Imagine you’re a passenger on a ship. You’re in the middle of the ocean, weeks from land. No matter what happens, you can’t get off. This doesn’t bother you because there are professional sailors in charge. They know what they’re doing. The ship is steady and heading in the right direction. You’re fine.
Then one day you realize that something horrible has happened. Maybe there was a mutiny overnight. Maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. You’re not sure. But it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. They seem grandiose and aggressive, maybe drunk. They’re gorging on the ship’s stores with such abandon it’s obvious there won’t be enough food left for you. You can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. Anyone who points out the consequences of what they’re doing gets keelhauled.
Most terrifying of all, the crew has become incompetent. They have no idea how to sail. They’re spinning the ship’s wheel like they’re playing roulette and cackling like mental patients. The boat is listing, taking on water, about to sink. They’re totally unaware that any of this is happening. As waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. You look on in horror, helpless and desperate. You have nowhere to go. You’re trapped on a ship of fools.
Plato imagined this scene in The Republic. He never mentions what happened to the ship. It would be nice to know. What was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. The people who did it don’t seem aware of what they’ve done. They don’t want to know, and they don’t want you to tell them. Facts threaten their fantasies. And so they continue as if what they’re doing is working, making mistakes and reaping consequences that were predictable even to Greek philosophers thousands of years before the Internet. They’re fools. The rest of us are their passengers.
Why did America elect Donald Trump? It seems like a question the people in charge might ask. Virtually nobody thought that Trump could become president. Trump himself had no idea. For much of the race, his critics dismissed Trump’s campaign as a marketing ploy. Initially it probably was.
Yet somehow Trump won. Why? Donald Trump isn’t the sort of candidate you’d vote for lightly. His voters meant it. Were they endorsing Trump as a man? His personal decency? His command of policy? His hairstyle? Did millions of Americans see his Access Hollywood tape and think, “Finally, a candidate who speaks for me”? Probably not.
Donald Trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. He never hid that. Voters knew it. They just concluded that the options were worse—and not just Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, but the Bush family and their donors and the entire Republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and Hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016: the people in charge.
Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created. Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. He didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. You couldn’t really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
There was also the possibility that Trump might listen. At times he seemed interested in what voters thought. The people in charge demonstrably weren’t. Virtually none of their core beliefs had majority support from the population they governed. It was a strange arrangement for a democracy. In the end, it was unsustainable.
Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.
In retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: Ignore voters for long enough and you get Donald Trump. Yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. Instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, America’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. Beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
Trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
Trump won because Russian agents “hacked” the election.
Trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
Trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
None of these explanations withstand scrutiny. They’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. Yet they seemed strangely familiar to me. I covered Bill Clinton’s two elections. I remember telling lies like this to myself.
If you were a conservative in 1992, Bill Clinton drove you insane. Here was a glib, inexperienced BS artist from nowhere running against an uninspiring but basically honorable incumbent and, for reasons that weren’t clear, winning. Clinton was shifty and dishonest. That was obvious to conservatives. Somehow voters couldn’t see it. They liked Clinton.
Conservatives believed they could win if they warned voters about the real Bill Clinton. They tried everything: Gennifer Flowers, the draft-dodging letters, Whitewater, Hillary’s shady investments. All of Bill Clinton’s moral failings emerged during the campaign. Clinton turned out to be every bit as sleazy as conservatives claimed. It didn’t matter. He won anyway. Conservatives blamed the media.
Twenty-five years later, it’s clear that conservatives were the delusional ones. Voters knew from the beginning exactly who Bill Clinton was. They knew because voters always know. In politics as in life, nothing is really hidden, only ignored. A candidate’s character is transparent. Voters understood Clinton’s weaknesses. They just didn’t care.
The secret to Clinton’s resilience was simple: he took positions that voters agreed with, on topics they cared about. At a time when many American cities were virtually uninhabitable because of high crime rates, Clinton ran against crime. In a period when a shrinking industrial economy had left millions without work, Clinton ran on jobs.
Once he got elected, Clinton seemed to forget how he’d won. He spent his first six months in office responding to the demands of his donors, a group far more affluent and ideological than his voters. Clinton’s new priorities seemed to mirror those of the New York Times editorial page: gun control, global warming, gays in the military. His approval rating tanked. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress in the first midterm election.
Clinton quickly learned his lesson. He scurried back to the middle and stayed there for the next six years, through scandal and impeachment. Clinton understood that as long as he stayed connected to the broad center of American public opinion, voters would overlook his personal shortcomings. It’s the oldest truth of electoral politics: give people what they want, and you win. That’s how democracy works.
Somehow, Bill Clinton’s heirs learned nothing from the experience. They mimicked his speaking style and his slickness. Some had similar personal lives. They forgot about paying attention to the public’s opinion about issues.
Meanwhile, America changed. The country went through several momentous but little-publicized transformations that made it much harder to govern. Our leaders didn’t seem to notice. At exactly the moment when America needed prudent, responsive leadership, the ruling class got dumber and more insular.
The first and most profound of these changes was the decline of the middle class. A vibrant, self-sustaining bourgeoisie is the backbone of most successful nations, but it is essential to a democracy. Democracies don’t work except in middle-class countries. In 2015, for the first time in its history, the United States stopped being a predominantly middle-class country.
In 1970, the year after I was born, well over 60 percent of American adults ranked as middle class. That year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. By 2015, America’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more Latin American. Middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. Fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. A majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income. America was becoming a country of rich and poor, and the rich were richer than ever. People who once flew first class now took NetJets.
Over the same period in which manufacturing declined, making the middle class poorer, the finance economy boomed, making the rich wealthier than ever before. This happened over decades, but the recession of 2008 accelerated the disparities. During the crash of the housing market, more than a quarter of all household wealth in America evaporated. When the smoke cleared and the recovery began, the richest American families controlled a larger share of the economy than they did before the recession.
Over time, this trend reshaped America. What had been essentially an egalitarian country, where people from every income group save the very top and the very bottom mixed regularly, has become increasingly stratified. In 1980 it would have been unremarkable for a family in the highest tax bracket to eat regularly at McDonald’s, stay in motels, and take vacations by car.
A few decades later, that is nearly impossible to imagine. There aren’t many successful executives eating Big Macs at rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike, or even many college graduates. Only hookers and truck drivers stay in motels. Most affluent people under forty have never been inside one.
The rich now reside on the other side of a rope line from everyone else. They stand in their own queues at the airport, sleep on their own restricted floors in hotels. They watch sporting events from skyboxes, while everyone else sits in the stands. They go to different schools. They eat different food. They ski on private mountains, with people very much like themselves.
Suddenly America has a new class system.
Neither party is comfortable talking about this. Traditionally, income inequality was a core Democratic concern. But the party, long the standard-bearer for the working class, has reoriented completely. The party’s base has shifted to the affluent, and its priorities now mirror those of progressive professionals in Washington, New York, and Silicon Valley.
Forty years ago, Democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. Now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
Republicans, meanwhile, have never wanted to talk about the gap between rich and poor. The party of business rejected the very idea of income inequality, in part because it sounded like a theory concocted by French intellectuals to discredit capitalism. When pressed, Republicans tended to dismiss reports of inequality with a shrug. They assume the American economy is basically just: Rich people have earned their wealth; the poor have earned their poverty. If anything, conservatives pointed out, the poor in America are rich by international standards. They have iPhones and cable TV. How poor can they really be?
This misses the point. Prosperity is a relative measure. It doesn’t matter how much brightly colored plastic crap I can buy from China. If you can buy more, you’re the rich one. I’m poor by comparison.
Poverty doesn’t cause instability. Envy does.
This is why grossly unequal societies tend to collapse, while egalitarian ones endure. America thrived for 250 years mostly because of its political stability. The country had no immense underclass plotting to smash the system. There was not a dominant cabal of the ultrawealthy capable of overpowering the majority. The country was fundamentally stable. On the strata of that stability its citizens built a remarkable society.
In Venezuela, the opposite happened. Venezuela used to be a prosperous country. Its middle class was large by regional standards, and well educated. The country had one of the biggest oil reserves in the world. The capital was a clean, modern city. Now there are toilet paper shortages in Caracas. Venezuela has the highest murder rate in the Western Hemisphere. Virtually everyone who can leave already has.
How did this happen? Simple: a small number of families took control of most of the Venezuelan economy. Wealth distribution this lopsided would work under many forms of government. It doesn’t work in a democracy. Voters deeply resented it. They elected a demagogic populist named Hugo Chavez to show their displeasure. Twenty years later, Venezuela is no longer a democracy at all. Its economy has all but evaporated.
America isn’t Venezuela. But if wealth disparities continue to grow, why wouldn’t it be?
Our political leaders ought to be concerned. Instead they work to make the country even less stable, by encouraging rapid demographic change. For decades, ever-increasing immigration has been the rule in the United States, endorsed by both political parties. In 1970, less than 5 percent of America’s population were immigrants. By 2018, that number had risen to nearly 14 percent.
This is good news for the leadership of both political parties. Democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: You don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
Republican donors want lower wages. Many of them have employees. They know immigrants from the third world will work for less, and be grateful to do it. Minimum wage seems like a pittance to most Americans, something teenagers get for a summer job, but if you’ve just arrived from a slum in Tegucigalpa, it’s a huge improvement over what you’re used to.
With the enthusiastic consent of both parties, more than 15 million illegal immigrants have been allowed to enter the United States, get jobs, and use public services in a country they are not legally allowed to live in. The people who made the policies benefited from them.
What was the effect on the country? Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime. Our elites relentlessly celebrate those changes, but their very scale destabilizes our society.
If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace. It disorients them. Over time it makes even the most open-minded people jumpy and hostile and suspicious of one another. It encourages tribalism.
Again and again, we are told these changes are entirely good. Change itself is inherently virtuous, our leaders explain. Those who oppose it are bigots. We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language. It’s called diversity. It’s our highest value.
In fact diversity is not a value. It’s a neutral fact, inherently neither good nor bad. Lost in the mindless celebration of change is an obvious question: why should a country with no shared language, ethnicity, religion, culture, or history remain a country? Countries don’t hang together simply because. They need a reason. What’s ours?
It’s hard to think of a more important question. Our ruling class, the people responsible for these changes, ought to be fixated on it. They ought to be staying up late looking for the glue strong enough to hold a country of 330 million people together.
They’re not. Instead they act like the problem doesn’t exist. Their predictions for the future are confident but faith-based: all will be well because it always has been. When confronted or pressed for details, they retreat into a familiar platitude, which they repeat like a Zen koan: Diversity is our strength.
But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question.
Instead, Americans are told to shut up and be grateful. Immigrants are doing the jobs you won’t do. There’s some truth in this, depending upon what the jobs are and what they pay. But what would happen if those jobs disappeared? One recent study concluded that 20 million low-skilled American jobs could disappear in the next twenty-five years, replaced by automation. Let’s say that’s half-true, and the country loses 10 million jobs in a relatively short period.
What will become of the people who currently occupy them?
Many of those workers are recent immigrants, but they won’t go home. They’ll still live here. How many will be successfully retrained as software engineers? Maybe some. The rest are likely to wind up angry and disenfranchised and wondering what happened to that American dream they were promised in exchange for washing our underwear. It won’t take much to convince them to vote for radical populists who will make Donald Trump look restrained. Things could get volatile. The cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
Policy makers don’t seem worried about this, but voters clearly sense a threat. One of the most remarkable things about our immigration policy is how unpopular it is. Only the ruling class supports it. For more than fifty years, Gallup has polled Americans on whether they want more immigration, less immigration, or about the same amount. Not a single time has a plurality supported higher immigration levels. When Americans are asked what their preferred level of annual immigration is, they almost always want less than the current norm of about one million new legal immigrants per year.
America was radically and permanently changed, against the will of its own population, by the people who run the country. Dare to complain about that and you’ll be shouted down as a bigot, as if demanding representation in a democracy were immoral. Not surprisingly, many voters have concluded that our democracy isn’t real. In important ways, it’s not.
Immigration is far from the only example. From Iraq to Libya to Syria to Yemen, America has embarked on repeated military adventures in the Middle East. None of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. Polls have repeatedly shown that Americans think the country is overstretched and too willing to take on global commitments. Thousands of Americans have died fighting abroad. The wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged America’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. Enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in America. Yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
Have these wars against terrorism even made America safer from terrorism? It’s debatable. One of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight Islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for Islamic extremism.
Pretty much every major foreign policy decision in recent years has been a disaster. Yet elite enthusiasm for nation building and pointless wars continues unabated. Our leaders still seem more committed to liberating Syrian towns from some armed group or other than to fixing rotting suburbs in Akron. Our leaders seem less interested than ever in the country they actually govern. Consider the elite response to the opioid epidemic.
From 1999 to 2016, the death rate from opioid drugs has risen more than 400 percent. Drug overdoses are killing more Americans every year than died during the entire Vietnam War. Outside the richest cities, life expectancy is falling for the first time in American history due to a combination of drug overdoses and suicides.
If you were around in the 1980s, you may remember the two big health crises of that decade: AIDS and the crack epidemic. Both of these were treated as genuine national emergencies. Billions of dollars went to AIDS research. Hollywood stars wore red ribbons, held galas, and made countless public service advertisements to convince kids to shun drugs and use condoms. Congress allocated funding for the National Institutes of Health and passed laws to get drug dealers off the streets. Some of these efforts succeeded, others didn’t. But it was obvious that America’s leadership regarded crack and AIDS as genuine national emergencies.
Today, opioids are killing Americans at a much faster rate than AIDS or crack, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing. It’s not a crisis that has interested Washington much. There’s been no effort to rein in the pharmaceutical companies that flooded communities with opioids. Nobody seems to be rethinking our current rehabilitation and treatment models for addicts, which clearly aren’t working. Both the Congress and the White House seem to have run out of ideas, or even the desire to think of new ones.
In a healthy society, decades of obvious failures by elites would force a change of ideas or a change of leadership. Neither has happened. The same class of lawmakers, journalists, and business chieftains holds power, despite their dismal record. America now has not only one of the least impressive ruling classes in history, but also the least self-aware. They have no idea how bad they are.
There’s a reason for that. The path to the American elite has been well marked for decades: Perform well on standardized tests, win admission to an elite school, enter one of a handful of elite professions, settle in a handful of elite zip codes, marry a fellow elite, and reproduce. Repeat that cycle for a couple of generations and you wind up with a ruling class so insulated from the country it rules that failure goes unnoticed. A small group of people accumulates unimaginable wealth while the rest of the country becomes a desiccated husk. Yet everything seems fine.
The meritocracy, it turns out, creates its own kind of stratification, a kind more rigid than the aristocracy it replaced. Meanwhile, the meritocratic system fails to inculcate the leadership qualities that generational rule requires. Acing the SAT doesn’t make you wise. Ascending from McKinsey to Goldman Sachs doesn’t confer empathy. That’s unfortunate for America, because wisdom and empathy are prerequisites for effective leadership. You’ve got to care about the people you govern. Would you be a good parent if you despised your children? Would you be a good officer if you didn’t care about the lives of your soldiers?
Our new ruling class doesn’t care, not simply about American citizens, but about the future of the country itself. They view America the way a private equity firm sizes up an aging industrial conglomerate: as something outdated they can profit from. When it fails, they’re gone. They’ve got money offshore and foreign passports at home. Our rulers have no intention of staying for the finale.
Countries can survive war and famines and disease. They cannot survive leaders who despise their own people. Increasingly our leaders work against the public’s interests. They view the concerns of middle-class America as superstitious and backward. They fantasize about replacing Americans who live here, with their antiquated attitudes and seemingly intractable problems, with a new population of more pliant immigrants.
Increasingly Americans have begun to understand this, and they resent it.
Historically, rulers derive legitimacy from one of two sources: God or voters. Rulers are in charge either because they claim some higher power put them there, or because a majority of people voted for them. Both systems have been tried for centuries. Both can work. The one system that absolutely does not work and never will is ersatz democracy. If you tell people they’re in charge, but then act as if they’re not, you’ll infuriate them. It’s too dishonest. They’ll go crazy.
Oligarchies posing as democracies will always be overthrown in the end.
That’s the story of 2016. What’s remarkable is how the ruling class responded. Donald Trump won the Republican primaries, and Republican leaders immediately began plotting to take his nomination at the convention. Trump won the general election, and elites schemed to have the results nullified by electors. Trump assumed office, and the permanent class in Washington worked to sabotage his administration.
What message do voters take from this? All your fears are real. You may have suspected our democracy was actually an oligarchy. Now you know for sure. You can vote all you want, but voting is a charade. Your leaders don’t care what you think. Shut up and obey.
You don’t have to support Trump to see this as a dangerous message. Democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. In a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the Bastille; they can vote. Once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. Wise leaders understand this. They’re self-reflective and self-critical. When they lose elections, they think about why.
Maybe America’s most effective government agency is the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes. Any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the NTSB combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. Its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. The NTSB is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
If our political and intellectual elites ran the NTSB, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming Vladimir Putin. They’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. If you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
After a while, you’d stop flying. It would be too dangerous. But our leaders wouldn’t notice. They’d feel satisfied and virtuous. And in any case, they fly private anyway. Their planes are safe.
The aftermath of the 2016 election is recognizable to any parent who has argued with a child. Everything’s fine until the kid loses interest in what you think. Once it becomes clear the child really doesn’t care about your stupid rules, you lose it and start screaming. The less control you have, the more hysterical you become.
Dying regimes are the same way. They get more repressive as they fade. As their power ebbs, rulers lash out against dissent and disobedience. Deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu barked orders at his guards as they led him to the firing squad.
Our leaders understood Trump’s election as a direct challenge to their power. They’ve been fretting about his authoritarian tendencies ever since. Because they lack self-awareness, they don’t perceive this as projection. They can’t see that they’re actually talking about themselves.
Let’s say you were an authoritarian who sought to weaken American democracy. How would you go about doing that? You’d probably start by trying to control what people say and think. If citizens dissented from the mandated orthodoxy, or dared to consider unauthorized ideas, you’d hurt them. You’d shame them on social media. You’d shout them down in public. You’d get them fired from their jobs. You’d make sure everyone was afraid to disagree with you.
After that, you’d work to disarm the population: you’d take their guns away. That way, they would be entirely dependent on you for safety, not to mention unable to resist your plans for them. Then, just to make sure you’d quelled all opposition, you’d systematically target any institution that might oppose or put brakes on your power. You’d be especially concerned about churches, the family, and independent businesses. You’d be sure to undermine and crush those, using laws and relentless propaganda.
If, despite all this, election results still didn’t go your way, you’d use an unelected bureaucracy to neuter any leader you hadn’t handpicked yourself. But you’d be shaken by an election like that. You’d resolve never to allow one again. To make sure of that, you’d work tirelessly to replace the old and ungrateful population with a new and more obedient one. That’s what you’d do.
Sound familiar? For all of his many faults, Donald Trump isn’t doing any of that. Our ruling class is.
It’s probably a fruitless exercise on their part. The status quo is over. A revolution is on the way.
Hopefully it’ll be the kind of low-grade revolution where everybody learns something and nobody gets hurt. But it will be wrenching either way, because revolutions always are. This used to be a placid country. It’s not anymore, and won’t be for a while.
What went wrong?
The disaster began when almost everyone in power joined the same team. You used to hear debates between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, on issues that mattered to the rest of the country. That’s over. Our public debates are mostly symbolic. They are sideshows designed to divert attention from the fact that those who make the essential decisions, about the economy and the government and war, have reached consensus on the fundamentals. They agree with each other. They just don’t agree with the population they govern.
Left and right are no longer meaningful categories in America. The rift is between those who benefit from the status quo, and those who don’t. That’s rarely acknowledged in public, which is convenient for those who are benefiting. The people in charge are free to pursue policies that are disconnected from the public good but that have, not coincidentally, made them richer, more powerful, and much more self-satisfied.
But not more impressive. Our leaders are fools, unaware that they are captains of a sinking ship.