The whole idea behind this book is to give the reader a simple and coherent explanation for why American society has become so polarized over the last few decades, and during the last few years in particular. It is not meant to be a dreary slog. It is not a political science treatise. You will not find academic theories or a lot of citations and footnotes. That is just one of several reasons that no college student will ever see this book show up on his syllabus.
The primary reason is that it is entirely sympathetic to Normal Americans and their struggle to reclaim what belongs to them—the United States of America.
So, this book is not strewn with the kind of jargon I learned as a poli sci major. I hate jargon. It is one of the many tools that experts tend to use to make their areas of expertise seem more complex and difficult than they really are, thereby making themselves indispensable. What’s happened and is happening now in our country is not that difficult to understand. My purpose is to provide a clear, uncomplicated way of thinking about what is going on so the reader can more effectively exercise his or her birthright—sovereignty. I hope I have done that.
This book was written for Normal Americans. Note the capitalization—the term Normal appears throughout the book, and the concept is important. One way to understand American society today is to see it divided into two general classes, an Elite and the Normals. The Elite are those people, the experts, who run the day-to-day operations of society’s institutions—like the government, the media, academia, and Hollywood. But today, America’s Elite also includes those who merely identify with the values and ideology of the Elite. You don’t actually have to be elite to be Elite, and the consequences of that low bar to entry explain a lot about why the Elites are so upset that the Normals elected a guy like Donald Trump.
The only real qualification for joining America’s modern Elite is to choose to affiliate with the Elite. The guy who runs Goldman Sachs? He’s Elite. But so is the twenty-three-year old dude with the goatee and knit cap spending all afternoon in the Starbucks tapping away on his iPad Pro, sipping a cruelty-free green tea as he tweets “TRUMP RUSSIA TREASON!” at conservatives on Twitter.
Let me reiterate something. Being in the American Elite has nothing to do with actually being elite, as we typically understand that word. You don’t have to be special to affiliate with the Elite. To the extent our Elite is a meritocracy, it is a meritocracy without merit—and without a willingness to accept accountability when it fails to perform adequately. If the last thirty years have taught us anything, it is that.
To be Elite today, you just have to decide that you aren’t like regular people.
The Normals are everyone else.
The Normals cede day-to-day control of the operations of society’s institutions to the experts. Those experts and those who identify with them are the Elite. The Normals would happily let the Elite do what the Elite does and focus on living their own lives if the Elite would both perform competently and not subject those it is supposed to be serving to an escalating series of petty oppressions—and some not so petty oppressions.
Now, those are very broad generalizations, but generalizations are useful. Not every member of the Elite will precisely conform to the general characteristics of the Elite, nor every Normal precisely conform to the general characteristics of the Normals. But in general, these generalizations are generally sound.
Within each broad caste you will find further divisions. While most of the Elite holds to a center-left political ideology—enough so that sometimes as you read this book you will see that it is almost identical—there are members of the Elite who lean to the right. It gets interesting when class loyalty clashes with ideology, and you often see people prioritize the premises and assumptions of their class over their alleged political ideology.
That’s where the tiresome Never Trump contingent comes in. When you see alleged conservative and noted cruise shiller Bill Kristol tweet about how he hopes the mandarins in the bureaucracy will step in to neutralize the policy choices of our elected president, you see someone ditching his putative conservatism in favor of class solidarity. And it probably does not hurt that if his fellow Elites were to succeed, Captain Kristol and his crew would stand to return to the positions of relative prestige they held before the Normals tired of Conservative, Inc.’s inability (or unwillingness) to win and elected Donald Trump.
Normals is not a synonym for conservative. The Normals tend to be center right, if you have to place them on the political spectrum, but that’s mostly because traditional American values like faith, family, and patriotism have become identified with center-right politics as liberals have either stopped defending them or abandoned them altogether. However, Normals do embrace some concepts that ideological conservatives (like me) consider heresies, such as doubts about “free trade.” Further, some Normals are on the left—there were Normals who supported Bernie Sanders. They feel the high and mighty are giving them a raw deal, and many of them chose Trump over Hillary Clinton for just that reason.
The Normals embrace traditional Main Street values—faith, family, and patriotism—and a sense that America and Americans must be the priority. This puts Normals in conflict with an Elite that has eschewed traditional patriotism for at best a kind of ironic detachment from outright manifestations of it—the “flag waving” they find so déclassé—and at worst, an idea that they are “citizens of the world,” immune from the crude nationalism you will find should you be forced to venture west of I-95. When your central image of yourself is not as an “American,” then why would you put either America’s or Americans’ interest before anywhere or anyone else’s?
The tension between the Elite and the Normals arose largely because today’s Elite no longer shares such core values (even if, like the Kennedys, they merely pretended to do so for public consumption), and because the Elite no longer respects the Normals as the reservoir of those values. Back in the forties, Hollywood made movies extolling the Normals as the source of those values—It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), anyone?—but no longer. Starting in the sixties, the young members of the Elite began to reject these traditional values. This sparked a conflict both with the older Elite and with the Normals, who struck back in the guise of Nixon’s “Silent Majority.”
The Elite today are the heirs of those Elite rebels from the sixties. But unlike previous generations of the Elite, this generation is imbued with the anti-Western, Marxist poison they learned in academia thanks to the faculty acolytes of the Frankfurt School. (For a closer look at those monsters, see Michael Walsh’s essential books The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West [New York: Encounter Books, 2017] and The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West [New York: Encounter Books, 2018].)
And because of this, combined with their own class prejudices and the temptation to preserve and enhance the privilege and power that comes with their status, the Elite has allowed itself to believe that the Normals are mindless, racist bigots bewitched with religious nonsense and an irrational love of firearms. Class membership has thereby become a moral test, and the Normals fail.
Today’s Elite hates the Normals—hates them—and it acts accordingly.
Except the Normals have noticed. And they are starting to hate the Elite right back.