What so many of us had hoped would never happen again, has
happened: Donald Trump is once again
President of the United States. Of
course, while this was a disappointing – if not alarming – result to myself and
others, it was hardly the shock that it was in 2016, when he attained that
office for the first time. His opponent
then was Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, and a
former U.S. Senator (not to mention wife of former President Bill Clinton): a
strong contender favored by most pollsters to easily win the election. By contrast, I thought that Kamala Harris was
a terrible choice as the Democratic candidate, and after learning of her
candidacy, I privately referred to her as “BMF” – “Biden’s middle finger” –
because I believed that Biden, in selecting her to run in his place, was
essentially saying to those of his fellow Democrats who had so unceremoniously
pressured him to drop out of the running, “Okay, you want me out? See how successful you’re going to be with her.” She was a cynical choice to be his running
mate from the very beginning, after having dropped out of the presidential
primaries in late 2019 due to dwindling campaign funds and amid rumors that her
campaign had been mismanaged and that she had been an indecisive leader. After securing his candidacy in 2020, rather
than choosing from among the other strong contenders in the primaries, Biden
selected Harris as his running mate. By
all appearances, it was a “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) choice: racial
and gender window-dressing as a lazy way to appeal to a broader demographic
electorate. As Vice-President, Harris
continued to be dogged by rumors of a toxic work environment existing among her
staff. Her underwhelming performance as
Vice-President really concerned me, because she was, as they say, “only a
heartbeat away from the Presidency”. Nevertheless,
I supported the Democratic ticket this year: not as a vote for Harris, but
rather as a vote against Trump.
While Trump’s victory this time may not have been a shock,
it is still disturbing to witness the jubilation of his supporters – how
ecstatic they are that a man who is a convicted felon, has been accused of the rape
and sexual assault of multiple females (including, with Jeffrey Epstein, a 13
year-old girl), and who has left a string of failed and fraudulent businesses
in his wake, will now be leading the country.
He hasn’t even taken office yet, and his actions already seem to be
demonstrating that his next term of office will be worse that his last: his
picks for cabinet members and top advisors, in addition to being unquestioning
sycophants, have, at best, dubious resumes for their positions and, at worst,
past histories that are more sordid than Trump’s own. They are a collection of kooks and cranks
that remind me of the villains in the old 1960’s Batman television show: the
only thing that they are missing are the outlandish costumes.
Unless Trump’s supporters are merely being intentionally ignorant about his behavior, the only explanation for this that I can come up with is that they believe the disease is much worse than the cure: that – in the words of Ronald Reagan over four decades ago – “the ship of state is out of control”. In this sense, they see Donald Trump fulfilling the role that Japanese kamikaze pilots did in World War II, when they intentionally flew their planes into enemy battleships in order to sink them. Yes, these Trump supporters may believe, he will throw America into chaos, which may result in his own eventual immolation, but it’s something that has to be done, because only a radical cure like this will save America.
But save America from . . . what? That is the question that the other half of
the country is asking. When I wrote “The
Rise and Fall of Donald Trump” after his election in 2016, I predicted that his
presidency would be like a B-movie, culminating in a calamitous ending. I never imagined, back then, how calamitous
that ending would be, after he refused to concede his defeat in the next election,
based on bogus claims of vote-count fraud, and an angry mob of his followers
stormed the Capitol building, with many of them apparently intending to murder
both Vice-President Mike Pence (for certifying the election results) and
Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
In keeping with my B-movie analogy, I concluded “The Rise and Fall of
Donald Trump” by saying “let us hope that there will not be a sequel”. But I had preceded this by noting that
Trump’s “secret weapon was that mass of the American populace disenchanted with
the hollow, recurring promises made by the liberal establishment which seemed
unwilling or incapable of connecting with them at a meaningful and fundamental
level. That they actually voted for
Donald Trump, in spite of all of his blatant shortcomings, merely shows how
extreme their level of disenchantment was.”
I believe that this accounts for the muted reaction to the recent
election outcome among those who had not supported Trump. There was relief, of course, that the
election outcome would not be violently resisted by his minions, since it had
gone their way. (Many election
commissioners – particularly those in battleground states – had actually feared
for their personal safety, and that of their staffs.) There was also an acknowledgement that Trump
had not just won the controversial Electoral College vote, but had won the
popular vote as well (something which couldn’t be said in his contest against
Hillary Clinton). But I believe that,
beyond this, there is, finally, the realization among Democrats and the Left in
general that something they are doing has strongly alienated half of the
country. And they are finally ready to
do some serious soul-searching to find out what that is.
In retrospect, it is personally ironic that the very next piece that I wrote after “The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump” was “Blue Collar Elegy”, in which I praised the book Hillbilly Elegy and its author, J. D. Vance, because I felt that the experiences he described strongly resonated with many of my own growing up in a working class neighborhood. I wrote that I believed the intent of his book was to:
. . . shine a
spotlight on an entire segment – and a growing one – of American culture which
is increasingly finding itself in trouble.
It is the segment of white blue collar workers who had once been able to
adequately provide for their families in the factory towns across America. They were patriotic, hard-working, religious,
and with strong family values. They
generally mistrusted government intrusion, and particularly resented those who
seemed to eschew their work ethic and instead depended upon the largess of
government spending to sustain themselves.
The paradox, of course, is that as the factory jobs which provided
employment for these blue collar workers began to disappear, they [i.e.,
those in J. D. Vance’s generation, not my own] found themselves
increasingly reliant upon government aid to get by. And, as unemployment and underemployment
became more rampant among them, alcoholism and drug use became more widespread,
and in its wake, the structure of the nuclear family began to unravel. Broken or abusive marriages, unwed mothers,
and criminality became a pervasive phenomenon.
J. D. Vance had once been a harsh critic of Donald Trump,
and I never would have imagined – especially back then, when I wrote that piece
– that he would eventually become a staunch ally, and running mate. But when I was a young man, just passing the
threshold of adulthood, those in my generation were contending with a different
kind of malaise. It had been brought on
by the resignation of disgraced President Richard Nixon, and the loss of the
Viet Nam War, followed by years of high inflation and high unemployment caused
by the oil price shocks of the 1970s.
America had seemed to lose its standing in the world, and its
competitiveness, and it left us with a pervading sense of very low morale. Jimmy Carter had succeeded in restoring faith
in the integrity of the office of the presidency, but he could do little or
nothing to restore America’s faith in itself.
In a famous speech which he gave in July 1979, Carter himself alluded to
this, calling it a “crisis in confidence”, a “growing doubt about the meaning
of our own lives” and declaring that it is “threatening to destroy the social
and political fabric of America”. Later
that year, in November, Iranian revolutionaries took 52 Americans in the U.S.
embassy hostage, and the following month, the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan. By the end of that year,
America seemed completely incapable of addressing fundamental problems in the
international as well as domestic spheres.
How had it ended up in such a sorry state? I believe that the liberalism which had been such a potent force for social change in the 1960s had, after the fall of Richard Nixon and the ignoble loss of the Viet Nam war, metastasized into a philosophy of national self-loathing. Rather than focusing on what had been accomplished in that decade, liberals instead ruminated in a very critical manner over what still remained to be done. America had fallen, in this world view, because it was a capitalist, racist, sexist, imperialist power that had lost its way. Movies in the 1970s, line Fun with Dick and Jane (starring George Segal and Jane Fonda) and Thieves (starring Marlo Thomas and Charles Grodin), espoused a Robin Hood ethos which justified burglary and theft as a sort of noble reaction to the unearned social privileges of those living well. Even the movie 9 to 5, (starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton) which was ostensibly a feminist satire, portrayed successful businessmen as accomplished con artists, rather than as people engaging in anything genuinely productive. This sentiment featured prominently on television as well, where the iconic successful businessman was the scheming, manipulative J. R. Ewing of Dallas. It pervaded the culture, including the blue collar world that I grew up in, and had an enervating impact. As children in the 1960s, and teens in the 1970s, we absorbed the belief that striving to succeed in a conventional way – even in the classroom – was “selling out”, because we would be aligning ourselves with the “Establishment”. And since few of us had parents or peers that were college graduates, the incentives for us to pursue a college education of our own – in spite of its affordability back then, unlike now – were greatly diminished. But in addition to this, having grown up with fathers who had been able to comfortably support their families by working in jobs that did not require a higher education, we really believed that this would be unnecessary for us as well. As we started entering the workforce in the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, we discovered even back then that those types of jobs were disappearing.
But a potent counter-movement emerged in reaction to the
stifling liberalism of the post-Nixon, post-war years. This was the resurgence of
libertarianism. In academia it found its
strongest expression in the philosopher Robert Nozick’s 1974 book Anarchy,
State, and Utopia, which was a libertarian rebuttal to philosopher John
Rawls’s classic A Theory of Justice.
(Rawls had argued that an ideal just society could be designed if its
architects existed under a “veil of ignorance”: not knowing what their individual
identities – sex, race, economic status, personal capabilities – were while
they were designing it. Nozick countered
that justice is more effectively attained and preserved, and the general
welfare maximized, when individuals are free to act in their own self-interest,
with certain minimal limitations preventing fraud and coercion.) Libertarian ideas found expression in popular
media as well, in books such as Robert Ringer’s Restoring the American Dream
(1979), and the 1980 public television series Free to Choose, which was
based on Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s book of the same name,
and which espoused the benefits of the free market and warned of the dangers of
excessive government intervention.
Around this time there was also a resurgence of popularity and interest
in the books of Ayn Rand, a libertarian philosopher who had popularized the
ideology in the mid-twentieth century through works of fiction like The
Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
Rand was a very powerful and persuasive writer, and created a compelling
worldview in her novels in which there are essentially two types of
people: On the one hand there are the
entrepreneurs, architects, industrialists, and artists who, through their own
personal initiative, create value in the world, and maintain the engine of
civilization. On the other hand, there
are those who try to expropriate wealth without working for it or earning it,
by appealing to contorted ideas of social justice, arguing that their
disadvantaged position in life (which Rand’s novels always implied was due to
their own timidity, laziness, and lack of personal initiative) entitled them to
a share of that wealth. This was a
two-dimensional view of the world, certainly, but it presented a potent
antidote to the malaise that had crippled America, which itself was partially
the product of a two-dimensional, anti-business posture on the Left. One popular stereotype that particularly
rankled the middle and working classes was that of the “welfare queen”: a
non-working woman who lived off the largesse of the government, feeling
entitled to take the tax money paid by working people to support her and her
children. The stereotypical welfare
queen usually had many children, often with different (also non-working)
fathers, and the more children that she had, the more justified she felt in
taking handouts from the government.
Libertarianism presented a non-racist cure to this generally perceived
social problem, by advocating the minimization – if not complete elimination – of
the welfare state.
In the U.S. presidential election of 1980, the Libertarian candidate, Ed Clark, won more than one percent of the popular vote – something the party had never achieved before (and would not do again for over thirty years). The vote probably would have been much higher, if not for the fact that the Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, had incorporated much of the Libertarian ideology and rhetoric into his own campaign. (Even Jimmy Carter, whose administration advocated government spending cuts and deregulation, embraced much of the growing libertarian sentiment, much to the chagrin of liberal Democrats.) His plan consisted of reducing government expenditures, but also reducing taxes – with a particular emphasis on bringing down taxes in the higher income brackets. Reagan had espoused what would come to be known as “trickle-down economics”: the idea that the wealthy in America created new businesses and industries, while supporting the continued growth of existing ones, and by lightening the tax burden of the wealthy, their ability to do this would be enhanced, which would be reflected in more economic growth, and more jobs. The extreme Left vision of the world was that the wealthy were plunderers, using various nefarious means to gain and retain a larger share of the economic pie. But this new, libertarian view espoused by Reagan Republicans saw the wealthy as making the entire pie grow in size, to everyone’s benefit. It proved to be a successful campaign strategy, leaving liberals genuinely perplexed that it resonated with so many people: I remember a sketch from the comedy program Saturday Night Live at the time which featured Reagan supporters as formerly sane persons having been overcome by some mysterious alien force, just like the one that replaced people with soulless duplicates in the classic horror film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Liberals were left stunned at his electoral victory, and, true to his word, once in office he led an aggressive effort to pare back the size of the federal government, while implementing tax cuts. During his first two years in office, the country experienced back-to-back recessions, with the second one being particularly severe. But when the economy recovered, at the end of 1982, it grew annually at an average rate of 4.5% during the remainder of Reagan’s two terms, which was significantly higher than the average growth rate of 3.2% in the 1970s. And unemployment, which had peaked at 10.8% at the end of 1982, fell to 5.3% by the end of Reagan’s second term – the lowest it had been since 1974. “Trickle-down economics” had seemed to live up its promise.
What “trickle down” economics failed to do was shrink the national debt, which actually mushroomed during the Reagan administration from 900 billion dollars to 2.3 trillion dollars. This was due in large part to increased defense spending, stemming from Reagan’s staunch and aggressive opposition to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. But given that his militaristic posturing actually led to groundbreaking peace treaties between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that included nuclear disarmament, and indirectly led to the eventual fall of the Soviet Union and liberation of Eastern Europe, it is hard to find fault with this departure from the libertarian philosophy of a limited government with minimal military and police forces. There was one pernicious, lingering consequence, however, that stemmed from the other successes of “Reaganomics”, which was the idea that cutting taxes – particularly on the wealthy – was always a winning solution for jumpstarting the economy, even if there were no government spending cuts to offset the tax cuts. During Reagan’s administration, the economist Arthur Laffer popularized the idea that tax cuts might even raise government revenues, because the greater economic growth would more than offset the reduction in tax rates. Unfortunately, this has enshrined tax cuts as a permanent hat trick that Republicans fall back on time and again to curry favor with the voters: a painless solution to cure any form of economic malaise, but one that drives the U.S. government deeper and deeper into debt.
I recounted the Reagan experience in some detail because
this is the closest historical parallel, I think, to what happened in this
election. Democrats back then, and
liberals in general, had lost touch with a sizable portion of the American
electorate, and then found themselves asking, after Reagan’s victory, “What
just happened here!!!?” They only
regained the White House when Bill Clinton crafted a more pro-business
liberalism, with his slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid”, and social programs,
like “workfare”, which were intended to reduce the scope of nonproductive
welfare programs and both encourage and enable the poor to work for a
living. Even now, decades later, I think
that the Left fails to appreciate how much of the libertarian ethos is still
retained by the middle and working classes.
They don’t want government handouts in the form of tax cuts, or
subsidies, or government-funded programs: what they want is a healthy economy
that will provide them with an opportunity to work and support themselves and
their families. The Randian worldview of
producers vs. takers may have been overly simplistic, but who can deny that
many of the transformational industries which have arisen over just the past
few decades came about because of visionary entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill
Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk?
That does not mean, of course, that liberal criticisms of
this worldview are completely unfounded.
Not all of the socially privileged have attained and kept their wealth
by creating or sustaining industries. Many,
if they are not merely throwing it around in profligate diversions, are using
their money to make more money, without actually producing anything. As an energy consultant once described it to
me, there is a massive pool of such money circulating through the economy, with
its owners constantly in search of the Next Big Thing: something that will
yield a higher-than-average return on investment. This is really just a form of high stakes
gambling, but a form of gambling in which the House doesn’t always win, at
least initially. Eventually, however,
when this pool of money all goes to the same place, it creates a bubble, and
when the bubble bursts, it leaves an economic meltdown in its wake, and often
it is the working classes that bear the brunt of the repercussions. Even when new businesses are created, they
don’t always fit the heroic mold of those in an Ayn Rand novel; for every
Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, there has been an Enron, a WorldCom, and a Kobe
Steel. (Trump supporters, of course,
would put his companies in the first category, while his detractors would be
more inclined to include at least some of them – like Trump University – in the
second.) And while, as a consumer, I
have greatly benefited from legitimate businesses like Amazon and Walmart, I’m
not sure I would like those companies as much if I had to work for them. Working conditions may not be as brutal as
they were in the industries of the 19th century, like Andrew Carnegie’s steel
mills, where employees were expected to work long hours, in hazardous
conditions, but the jobs created by many of the present-day captains of
industry hardly sustain a middle-class household. Nevertheless, for much if not most of the
population, the specter of Big Government continues to be a much more ominous
one than the specter of Big Business.
Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump, with all of
their obvious differences, had something very important in common. They were all perceived as Washington
outsiders. Carter was a peanut farmer
and governor of Georgia, Reagan was a Hollywood actor, and Donald Trump was a
successful business entrepreneur – or at least he played one on TV. In fact, nearly every president elected in the
last half-century has been a Washington outsider, or perceived as such. Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, and
someone who most people had never heard of a decade before he became
president. George W. Bush, although the
son of a president, resided in Texas, and was its governor. Barack Obama was a freshman senator who had
been in Congress for less than four years when he was elected president. For presidential candidates during this time,
being perceived as a Washington insider has actually been a political
liability. One would think for example,
that a man with a resume like that of George H. W. Bush, who had been a
congressman, a U.S. ambassador, Director of the C.I.A., and vice-president to
Ronald Reagan, would be unbeatable as a presidential candidate. But after winning one term by riding on the
coattails of Reagan’s immense popularity, he was unable to secure a second
term, after losing to outsider Bill Clinton.
And Bill’s wife Hillary had a similarly sterling resume, having served
as a Senator and then Secretary of State in the Obama administration. I, like so many others, was shocked when she
lost to Donald Trump, but I was even more shocked when I learned that my
mother, who had voted for Barack Obama both times, had voted for Trump in that
election. My mother explained that she
disliked and distrusted Hillary because Hillary was too much a part of the
political establishment. And that, I
think, is what makes these outsiders so popular as presidential
candidates. There has been a long-standing
perception among many if not most voters that America is in need of a
fundamental change, and only somebody who is not part of the Washington
establishment can make a credible case that they will be an agent for
change. Persons who have lived and
worked in D.C. in any important capacity, for a significant length of time, are
seen as part of the problem, rather than someone who could be trusted to
provide a solution. Ironically, the only
president who has overcome the Insider Curse is Joe Biden – former
vice-president to Barack Obama and, before that, a member of Congress for
nearly 40 years – after much of the population had become angry and alarmed by
Trump’s behavior during his first term of office.
But while the Insider Curse has been a staple of Washington
presidential politics for fifty years, there have been fundamental changes in
Capitol culture – and the political culture at large – during that time. Around 1980, when libertarianism was having a
resurgence of popularity, a disparaging term arose among its followers to
describe the mainstream political parties: “Demopublicans”. This alluded to the perception – not just
held by libertarians – that there was no fundamental difference between the two
major political parties, and that this was largely responsible for the national
government’s inability to address America’s fundamental problems. Nobody today would accuse the two parties of
being indistinguishable: they seem to be implacable adversaries, with radically
divergent worldviews, and generally unable to cooperate in any effective sort
of way. When I used to live and work in
the D.C. area, I would sometimes ask old-timers there what brought about this
change. They said that back in the 1980s,
members of Congress genuinely considered themselves residents of Washington:
they would spend most of their time in the city, working, dining at local
restaurants, and drinking at local bars.
And because of this, they tended to socialize with each other more
often, blurring party lines and differences, which fostered increased dialogue
and cooperation. But in recent decades,
serving in Congress has become more of a commuter occupation, and its members
spend more time back in their home districts, with their constituents. This in itself has muted much of the former
dialogue between parties, but there has also been a marked decline in civility
between them. My old-timer friends laid
the blame for this on one individual: Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich.
In 1994, when Republicans regained control of the House of
Representatives for the first time in forty years, and Newt Gingrich became
Speaker of the House, he almost immediately set about reshaping the Republican
Party. He was a staunch conservative,
but his brand of conservatism went beyond the libertarian conservatism
popularized by Reagan, and included a Christian religious slant. The behavior that he exhibited – and encouraged
his fellow party members to exhibit – toward Democrats hardly smacked of brotherly love, however. It was a combative stance – openly
belligerent – which descended into name-calling, with epithets directed against
the Democrats like “fascists” and “traitors”.
Gingrich introduced the style of obstructionism and intransigent
political brinkmanship that even led to a government shutdown when the parties
could not agree on a government spending package: something which is sadly no
longer uncommon.
But the lack of civility between the two parties, and between liberals and conservatives in general, had already been fomenting in the years preceding its appearance in Congress. Its flames had been fanned by talk radio, and by the growing popularity of conservative deejays like Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh’s success, ironically enough, had its roots in the youth counterculture of the 1960s, when one of the most popular expressions of resistance against the Establishment, particularly by the young, was to engage in shocking behavior. Young men let their hair grow long, and both sexes often wore clothing that appeared outlandish to their conservative, older peers. Rock and roll music included lyrics that were bawdy and intentionally provocative. And although rock stars were ostensibly popular mouthpieces for the radical youth, the lyrics of their songs did not necessarily reflect this. The Rolling Stones song "Brown Sugar", for example, which I had heard at least one popular deejay call the greatest rock-and-roll song of all time, celebrates, in its lyrics, the sublime pleasure of sexually exploiting a captive black woman. Now I’m sure that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards never really intended to advocate slavery, racism, or the sexual abuse of women in their songs. What they merely wanted to do was write lyrics that would shock anyone who was not of their generation. But when the youth of the Sixties grew up, and began assuming positions of power and influence, the conservative, conformist, button-down Establishment began to fade away, and in its place arose a new social order: one which had a much more left-leaning orientation. And yet, in spite of the old Conservative establishment being dead, many entertainers still found that the best avenue to success was by being shocking, although it was no longer clear who exactly they were intending to unnerve. This was particularly evident with the popular “shock jock” deejays, like Howard Stern and Steve Dahl, who were not above resorting to racist and sexist humor to elicit laughs from their audiences. Entertainers of this stripe cleared the path for deejays like Rush Limbaugh, who specifically targeted the new liberal establishment for derision. Limbaugh cultivated a sense of outrage among his listeners by presenting a caricatured view of liberals, falling back upon a common tactic used by extremists at both ends of the political spectrum, which is to highlight the bizarre statements and behaviors of persons at the opposite extreme. He convinced his conservative audience that it was under siege, by maniacal liberals – not unlike those in Ayn Rand’s novels – who used distorted notions of social justice to take what his audience had rightfully earned, while providing unearned privileges and opportunities to envious, undeserving people unwilling to sustain the American Dream by supporting it or working for it. Like Gingrich, Limbaugh enjoyed labelling his adversaries with derogatory terms, and even invented some of his own, like “feminazis”. Conservative extremism found an even broader venue when the Fox News channel was introduced in 1996.
Most of my liberal friends attribute the present Great
Divide in politics to that media phenomenon, and some go so far to say that a
large portion of the country has been deluded – even brainwashed – by
conservative extremist commentators.
While I think there is some truth to this, I cannot believe that half of
the country has been consumed by a demagogue-induced hysteria that is based
entirely on paranoid fictions. One
defense that is often made of Fox News is that it actually has provided a
counterbalance to a media that is dominated by left-leaning newspapers and
television news programs, and this is not unfounded. In the 1960s, the most popular anchorperson on television was Walter Cronkite of CBS, who was admired and trusted by the
general public as a principled and impartial purveyor of the news. But his successor in 1981, Dan Rather, left
no doubt about his liberal political orientation, and it was an orientation
that was also adopted by the other major networks. Similarly, the most popular nighttime talk
show entertainer in the 1960s and 1970s was the Tonight Show’s Johnny
Carson, who had no scruples about lampooning politicians on the Left or the
Right in his nightly monologues, although by the end of his career, he did seem
to adopt a more left-leaning orientation.
The plethora of nighttime talk show hosts today universally present
monologues that are hardly more than liberal talking points. But rather than provide a plausible
counterpoint to the dominant media perspectives, Fox News, from its very
outset, presented skewed reporting and inflammatory commentary that often sank
to the level of demagoguery practiced by Limbaugh and his fellow
ultraconservative deejays. But again,
given the extreme popularity of the Fox News Channel – it is currently the most
popular cable news network in America – I have to believe that it is touching
some large-scale nerve of discontent that was not entirely a product of its own
creation. In what follows, I will
explore what I think are some legitimate grievances that has driven so much of
the U.S. electorate back to Trump.
I don’t think that I am the only one who is perennially
irritated by the need to identify what pronouns I would like to have used in
reference to me: on professional networking sites, resumes, or other areas that
require personal identification, when only 1.1% of the U.S. population identify
as transgender. It strikes me as a clear
case of “tyranny of the minority”. But
what is even more disturbing is that the U.S. psychiatric and medical
establishment condones sex reassignment surgeries for minors who consider
themselves transgender. Given that
unhappiness, depression, and a confusion about one’s evolving personal identity
occurs often among the young – particularly adolescents – it is recklessly
irresponsible to allow such an extreme and irreversible procedure to be
performed on them. Liberals downplay
this by contending that the prevalence of the practice is overblown, but that
it is allowed to be done at all is a national disgrace. Female athletes are at a genuine disadvantage
when competing against former males, and parents of female athletes have an
additional concern about their safety. What
I also find intriguing – and disturbing – is that the number of persons who
consider themselves transexuals has grown significantly. According to a Gallop poll done in 2024, the
percentage of persons in Gen Z who identify as such is 1.5%. Among Millennials, the percentage is only
0.35%, and in all of the older generations the reported percentage is never
higher than 0.2%. It would seem that a
pressing and relevant question is why the growth in transexuals has mushroomed
in the younger generations, but in today’s academic environment, I suspect that
a scholar would fear that the social repercussions of doing such research might
be permanently damaging to his or her career and reputation.
On May 25, 2020, four white police officers in Minneapolis,
Minnesota killed a black suspect, George Floyd, by asphyxiation, after having
pinned him down for over nine minutes.
This clear case of police brutality – with its racist overtones –
sparked a national outrage. While the
crime was an unpardonable example of race-based police brutality, George Floyd
hardly fit the role of innocent martyr. He
had served several jail terms, including a stint of several years for a home
invasion that he had committed with five other men, during which he held a
pistol to the sole female occupant while his accomplices searched for things to
steal. But his funeral was televised,
apparently in order for it to serve as a sort of national mourning. The service was presided over by the Reverand
Al Sharpton, a racial demagogue who had risen to prominence in 1987 after a
young woman, Tawana Brawley, had claimed to have been gang-raped by five white
men. Sharpton involved himself in the
case at that time, fanning the flames of hatred and outrage by claiming that Brawley
was also the victim of a government coverup that was trying to protect the
white defendants, and even hinted at a broader conspiracy that included the Ku
Klux Klan and the Mafia. Brawley’s
claims were ultimately proved to have been a complete fabrication, but
Sharpton’s antics had elevated him permanently to the status of a national
celebrity. Sadly, Floyd’s murder was
just one of many that had been perpetrated by police officers upon black
victims, and the earlier murders had led to the creation of the Black Lives
Matter movement, which organized mass demonstrations and marches to protest
police brutality. But the George Floyd
incident provoked particular outrage, leading to riots that left in their wake
burned out businesses throughout the country.
Before these riots, most whites were probably sympathetic to the Black
Lives Matter movement, but the riots provoked a reaction of extreme anger among
many of them. I remember seeing a
picture posted on Facebook of a business that was destroyed, in spite of the
fact that it had posted a Black Lives Matter sign on its front. The destruction from these riots was
widespread and indiscriminate, leaving many hard-working entrepreneurs without
their livelihood, and also left much of the population perplexed over how this
looting and devastation was advancing the cause of social justice. The riots have left a bitter, lingering
memory among many.
While on the subject of racial tensions, I have to mention an additional irritant which I think has contributed to the loss of support for Democrats, and this is the phenomenon of South-shaming, which emerged in earnest during the Obama administration. The Civil War, a documentary by Ken Burns that first aired in 1990, was a magnificent achievement. While not shying away from tracing the pro-slavery sentiments that led to Southern separatism, the documentary nevertheless presented a retelling of the conflict that was sympathetic to both sides, illustrating the heroism exhibited by both Union and Confederate combatants. Ultimately, it was a celebration of how the United States, after healing from the wounds of that devastating conflict, emerged as a powerful, more unified nation. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter had symbolically finalized the reconciliation of North and South by signing a Congressional posthumous restoration of full citizenship rights to Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The following year, a television series titled The Dukes of Hazzard began to air, about two young Georgia cousins bucking local authority while riding around in a fast car that they named the General Lee, which had a Confederate battle flag painted on its hood. I personally thought that the series was rather silly, and never watched it, but still regarded it – along with the rest of the country at the time, apparently – as harmless fun. We all understood the Confederate flag to be an emblem of Southern pride, which did not connote racist overtones. There is a heritage that Southerners are very proud of, rooted in a stoic character, religious piety, individualism, and a forthrightness in manner, devoid of duplicity – a tendency to say what one means and mean what one says. Even liberal Southerners take pride in this heritage, such as the late, great country and western singer Johnny Cash. When Canadian rock star Neil Young indiscriminately tarred that culture with his song “Southern Man” in 1970, the band Lynyrd Skynyrd shot back in 1974 with “Sweet Home Alabama”: a jubilant, rollicking song that said to Young and other Northern liberals that they could take their jaded, myopic view of the modern South and go stuff themselves. But by the time of the Obama administration, Woke sensibilities had developed an intolerance for symbols that even indirectly glorified persons or institutions from the less enlightened past. This even extended to historic personages generally regarded as having done great things in their lifetimes, like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, because of their antiquated views on race. (A bust of Winston Churchill was removed from the Oval Office during both the Obama and Biden administrations.) Statues of Confederate generals were taken down in various places, and the Confederate flag was vilified – condemned by liberals as a hateful symbol comparable to the Nazi swastika. (And while it is true that hate groups, when holding rallies in the South, often display the swastika and Confederate flag together, for most Southerners the flag is simply a symbol of cultural pride, with no connotations of race hatred.) Even the word “Dixie” was condemned. I had actually admired Texas band The Dixie Chicks when one of their members spoke out against the American-led invasion of Iraq orchestrated by George W. Bush, but when the band decided to drop “Dixie” from its name in 2020, I regarded this as just another silly example of Woke-extremism. One can only wonder when that band will also realize that the word “Chicks” might offend Woke feminist sensibilities, and drop it as well. That will create a real conundrum, however, because there is already a band that calls itself the The. Perhaps the “band-formerly-known-as-The-Dixie-Chicks” will have to settle for being referred to by some non-verbal, physical expression, like a look of pained, sanctimonious consternation. In any case, it was clear in this most recent election that the Democratic liberals have succeeded in almost completely alienating the Dixie states, since all of them, with the exception of Maryland and Virginia, voted for Trump in the Electoral College. It is a stark reversal of Jimmy Carter’s achievement in 1976, when he won all of the Dixie states except Virginia.
And now we come to that other flashpoint issue that drove so many voters into the Trump camp: immigration. I should start by putting my cards on the table by saying that I believe that one of America’s greatest strengths lies in the fact that it is a nation of immigrants. I suspect that I am far from being alone in this belief. In fact, I used to joke that the best policy on immigration would be to let anyone willing to migrate to this country do so, while anyone belonging to a family that’s been here for more than three generations should have to pass a test in order to stay. I was exaggerating of course, but I’ve come to see what I call the “entitlement curse” among Americans who are not first- or second-generation, which causes them to feel that the country owes them something simply for living here, and hampers their drive to succeed by putting in the effort to do so. I’ve seen the entitlement curse play out in friends and relatives, and I was a victim of it myself, in my youth. I have two Master’s degrees and a PhD, so people are often surprised when I tell them that I flunked out of college – twice – during my initial attempts, right after high school, and this simply because I didn’t bother to attend most of the classes. At that time, I really didn’t put much stock in higher education, because I believed that America would provide me with a good job, no matter what I did. (And, as I said earlier, I and most of my working class friends believed that submitting ourselves to education meant that we were allowing ourselves to be “brainwashed” by the Establishment.) Fortunately, two happy accidents put me onto a better path. The first one occurred after I spent the initial years after high school working menial, low-paying jobs, and eventually found myself working in a factory laboratory. My boss had a PhD in engineering, and I soon observed what this had brought to him: an interesting circle of friends, a beautiful and intelligent wife, and a job that he loved to do, and which paid him very well to do it. This epiphany inspired me to return to college in earnest, taking classes part-time at first at a local community college, but eventually taking a full-time class load and getting straight A’s, while still working at that factory. The second happy accident occurred when I finally left that job and transferred to a four-year university. Around this time there was a flood of immigrant refugees entering the country from Viet Nam. I remember a woman from the old neighborhood bitterly complaining that the first thing these refugees asked upon entering the country was where to find the Welfare office. And I was less than pleased when I then discovered that my roommate in college would be one of these Vietnamese refugees. I had been paired with him because we were both years older than the typical students in our dormitory. But I eventually realized that it was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me. Like me, he was an electrical engineering student, and I had quickly discovered that in spite of my mathematical aptitude, the subject of electrical engineering was not one that I was perfectly suited for, particularly in this very competitive university. I was profoundly inspired as I observed how my roommate diligently applied himself to his classes, having to study each textbook line by line, because English was his second language. That, and his personal guidance – he had a much greater natural talent for this subject than I did – was just what I needed to get me through the final hurdle to my first degree. I suspect that many of my fellow American students in that dormitory hall never even made it to their senior year, because the college experience for them was more of a party than an opportunity to improve themselves.
I remember having a spirited debate with my mother about immigration. She railed about the Hispanics in particular, and how they seemed to be overrunning the country. I was living and working in the D.C. area at the time of our debate, and I said – only half-joking – that Hispanics seemed to be the only ones who were doing any genuine work out there. But in retrospect, I can understand the cause of her consternation. The city that I grew up in – Waukegan, Illinois – had been a typical Midwestern town. We were an ethnically and racially diverse community, but shared a common culture. We all spoke the same language, attended the same schools, and, as teenagers, we worked at the same fast food restaurants together and socialized outside of work. Waukegan prided itself as being the hometown of comedian Jack Benny, and the birthplace of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. But by the time that I had this debate with my mother, Waukegan was no longer the same city. The grocery stores had been replaced by “supermercados”, and the signs in all stores were now posted in both English and Spanish. The city’s historical traditions and common culture seemed to be disintegrating, and giving way to something entirely alien . . . “foreign”. And while this didn’t lead to an explosion of crimes and gang activity (let alone the abduction and eating of family pets), as opponents of immigration often warn will happen, it did leave the long-term inhabitants feeling disoriented, and even strangers in their own neighborhoods. This of course is not a universal phenomenon, and I’m not sure why it happened to a city nestled in the far north end of a northern Midwestern state, but I can understand why it produced so much resentment among the non-immigrant community. I still believe that immigration is the “secret sauce” that has made – and continues to make – America a great country, but unrestricted immigration of the sort that occurred during the Biden administration left much of the population legitimately feeling under siege.
Shortly after Trump won the presidential election – in both the Electoral College and by the popular vote – a friend remarked to me, “I never understood how a majority of the German people could fall under the sway of Naziism . . . but now I do.” And I suppose if somebody back then had attempted to do something similar to what I’ve done in the preceding paragraphs – get into the heads of people to understand why they made the choices they did – he or she might be accused of trying to justify rather than merely explain their actions. I completely agree that there is much in pro-Trumpism that is toxic and irrational. Many of his supporters – like the goof who wore the shaman helmet during the January 6 insurrection - are simply “shock jocks” in miniature: people who could never be taken seriously based on anything they had ever done or accomplished in their lives, and so they resort to, or support, behaviors that anger and/or frighten others in order to get respect and attention (like those of our current “Shock-Jock-in-Chief”, D. J. Trump). Many are of the gullible, shallow-brained variety who easily fall sway to outlandish conspiracy theories like “QAnon” or other lies and half-truths that have been circulating on the internet and social media in particular. Others are just racists or neo-Nazis. But I also personally know many decent, intelligent, rational, hard-working people – relatives, neighbors, friends, and coworkers – who supported Trump in this past election. They know who and what he is, and what he is capable of doing, and yet there is something about the liberal establishment that is so abhorrent to them that they see a return of Trump to power as the only solution, however extreme, to remedy things. I think it is important for the rest of us, and for the future of our country, to try to understand what has driven them to this conclusion. I personally admit that the slogan “Make America Great Again” is still a mystery to me: Given that America is one of the most prosperous nations in the world, the most powerful militarily, and – at least until now – one of the shrinking minority of nations that can still be called a legitimate democracy, how can it be considered anything less than great, and what greatness needs to be restored? During the Biden administration, a house down the block from where I live had been displaying the American flag upside down. It is now right side up again, along with another flag exhorting the new victors to “Take back America”. And again I wonder: take back America . . . from who? From me?
I certainly agree that America – and the world – is facing a
series of crises that will threaten our very civilization, and that the only
way to address these crises is by addressing them in bold and unconventional
ways. In a previous entry (https://johnsemeraldtablet.blogspot.com/2017/05/house-of-cards.html),
I described two of the greatest of these: an out-of-control, ballooning
national debt, and the degradation of our global ecosystem. Like a house of cards, these looming
catastrophes have been and can be ignored until a breaking point is reached, but by then it will be too late to remedy them economically, effectively, and painlessly. Even worse, if we suffer from an economic
collapse stemming from an ecological collapse, it will be like no economic
downturn that we have ever experienced before, because the typical policy
approaches to get us out of it – raising or lowering interest rates, cutting
taxes, increasing government spending – simply won’t work. Here in America and in the rest of the world
there are growing social problems as well, particularly among the young, which
some psychologists like Johnathan Haidt have attributed to helicopter parenting
and the growing attachment to social media.
There is a genuine “boy crisis” which has both sociological and economic
causes, as young men – particularly in the working classes – find it more
difficult to find meaningful roles in society, including gainful
employment. Many feminists have
downplayed discussion of this as merely a form of male backlash against the
gains that women have made in both education and employment, but the problem is
real. It certainly cannot be solved, however,
as J. D. Vance seems to believe, by shaming, encouraging, or compelling women
to stop being “childless cat ladies”, make babies, and return to more
traditional roles. What is required is
to acknowledge that men and women are different, and that these differences
should be recognized at the earliest ages when educating, training, and
preparing them for the meaningful roles that both will choose to assume in
society. The rise of the surveillance
state poses threats to both men and women all over the globe, as it facilitates
totalitarianism. The writer Yuval
Harari, in his latest book Nexus, describes how Iran is now using
universal surveillance and soft power oppression to enforce dress codes on
women. Like the speed cameras in the
U.S., if a camera in Iran photographs a woman not wearing the traditional veil,
she will be given a citation, and further offenses will result in suspension of
her driver’s license, and ultimately confiscation of her car. It is a very subtle and effective way to impose
behavioral norms that will prevent the general outrage and protests that
occurred in 2022 after a woman was killed while in custody for violating Iran’s
dress code. China and North Korea are
also effectively using the surveillance state to control their own populations,
and it is distressing to realize how easily it could be applied by other
non-democratic regimes. (According to
the Economist Democracy Index, less than 8% of the world’s population now lives
under full democracies, and that percentage has been declining.) As Harari also points out, the rise of
artificial intelligence could be either a blessing or a curse to humanity and
human freedoms, depending upon how the political and business powers of the
world guide and regulate its development.
And finally, as an economist, I believe that one of the most pressing
challenges that our civilization is going to face is to come up with a new
economic paradigm that is no longer premised on unlimited growth. I do not believe, as Elon Musk seems to
believe, that our most intractable economic problems can be solved by growing
out of them: by essentially creating a new Baby Boom. Setting aside again that reactionary scenario
of incentivizing or pressuring women to make more babies (visions of The Handmaid’s
Tale come to mind), our global ecosystem is already tottering and
crumbling under the weight of more than 8 billion people. As fertility rates fall, and as actual
populations are beginning to decline in many countries, instead of treating
that as the problem, it is imperative to come up with an economics that does
not define economic well-being in terms of GDP growth. We need a steady-state economics, and a complete
rethinking of what makes – or should make – a healthy economy . . . and society.
All of these challenges and crises - economic,
environmental, societal, totalitarian, and technological – are presently
setting our country and our entire world on a collision course with disaster,
unless they are addressed in a timely and intelligent manner. It is a very distressing thought to realize,
that in spite of my relatively advanced age, I might actually live long enough
to see the end of civilization as we know it.
We now have a kamikaze leader, leading a kamikaze country, in a kamikaze
world. But the Japanese word “kamikaze”
actually translates to “divine wind” in English. And that is now my hope: that the disaster of
a new Trump presidency – if we survive it – will act like a “divine wind”,
clearing away the idiocy in both the Left and the Right, the Democrat and
Republican parties, and that among the wreckage of what’s left over, real,
rational leaders will emerge who are willing to tackle the problems that really
matter – the ones that are putting our civilization and the world at the brink
of collapse.
