If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.
For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”
What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.
As recently as 1960, the creed was our national consensus. Running that year for the Democratic nomination, candidates like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey genuinely embraced the creed, differing from Republicans only in how its elements should be realized.
Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened? Many of the dynamics of the reversal can be found in developments across the whole of American society: in the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class, and in the plight of the working class caught in between.
In my 2012 book “Coming Apart,” I discussed these new classes at length. The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it. Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away.
COMMENTS:
* Rod, what is Murray doing except stating the obvious? He actually gets paid to make these observations?
Like the working class does not realize it is getting clobbered by the Elites.
Of course Murray spouts his pedestrian wisdom from the warped intellectual summit of Neocon Social Darwinism – AEI. I.e., a propaganda mill for rationalizing shoveling TRILLIONS of tax dollars to the Security State for policing the planet while America rots.
And allowing Crony special interests to extract their many pounds of flesh from the American worker via support for bogus Crony crafted trade deals and massive immigration. (Because the American worker is too lazy and too stupid.)
BTW, in Murray’s essay he quotes the sky high median incomes of the Mainline, Brookline and the Upper East Side. Conveniently neglecting to mention McLean, Bethesda and Northwest DC where he and his plutocrat pals live fat and happy on their six figure “non-profit” salaries. (And that huge AEI stash comes from where?)
Must be nice being able to live large just for opining on social and economic pathologies from the perch of a cronied-up Think Tank. With nary a solution in sight.
I’ve said it before, the Crony Elites always walk away rich from their wreckage. And that includes the comfortably ensconced denizens of AEI.
BTW, according to the last filed (2014) IRS Form 990 by AEI, Charles Murray was paid $316,216 in total compensation.
His AEI pal James Pethokoukis heading up the arduous and freighted with risk job of AEI blog editor was paid $209,518 for his calm dedication and resourcefulness under pressure. I mean like Murray, he must sweat bullets for that 200 Grand to update the blog.
Pethokoukis penned a “conservative” response to Murray’s essay that includes not raising the minimum wage and easing public transport for unemployed Americans so that they can travel to illusory jobs that don’t exist for them because those jobs are currently held by the immigrants favored by AEI, (i.e., AEI’s Crony benefactors). And Pethokoukis implies that immigration is a false issue raised by the “the oxygen-gulping front-runner” Donald Trump. “Ignore those immigrants… Nothing to see here… Keep moving…”
In other words, the AEI cohort believes the Republican “I got mine.” Nomenklatura has the right message of camouflaged Social Darwinism and that the working class are Chumps for Trump. It’s just up to the “establishment” Republican candidates to convince the Chumps to believe the bankrupt theology of Conservatism Inc.
AEI took in over $223,000,000 in 2014 to fund their propaganda apparatus. Again, where does that money come from? You think from 50 and 75 dollar donations from Joe Sixpack “conservative” Americans? Or the Corporate Cronies and the MIC that shovel huge American Green to the “Think Tanks” that pimp for them?
* Automation is inevitable and it will gradually eliminate a larger and larger proportion of the work that humans did or are doing now. At some point only those on the far right of the bell curve will succeed in getting desirable jobs. And this will be true not just with respect to IQ but also artistic ability, athletic ability, sexual attractiveness, and other traits or combinations of traits. Already about 90% of the work that lawyers, CPAs, actuaries and the like do can be done better by AI (think Turbo Tax and the various law applications on the internet). AI can also read medical images and stained slides better than radiologists and pathologists. Machinery is currently being built to replace human workers in various types of stoop labor. Anybody who watches the television show, “How It’s Made”, quickly notices humans doing assembly line tasks that a machine could and undoubtedly soon will do better than any human. Even a lot of programming is automated these days. Nobody writes the enormous code packages surrounding real applications. This is done automatically by various programming tools. In the end only a very small fraction of humans will be needed to do essential and/or rewarding work.
For most of the developed world’s history the primary means of organizing society has been through a rewards system that connected labor and participation in other social activities. Now, under the onslaught of industrialization, that system is breaking down. The positive result is that soon most of humanity will be freed of the need to work unless they desire to. The negative impact is that social control and order are breaking down. Dealing with these issues is one of the major challenges facing the developed world. A way must be found to equitably distribute the wealth flowing from an automated economy while still being able to use that wealth to encourage socially useful behaviors and discourage socially destructive ones. The current system is already broken.
It’s ironic that Marx was ultimately right about one thing: Capital – automation – has accumulated to the point that ultimately most of us will be impoverished and only a very small proportion — much, much less than 1%! — will have any real wealth. He was just a century-and-a-half late and failed utterly to appreciate the mechanisms and results. But Marx was terribly wrong to assume that this would automatically lead to a golden age of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. Whatever we wind up with it won’t be this simple and getting there is going to require a lot of out-of-the-box thinking, hard work, and suffering.
