-home mother who raises happy, healthy children can have high levels of earned success, while a wealthy stockbroker can have low earned success. Priests, schoolteachers, artists, writers—no matter their financial status—can have high levels of earned success if they feel like they made a difference in the world.

The reason the American experiment is so bound up in earned success is that our system was designed to let people choose their own path to earned success. This is what the “individual pursuit of happiness” means. And the more mediating institutions we have, the more paths to earned success there are.

Brooks contrasts earned success with “learned helplessness,” a term coined by the eminent University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman. Learned helplessness has clinical definitions related to the study of depression, but in this context it is what you get when the incentives for work and rewards for merit get out of whack. When people feel their fate is out of their hands, when they are not captains of themselves, they respond accordingly.5 Marx thought alienation was endemic to capitalism, but anyone who has lived in or even visited a communist society knows that alienation is even more prevalent in state-run economies. One can feel like a cog in the machine in a free-market society, but the free-market society by definition allows for the right to exit systems, jobs, careers, etc., that do not serve the interests of the individual. Statist systems do not recognize the right to exit.

But the right to exit is a right in name only if you have no place to exit to. Mediating institutions provide such safe havens. A man may be miserable in his work but feel rich in his life outside of work—if he is needed or valued or esteemed by his friends, family, church, or the volunteer fire department.

Every ideological flavor of statist, from the Marxist left to the monarchist right, has argued for the last three hundred years that the state must be given the power to cure the alienation of the market, bind the wounds of division, and act like a loving parent caring for its children. It does not work. But the more people believe it does, the more they turn their backs on the only thing that does: us. We build the reefs where people find an emotional or psychological home. And when the state touches them, it wounds them.

There’s a reason why American liberals express such admiration for the European model: They tend to think like Europeans. American liberals are three times more likely than conservatives to tell pollsters they want the government to “do more” to reduce income inequality. At the same time, conservatives who believed that the government should not tackle income inequality gave four times as much money to charity as liberals. In 2002, people who said the government is “spending too much money on welfare” were more likely to help a homeless person with a gift of food or money.6 When we outsource compassion for others to the government, we free ourselves up to think only about ourselves.

To be fair, the belief that the state, and only the state, can satisfy the allegedly ever greater complexities of modern life is sincerely held and does derive from real compassion. The point isn’t that those who want the state to handle everything are evil or selfish—after all, they want to pay higher taxes to help others. The point is that they are blind to the costs of their compassion. In Barack Obama’s second inaugural, he proclaimed:

For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.7

Look closely at what he is saying here. In his vision of America, there are only two actors on the national stage: the federal government and the individual. Forget mediating institutions; even state and local governments—which, being closer to the ground, are better equipped to understand the challenges people face—don’t enter the picture. As Yuval Levin writes in his seminal Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism, “This emaciated understanding of the life of our nation is precisely why the Left is for now poorly equipped to help America adjust to twenty-first-century realities.” By reducing American life to the individual or the state, with nothing important in the middle, we sweep aside all of the nooks and crannies of life where people live and interact. The cliché that “government is just the word for the things we do together” renders invisible the vast ecosystem of civil society where people voluntarily cooperate and find meaning in their lives. This vision, Levin writes, “flattens the complex, evolved topography of social life and leaves us no way out of the corrosive feedback loop of individualism and centralization.”8

This is the vision not of the English garden but of a field yielding a single crop. Every stalk of wheat is equal in its sameness to the other and its need for nurturing by the government. Atomism, another form of alienation, is the feeling of being alone in the world, with no one to help you. Such feelings of isolation are inevitable when the state crowds out all the little nooks and crannies of civil society where people actually live. Levin notes that “collectivism and atomism are not opposite ends of the political spectrum, but rather two sides of one coin.”9

As a video played on the first day of the 2012 Democratic Convention put it, “Government’s the only thing that we all belong to.”10 That same year, Barack Obama’s campaign released a slideshow ad called “The Life of Julia.” It was about a fictional woman named Julia and all that the government will do for her over her entire lifetime. Each slide begins with the words “Under President Obama…” and then proceeds to explain some specific benefit she receives from the state, from government-provided education under Head Start as a kindergartner to support in high school as part of Obama’s Race to the Top program. In college, “under President Obama,” she gets a tax credit and government-supported health care. And so it goes. After graduation, she gets help from Equal Pay laws, and government subsidies defray her student loans and pay for her birth control. Later, “under President Obama: Julia decides to have a child.” When she’s old, “under President Obama,” she signs up for Medicare. And ultimately, “under President Obama,” she gets to retire and live off social security and even volunteer in a “community garden.”11

Leaving aside the weird implication that Barack Obama is sort of president for life in this formulation, the most interesting implication of the ad is what’s not there. Julia has no family, save for her one child, who vanishes from her life after he turns eighteen. But there are no parents, no husband, no loved ones whatsoever. There is no church, no voluntary association of any kind, until, of course, Julia’s golden years, when she has the time to volunteer for a community garden. The state, in other words, takes the place of family, friends, community, and religion.

The desire to be part of a family of some kind is one of the most deeply felt emotional instincts humans have. It’s why nearly every TV show is really about families, either traditional ones or virtual ones. The desire for family is of a piece with what Robert Nisbet called “the quest for community.” Indeed, one reason the “Life of Julia” ad resonated with anyone it is that it offered a vision of belonging to something, an opportunity to have the state step in and fill the holes in your soul. This story—that the state can be your family or provide you with a sense of community—is incredibly powerful and popular. It also leaves conservatives and especially libertarians at a distinct disadvantage. As a matter of core ideology, we do not see the state as a good, reliable, or even possible substitute for the sense of social solidarity and belonging that can only come from civil society, starting with family. (Or at least most of us didn’t before the rise of Trump.)

This vision of the state being our mother or father is popular because it appeals to something deep within us, which is why you can find such appeals in every era of human history. Indeed, this vision is in its own way tribal. We are all equal, we are all dependent on one another, we all need a Big Man—be it Barack Obama or Donald Trump—to lead us and punish our enemies, however defined. But why is it so compelling right now?

One obvious but partial reason is that the economy has been failing large swaths of Americans. Because capitalism is unnatural, it must deliver the goods or people will say, “Why bother?” And, since the year 2000, America’s market economy has not been holding up its end of the bargain. “It turns out,” writes prominent demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, “that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.”12

Between early 2000 and late 2016, America got vastly richer. The net worth of American households and nonprofit institutions more than doubled, from an estimated $44 trillion to $90 trillion. But per capita growth has only averaged about 1 percent. In other words, the distribution of economic prosperity across the whole society has been painfully unequal. Nicholas Eberstadt estimates that if we merely had the postwar economic growth that was normal before 2000, per capita GDP would have been 20 percent higher in 2016.13

The scope of the problem becomes more apparent when one looks at the state of work in America. “Work rates have fallen off a cliff since the year 2000 and are at their lowest levels in decades,” Eberstadt writes. The official statistics are merely mediocre, but they are also deceptive, because they only track people looking for work. For every unemployed American male between twenty-five and fifty-five looking for work, “there are another three who are neither working nor looking for work.” Meanwhile the work rate for women outside the home—“one of our society’s most distinctive postwar trends,” Eberstadt points out—has been thrown into reverse. Work rates for prime age women “are back to where they were a generation ago, in the late 1980s.”14

At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, after roughly ninety straight months of admittedly lackluster economic growth, the share of American males of prime work age who were employed was lower than it was at the tail end of the Great Depression in 1940—when the official unemployment rate was above 14 percent. Since 1948, the share of men over the age of twenty who do not work for pay has more than doubled.15

Again, the overall story is not bleak, but the narrative for one large segment of the American people has been. The rest of America has prospered. In 1979, the upper middle class was 12.9 percent of the population; as of 2014, it was 29.4 percent.16 According to the Census Bureau, after adjusting for inflation, the share of households with annual income of $100,000 or more rose from 8 percent in 1967 to 26.4 percent in 2015.17 In 2015, according to the Pew Research Center, there were 11 percent fewer Americans in the middle class than in 1971, but that’s because 7 percent moved into higher groups while 4 percent fell behind. The share of Americans in the upper middle and highest tiers grew by 50 percent from 1971 to 2015.18

But while it is important to note that income inequality has heightened in large part because the rich got richer and the middle class got much bigger, that doesn’t change the fact that a big chunk of Americans are stuck. And they just happen to be a disproportionate share of Donald Trump’s base.^*1

Many want to blame capitalism for this stalling of the economy. And it’s certainly fair to note that the market’s creative destruction often leaves some people holding the bag. Despite Donald Trump’s claims, the coal industry was hurt more by innovation and the market than by the Obama administration. The invention of fracking and other techniques made natural gas a more economically viable commodity than coal. The Obama administration didn’t help the industry, but creative destruction hurt more.19 Similarly, automation has done more to destroy manufacturing jobs than outsourcing or bad trade deals. American manufacturing is actually doing great.20 Manufacturing output is near an all-time high and remains the largest sector of the economy.21 The hitch is that, because of innovation, manufacturing simply requires fewer people to do the same job. We manufacture twice as much as we did in 1984 but with a third fewer workers.22

Also, it should not surprise anyone that when billions of people enter the global labor force thanks to the spread of capitalism and massive improvements in global transportation and communications, winners abroad will create some losers domestically. Still, while it is right and proper for Americans to care more about Americans than about non-Americans, we should not lose sight of the fact that the spread of markets around the world has led to the largest and quickest decline in poverty in all of human history. That it takes time for the American economy to adjust to the sudden expansion of the global market system is not an indictment of the market system. But the way our elites have managed that adjustment is an indictment of them.

There is a reason why the Obama campaign thought “The Life of Julia” would be persuasive. There’s a reason why very smart political consultants opened the Democratic Convention with the words “Government is the one thing we belong to.” And there is a reason why Donald Trump blamed “deindustrialization” on the “failed leadership” in Washington. When civil society is healthy, most people do not look to Washington for the answers to their problems. We look closer to home. It is only when the forests have been cleared that we can see distant peaks. But when the family and civil society are depleted or dysfunctional, we do not lose our desire to “belong” to something, nor do we lose our need for help when misfortune befalls us. And there is the state offering to fill in where other institutions have failed or fled. Statists have argued since the Founding that the government in Washington is the answer to our problems. That argument is more persuasive when the forests have been cleared away and all eyes look naturally to Washington.

This trend benefited Barack Obama because his political philosophy is consistent with it and his campaign always encouraged the idea that he was the representation of a national awakening of some kind. His slogan “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” was a brilliant if creepy new age form of populism. But the erosion of civil society and the traditional economy also helped Donald Trump. Where Obama pressed a technocratic progressive vision of the government as every citizen’s partner and helpmate, Donald Trump offered nostalgia and nationalism.

I’ll get to the specifics of Donald Trump’s message in a moment. But I need to take a moment to deal with nationalism as an ideology generally. There is a raging debate in conservative circles about nationalism that divides many traditional allies and friends. At National Review, where I am a senior editor, some of my colleagues have led the charge for conservatism to embrace what my friends Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru call “benign nationalism”:

It includes loyalty to one’s country: a sense of belonging, allegiance, and gratitude to it. And this sense attaches to the country’s people and culture, not just to its political institutions and laws. Such nationalism includes solidarity with one’s countrymen, whose welfare comes before, albeit not to the complete exclusion of, that of foreigners. When this nationalism finds political expression, it supports a federal government that is jealous of its sovereignty, forthright and unapologetic about advancing its people’s interests, and mindful of the need for national cohesion.23

On the surface, my only objections to this are terminological. But terminology matters, given that rhetoric shapes how we think about the world we live in. What Lowry and Ponnuru are referring to here, by my lights, is not really nationalism but patriotism. Nationalism is a universal phenomenon. Generically, it has no ideological content save glorification of whatever nation it manifests itself in. In this, it is somewhat similar to generic conservatism and radicalism. A conservative in Russia wants to conserve very different things from a conservative in the United Kingdom. A radical in Spain wants to tear down very different things from what a radical wants to tear down in Saudi Arabia. Likewise, a nationalist celebrates different things in every nation.

One could make the same argument about patriotism, of course. A patriot here is different from a patriot over there. But in the American context, patriotism is defined by adherence to a set of principles and ideals that is higher than mere nationalism. It is also a cultural orientation that is inherent to the idea of American exceptionalism. Despite a common misunderstanding on both the right and the left, American exceptionalism never meant “We’re better than everyone else.” It wasn’t jingoism; it was an observation. Until the last decade or so, the long-running argument over American exceptionalism wasn’t whether we are or are not exceptional but whether our obvious exceptionalism was a good thing. For the left, which wanted America to be more like Europe, it was bad. For the right—both the isolationist and internationalist factions—American exceptionalism was something to be proud of. But it never meant “nationalism.”

Nationalism by definition is concerned with the collective will or spirit. Like arguments about the moral equivalent of war, the fundamental assumptions and emotional heart of nationalism are the cult of unity. We’re all in it together! Let’s unite around a cause larger than ourselves! The word “fascism” is based on fasces—a bundle of sticks around an axe—which was the symbol of Roman authority and meant “strength in numbers.” In America, patriotism can include these things in moments of crisis, but it never loses sight of the fact that the fundamental unit of our constitutional order is not the group but the individual. To the nationalist, the heroic entity is the righteous crowd; to the patriot, the hero is the man who, with law on his side, stands up to the crowd. G. K. Chesterton captured the difference well: “ ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ ”24

I have always argued that a little nationalism is essential to the American project. Nationalism is a pre-rational, emotional, ultimately tribal commitment to one’s home country. This place is mine and I love it not least because it is mine. We are products of the nations we hail from, and a minimal amount of gratitude and appreciation for where we come from is good and healthy. But if a little nationalism is healthy, too much of it is poisonous. Indeed, all poisons are determined by the dose. In other words, nationalism is not, properly speaking, an ideology at all; it is a passion, like lust. Sexual attraction is important for every marriage, but no healthy marriage is based on lust. Strong unions depend on shared values, commitment to certain principles and projects that are more important than the self. So it is with nations. The Founders recognized that political passion is dangerous, which is why they set up a system designed to keep it in check.

Historically, nationalism has always been at war with such artificial restraints on the will of the people, which is why historians usually use the term “romantic nationalism.” Romantic nationalism emerges in the waning days of the French Revolution when French and German intellectuals—and the masses—rebelled against the cold rationality and legalisms of the Enlightenment. The Jacobins of the Great Terror were committed nationalists, convinced that the French were God’s chosen people. They inscribed the words “The citizen is born, lives and dies for the fatherland” above every altar and plastered it on every thoroughfare.25 Robespierre did not shrink from embracing nationalism: “I am French, I am one of thy representatives….O sublime people! Accept the sacrifices of my whole being; happy is the man who is born in your midst; happier is he who can die for your happiness.”26

In Germany, intellectuals like Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Fichte rose up against first the Enlightenment-based autocracy of Frederick the Great and then the cold militaristic pragmatism of Napoleon’s empire. Reason and science served to disenchant the world, to borrow Max Weber’s phrase, and nationalism was a “re-enchantment creed” (to borrow Ernest Gellner’s words). Nationalism, with its myths and fables, would restore some of the meaning lost to the Age of Reason. Marxism would soon provide another such creed. Herder and Fichte borrowed heavily from Rousseau and his idea of creating a society based upon the general will, which Herder redefined as the Volksgeist or spirit of the people.27

He and Fichte used the German language as the defining feature of the mythical German nation. French was the language of Enlightenment thinking, which suppressed the authentic German soul. “Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine,” Herder exhorted. “Speak German, O you German!”28 “Men are formed by language far more than language is by men,” Fichte believed. The German tongue was pure, he insisted, because it had defied the corruption of not just the slime of the Seine but the foreign ideas of the Roman Empire and its alien Latin tongue. “The Germans still speak a living language and have done so ever since it first streamed forth from nature, whereas the other Teutonic tribes speak a language that stirs only on the surface yet is dead at the root.” Fichte was not a biological racist—though he was no fan of the Jews—but his ideas about language would later lend themselves to the more virulent ethnic nationalism of the Nazis: “Of all modern peoples it is you in whom the seed of human perfection most decidedly lies and to whom the lead in its development is assigned. If you perish in your essentiality, then all the hopes of the entire human race for salvation from the depths of its misery perish with you.”29

Racial essentialism, tribal superiority, the elevation of passion and myth—nationalism is not only powerless against these things, it is the medium by which these passions grow like bacteria in a petri dish. Nationalism works on the assumption that the search for meaning and spiritual redemption is a collective enterprise. Lowry and Ponnuru’s “benign nationalism” is certainly at odds with such things, because the best part of American culture stands athwart mindless passions. But all the valuable work in the concept of benign nationalism is done by the word “benign,” not “nationalism.”

That’s because nationalism shorn of negating qualifiers has no internal checks, no limiting principles that mitigate against giving in to collective passion. And that is why nationalism taken to its logical extreme must become statism or some form of socialism. It is a vestigial nostrum of Marxism and Leninism that nationalism and socialism are opposites. But everywhere nationalism has free rein, it becomes some kind of socialism. And every time socialism is set loose in an actual nation, it becomes nationalism. Take a speech by Hugo Chávez or Fidel Castro and replace words like “nationalist” and “nationalize” with “socialist” and “socialize”; the meaning of the sentence will not change. When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it, and vice versa. When you leave the page and leap into the real world, the terms are not opposites; they are synonyms.

Nationalism uncaged has to become statism, because the state is the only institution that is supposed to represent all of us. Which brings us back to Donald Trump.

In his inaugural address, President Trump laid out his vision of the new order:

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.30

This is the same song sung by Barack Obama, just set to a different tune, aimed at different ears. Both men bought into the idea that all of America’s problems could be fixed from Washington. Their programs and rhetoric were different in all sorts of important ways, but the underlying assumption of both men was that, if we have the right person sitting in the Oval Office, we can transform the country, or “Make America Great Again.”

In this, Trump differed from traditional conservatives, who argue that Washington is too powerful and too involved in our lives and the economy. Trump argued—or shouted—that Washington elites were too weak, too stupid, to fix our problems. He insisted it would be “easy” to provide better health care to everyone while spending less money at the same time. He could, singlehandedly, counter the tide of globalization through his superior deal making. There would be so much winning, he warned his followers that they would one day suffer from chronic winning fatigue.31

Just as the decay of civil society made the hearts of liberals—but not just liberals—receptive to Barack Obama’s re-enchantment creed of “fundamentally transforming” America, it made many conservatives—but not just conservatives (Trump won millions of votes from Obama voters)32—receptive to Trump’s “America first” nationalism.

Ultimately, the question of whether polarization in American politics breeds tribal thinking or tribal thinking breeds polarization can only be answered with “Both.” But what is clear is that a large amount of Trump’s support, in the election and to this day, stems from a desire to fight fire with fire. In hundreds of arguments, conversations, and debates with Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters—and many of his reluctant ones—the loudest refrain is that we live with Trump or we die with Hillary. For the true believers, this was an exciting choice. For the more skeptical ones, it was a lamentable but necessary one. The traditional American conservative vision of limited government and free markets had passed its sell-buy date. The choice now is progressivism or nationalism.

Progressivism, in other words, conjured a nationalist backlash that is less an alternative to the statism of the left and more a right-wing version of it. We should take a moment to look at how it happened.

There’s a deep confusion within progressivism. On the one hand, progressives take deep pride in their role as agents of “social change.” Often they have every reason to be proud. If you believe in the causes of, say, civil rights and feminism, why wouldn’t you celebrate your accomplishments? But at the same time, progressives want to claim that any effort to resist the forces of “progress” is an act of aggression in the culture war. From abortion and gay marriage to the hot fad for transgender rights, progressives want every institution and community to bend the knee to their movement. And when anyone refuses, the resisters are cast as the aggressors.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” worked on many levels because it is so diversely interpretable. But a key part of Trump’s “MAGA” appeal was the notion that we could return to a simpler—often mythological—time where middle-class jobs dangled from the trees like ripe fruit, the police had a free hand to deal with troublemakers, and “political correctness” didn’t ruin everyone’s fun. “MAGA,” particularly when adorned with all of the other nationalist and populist rhetoric, fell in the great Herdian tradition of conjuring myths of an imagined past where “we the [right] people” weren’t humiliated by foreigners at home or abroad.

Even among the ranks of Trump-supporting conservatives who understood he was in all likelihood selling snake oil, this mind-set won the argument. Michael Anton, a multimillionaire hedge fund partner and part-time intellectual who now works for the Trump administration, wrote a famous pseudonymous essay for the Claremont Review of Books titled “The Flight 93 Election.” In it, he argued that America was essentially doomed if Hillary Clinton was elected. So, like the passengers who overpowered the terrorists on 9/11, there was no choice but to back Trump. Selfless courage was required (but not so much courage as to risk losing his job by publishing under his own name).33 This argument was widely subscribed to by many leading conservatives, even many who had once been passionate opponents of Trump. The imperial arrogance of progressive social engineers and social justice warriors had earned an apocalyptic backlash so powerful that even clear-eyed conservatives who recognized Trump’s dishonesty and demagoguery couldn’t resist it. Indeed, as much as I hold Trump in contempt, I am still compelled to admit that, if my vote would have decided the election, I probably would have voted for him.

“Make America Great Again” captured the spirit of the backlash. It invoked nostalgic claims about trade, foreign policy, crime, culture, and economics. But the most salient and illustrative platform of the Trump agenda was immigration.

The Swiss writer Max Frisch famously said of the guest workers his country imported that “we wanted workers, but we got people instead.”34 That insight applies most poignantly to Europe. The massive influx of immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia had the predictable consequence, testing national and local institutions and giving rise to huge spikes in populism and calls for more authoritarianism.

Many on the left concede that immigration is fueling a populist backlash, but they then take the position that the backlash is racist and bigoted and therefore politically illegitimate. No doubt mass immigration elicits racist and other bigoted attitudes in some segments of the population. But relying on these sorts of explanations encourages a kind of smug virtue signaling: People who don’t like immigration are backward bigots—unlike me.

Such responses not only miss the complexity of the issue but also encourage further resentment among the segments of society being demonized. In a sense, it is a kind of victim blaming. For instance, at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, work is far more often a matter of physical labor. If you have little or no education, working with your hands is usually your only option. Importing large numbers of competitors who keep wages down—or are perceived to be doing so—is not going to be celebrated by day laborers with nearly the gusto that one hears from journalists and the well-heeled. If we started importing very large numbers of pundits who could do the same job as the editors of the New York Times for half the price, one might find a bit more nuance in their pages.

I tend to believe that high levels of immigration, particularly skills-based immigration, are economically desirable policies. Also, the evidence that low-skilled immigration is a net detriment to the country is not as cut-and-dried as some claim. (The field of economics that studies immigration is shot through with methodological and ideological problems.)35 But the simple fact is that, as with trade and automation, all economic policies create winners and losers. Proponents of very large levels of immigration almost invariably tend to be in the winners column, and a dismayingly high proportion of them also tend to be condescendingly dismissive of the complaints of the losers. When I talk to wealthy audiences, I will often point out that the people in the room only know two kinds of immigrants: extremely hardworking manual laborers who tend to do their landscaping or clean their homes and offices, and extremely hardworking and highly educated wealthy “citizens of the world” like themselves. In neither instance do the members of the audience have any reason to feel threatened by immigrants, economically or culturally. (Their children will not be going to the overwhelmed public schools of the day laborers, and if the children of affluent immigrants attend their children’s private schools, all the better: “Diversity” is a wonderful thing.) Being rich can mean being able to afford generosity at someone else’s expense.

Regardless, it’s a mistake to put all the emphasis on economic arguments about immigration. Economists are very good at describing the world through models, but they tend to downgrade, dismiss, or demonize the cultural and psychological costs of immigration. So when it comes to immigration, economists talk about workers, labor costs, productivity, and all manner of costs and benefits. But those models are silent on all the other costs and benefits—social cohesion, civic and institutional health, community trust—that are difficult to quantify.

But it’s not impossible. A recent paper by Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that the bulk of the evidence points to the rise of populism in America and Europe having more to do with “cultural backlash” than economic dislocation.36 Their cultural backlash theory includes issues other than immigration. Feminism, gay rights, and other forms of progressive change are part of the psychological mix. But there’s reason to believe that immigration is probably the biggest driver of cultural backlash in populist strongholds.

A recent study by researchers at the London School of Economics found that, while levels of unemployment didn’t correlate very tightly with populist support for Brexit, levels of immigration did. An earlier 2012 study found that opposition to immigration had less to do with economic concerns than worries about what newcomers would do to “the composition of the local population” and how it would affect “their neighborhoods, schools and workplaces.”37

A lot of the political science literature on this topic is replete with ad hominem labels (or technically neutral labels used in ad hominem ways): “racism,” “xenophobia,” “nativism,” “bigotry,” “isolationism,” etc. And while it is tragically true that it is easy to find examples to back up such descriptors, the tragedy is compounded when we use these terms as a blanket condemnation of anyone who has objections to mass-scale immigration. In other words, all racist xenophobes and white supremacists are opposed to immigration, but not all immigration opponents are racists and xenophobes. National Review magazine has been at the forefront of those arguing that if responsible politicians don’t deal with the legitimate concerns of voters with regard to immigration, the issue will be taken up by irresponsible politicians—because, in the minds of voters, they are the only ones talking about the problem. The 2016 election proved us right.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration during the campaign was like a mirror of the most cartoonish platitudes of the left. While pro-immigration absolutists scoff at any suggestion that immigrants are anything other than the noblest of Americans, Trump often painted immigrants—particularly illegal immigrants—as the dregs of humanity. For instance, Hillary Clinton said that Islam has “nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”38 And Donald Trump, by vowing to ban all Muslims (at least initially), made it clear that he thinks Islam has everything to do with terrorism. The same dynamic played itself out with his constant invocation of the statistically unrepresentative number of crimes committed by illegal immigrants. This rhetorical tactic helped Trump in two ways. First, he demagogically played on the natural tribal instinct of fear of others. But second, he signaled that he was willing to defy the “politically correct” rules of the “weak” and “stupid” establishment.

In other words, the left painted with a broad brush in a single color and so did Trump. And when that happens, there is no room for the shading and contrasts necessary to describe the world as it actually is. One scholar who has tried is Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam, a decent left-wing liberal who is arguably America’s leading social scientist on civil society and community. In a massive survey of over 30,000 Americans, he found that there was an undeniable correlation between increased diversity and breakdowns in community. He is adamant that racism isn’t the primary explanation. (In fact, supporters of the idea that racism is the primary driver of anti-immigrant sentiment have never paid much attention to the immigration controversies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the anti-immigrant sentiments in Africa and the Middle East in which race plays no role.)

According to Putnam, people who live in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”39

In short, he writes, “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”40 Putnam hated his findings and recognized that they would not be well received by his peers. So he spent a year retesting the numbers for some other explanations. He couldn’t find any.

In ethnically or culturally homogenous communities, there is more social trust and more social capital. People who share languages, customs, faiths, institutions, and plain old history are simply more likely to work out their differences and problems without looking to the government to do it for them. In short, a shared culture builds trust, which is essential to democracy and economic growth. “Trust,” writes Francis Fukuyama, “is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of members of that community.”41

Think of the typical postcard hamlet in Europe, where kids dress in communal garb, parents organize festivals, and everyone goes to the same church. Is it any wonder that there would be a larger reservoir of social trust and cooperativeness in such a community than in a diverse city full of strangers and newcomers? Sweden and other Scandinavian countries have been the beau ideal of American progressives for generations. What has been hard for those same progressives to grapple with is that ethnic homogeneity and a strong cultural consensus make social democracy much easier to pull off. One can say, without fear of contradiction, that the influx of immigrants and refugees into these countries—and others, like Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, France, etc.—has not contributed to greater social peace.

There is no value judgment here. Traditional small-town life can be wonderful. It can also be stultifying for those who want something more—or merely something else. The Medieval German expression Stadtluft macht frei (“City air makes you free”) captured this distinction. Moving to the city has always meant escaping from the more ordered and tradition-bound ways of rural life.

The customs—festivals, May Day dances, whatever—of traditional communities aren’t merely quaint cultural activities; they are circuits of social trust, solidarity, and cooperation. It is right and good to value inclusiveness. But inclusiveness can go only so far and do so much. Christians can visit a mosque, but they probably can’t pray there regularly. People who speak Korean are simply going to have a hard time forging relationships with people who don’t.

The share of the foreign-born U.S. population is at its all-time high. In 1960 the foreign-born population was obviously smaller in absolute terms and as a share of the country, but it also overwhelmingly consisted of immigrants from Europe and Canada (84 percent), people who have an easier time assimilating into the majority culture.42 Mexicans made up 6 percent of the foreign-born population, and other Latin Americans another 3.5 percent, for a total of 9.5 percent of the foreign-born population. In 2014, 27.7 percent came from Mexico and another 23.9 percent from other Latin American countries.43 Of the 48 million students enrolled in K-12 public schools in 2012, nearly one in four spoke a language other than English at home.44

People often note that we’ve had similar proportions of foreign-born students in public schools before (though we are in uncharted territory when it comes to the absolute numbers). They cite the success immigrants who came through Ellis Island had at finding and achieving the American dream. That is a great story and one that I love. What they leave out is that in those days America at the state, local, and federal levels was absolutely determined to turn immigrants into Americans. Sometimes that effort was too draconian—as in World War I—when German speakers were essentially persecuted for even speaking their native language in public.^*2 But the schools, churches, and popular culture had both the tools and the will to encourage assimilation.

Today, all of the will is on the other side of the equation. There is a large and aggressive educational and political lobby that works against assimilation and strives to create ever more incentives for immigrants—as well as native-born ethnic groups—to maintain their minority identity at all costs.

Assimilation is still popular among many immigrants and many native-born Americans. But it is on the outs precisely where it is most needed. In the University of California system, an administration memo cautions faculty and staff not to use certain language that can lead to “micro-aggressions”—which the UC system defines as “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.” One example of an offensive, hostile, or derogatory statement: saying “America is a melting pot.” This sends the signal that the speaker expects minorities to “assimilate to the dominant culture.”45

Well, yeah.

Whatever your preferred policy on immigration might be—my own is to simply have one and enforce it—it should be remembered that fear and distrust of strangers is entirely natural. I do not like the demagoguery and demonization of immigrants that is thriving on the right these days, but the fact is that such responses are a feature of human nature. That doesn’t excuse overt acts of bigotry or cruelty, but it should at least instill a little humility and empathy in people who think “nativism” is nothing more than know-nothingism. Many of the people concerned with immigration know something far better than their critics do: Their communities are changing in ways they do not like.

Donald Trump tapped into the frustrations of millions of people fed up with the failed promises of politicians who said they would do something about the problem. I don’t like how he did it, and I think he will ultimately fail in fulfilling most of his promises—probably resulting in even more populist anger. But that doesn’t mean the concerns he tapped into were wholly illegitimate.

Again, polarization fuels these trends and these trends fuel polarization.

To understand how, it’s important to understand the degree to which the erosion of civil society has caused millions of Americans to flock to partisan politics as a source of tribal meaning. Political parties in America were not always particularly ideological. If someone told you she was a Republican or a Democrat in, say, 1950, you would need more information before you could guess whether she was a conservative or a liberal. There were very progressive Republicans and there were very conservative Democrats. But in the last few decades, starting in the 1960s and intensifying with almost every passing year, the parties have become not only more ideological but tribal. “Today, political parties are no longer just the people who are supposed to govern the way you want. They are a team to support, and a tribe to feel a part of. And the public’s view of politics is becoming more and more zero-sum: It’s about helping their team win, and making sure the other team loses,” writes Amanda Taub, who covers social science for the New York Times.46

“Partisanship, for a long period of time, wasn’t viewed as part of who we are,” explain political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood. “It wasn’t core to our identity. It was just an ancillary trait. But in the modern era we view party identity as something akin to gender, ethnicity or race—the core traits that we use to describe ourselves to others.” But now partisanship is becoming a bigger predictor of behavior and attitudes than race.47

As other sources of meaning wither, and as we think of ourselves as residents of the national community rather than local ones, the stakes of politics inevitably increase, not just in terms of policy but psychologically. The logic of sports and war takes over. If they win, we lose, and vice versa. Citizens in California and New York become invested in partisan fights in North Carolina or Indiana as if they were skirmishes in a larger war.

This tribal us-versus-them worldview is intensified on social media, where it is easier to find like-minded but virtual “friends” a thousand miles away than it is to have a conversation with your actual neighbor. On both sides of the political aisle, the point of politics ceases to be persuasion and becomes instead victory, humiliation, and rubbing it in. Studies have shown that when people see someone being shocked with electrodes, the parts of the observer’s brain that feel pain light up as well. In one study, this empathetic response was more likely when the observer was told the victim was a fan of their favorite soccer team. But when the observer was told the subject was a fan of a rival team, the observer’s pleasure centers brain lit up instead.48 This is pure tribalism, and it is wired into us. When one of my people suffers, I feel pain. When “the other” suffers, I take delight.

I am unaware of whether similar experiments were conducted using ideological or political tribes, but I have no doubt that the same thing would happen. The suffering of liberal avatars is something for conservatives to revel in, and vice versa. In the aftermath of terror attacks and mass shootings, the left openly hopes that the perpetrator was an angry white male belonging to some “right-wing hate group.” When the murderer is confirmed as a radical Muslim, many right-wingers struggle to contain their glee that their worldview has been confirmed.

Facebook and Twitter have become platforms where you boast of your purity and commitment to the good things and how your ideological opposites are not only corrupt but metaphysically committed to the bad things. (There is a curious paradox of tribal polarization on the left and the right. People tend to argue both that the enemy is totally committed to its evil ideology and that he is willing to sell out for personal profit.) “You want to show that you’re a good member of your tribe,” Westwood told the New York Times. “You want to show others that Republicans are bad or Democrats are bad, and your tribe is good. Social media provides a unique opportunity to publicly declare to the world what your beliefs are and how willing you are to denigrate the opposition and reinforce your own political candidates.”49

The desire for news that satisfies the popular lust for what might be called ecstatic schadenfreude—obscene pleasure at the sadness of others—has created a market, and when there is a market entrepreneurs rush in. Hence the rise of “fake news” aimed at the trollish hordes on the left and right who think saying “Your tears are delicious” or “Butthurt” is an argument. Bias is endemic to all journalism. Fraud, however, while not new to journalism, is experiencing a kind of new golden age. Outright fabrications fly around the Internet, fueled by pay-for-click ad rates and a burning desire among millions of people to see reality bend in their direction. Meanwhile, half-truths, which are often the most effective whole lies, saturate even respectable news organizations. Headlines have always erred on the side of the sensational. But in an era when millions of people only read the headlines, and when much of the political conversation takes place in the 140-character realm of Twitter, the national conversation has become a noxious smog of feelings and desired yet fake facts. If a fanatic is someone who can’t change his opinion and won’t change the subject, then fanaticism runs amok on the left and the right these days. Of course, when a president believes that lies are true if they feel true to him, falsehood has a powerful megaphone.

Tyler Cowen, a brilliant economist at George Mason University, takes the somewhat too cynical view that much of ideological discourse can be boiled down to a desire to see the relative status of one group lowered or raised.50 He was talking about the rarefied world of academics and intellectuals. But it seems obviously even truer in the trenches of the political culture. Whatever you make of the underlying merits of the issues related to the Black Lives Matter movement, symbolically it is very much an argument about the relative status of groups. The effort to force Christian bakers to make wedding cakes for same-sex marriages against their will has very little to do with tolerance and a great deal to do with a vengeful spirit that shouts out: “You will be made to care!” When Hillary Clinton wrote off roughly half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,”51 those supporters turned it into a badge of honor and a foil for rhetorical vengeance.

Again, I must point out that all of these trends are interrelated to and mutually reinforcing of each other, but one can only think critically about phenomena by isolating them. Mass immigration erodes mediating institutions, and the decline of these authentic communities fuels the migration to “virtual communities” online where resentments are reinforced as like congregates with like, lending support to statements and attitudes we would normally never express in real life. This reinforcement encourages people to say them in real life. The resulting backlash is then celebrated as “winning” on the Internet, which can be increasingly monetized. Immigration and economic churn make people feel insecure, so they go on Facebook, where people curate their lives to make it seem like everything is going swimmingly, and this breeds feelings of envy and status/class anxiety. As Montesquieu said, “If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”52

And all of these trends cause people to search for new sources of identity—in race, gender, sex, faith, and political affiliation—and as these shallow categories of self-understanding harden, tribal polarization intensifies. What we often call tribalism in modern democracies is actually more properly speaking what you might call “coalitionalism.” But coalitionalism isn’t a word, and sounds too much like normal politics, which has always been about building coalitions, even for tyrants, since the word was invented. Tribalism gets closer to the reality of our polarization.

Conservatism was moving in the direction of identity politics for white people long before Trump, and it may have ended up where it is today sooner or later had he never run for president. But I believe the precipitating cause for the right’s surrender to populism and tribalism was the failure of the Tea Parties. The populist movement that rose up to oppose President Obama was the only American populist cause I have ever sympathized with, never mind supported. (I spoke to many Tea Party rallies.) Why? Because as much as I dislike and distrust crowds, the Tea Parties married populism to the principles of the Founding, demanding the government live within its means and abide by the Constitution. I met countless people from the little platoons of civil society who had become animated with passion for the primary documents of our civilization. They held book clubs and seminars in living rooms and rec centers. They studied how the debt and the deficit work. When they held rallies, a few cranks would show, as happens whenever political enthusiasm is high and people gather. But the cranks were held at bay. The crowds cleaned up after themselves and took their citizenship seriously. There was passion, but it was married to principle.

They succeeded in getting many politicians elected. But ultimately they failed by the standards they set for themselves at the outset. The banks got bailed out. Obamacare stayed in place. The debt grew bigger. Taxes went up. But those failures are not what turned so many Tea Partiers into tribalists. It was the fact that, despite espousing the principles of the Constitution and arguing for wholly defensible and patriotic goals (whether you agree with them as a policy matter or not), they were still demonized by the media and Hollywood as racist yokels and boobs. This highlights the cancerous dynamic at work. If you tell people that, in effect, fighting for the Constitution and universal principles is just a “white thing,” then many of those whites will eventually agree with you. They will see the Constitution as the document of “real Americans.” But because the Constitution limits their power, they will eventually conclude that loyalty to the Constitution is a waste of time. What starts as a claim that only white people care about the Constitution ends with no one caring about the Constitution. We’re not quite there yet, but in many quarters we’re close. As bizarre as it sounds, there is a growing faction on the right who worship the by-any-means-necessary left-wing agitator Saul Alinsky. They believe the left brilliantly used his tactics to take over the country, and because we are in an existential battle, we must emulate their tactics. Chiefly, if the other side won’t be constrained by the rules, then “we” shouldn’t be either.

When Trump’s critics decry his violation of “democratic norms,” the immediate response is “What about Obama?”

And that is a very good question. But my response is: “I criticized Obama for his violations of democratic norms. So I am consistent when I criticize Trump for the same thing.” The most reliable retort for Trump’s biggest backers is: “Well, why should we abide by the rules when they don’t?”

Donald Trump waded into this maelstrom of dysfunction and intensified it even further.

For years conservatives have complained that Republicans surrender too easily. And as a senior editor of National Review, I would lose my executive washroom privileges if I dared claim this wasn’t true. I don’t need to recount the history of the New Deal or the Great Society to demonstrate that the GOP often finds itself dragged along in the tide of ever-growing government. Moreover, while I think that conservatives have the right side of the argument on many cultural issues, this record of failure helps explain why Republicans often focus on symbolic social issues that rev up the base. The only problem is that Republicans often throw in the towel on those fights too. Part of this is simply the nature of conservatism. We tend, as Hayek said, to get pulled in directions not of our own choosing. In principle, that doesn’t bother me, because giving society time to digest inevitable changes is an important function. Still, it would be nice to win more.

Donald Trump tapped into this frustration as well, as all of his Charlie Sheen-like outbursts about “winning” illustrate. The problem is that winning and fighting are not stand-alone principles. In my numerous debates with many of Trump’s biggest conservative supporters, I was constantly astounded by how many supposedly—or formerly—principled conservatives had embraced “winning” and “fighting” as ends unto themselves. Trump could hurl the crudest epithets to defend an objectively immoral or politically indefensible position, and the response from his cheerleaders was “At least he fights!” Trump has become an avatar of “we the people,” and winning has become decoupled from the substance of any victory. When he cannot declare victory, it is because others failed him or unfairly thwarted him. When he declares victory, the substance doesn’t matter. When he does the incomprehensible, it is part of a genius we cannot appreciate. In short, for many people, it is simply a cult of personality.

In the primaries, pollsters asked Republicans whether they favored single-payer health care, and the vast majority said no. When they were told Donald Trump supports it (accurate at the time), nearly a plurality suddenly supported it.53 In August of 2017, a poll found that half of Republicans would support postponing the 2020 elections if Donald Trump favored it.54

At the Conservative Action Political Committee—CPAC—meeting in February 2017, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway suggested that the C in “CPAC” will be replaced with a T for a “Trump.”55 That was a glib exaggeration, but listening to the audience cheer as he threw aside free trade in favor of his preferred “economic nationalism,” one could see how the ember of truth in her comment could grow into a flame.

Barack Obama had a similar cult of personality. Celebrities pledged allegiance to the president.56 One columnist speculated whether he was a “Lightworker,” which he defined as “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”57 Deepak Chopra proclaimed he represented “a quantum leap in American consciousness.”58 “Barack Obama is our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings…,” proclaimed life coach Eve Konstantine. “He’s our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence.”59 The mainstream media ignored all of this—and so much more—because they were besotted with him too. “We thought he was going to be…the next messiah,” Barbara Walters confessed.60 And this, too, fueled deep feelings of resentment among millions of dissenting Americans who were not motivated by racism but by simple disagreement, healthy skepticism, or plain old partisanship. But they were called racists nonetheless.

The liberal pundits, reporters, and politicians who look at Donald Trump and ask “Where did this monster come from?” didn’t create Donald Trump—and they certainly didn’t vote for him—but they helped pile the kindling high for the flames of backlash to come.

Scholars studying such diverse phenomena as Islamic terrorism, white supremacy, street gangs, and cults have found that the key recruitment tool is always the same: the promise of meaning and belonging. Human beings are hardwired to want to belong, to be part of a cause larger than themselves, and to be valued for their contribution to that cause. Young people with scant social capital—i.e., dysfunctional families, unresponsive schools and communities, etc.—are the most susceptible to such appeals precisely because they have few alternative sources of meaning and belonging. This is the core insight of every Big Brother program and Boys & Girls Club. But the poor, the poorly educated, and those “left behind” by capitalism are not the only people susceptible to such appeals. We all are. Many of the 9/11 terrorists were well educated. Osama Bin Laden was rich. Modernity itself leaves many cold if they don’t have the resources or opportunity to find healthy sources of meaning and belonging.

In April 1993, Hillary Clinton delivered a commencement address to the University of Texas at Austin in which she declared that “we need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”61

In my first book, I subjected Clinton to withering criticism for her politics-of-meaning speech. I now think I was somewhat unfair. Her diagnosis had merit. It was consistent with the long tradition of critics of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to address the “social question.” People crave the sense of tribal solidarity that allowed us to evolve and to climb to the top of the food chain. Where I still stand in stark disagreement with Clinton is her remedy for the problem: more centralization. Like Obama, Clinton’s answer is to give the state more power in an effort to satisfy our longing for meaning. That approach only fuels the problem, because it makes the state the only source of meaning in our lives, which in turn fuels resentment among the millions who find the state’s definition of meaning wanting. Prior to the Glorious Revolution, a Catholic in England felt that a Protestant on the throne was a threat to his or her whole place in the universe. And vice versa.

That is the direction we are heading, and that direction is backward. When the president or a party in power is invested with that kind of meaning and significance, the “outs” feel like they are strangers in their own land. And the party in power does everything it can to exacerbate that feeling. Then, when the other party gets in, it gets its payback. The only solution is to break the cycle by making the state less important and letting the dying reefs of civil society grow back to health.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t important things for the state to do. But what the state cannot do is fill the holes in our souls. That is what monarchs who ruled by divine right claimed, and it is what theocrats preach.