Return of the oppressed

By Ed Lake, aeon.co
Ver original

Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of
fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth. Just one rich family, the six heirs of the brothers Sam and James Walton, founders
of Walmart, are worth more than the bottom 40 per cent of the American population combined ($115 billion in 2012).

After thousands of scholarly and popular articles on the topic, one might think we would have a pretty good idea why the richest
people in the US are pulling away from the rest. But it seems we dont. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011:
the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood. Some commentators point to economic
factors, some to politics, and others again to culture. Yet obviously enough, all these factors must interact in complex ways.
What is slightly less obvious is how a very long historical perspective can help us to see the whole mechanism.

In his book Wealth and Democracy (2002), Kevin Phillips came up with a useful way of thinking about the changing patterns of
wealth inequality in the US. He looked at the net wealth of the nations median household and compared it with the size of the
largest fortune in the US. The ratio of the two figures provided a rough measure of wealth inequality, and thats what he tracked,
touching down every decade or so from the turn of the 19th century all the way to the present. In doing so, he found a striking
pattern.

We found repeated back-and-forth swings in demographic, economic, social, and political structures

From 1800 to the 1920s, inequality increased more than a hundredfold. Then came the reversal: from the 1920s to 1980, it
shrank back to levels not seen since the mid-19th century. Over that time, the top fortunes hardly grew (from one to two billion
dollars; a decline in real terms). Yet the wealth of a typical family increased by a multiple of 40. From 1980 to the present, the
wealth gap has been on another steep, if erratic, rise. Commentators have called the period from 1920s to 1970s the great
compression. The past 30 years are known as the great divergence. Bring the 19th century into the picture, however, and one
sees not isolated movements so much as a rhythm. In other words, when looked at over a long period, the development of
wealth inequality in the US appears to be cyclical. And if its cyclical, we can predict what happens next.

An obvious objection presents itself at this point. Does observing just one and a half cycles really show that there is a regular

pattern in the dynamics of inequality? No, by itself it doesnt. But this is where looking at other historical societies becomes
interesting. In our book Secular Cycles (2009), Sergey Nefedov and I applied the Phillips approach to England, France and
Russia throughout both the medieval and early modern periods, and also to ancient Rome. All of these societies (and others for
which information was patchier) went through recurring secular cycles, which is to say, very long ones. Over periods of two to

three centuries, we found repeated back-and-forth swings in demographic, economic, social, and political structures. And the
cycles of inequality were an integral part of the overall motion.

Incidentally, when students of dynamical systems (or, more colourfully, chaoticians such as Jeff Goldblums character in the
film Jurassic Park) talk about cycles, we do not mean rigid, mechanical, clock-like movements. Cycles in the real world are
chaotic, because complex systems such as human societies have many parts that are constantly moving and influencing each
other. Despite this complexity, our historical research on Rome, England, France, Russia and now the US shows that these
complex interactions add up to a general rhythm. Upward trends in variables (for example, economic inequality) alternate with
downward trends. And most importantly, the ways in which other parts of the system move can tell us why certain trends
periodically reverse themselves. Understanding (and perhaps even forecasting) such trend-reversals is at the core of the new
discipline of cliodynamics, which looks at history through the lens of mathematical modelling.

So it looks like the pattern that we see in the US is real. Ours is, of course, a very different society from ancient Rome or
medieval England. It is cut off from them by the Industrial Revolution and by innumerable advances in technology since then.
Even so, a historically based model might shed light on what has been happening in the US over the past three decades.

First, we need to think about jobs. Unless other forces intervene, an overabundance of labour will tend to drive down its price,
which naturally means that workers and their families have less to live on. One of the most important forces affecting the labour
supply in the US has been immigration, and it turns out that immigration, as measured by the proportion of the population who
were born abroad, has changed in a cyclical manner just like inequality. In fact, the periods of high immigration coincided with
the periods of stagnating wages. The Great Compression, meanwhile, unfolded under a low-immigration regime. This tallies
with work by the Harvard economist George Borjas, who argues that immigration plays an important role in depressing wages,
especially for those unskilled workers who compete most directly with new arrivals.

Immigration is only one part of a complex story. Another reason why the labour supply in the US went up in the 19th century is,
not to put too fine a point on it, sex. The native-born population was growing at what were, at the time, unprecedented rates: a
2.9 per cent growth per year in the 1800s, only gradually declining after that. By 1850 there was no available farmland in
Eastern Seaboard states. Many from that population surplus moved west, but others ended up in eastern cities where, of
course, they competed for jobs with new immigrants.

This connection between the oversupply of labour and plummeting living standards for the poor is one of the more robust
generalisations in history. Consider the case of medieval England. The population of England doubled between 1150 and 1300.
There was little possibility of overseas emigration, so the surplus peasants flocked to the cities, causing the population of
London to balloon from 20,000 to 80,000. Too many hungry mouths and too many idle hands resulted in a fourfold increase in
food prices and a halving of real wages. Then, when a series of horrible epidemics, starting with the Black Death of 1348,
carried away more than half of the population, the same dynamic ran in reverse. The catastrophe, paradoxically, introduced a
Golden Age for common people. Real wages tripled and living standards went up, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Common people relied less on bread, gorging themselves instead on meat, fish, and dairy products.

The tug of war between the top and typical incomes doesnt have to be a zero-sum game, but in practice it often is

Much the same pattern can be seen during the secular cycle of the Roman Principate. The population of the Roman Empire
grew rapidly during the first two centuries up to 165AD. Then came a series of deadly epidemics, known as the Antonine

Plague. In Roman Egypt, for which we have contemporary data thanks to preserved papyri, real wages first fell (when the
population increased) and then regained ground (when the population collapsed). We also know that many grain fields were
converted to orchards and vineyards following the plagues. The implication is that the standard of life for common people
improved they ate less bread, more fruit, and drank wine. The gap between common people and the elites shrank.

Naturally, the conditions affecting the labour supply were different in the second half of the 20th century in the US. An important
new element was globalisation, which allows corporations to move jobs to poorer countries (with that giant sucking sound, as
Ross Perot put it during his 1992 presidential campaign). But none of this alters the fact that an oversupply of labour tends to
depress wages for the poorer section of the population. And just as in Roman Egypt, the poor in the US today eat more
energy-dense foods bread, pasta, and potatoes while the wealthy eat more fruit and drink wine.

Falling wages isnt the only reason why labour oversupply leads to inequality. As the slice of the economic pie going to
employees diminishes, the share going to employers goes up. Periods of rapid growth for top fortunes are commonly
associated with stagnating incomes for the majority. Equally, when worker incomes grew in the Great Compression, top
fortunes actually declined in real terms. The tug of war between the top and typical incomes doesnt have to be a zero-sum
game, but in practice it often is. And so in 13th-century England, as the overall population doubles, we find landowners
charging peasants higher rents and paying less in wages: the immiseration of the general populace translates into a Golden
Age for the aristocrats.

As the historian Christopher Dyer wrote, life was good for the upper-crust English around 1300. They drank more wine and
spent their spare cash building or refurbishing castles, cathedrals, and monasteries. They didnt just enjoy a better living
standard; they also grew in number. For example, the number of knights and esquires tripled between 1200 and 1300. But
disaster struck in 1348, when the Black Death removed the population surplus (and then some). By the 15th century, while the
common people were enjoying their own Golden Age, the aristocracy had fallen on hard times. We can infer the severity of their
financial straits from the amount of claret imported from France. Only the gentry drank wine, and around 1300, England
imported 20,000 tuns or casks of it from France per year. By 1460, this declined to only 5,000. In the mid-15th century, there
were simply fewer aristocrats and they were much poorer.

In the US between around 1870 and 1900, there was another Golden Age for the elites, appropriately called the Gilded Age.
While living standards for the majority declined (seen vividly in dwindling average heights and life expectancies), the moneyed
classes were enjoying ever more luxurious lifestyles. And just like in 13th-century England, the total number of the wealthy was
shooting up. Between 1825 and 1900, the number of millionaires (in constant 1900 dollars) went from 2.5 per million of the
population to 19 per million. In our current cycle, the proportion of decamillionaires (those whose net worth exceeds 10 million
in 1995 dollars) grew tenfold between 1992 and 2007 from 0.04 to 0.4 per cent of the US population.

This seems like a peculiar development. The reason for it cheeringly enough, you might say is that cheap labour allows
many enterprising, hard-working or simply lucky members of the poorer classes to climb into the ranks of the wealthy. In the
19th century, a skilled artisan in the US could expand his workshop by hiring other workers, eventually becoming the owner of a
large business; Sven Beckerts The Monied Metropolis (2003) describes many instances of this story playing out. In America
today, enterprising and hard-working individuals start dotcom companies or claw their way into jobs as the CEOs of large
corporations.

On the face of it, this is a wonderful testament to merit-based upward mobility. But there are side effects. Dont forget that most
people are stuck with stagnant or falling real wages. Upward mobility for a few hollows out the middle class and causes the
social pyramid to become top-heavy. Too many elites relative to the general population (a condition I call elite overproduction)
leads to ever-stiffer rivalry in the upper echelons. And then you get trouble.

In the US, there is famously a close connection between wealth and power. Many well-off individuals typically not the
founders of great fortunes but their children and grandchildren choose to enter politics (Mitt Romney is a convenient
example, though the Kennedy clan also comes to mind). Yet the number of political offices is fixed: there are only so many
senators and representatives at the federal and state levels, and only one US president. As the ranks of the wealthy swell, so
too do the numbers of wealthy aspirants for the finite supply of political positions.

When watching political battles in todays Senate, it is hard not to think about their parallels in Republican Rome. The
population of Italy roughly doubled during the second century BC, while the number of aristocrats increased even more. Again,
the supply of political offices was fixed there were 300 places in the senate and membership was for life. By the end of the
century, competition for influence had turned ugly. During the Gracchan period (139110BC), political feuding led to the
slaughter of the tribunes Tiberius and Gaius on the streets of Rome. During the next century, intra-elite conflict spilt out of
Rome into Italy and then into the broader Mediterranean. The civil wars of the first century BC, fuelled by a surplus of politically
ambitious aristocrats, ultimately caused the fall of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire.

Beside sheer numbers, there is a further, subtler factor that aggravates internal class rivalry. So far I have been talking about
the elites as if they are all the same. But they arent: the differences within the wealthiest one per cent are almost as stark as
the difference between the top one per cent and the remaining 99. The millionaires want to reach the level of decamillionaires,
who strive to match the centimillionaires, who are trying to keep up with billionaires. The result is very intense status rivalry,
expressed through conspicuous consumption. Towards the end of the Republic, Roman aristocrats competed by exhibiting
works of art and massive silver decorations in their homes. They threw extravagant banquets with peacocks from Samos,
oysters from Lake Lucrino and snails from Africa, all imported at great expense. Archaeology confirms a genuine and dramatic
shift towards luxury.

The US political system is much more attuned to the wishes of the rich than to the aspirations of the poor

Intra-elite competition also seems to affect the social mood. Norms of competition and extreme individualism become prevalent
and norms of co-operation and collective action recede. Social Darwinism took off during the original Gilded Age, and Ayn Rand
(who argued that altruism is evil) has grown astonishingly popular during what we might call our Second Gilded Age. The
glorification of competition and individual success in itself becomes a driver of economic inequality. As Christopher Hayes wrote
in Twilight of the Elites (2012): defenders of the status quo invoke a kind of neo-Calvinist logic by saying that those at the top,
by virtue of their placement there, must be the most deserving. By the same reasoning, those at the bottom are not deserving.
As such social norms spread, it becomes increasingly easy for CEOs to justify giving themselves huge bonuses while cutting
the wages of workers.

Such cultural attitudes work with economic forces to widen inequality. Economists know very well that few markets are efficient
in the sense that their prices are set entirely by the forces of supply and demand. Labour markets are especially sensitive to
cultural norms about what is fair compensation, so prevailing theories about inequality have practical consequences. And

labour markets are also strongly affected by government regulation, as the economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has
argued. So lets consider how politics enters the equation here.

The US, as we saw, breeds strong links between wealth and politics. Some wealthy individuals run for office themselves.
Others use their money to support their favoured politicians and policies. As a result, the US political system is much more
attuned to the wishes of the rich than to the aspirations of the poor. Kevin Phillips has been one of the most influential voices
raised in alarm at the dangers for democracy of growing wealth disparity.

Yet the US political system has been under the influence of wealthy elites ever since the American Revolution. In some
historical periods it worked primarily for the benefit of the wealthy. In others, it pursued policies that benefited the society as a
whole. Take the minimum wage, which grew during the Great Compression era and declined (in real terms) after 1980. The
proportion of American workers who were unionised changed in a similarly cyclical fashion, as the legislative field tilted first one
way then the other. The top marginal tax rate was 68 per cent or higher before 1980; by 1988 it declined to 28 per cent. In one
era, government policy systematically favoured the majority, while in another it favoured the narrow interests of the wealthy
elites. This inconsistency calls for explanation.

It is relatively easy to understand the periods when the wealthy bent the agenda to suit their interests (though of course, not all
rich people care exclusively about their own wealth). How, though, can we account for the much more broadly inclusive policies
of the Great Compression era? And what caused the reversal that ended the Gilded Age and ushered in the Great
Compression? Or the second switch, which took place around 1980?

History provides another clue. Unequal societies generally turn a corner once they have passed through a long spell of political
instability. Governing elites tire of incessant violence and disorder. They realise that they need to suppress their internal
rivalries, and switch to a more co-operative way of governing, if they are to have any hope of preserving the social order. We
see this shift in the social mood repeatedly throughout history towards the end of the Roman civil wars (first century BC),
following the English Wars of the Roses (1455-85), and after the Fronde (1648-53), the final great outbreak of violence that had
been convulsing France since the Wars of Religion began in the late 16th century. Put simply, it is fear of revolution that
restores equality. And my analysis of US history in a forthcoming book suggests that this is precisely what happened in the US
around 1920.

Reforms that ensured an equitable distribution of the fruits of economic growth turned out to be a highly effective counter to the
lure of Bolshevism

These were the years of extreme insecurity. There were race riots (the Red Summer of 1919), worker insurrections, and an
Italian anarchist terrorist campaign aimed directly at the elites. The worst incident in US labour history was the West Virginia
Mine War of 192021, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain. Although it started as a workers dispute, the Mine War
eventually turned into the largest armed insurrection that the US has ever seen, the Civil War excepted. Between 10,000 and
15,000 miners armed with rifles battled against thousands of strikebreakers and sheriff deputies. The federal government
eventually called in the Air Force, the only time it has ever done so against its own people. Add to all this the rise of the Soviet
Union and the wave of socialist revolutions that swept Europe after the First World War, triggering the Red Scare of 1921, and
you get a sense of the atmosphere. Quantitative data indicate that this period was the most violent in US history, second only to
the Civil War. It was much, much worse than the 1960s.

The US, in short, was in a revolutionary situation, and many among the political and business elites realised it. They began to
push through a remarkable series of reforms. In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed legislation that effectively shut down
immigration into the US. Although much of the motivation behind these laws was to exclude dangerous aliens such as Italian
anarchists and Eastern European socialists, the broader effect was to reduce the labour surplus. Worker wages grew rapidly. At
around the same time, federal income tax came in and the rate at which top incomes were taxed began to increase. Somewhat
later, provoked by the Great Depression, other laws legalised collective bargaining through unions, introduced a minimum
wage, and established Social Security.

The US elites entered into an unwritten compact with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the
fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of
the political-economic system would not be challenged (no revolution). The deal allowed the lower and upper classes to
co-operate in solving the challenges facing the American Republic overcoming the Great Depression, winning the Second
World War, and countering the Soviet threat during the Cold War.

It almost goes without saying that there was a racist and xenophobic underside to all this. The co-operating group was mainly
native-born white Protestants. African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and foreigners were excluded or heavily discriminated
against. Nevertheless, while making such categorical inequalities worse, the compact led to a dramatic reduction in overall
economic inequality.

The New Deal Coalition which ruled the US from 1932 to the late 1960s did so well that the business community, opposed to
its policies at first, came to accept them in the post-war years. As the historian Kim Phillips-Fein wrote in Invisible Hands
(2010):

Many managers and stockholders [made] peace with the liberal order that had emerged. They began to bargain regularly with
the labour unions at their companies. They advocated the use of fiscal policy and government action to help the nation to cope
with economic downturns. They accepted the idea that the state might have some role to play in guiding economic life.

When Barry Goldwater campaigned on a pro-business, anti-union and anti-big government platform in the 1964 presidential
elections, he couldnt win any lasting support from the corporate community. The conservatives had to wait another 16 years for
their triumph.

But by the late 1970s, a new generation of political and business leaders had come to power. To them the revolutionary
situation of 1919-21 was just history. In this they were similar to the French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution,
who did not see that their actions could bring down the Ancien Rgime the last great social breakdown, the Fronde, being so
far in the past.

The US elites, similarly, took the smooth functioning of the political-economic system for granted. The only problem, as they
saw it, was that they werent being adequately compensated for their efforts. Feelings of dissatisfaction ran high during the Bear
Market of 197382, when capital returns took a particular beating. The high inflation of that decade ate into inherited wealth. A

fortune of $2 billion in 1982 was a third smaller, when expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars, than $1 billion in 1962, and only a
sixth of $1 billion in 1912. All these factors contributed to the reversal of the late 1970s.

It is no coincidence that the life of Communism (from the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989) coincides almost perfectly with the Great Compression era. The Red Scares of, firstly, 191921 and then 194757
suggest that US elites took the Soviet threat quite seriously. More generally, the Soviet Union, especially in its early years,
aggressively promoted an ideology that was highly threatening to the political-economic system favoured by the US elites.
Reforms that ensured an equitable distribution of the fruits of economic growth turned out to be a highly effective counter to the
lure of Bolshevism.

Nevertheless, when Communism collapsed, its significance was seriously misread. Its true that the Soviet economy could not
compete with a system based on free markets plus policies and norms that promoted equity. Yet the fall of the Soviet Union
was interpreted as a vindication of free markets, period. The triumphalist, heady atmosphere of the 1990s was highly conducive
to the spread of Ayn Randism and other individualist ideologies. The unwritten social contract that had emerged during the New
Deal and braved the challenges of the Second World War had faded from memory.

What, then, explains the rapid growth of top fortunes in the US over the past 30 years? Why did the wages of unskilled workers
stagnate or decline? What accounts for the bitterness of election rhetoric in the US, the growing legislative gridlock, the
rampant political polarisation? My answer is that all of these trends are part of a complex and interlocking system. I dont just
mean that everything affects everything else; that would be vacuous. Rather, that cliodynamic theory can tell us specifically how
demographic, economic and cultural variables relate to one another, and how their interactions generate social change.
Cliodynamics also explains why historical reversals in such diverse areas as economics and culture happen at roughly similar
times. The theory of secular cycles was developed using data from historical societies, but it looks like it can provide answers to
questions about our own society.

Our society, like all previous complex societies, is on a rollercoaster. Impersonal social forces bring us to the top; then comes
the inevitable plunge. But the descent is not inevitable. Ours is the first society that can perceive how those forces operate,
even if dimly. This means that we can avoid the worst perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by
redesigning the rollercoaster altogether.

Three years ago I published a short article in the science journal Nature. I pointed out that several leading indicators of political
instability look set to peak around 2020. In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be
particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction is not a prophecy. I dont believe that disaster is pre-ordained, no
matter what we do. On the contrary, if we understand the causes, we have a chance to prevent it from happening. But the first
thing we will have to do is reverse the trend of ever-growing inequality.

Correction, Feb 13, 2013: When first published, this article misidentified Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, as an
inheritor of a large fortune. In fact he amassed most of his wealth himself.

-------------------------------//-----------------------------------------------------Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt

By George Packer, www.newyorker.comVer originaloctubre 31, 2016

Democrats can reclaim the economic mantle, Clinton said, adding, I want to really marry the public and the private sector.
Foto por: Photograph Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker
The basement of a hotel on Capitol Hill. A meeting room with beige walls and headachy light, cavernous enough to
accommodate three hundred occupants but empty, except for Hillary Clinton. She sat at a small round table with a cloth draped
to the carpet. Her eyes were narrower than usualfatigueand she wore a knee-length dress jacket of steel-blue leather,
buttoned to the lapels; its metallic shine gave an impression of armor, as if shed just descended from the battlefield to take a
breather in this underground hideout. Politics, at times so thrilling, is generally a dismal business, and Clintons acceptance of
this is key to her power. Shes the officer who keeps on marching in mud.
I sat down across from her. With only a few weeks left until the election, I wanted to ask her about the voters shes had the
most trouble winning. Why were so many downwardly mobile white Americans supporting Donald Trump?
Its Pox on both your houses, Clinton said. It was certainly a rejection of every other Republican running. So pick the guy
whos the outsider, pick the guy whos giving you an explanationin my view, a trumped-up one, not convincingbut,
nevertheless, people are hungry for that. Voters needed a narrative for their lives, she said, including someone to blame for
what had gone wrong. Donald Trump came up with a fairly simple, easily understood, and to some extent satisfying story. And
I think we Democrats have not provided as clear a message about how we see the economy as we need to. She continued,
We need to get back to claiming the economic mantlethat we are the ones who create the jobs, who provide the support that
is needed to get more fairness into the economy.
Clinton has given a lot of thought to economic policy. She wants to use tax incentives and other enticements to nudge
corporations into focussing less on share price and more on long-term investments, in research, equipment, and workers. She
said, We have come to heavily favor the financial markets over the otherwise productive markets, including manufacturing,
which have been pushed to a narrower place within the over-all economy while an enormous amount of intelligence, effort, and
dollars went into spinning transactions. As she plunged into the details, her eyes widened, her color rose, and her finger
occasionally gave the table a thump for emphasis. I want to really marry the public and the private sector, she said. Her ideas
are progressive but incrementalist: raise the federal minimum wage to twelve dollars an hour, but not fifteen; support free trade,
as long as workers rights are protected and corporations arent allowed to evade regulations.
The thumps got harder when Clinton turned to the Democratic Party. In her acceptance speech at the Philadelphia Convention,
she said, Americans are willing to workand work hard. But right now an awful lot of people feel there is less and less respect
for the work they do. And less respect for them, period. Democrats, we are the party of working people, but we havent done a
good enough job showing we get what youre going through. One didnt often hear that thought from Democratic politicians,
and I asked Clinton what she had meant by it.
We have been fighting out elections in general on a lot of noneconomic issues over the past thirty years, she saidsocial
issues, welfare, crime, war. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but we havent had a coherent, compelling economic case
that needs to be made in order to lay down a foundation on which to both conduct politics and do policy.
In the nineties, President Bill Clinton embraced globalization as the overarching solution to the countrys problemsthe bridge
to the twenty-first century. But the new century defied the optimistic predictions of lites, and during this election, in a
nationalistic backlash, many Americansalong with citizens of other Western democracieshave rebelled. I think we havent
organized ourselves for the twenty-first-century globalization, Hillary admitted. America had wrongly ceded manufacturing to
other countries, she said, and allowed trade deals to hurt workers.
Clinton has been in politics throughout these decades of economic stagnation and inequality, of political Balkanization, of
weakening faith in American institutions and leaders. During this period, her party lost its working-class base. Its one of
historys anomalies that she could soon be in a position to prove that politics still worksthat it can better the lives of
Americans, including those who despise Clinton and her kind.
A few years ago, on a rural highway south of Tampa, I saw a metal warehouse with a sign that said american dream welding +
fabrication. Broken vehicles and busted equipment were scattered around the yard. The place looked sun-beaten and
dilapidated. When I pulled up, the owner eased himself down from a front-end loader, hobbled over, and leaned against a pole.
He was in his fifties, with a heavy red face, dishevelled hair, and a bushy mustache going from strawberry blond to white. He
wore a blue short-sleeved shirt torn at the tails and shorts that exposed swollen legs. He had powerful forearms, but his body
was visibly turning against him. The corners of his mouth sloped downward, in an expression poised between self-mockery and
disgust at the world. It was a face that invited human exchangea saving grace in a ruined landscape.
His name was Mark Frisbie. When he was younger, a girlfriend had asked him, Are you the Frisbee from Wham-O? Frisbie
retorted, Sure, thats why I live in a trailer with no front porch and drive a pickup instead of a Porsche. At the age of fifteen,
Frisbie began working for a farm-equipment manufacturer; he stayed for three decades, until he launched American Dream. He
went into business to please his father, he saidThen the bastard died on me. After spotting the metal warehouse, Frisbie

agreed to buy it, for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The next day, the woman who owned it got a call from a man in
Georgia offering four hundred and fifty thousand. But she and Frisbie had already shaken on the deal, and she wouldnt back
out.
Barter and a handshake used to mean something, he said. Not anymore.
It was the depth of the recession, and Frisbies customers had grown scarce, demanding, and unreliable. He was down from
half a dozen employees to himself and his stepson, William Zipperer. (Frisbie had five children.) The government was killing
him with regulations, and one law had required him to build a fence around his repair yard. Politicians did nothing to help him.
They all steal, he said. Theyre just in it for themselves. The house behind his shop was a drug den. His wife had lost her
day-care center to bank foreclosure. Frisbie had spent four days at a local hospital for back and chest pain, running up a
sixty-thousand-dollar bill. The doctor was Arab or Indian, and his accented English was barely intelligible to Frisbie, but he
picked up on an accusation that he was shopping around for pain prescriptions. Mexicans were moving in; Frisbie and his wife
wanted to move out. As we talked, two Latinos were stuccoing a gas station across the highway.
Immigrants, politicians, banks, criminals, the economy, medical bills. You heard Frisbies complaints all over the country,
especially in small towns and rural areas. I soon forgot about Frisbie, but the rise of Donald Trump got me thinking about him
again. When I called American Dream and asked Frisbie which Presidential candidate he was supporting, he said, Do they
have that line for None of the above? He had lost the house that had been in his family for generations, and he and his wife
had been forced to live in his shop for several years, until they moved into a retirement trailer park. His health had grown
worsehe was strapped to an oxygen tankbut he didnt trust Clintons promises to improve health care. As for Trump, his
mockery of the disabled offended Frisbie. To make fun of somebody like he did, on national TV! he said. And when they
asked him what hes ever done for the country, and he said, I built a hotelhow many jobs has he done for the U.S. that he
hasnt outsourced to people from other places? He went on, I dont see where were going, or how either of them is going to
benefit us in the economy.
The nineteenth-century term for someone like Frisbie was workingman. In the mid-twentieth century, it was blue collar.
During the Nixon years, people like him embodied the silent majorityseen by admirers as hardworking, patriotic, and
self-reliant, and by detractors as narrow-minded, jingoistic, and bigoted. In the wake of the culture wars of the seventies and
eighties, some downscale whites embraced the slur redneck as a badge of honor. (Not just in the South: they kicked ass in
my California high school, too, showing off the ring worn into the back pocket of their jeans by cans of snuff.) In White Trash:
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, the historian Nancy Isenberg writes, More than a reaction to progressive
changes in race relations, this shift was spurred on by a larger fascination with identity politics. Being a redneck implied that
class took on the traits (and allure) of an ethnic heritage, which in turn reflected the modern desire to measure class as merely
a cultural phenomenon.
Today, Frisbie is part of the white working class. At first, the term sounds more neutral than its predecessorsa category
suitable for pollsters and economists (who generally define working class as lacking a college degree). But the phrase is
vexing. The blunt racial modifier, buried or implied in earlier versions, declares itself up front. Without the adjective white, the
term is meaningless as a predictor of group thinking and behavior; but without the noun working class it misses the other key
demographic. White working class mixes race and class into a volatile compound, privilege and disadvantage crammed into a
single phrase.
Working class, meanwhile, has become a euphemism. It once suggested productivity and sturdiness. Now it means
downwardly mobile, poor, even pathological. A significant part of the W.W.C. has succumbed to the ills that used to be
associated with the black urban underclass: intergenerational poverty, welfare, debt, bankruptcy, out-of-wedlock births, trash
entertainment, addiction, jail, social distrust, political cynicism, bad health, unhappiness, early death. The heartland towns that
abandoned the Democrats in the eighties to bask in Ronald Reagans morning sunlight; the communities that Sarah Palin, on a
2008 campaign stop in Greensboro, North Carolina, called the best of America . . . the real Americathose places were
hollowing out, and politicians didnt seem to notice. A great inversion occurred. The dangerous, depraved cities gradually
became safe for clean-living professional families who happily paid thousands of dollars to prep their kids for the
gifted-and-talented test, while the region surrounding Greensboro lost tobacco, textiles, and furniture-making, in a rapid
collapse around the turn of the millennium, so that Oxycontin and disability and home invasions had taken root by the time Palin
saluted those towns, in remarks that were a generation out of date.
J. D. Vance, a son of Appalachia and the Rust Belt, managed to escape this crisishe served with the Marines in Iraq, went to
college at Ohio State, then attended Yale Law School, forty years after the Clintons went there. He now works in a
venture-capital firm. This kind of ascendance, once not so remarkable, now seems urgently in need of the honest accounting
that Vance provides in his new memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Its a kind of Black Boy of the W.W.C. Vance grew up with a turbulent
mother who became addicted to painkillers and bounced from one man to another, giving and receiving abuse. The life he
describes is not just materially deprived but culturally isolated and self-destructive. When he meets people with TV accents,
he feels a deep estrangement. Reading Hillbilly Elegy, I understood why, on trips to regions like North Carolinas Piedmont, I

sometimes felt that Id travelled farther from New York than if Id gone to West Africa or the Middle East. Vance is tender but
unsparing toward his world. Sometimes I view members of the lite with an almost primal scorn, he writes. But I have to give
it to them: Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer.
These people are beating us at our own damned game. Vance points out that polls show members of the white working class
to be the most pessimistic people in the country.
Americans like Mark Frisbie have no foundation to stand on; theyre unorganized, unheard, unspoken for. They sink alone. The
institutions of a healthy democracygovernment, corporation, school, bank, union, church, civic group, media
organizationfeel remote and false, geared for the benefit of those who run them. And no institution is guiltier of this
abandonment than the political parties.
So it shouldnt have come as a complete surprise when millions of Americans were suddenly drawn to a crass strongman who
tossed out fraudulent promises and gave institutions and lites the middle finger. The fact that so many informed, sophisticated
Americans failed to see Donald Trump coming, and then kept writing him off, is itself a sign of a democracy in which no center
holds. Most of his critics are too reasonable to fathom his fury-driven campaign. Many dont know a single Trump supporter. But
to fight Trump you have to understand his appeal.
Trumps core voters are revealed by poll after poll to be members of the W.W.C. His campaign has made them a self-conscious
identity group. Theyre one among many factions in the country todaytheir mutual suspicions flaring, the boundaries between
them hardening. A disaster on this scale belongs to no single set of Americans, and it will play out long after the November
election, regardless of the outcome. Trump represents the whole countrys failure.
For most of the twentieth century, the identities of the major political parties were clear: Republicans spoke for those who
wanted to get ahead, and Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Whatever the vagaries and hypocrisies of a
given period or politician, these were the terms by which the parties understood and advertised themselves: the interests of
business on one side, workers on the other. The lineup held as late as 1968, and its still evident in Miami and the Siege of
Chicago, Norman Mailers brilliant report on the party conventions of that lunatic year. Heres Richard Nixon, back from the
political dead, greeting Republican delegates in Miami Beach: a parade of wives and children and men who owned hardware
stores or were druggists, or first teller in the bank, proprietor of a haberdashery or principal of a small-town high school, local
lawyer, retired doctor, a widow on a tidy income, her minister and fellow-delegate, minor executives from minor corporations,
men who owned their farms . . . out to pay homage to their own true candidate, the representative of their conservative orderly
heart.
Mailers Democrats are personified in the brutal proletarian jowls of Mayor Richard Daley, and in the flesh and the smell of the
Chicago stockyards. The countrys political parties were corrupt, they were litist, yet they still represented distinct and
organized interests (unions, chambers of commerce) through traditional hierarchies (the Daley machine, the Republican county
apparatus). The Democratic Party, however, was about to tear itself apart over Vietnam.
In Chicago, the Party establishment voted down a peace plank and turned back the popular antiwar candidacies of Senators
Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. The Conventions nominee, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, had strong support
from labor but hadnt entered a single primary. This was what a rigged system looked like. The sham democracy and the chaos
in Chicago led to the creation of the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which reformed the Democrats nominating process,
weakening the Party bosses and strengthening women, minorities, young people, and single-issue activists. In Thomas Franks
recent book, Listen, Liberal, he describes the result: The McGovern Commission reforms seemed to be populist, but their
effect was to replace one group of party insiders with anotherin this case, to replace leaders of workers organizations with
affluent professionals.
This shift made a certain historical sense. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. was a sclerotic politburo, on the wrong side of the Vietnam War.
The class rhetoric of the New Deal sounded out of date, and the problems it addressed appeared to have been solved by the
wide prosperity of the postwar years. A different set of issues mattered to younger Democrats: the rights of disenfranchised
groups, the environment, government corruption, militarism. In 1971, Fred Dutton, a member of the McGovern Commission,
published a book called Changing Sources of Power, which hailed young college-educated idealists as the future of the Party.
Pocketbook issues would give way to concerns about quality of life. Called the New Politics, this set of priorities emphasized
personal morality over class interest. The activists who had been cheated by the Daley machine in Chicago in 1968 became the
insiders at the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami Beach, which nominated McGovern. Many union members, feeling
devalued by the Party, voted for Nixon, contributing to his landslide victory.
McGoverns campaign manager was a young Yale-educated lawyer named Gary Hart, who had assigned the campaigns
Texas effort to a Yale law student named Bill Clinton. Clintons new girlfriend from Yale, Hillary Rodham, joined him that
summer in San Antonio. Hart and Clinton embodied the transition that their party was undergoing. Education had lifted both
men from working-class, small-town backgrounds: Hart labored on the Kansas railroads as a boy; Clinton came from a dirt-poor
Arkansas watermelon patch called Hope. The McGovern rout left its young foot soldiers with two options: restore the Partys

working-class identity or move on to a future where educated professionals might compose a Democratic majority. Hart and
Clinton followed the second path. Hart emerged as the leader of the tech-minded Atari Democrats, in the eighties; Clinton, the
bright hope of Southern moderates, became the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a position that he used as a
launchpad for the Presidency in 1992.
Hillarys background was different. She had grown up outside Chicago, in a middle-class family. Her father, a staunch
conservative just this side of the John Birch Society, owned a small drapery business. Her mother taught her the Methodist
creed: Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can. Hillary changed
from Goldwater Girl to liberal activist in the crucible of the sixties, but she remained true to her origins. Sara Ehrman, one of
Hillarys co-workers in Texas in the summer of 1972, described Clinton to her biographer Carl Bernstein as a progressive
Christian in that she believed in litigation to do good, and to correct injustices. Clinton had a kind of spiritual high-mindedness .
. . a kind of fervor, and self-justification that God is on her side. Hillary went town to town in South Texas, registering Hispanic
voters, her Bible in hand. For her, politics had to conform to an idea of virtue. Bill, the natural, didnt ask if he was on Gods
sidepolitics was all about people.
Neither of them had a carefully worked-out ideology. Their political philosophy came down to two words: public service. Bill
and Hillary moved to Arkansas in 1974, and got married the following year. They were policy wonks, and by focussing on
incremental reformsin education, rural health care, childrens welfarethey thrived politically in Arkansas, where they spent
the two decades after McGoverns defeat. They muted some of the most divisive social issues, compromised on others, and
mashed together idealism with business-friendly ideas for economic growth. Old-fashioned Democratic class politics was
foreign to them, even though Bill sometimes sounded like an Ozark populist. Hillary was the more passionate liberal, and from
the beginning she was a tough fighter. When she took the lead on her husbands most important initiative as governorraising
the states abysmal educational standardsshe made an adversary of the teachers union. Instead of speaking for the working
class, the Clintons spoke about equipping workers to rise into the professional class. Their presumption was that all Americans
could be like them.
In the eighties, the decade of conservative ascendancy, the Clintons brand of politics seemed to provide the ingredients of a
Democratic revival. But, to some, the couples mixture of uplifting rhetoric and ideological elusiveness suggested untrammelled
ambition and hidden agendasanything but public service. Bill and Hillary became the objects of a deep suspicion, which
theyve never been able to shake. To the left, the Clintons were sellouts; to the right, they were spies, sneaking across partisan
lines to steal ideas and rhetoric that advanced their McGovernite revolution. Because Hillarys politics have always been joined
to an idea of virtue, and because she is a woman, the suspicions about her have been the greater, even on the left. The Times
Magazine notoriously mocked her as Saint Hillary.
Bill Clinton campaigned for President in 1992 as a populist champion of the struggling middle class, butconfronted with
deficits, a recalcitrant bond market, and Wall Street-friendly economic advisershe governed as a moderate Republican. His
first budget was long on deficit reduction and short on investments in workers. He passed the Family and Medical Leave Act,
and he raised the minimum wage, but other proposals, such as spending on job training, ran into Republican resistance and
Clintons own determination to balance the budget. In late 1993, over the objections of his union supporters, he pushed through
Congress the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had been negotiated by his predecessor, George H. W. Bush.
When I asked Hillary Clinton what her views on nafta had been, she said, I dont know that I was particularly focussed on it,
thats not what I was working on. I was working on health care. Some people who knew her at the time say that she privately
opposed the deal, but in public she remained loyal to her husbands Administration. She officially turned against nafta only in
2007, when she first ran for President.
Bill Clintons Presidency was so lacking in history-making events, yet so crowded with the embarrassing minutiae of
scandalmongering, that it was easy to miss the great change that those years meant for the country and the Democratic Party.
Clinton turned sharply toward deregulation, embracing the free-market ideas of his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and the
chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan. The results appeared to be spectacular. Here is Clintons version, in his final
State of the Union Message, in 2000: We are fortunate to be alive at this moment in history. Never before has our nation
enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats. The country
had more jobs, higher wages, faster growth, bigger surpluses; it had replaced outmoded ideologies with dazzling technology.
The longest peacetime expansion in history had practically abolished the business cycle. Economic conflict was obsolete.
Education was the answer to all problems of social class. (His laundry list of proposals to Congress included more money for
Internet access in schools and funds to help poor kids take college-test-prep courses.) My fellow-Americans, the President
announced. We have crossed the bridge we built to the twenty-first century.
In our conversation, Hillary Clinton spoke of the limits of an educationalist mind-set, which she called a peculiar form of
litism. Educationalists, she noted, say they want to lift everybody upthey dont want to tell anybody that they cant go as
high as their ambition will take them. The problem was that were going to have a lot of jobs in this economy that require
blue-collar skills, not B.A.s. We need to do something that is really important, and this is to just go right after the denigration of
jobs and skills that are not college-connected. A four-year degree isnt for everyone, she said; vocational education should be

brought back to high schools.

Yet educationalist litism describes the Democratic thinking that took root during her husbands Presidency. When I asked her
if this had helped drive working-class Americans away from the Democratic Party, she hedged. I dont really know the answer
to that, she said. I dont think it is really useful to focus just on the nineties, because really the nineties was an outlier.
In April, 2000, President Clinton hosted a celebration called the White House Conference on the New Economy. The
phenomenal productivity of the New Economy was powered by the goods and services created by the rising young professional
classI.T. engineers, bankers, financial analysts, lawyers, designers, management consultants. Bill Gates was a panelist, and
Greenspan gave an address. Introducing the assembly, President Clinton was euphoric. I believe the computer and the
Internet give us a chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in all of human history, he said.
The spirit of the time was a heady concoction of high purpose and self-congratulationa secular brand of Calvinism, with the
state of inward grace revealed outwardly by an Ivy League degree, Silicon Valley stock options, and a White House invitation.
Meritocracy had become the creed of Clintons party.
This spirit followed Bill and Hillary out of the White House. The conflation of virtue and success guided the family foundation
they created, the celebrity-studded charity events they hosted, their mammoth speaking fees, their promiscuous fund-raising.
In 1999, Thomas Friedman published The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. The book described
globalization as supplanting the Cold War system, but, unlike the Cold War, globalization was a product of technological
advances and blind economic forces, not government policies. Friedmans approach was descriptive, but he kept slipping into
ethics and metaphysics: the new world he described turned out to be both inevitable and for the best. His tone was that of a
vaguely threatening evangelist: globalization was a bullet train without an engineer, and anyone who didnt board right away
would be left behind or flattened by it. The job of government was to explain the merits of globalization to citizens while
softening its short-term blows, with a light cushion of social welfare and job-retraining programs, until its lasting benefits
became available to everyone (right around the time the Internet was ending global poverty). Rejecting globalization was like
rejecting the sunrise. Only the shortsighted, the stupid, the coddled, and the unprepared would turn against it. Resistance,
Friedman predicted, would come mainly from people in poor countriesbureaucrats attached to their perks and tribes wedded
to their local traditions (the olive tree of the title). The books heroes were entrepreneurs, financiers, and technologists, hopping
airports between New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong. The Lexus and the Olive Tree was Das Kapital for
meritocrats.
Earlier this year, an economist named Branko Milanovi published a book called Global Inequality: A New Approach for the
Age of Globalization. Its a progress report on the system that Friedman heralded. Milanovi analyzes global economic data
from the past quarter century and concludes that the world has become more equalpoor countries catching up with rich
onesbut that Western democracies have become less equal. Globalizations biggest winners are the new Asian middle and
upper classes, and the one-per-centers of the West: these groups have almost doubled their real incomes since the late
eighties. The biggest losers are the American and European working and middle classesuntil very recently, their incomes
hardly budged.
During these years, resistance to globalization has migrated from anarchists disrupting trade conferences to members of the
vast middle classes of the West. Many of them have become Trump supporters, Brexit voters, constituents of Marine Le Pen
and other European proto-fascists. After a generation of globalization, theyre trying to derail the train.
One of the participants at the 2000 White House conference, and one of Friedmans sources of wisdom in The Lexus and the
Olive Tree, was Clintons final Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers. At Treasury, Summers helped design the crisis
rescue of the newly globalizing economies of Mexico, Russia, and South Korea. Summers and his immediate predecessor,
Robert Rubin, pushed free trade and financial deregulation, and presided over the economic expansion of the Clinton years.
Time put their faces, along with Greenspans, on its cover, calling them The Committee to Save the World.
Just as Summers received credit for the nineties boom, he took some blame for the Great Recession. He had helped the
Clinton Administration push through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had walled off commercial banking from
investment banking. In 2000, he supported a law regulating derivatives that many critics have called insufficient. Summers has
argued, convincingly, that the repeal of Glass-Steagall had little bearing on the 2008 crisis for which it became a chief symbol.
Still, he strongly supported Wall Street deregulation, and he remains an important figure in the Democratic Partys alignment
with the professional class.
In July, I went to see Summers at his vacation home in Massachusetts. When I arrived, he had just pulled upin a
Lexusafter a morning of tennis. We sat on a terrace overlooking Cape Cod Bay. Summers described numerous trips that he
had made during his years at Treasury to review antipoverty programs in Africa and Latin America, and in American inner cities.
I dont think I ever went to Akron, or Flint, or Toledo, or Youngstown, he admitted. To Democratic policymakers, poverty was
foreign or it was black. As for displaced white workers in the Rust Belt, Summers said, their problems werent heavily on our

radar screen, and they were mad that their problems werent.
Summers still supports trade agreements, including nafta. The problem, he said, is that few people understand the benefits: the
jobs created by exporting goods; trades role in strengthening other economies, thereby reducing immigration flows from
countries like Mexico. The popularization of politics, he said, keeps leaders from pursuing controversial but important policies.
If the Marshall Plan had been focus-grouped, it never would have happened. Globalization creates what Summers called a
trilemma among global integration, public goods like environmental protection or high wages, and national sovereignty. Its
become clear that Democratic lites, including him, underestimated the power of nationalism, because they didnt feel it
strongly themselves.
Summers described the current Democratic Party as a coalition of the cosmopolitan lite and diversity. The Republicans, he
went on, combined social conservatism and an agenda of helping rich people. These alignments left neither party in synch
with Americans like Mark Frisbie: All these regular people who thought they are kind of the soul of the countrythey feel like
there was nobody who seemed to be thinking a lot about them. In 2004, the political scientist Samuel Huntington published his
final book, Who Are We? The Challenges to Americas National Identity. He used the term cosmopolitan lites to describe
Americans who are at home in the fluid world of transnational corporations, dual citizenship, blended identities, and multicultural
education. Such people dominate our universities, tech companies, publishers, nonprofits, entertainment studios, and news
media. They congregate in cities and on the coasts. Lately, they have become particularly obsessed with the food they eat. The
locavore movement, whatever its benefits to health and agriculture, is an inward-looking form of activism. When you visit a
farm-to-table restaurant and order the wild-nettle sformato for thirty dollars, the line between social consciousness and
self-gratification disappears. Buying synthetic-nitrate-free lunch meat at Whole Foods is also a way to isolate yourself from
contamination by the packaged food sold at Kmart and from the overweight, downwardly mobile people who shop there. The
people who buy food at Kmart know it.
Two decades ago, the conservative social scientist Charles Murray co-wrote The Bell Curve, which argued that inherited I.Q.,
ethnicity, and professional success are strongly connected, thereby dooming government efforts to educate poor Americans
into the middle class. The book generated great controversy, including charges of racism, and some of its methodology was
exposed as flawed. In a more recent book, Coming Apart, Murray focusses on the widening divide between a self-segregated
white upper class and an emerging white lower class. He concludes that the trends signify damage to the heart of American
community and the way in which the great majority of Americans pursue satisfying lives.
Murray lives in Burkittsville, Maryland, an hour and a quarters drive from Washington, D.C. Its a virtually all-white town where
elements of the working class have fallen on hard times. The energy coming out of the new lower class really only needed a
voice, because they are so pissed off at people like you and me, he said. We so obviously despise them, we so obviously
condescend to themflyover country. The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a
redneckthat wont give you any problems in Manhattan. And you can also talk about evangelical Christians in the most
disparaging termsyou will get no pushback from that. Theyre aware of this kind of condescension. And they also havent
been doing real well.
A few years ago, I met a seventy-year-old widow in southwestern Virginia named Lorna. She was a retired schoolteacher, living
on Social Security, and as we discussed politics she insisted on her right to use mercury light bulbs, since Al Gore lived in a
mansion and used a private jet. Lorna suddenly exploded: I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I cant eat
French fries or Coca-Colano way! They want to tell me what to think. I have thought for myself all my life.
The moral superiority of lites comes cheap. Recently, Murray has done demographic research on Super Zipsthe Zip
Codes of the most privileged residents of New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Super Zips are integrated
in only one wayAsians, he said. Blacks and Latinos are about as scarce in the Super Zips as they were in the
nineteen-fifties. Multiethnic America, with its tensions and resentments, poses no problem for lites, who can buy their way out.
This translates into a whole variety of liberal positionsMurray mentioned being pro-immigration and anti-school choicein
which the lite has not borne any of the costs.
Perhaps the first cosmopolitan lite in American history was Alexander Hamilton: an immigrant, an urbanite, a friend of the rich,
at home in political, financial, and journalistic circles of power. Hamilton created the American system of public and private
banking, and for two centuries he was a hero to conservatives, while his archrival Thomas Jeffersonfounder of the
Democratic Partywas taken as the champion of the common man. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor,
Jefferson once wrote. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by
artificial rules. But Democrats now embrace Hamilton for his immigrant background and his modern ideas of activist
government. Meanwhile, the name of the slave-owning, states-rights champion Jefferson has been removed from Democratic
fund-raising dinners. The Hamilton who distrusted popular democracy is now overlooked or acceptedafter all, todays
cosmopolitan lites similarly distrust the passions of their less educated compatriots.
If theres one creative work that epitomizes the Obama Presidency, its the hip-hop musical Hamilton, whose opening song

was dbuted by Lin-Manuel Miranda in the East Room of the White House, in 2009, with the Obamas in attendance. The show
has been universally praisedMichelle Obama called it the greatest work of art shed ever seen, and Dick Cheney is a fan. It
succeeds on every level: the score playing in your mind when you wake up; the brilliance of its lyrics; its boldness in giving
eighteenth-century history contemporary form and in casting people of color who, during Hamiltons time, were in bondage or
invisible. Mirandas Hamilton suggests that the real heirs to the American Revolution are not Tea Partiers waving Dont Tread
on Me flags but black and Latino Americans and immigrants.
Mirandas triumph is itself a coalition of the cosmopolitan lite and diversity. The Hamilton that theatregoers are paying
scalpers prices to see is a progressive, not the father of Wall Street. Meanwhile, far from Broadway, Jeffersons ploughmen are
lining up at Trump rallies.
Hamilton coincided with an important turn in American politics. Occupy Wall Street had come and gone, and while the
ninety-nine and the one per cent didnt disappear, black and white came to the fore. There was a growing recognition that a
historic President had cleared barriers at the top but not at the bottomthat the Obama years had brought little change in the
systemic inequities facing the black and the poor. This disappointment, along with shocking videos of police killings of unarmed
black men, produced a new level of activism not seen in American streets and popular culture since the late sixties.
Nelini Stamp, a New Yorker in her twenties, of black and Latino parentage, was an organizer at Occupy. In 2012, the fatal
shooting of Trayvon Martin jolted her consciousness, and the acquittal of his killer outraged her. She grew up on Staten Island,
just a few blocks from where, in 2014, Eric Garner was suffocated by a police officer. We have to talk about black folks, Stamp
told me. Class will always be at the center of my politics, but if Im not centering black folks at the same time then Im not going
to get free. Were not going to change things. We can have this populist argument all we want, but if we dont repair the sins of
the pastwe could have a bunch of reforms, but if were still being killed its going to become white economic populism if we
dont have the race stuff together.
Stamp is both a millennial and a student of the nineteen-thirtiesa Hamilton fan who works with the labor movement. Her
ideal, she said, would be to see white working-class people standing beside black folks, saying, Your struggle is my struggle.
Thats my dream!
This year, Stamps dream seems as distant as ever, with Trump inciting his working-class followers to use violence against
black protesters, and with students on lite campuses issuing sweeping denunciations of white privilege. All whites are unequal,
but some are more unequal than others. In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance writes, I may be white, but I do not identify with the
wasps of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have
no college degree.
For Democrats, the politics of race and class are fraught. If you focus insistently on class, as Bernie Sanders did at the start of
the campaign, you risk seeming to be concerned only with whites. Focus insistently on race, and the Party risks being seen as
a factional coalition without universal appealthe fate of the Democratic Party in the seventies and eighties. The new racial
politics puts Democrats like Clinton in the middle of this dilemma.
The voices of black protest today challenge the optimistic narrative of the civil-rights movementthe idea, widespread at the
time of Obamas election, of incremental progress and expanding opportunity in an increasingly multiracial society. (Rosa sat
so Martin could walk so Obama could run so we can all fly.) Many activists are turning back to earlier history for
explanationsthus the outpouring of films, novels, essays, poetry, pop music, and scholarly work about slavery and Jim Crow,
as if to say, Not so fast. The Black Lives Matter movement reflects this mood. It has achieved reforms, but it was conceived
not as a reformist movement but as a collective expression of grief and anger, a demand for restitution of wrongs that go back
centuries and whose effects remain ubiquitous. It tends to see American society not as increasingly mixed and fluid but as a set
of permanent hierarchies, like a caste system.
A new consensus has replaced the more sanguine civil-rights view. Its attuned to deep structures and symbols, rather than to
policies and progress. Ta-Nehisi Coatess best-selling and much praised book, Between the World and Me, is now required
reading for many college freshmen. His idea of history is static, and deeply pessimistic: The plunder of black life was drilled
into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a
sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. Coatess writing in Between the
World and Me has a stance and a rhetorical sweep that make the give-and-take of politics seem almost impossible.
Somewhere between this jeremiad and the nave idea of inevitable progress lies the complicated truth.
If racial injustice is considered to be monolithic and unchangingomitting the context of individual actions, white and
blackthe political response tends to be equally rigid: genuflection or rejection. Clintons constituency surely includes many
voters who would welcome a nuanced discussion of raceone that addresses, for example, both drug-sentencing reform and
urban crime. But identity politics breaks down the distinction between an idea and the person articulating it, so that before
speaking up one has to ask: Does my identity give me the right to say this? Could my identity be the focus of a Twitter

backlash? This atmosphere makes honest conversation very hard, and gives a demagogue like Trump the aura of being a
truthteller. The authenticity that his followers so admire is factually wrong and morally repulsive. But when people of good will
are afraid to air legitimate arguments the illegitimate kind gains power.
I recently spoke with the social scientist Glenn Loury, who teaches at Brown University. As he sees it, if race becomes an
irreducible category in politics, rather than being incorporated into universal claims of justice, its a weapon that can be picked
up and used by anyone. Better watch out, he said. I dont know how you live by the identity-politics sword and dont die by it.
Its logic lumps everyoneincluding soon-to-be-minority whitesinto an interest group. One persons nationalism intensifies
tribal feelings in others, in what feels like a zero-sum game. I really dont know how you ask white people not to be white in the
world were creating, Loury said. How are there not white interests in a world where there are these other interests? He
continued, My answer is that we not lose sight of the goal of racially transcendent humanism being the American bedrock. Its
the abandonment of this goal that Im objecting to.
Loury pointed out that the new racial politics actually asks little of sympathetic whites: a confession, a reading assignment. Last
August, Black Lives Matter activists met with Hillary Clinton backstage at a town hall on drug abuse, in New Hampshire. In a
rare moment of candor and passion, Clinton made the case for pragmatism and, above all, legislation. As a camera filmed the
exchange, one activist, Julius Jones, spoke of the anti-blackness current that is Americas first drug, adding, Americas first
drug is free black labor and turning black bodies into profit. Jones told Clinton that Americas fundamental problems cant be
solved until someone in her position tells white Americans the truth about the countrys founding sins. The activists wanted
Clinton to apologize.
She replied, There has to be a reckoningI agree with that. But I also think there has to be some positive vision and plan that
you can move people toward. She asked Black Lives Matter for a policy agenda, along the lines of the civil-rights movement.
Jones wasnt buying it: If you dont tell black people what we need to do, then we wont tell you all what you need to do.
Im not telling you, Clinton said. Im just telling you to tell me.
Jones replied, What I mean to say is that this is, and always has been, a white problem of violence. Its nottheres not much
that we can do to stop the violence against us.
As the conversation ended, Clinton said, Yeah, well, respectfully, if that is your position, then I will talk only to white people
about how we are going to deal with the very real problems. . . . I dont believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws,
you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. Youre not going to change every heart.
When I asked Clinton about the politics of race and class, she said, It cant be either-or. She listed recent advances made by
locked-out groups, including black people but also women, gays, and transgender people. But we also need to have an
economic messageher tone said, Come on, folks!with an economic set of policies that we can repeatedly talk about and
make the case that they will improve the lives of Americans. It was important to speak to peoples anxieties about identity, to
address systemic racism, Clinton said. But its also the case that a vast group of Americans have economic anxiety, and if
they think we are only talking about issues that they are not personally connected to, then its understandable that they would
say, Theres nothing there for me.
While the Democrats were becoming the party of rising professionals and diversity, the Republicans were finding fruitful hunting
grounds elsewhere. The Southern states turned Republican after 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights
Act. West Virginia, howeverwith a smaller black population than the Deep South, and heavy unionizationretained a strong
Democratic character into the nineties. But West Virginia hasnt voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate since Bill Clinton,
in 1996. Al Gores surprising failure there in 2000 was an overlooked factor in his narrow Electoral College loss, and a
harbinger of the future. Something changed that couldnt be attributed just to the politics of race. Culturally, the Republican
Party was getting closer to the working class.
To some liberal analysts, this crossover practically violated a law of naturewhy did less affluent white Americans keep voting
against their own interests? During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama spoke to an audience of donors in San Francisco, and
analyzed the phenomenon as a reaction to economic decline: They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to
people who arent like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. Its hard
to remember that, in 2008, the key constituents of his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, were
working-class whites; indeed, her only hope of winning the nomination lay in such states as West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.
Clinton pounced on Obamas speech, calling it litist.
She was right. Obama was expressing a widespread liberal attitude toward Republican-voting workersthat is, he didnt take
them seriously. Guns and religion, as much as jobs and incomes, are the authentic interest of millions of Americans. Trade and
immigration have failed to make their lives better, and, arguably, left them worse off. And if the Democratic Party was no longer

on their sideif government programs kept failing to improve their liveswhy not vote for the party that at least took them
seriously?
Thomas Frank told me recently, When the traditional party of working-class concerns walks away from those concerns, even
when they just do it rhetorically, it provides an enormous opening for the Republicans to address those concerns, even if they
do it rhetorically, too. The culture wars became class wars, with Republicans in the novel position of speaking for the have-nots
who were white. The fact that Democrats remained the party of activist government no longer won them automatic loyalty. As
communities in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and rural America declined, attitudes toward government programs grew more
hostile. J. D. Vance describes working, at seventeen, as a cashier in an Ohio grocery store. Some of his poor white customers
gamed their food stamps to buy beer and wine, while talking on cell phones that Vance couldnt afford. Political scientists have
spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly
Republican in less than a generation, he writes. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working
class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillmans.
In 2009, during the debate over the health-care bill, one protester at a town-hall meeting shouted, Keep your government
hands off my Medicare! In 2012, the Times posted an interactive map of the countrys geography of government benefits.
The graphic showed that the areas with the highest levels of welfare spending coincided with deep-red America. During the
Great Depression, the hard-pressed became the base of support for the New Deal. Now many Americans who resent
government most are those who depend on it most, or who live and work among those who do.
Since the eighties, the Republican Party has been an unlikely coalition of downscale whites (many of them evangelical
Christians) and business interests, united by a common dislike of the federal government. To conservative thinkers, this
alliance was more than a political convenience; it filled a moral requirement. Irving Kristol, the father of neoconservatism, was
an early apostle of supply-side economics, but he also wrote numerous essays about the need for a revival of religious faith, as
a way of regulating moral conduct in a liberal, secular world. For ordinary Americans, traditional religion was a bulwark against
the moral relativism of the modern age. Kristols pieces in the Wall Street Journal officiated at the unlikely wedding of business
executives and evangelical Christians in the church of conservatisma role that perhaps only a Jewish ex-Trotskyist could take
on.
The Republicans, long the boring party of BabbittMailers druggists and retired doctorswere infused with a powerful populist
energy. Kristol welcomed it. This new populism is no kind of blind rebellion against good constitutional government, he wrote,
in 1985. It is rather an effort to bring our governing lites to their senses. That is why so many peopleand I include
myselfwho would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.
It was a fateful marriage. The new conservative populism did not possess an orderly heart. It was riven with destructive
impulses. It fed on rage and the spectacle of pop culture. But intellectuals like Kristol didnt worry when media
demagoguesLimbaugh, Drudge, Breitbart, Coulter, Hannitycame on the scene with all the viciousness of the
nineteen-thirties radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin. They didnt worry when Republican officeholders deployed every
available weaponinvestigation, impeachment, Supreme Court majority, filibuster, government shutdown, conspiracy theories,
implied threats of violenceto destroy their political enemies. In 2007, Kristols son, William, the editor of the Weekly Standard,
sailed to Juneau and met the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Kristol thought hed found just what the Party needed to win the
next election: a telegenic product of the white working class, an authentic populist. Throughout 2008, Kristol promoted Palin as
the ideal running mate for John McCain. When McCain selected her, Kristol exulted in the Times, A Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a
heartbeat away? I suspect most voters will say, No problem. And someperhaps a decisive numberwill say, Its about
time.
That fall, at a diner in Glouster, Ohio, I sat down with a group of women who planned to vote for Palin (and McCain, as an
afterthought) because shed fit right in with us. Being a Wasilla Walmart Mom had become a qualification for high officefor
some, the main one. Palin even had a pregnant, unwed teen-age daughter. Her campaign appearances turned working-class
whiteness into identity politics: she strutted onstage to the beat of Gretchen Wilsons Redneck Woman. In her proud
ignorance, unrestrained narcissism, and contempt for the establishment, Palin was John the Baptist to the coming of Trump.
The conservative marriage survived the embarrassment of Palins campaign, which exposed her as someone more interested
in getting on TV than in governing. It rode the nihilistic anger of the Tea Party and the paranoid rants of Glenn Beck. It
benefitted from heavy spending by the Koch brothers and ignored the barely disguised racism that some Republican voters
directed at the black family now occupying the White House. When Trump and others began questioning President Obamas
birth certificate, Party lites turned a blind eye; the rank and file, for their part, fell in behind Mitt Romney, a Harvard-educated
investor. The persistence of this coalition required an immense amount of self-deception on both sides. Romney, who belonged
to a class that greatly benefitted from cheap immigrant labor, had to pretend to be outraged by the presence of undocumented
workers. Lower-middle-class Midwestern retirees who depended on Social Security had to ignore the fact that the
representatives they kept electing, like Paul Ryan, wanted to slash their benefits. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan returned to
Indiana and Texas embittered at having lost their youth in unwinnable wars, while conservative pundits like Kristol kept

demanding new onesbut their shared contempt for liberal lites kept them from noticing the Republican Partys internal
conflicts. In this way, red states and blue statesthe color-coding scheme enshrined by the networks on the night of the 2000
Presidential electioncontinued to define the countrys polarization into mutually hateful camps.
The inadequacy of this picture became clear to me in Obamas first term. During the Great Recession, I visited many hard-hit
small towns, exurbs, rural areas, and old industrial cities, and kept meeting Americans who didnt match the red-blue scheme.
They might be white Southern country people, but they hated corporations and big-box stores as well as the federal
government. They might have a law practice, but that didnt stop them from entertaining apocalyptic visions of armed citizens
turning to political violence. They followed the Tea Party, but, in their hostility toward big banks, they sounded a little like
Occupy Wall Street, or vice versa. They were loose molecules unattached to party hierarchiesmore individualistic than the
Democrats, more antibusiness than the Republicans. What united them was a distrust of distant leaders and institutions. They
believed that the game was rigged for the powerful and the connected, and that they and their children were screwed.
The left-versus-right division wasnt entirely mistaken, but one could draw a new chart that explained things differently and
perhaps more accurately: up versus down. Looked at this way, the lites on each side of the partisan divide have more in
common with one another than they do with voters down below. A network-systems administrator, an oil-and-gas-company
vice-president, a journalist, and a dermatologist hire nannies from the same countries, dine at the same Thai restaurants, travel
abroad on the same frequent-flier miles, and invest in the same emerging-markets index funds. They might have different
political views, but they share a common interest in the existing global order. As Thomas Frank put it, The leadership of the
two parties represents two classes. The G.O.P. is a business lite; Democrats are a status lite, the professional class. They
fight over sectors important for the national futureWall Street, Big Pharma, energy, Silicon Valley. That is the contested
terrain of American politics. What about the vast majority of people?
The political upheaval of the past year has clarified that there are class divides in both parties. Bernie Sanders posed a serious
insurgent challenge to Clinton, thundering in front of tens of thousands of ardent supportersall the while sounding like an
aging academic whod have been lucky to attract a dozen listeners at the Socialist Scholars Conference twenty-five years ago.
Sanders spoke for different groups of Americans who felt disenfranchised: young people with heavy college debt and lousy
career prospects, blue-collar workers who retained their Democratic identity, progressives (many of them professionals) who
found Obama and Clinton too moderate. It was a limited and unwieldy coalition, but it had far more energy than Clintons
constituency.
Initially, Clinton was caught off guard by the publics anger at the political establishment. She casually proposed her husband as
a jobs czar in a second Clinton Presidency, as if globalization hadnt lost its shine. One of her advisers told me that Hillarys
years in the State Department had insulated her and her staff from the mood of ordinary Americans. So, one could add, did her
customary life of socializing with, giving paid speeches to, and raising money from the ultra-rich, whose ranks the Clinton family
joined as private citizens. (From 2007 to last year, Bill and Hillary earned a hundred and thirty-nine million dollars; in 2010, their
daughter, Chelsea, married a hedge-fund manager.) In 2014, in a speech to the investment firms Goldman Sachs and
BlackRock, Hillary Clinton described her solid middle-class upbringing and then admitted, Now, obviously, Im kind of far
removed, because of the life Ive lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I havent
forgotten it.
Clinton was saying in private what she cant or wont in public. The e-mails hacked from the account of her campaign manager,
John Podesta, and released by WikiLeaks, show her staff worrying over passages from her paid speeches that, if made public,
could allow her to be portrayed as two-faced and overly friendly with corporate America. But when Clinton told one audience,
You need both a public and a private position, she was describing what used to be considered normal politicsdeploying
different strategies to get groups with varying interests behind a policy. Before what Lawrence Summers called the
popularization of politics, Lyndon Johnson required a degree of deception to pass civil-rights legislation. It is unsavory, and it
always has been that way, but we usually get where we need to be, Clinton told her audience. But if everybodys watching,
you know, all of the backroom discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. Clinton
would be comfortable and productive governing in back roomsshe was known for her quiet bipartisan efforts in the Senate.
But Americans today, especially on the Trump right and the Sanders left, wont give politicians anything close to that kind of
trust. Radical transparency occasionally brings corruption to light, but it can also make good governance harder.
Indefatigable and protean, Clinton read the disaffected landscape and adapted in her characteristic stylewith a policy agenda.
She endorsed profit-sharing for employees and declared opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. She demanded stricter
enforcement of trade rules that protect workers, and called for more infrastructure spending and trust-busting. She underscored
her commitment to equal pay for women. Publicly, she attacked the bloated salaries of the C.E.O.s with whom she privately
socializes and raises money.
I asked Clinton if Obama had made a mistake in not prosecuting any Wall Street executives after the financial crisis. She
replied, I think the failure to be able to bring criminal cases, to hold people responsible, was one of the contributing factors to a
lot of the real frustration and anger that a lot of voters feel. There is just nobody to blame. So if we cant blame Company X or

C.E.O. Y, lets blame immigrants. Right? Weve got to blame somebodythats human nature. We need a catharsis. F.D.R.
had done it by denouncing bankers and other economic royalists, Clinton said, her voice rising. And by doing so he told a
story. She went on, If you dont tell people whats happening to themnot every story has villains, but this story didat least
you could act the way that you know the people in the country felt.
After defeating Sanders, Clinton tried to win over his supporters by letting them write the Democratic Party platform. It is the
farthest left of any in recent memoryit effectively called for a new Glass-Steagall Act. The internal class divide is less severe
on the Democratic side. Even Lawrence Summers embraces government activism to reverse inequality, including infrastructure
spending and progressive reform of the tax code. But Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working
peoplenot white ones, anyway. Those voters, especially men, have become the Republican base, and the Republican Party
has experienced the 2016 election as an agonizing schism, a hostile takeover by its own rank and file. Conservative leaders
had taken the base for granted for so long that, when Trump burst into the race, in the summer of 2015, they were confounded.
Some scoffed at him, others patronized him, but for months they didnt take him seriously. He didnt sound like a conservative
at all.
Charles Murray is a small-government conservative and no Trump supporter (Hes just unfit to be President), but some of his
neighbors and friends are. My own personal political world has crumbled around me, he said. The number of people who
care about the things I care about is way smaller than I thought a year ago. I had not really seen the great truth that the Trump
campaign revealed, that should have been obvious but wasnt.
The great truth was that large numbers of Republican voters, especially less educated ones, werent constitutional originalists,
libertarian free traders, members of the Federalist Society, or devout readers of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They
actually wanted government to do more things that benefitted them (as opposed to benefitting people they saw as
undeserving). The Republicans held on to a very large part of this electorate for years and years, even though those voters
increasingly wonder whether Republicans are doing anything for them, Murray said. So Trump comes along, and people who
were never ideologically committed to the things Im committed to splinter off.
Party leaders should have anticipated Trumps riseafter all, he was created in their laboratory, before he broke free and
began to smash everything in sight. The Republican Party hasnt been truly conservative for decades. Its most energized
elements are not trying to restore stability or preserve the status quo. Rather, they are driven by a sense of violent opposition:
against changes in color and culture that appear to be sweeping away the country they once knew; against globalization, which
is as revolutionary and threatening as the political programs of the Jacobins and the anarchists once were.
Reactionaries are not conservatives, the political essayist Mark Lilla writes in his new book, The Shipwrecked Mind: On
Political Reaction. They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical
imaginings. This is the meaning of Trumps slogan, Make America Great Again. Though the phrase invoked nostalgia for an
imagined past, it had nothing to do with tradition. It was a call to sweep away the ruling order, including the Republican
leadership. The betrayal of lites is the linchpin of every reactionary story, Lilla writes.
The Trump phenomenon, which has onlookers in Europe and elsewhere agog at the latest American folly, isnt really
exceptional at all. American politics in 2016 has taken a big step toward politics in the rest of the world. The ebbing tide of the
white working and middle classes in America joins its counterpart in Great Britain, the Brexit vote; Marine Le Pens Front
National, in France; and the Alternative fr Deutschland party, which has begun to threaten Angela Merkels centrist coalition in
Germany. To Russians, Trump sounds like his role model, President Vladimir Putin; to Indians, Trump echoes the Hindu
nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Even the radical nostalgia of Islamists around the Muslim world bears more than
a passing resemblance to the longing of Trump supporters for an America purified and restored to an imagined glory. One way
or another, they all represent a reaction against modernity, with its ceaseless anxiety and churn.
A generation ago, a Presidential contender like Trump wasnt conceivable. Jimmy Carter brought smiling populism to the White
House, and Ronald Reagan was derided as a Hollywood cowboy, but both of them had governing experience and substantive
ideas that theyd worked out during lengthy public careers. But, as public trust in institutions eroded, celebrities took their place,
and the line between politics and entertainment began to disappear. It shouldnt be surprising that the most famous person in
politics is the former star of a reality TV show.
Theres an ongoing battle among Trumps opponents to define his supporters. Are they having a hard time economically, or are
they just racists? Do they need to be listened to, or should they be condemned and written off? Clinton, addressing a
fund-raising dinner on Wall Street in September, placed half of Trumps supporters in what she called the basket of
deplorablesbigots of various types. The other half, she said, are struggling and deserve empathy. Under criticism, she
half-apologized, saying that she had counted too many supporters as deplorables. Accurate or not, her remarks rivalled
Obamas guns and religion and Romneys forty-seven per cent for unwise campaign condescension. All three politicians
thought that they were speaking among friendsthat is, in front of wealthy donors, the only setting on the campaign trail where
truth comes out.

In March, the Washington Post reported that Trump voters were both more economically hard-pressed and more racially biased
than supporters of other Republican candidates. But in September a Gallup-poll economist, Jonathan T. Rothwell, released
survey results that complicated the picture. Those voters with favorable views of Trump are not, by and large, the poorest
Americans; nor are they personally affected by trade deals or cross-border immigration. But they tend to be less educated, in
poorer health, and less confident in their childrens prospectsand theyre often residents of nearly all-white neighborhoods.
Theyre more deficient in social capital than in economic capital. The Gallup poll doesnt indicate how many Trump supporters
are racists. Of course, theres no way to disentangle economic and cultural motives, to draw a clear map of the stresses and
resentments that animate the psyches of tens of millions of people. Some Americans have shown themselves to be implacably
bigoted, but bias is not a fixed quality in most of us; its subject to manipulation, and it can wax and wane with circumstances. A
sense of isolation and siege is unlikely to make anyone more tolerant.
In one way, these calculations dont matter. Anyone who votes for Trumpincluding the Dartmouth-educated moderate
Republican financial adviser who wouldnt dream of using racial code words but just cant stand Hillary Clintonwill have tried
to put a dangerous and despicable man in charge of the country. Trump is a national threat like no one else who has come
close to the Presidency. Win or lose, he has already defined politics so far down that a shocking degree of hatred, ignorance,
and lies is becoming normal.
At the same time, it isnt possible to wait around for demography to turn millions of disenchanted Americans into relics and
expect to live in a decent country. This election has told us that many Americans feel their way of life is disappearing. Perhaps
their lament is futilethe world is inexorably becoming Thomas Friedmans. Perhaps their nostalgia is misguidedmulticultural
America is more free and equal than the republic of Hamilton and Jefferson. Perhaps their feeling is immoral, implying ugly
biases. But it shouldnt be dismissed. If nearly half of your compatriots feel deeply at odds with the drift of things, its a matter of
self-interest to try to understand why. Nationalism is a force that lites always underestimatethats been a lesson of the years
seismic political events, here and in Europe. It can be turned to good or ill, but it never completely goes away. Its as real and
abiding as an attachment to family or to home. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo, Trump declared in his
convention speech. In his hands, nationalism is a loaded gun, aimed not just at foreigners but also at Americans who dont
make the cut. But people are not wrong to want to live in cohesive communities, to ask new arrivals to become part of the
melting pot, and to crave a degree of stability in a moral order based on values other than just diversity and efficiency. A world
of heirloom tomatoes and self-driving cars isnt the true and only Heaven.
Late last year, President Obama sat down with his chief speechwriter, Cody Keenan. Obama told Keenan that, during his final
year in office, he wanted to make an argument for American progress in the twenty-first century. He called it an ode to reason,
rationality, humility, and delayed gratification. Throughout the year, in a kind of extended farewell address, Obama has been
speaking around the country about tolerance, compromise, and our common humanity. He never states his theme directly, but
its the values of liberal democracy. He is reacting to the unprecedented ugliness of Trump, but also to a larger sense that
liberal values are always fragile, always in need of renewal, especially for a new generation with lowered expectations.
In May, at Howard Universitys commencement, the President condemned the trend on college campuses of disinviting
controversial speakers, and he told the graduating class, We must expand our moral imaginations to understand and
empathize with all people who are struggling, not just black folks who are strugglingthe refugee, the immigrant, the rural poor,
the transgender person, and, yes, the middle-aged white guy who you may think has all the advantages, but over the last
several decades has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change, and feels powerless to stop
it. You got to get in his head, too. In Dallas in July, at a memorial service for five murdered police officers, Obama described
how black people experience the criminal-justice system in America, and said, We cant simply dismiss it as a symptom of
political correctness or reverse racism. To have your experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed
perhaps even by your white friends and co-workers and fellow church members again and again and againit hurts. Surely we
can see that, all of us.
Obama is summoning Americans to a sense of national community based on values that run deeper than race, class, and
ideology. Hes urging them to affirm the possibility of gradual change, and to resist the mind-set of all or nothing, which runs
especially hot this year. These speeches are, in part, a confession of failure. Ive seen how inadequate words can be in
bringing about lasting change, he said in Dallas. Ive seen how inadequate my own words have been. After all, Obama has
been saying things like this ever since he first attracted national attention, at the Democratic Convention in 2004. He was
elected President with a similar message, though his time in office has burnished and chastened it. Now, as he says goodbye,
the country is more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember.
More and more, we live as tribes. Its easier and more satisfying to hunker down with your cohort on social media than to take
up Obamas challenge and get in someone elses head. Whats striking is the widespread feeling that liberal values are no
longer even valuablea feeling shared by many people who think of themselves as liberals.
Hillary Clinton is a strange fit for this moment. Shes a lifelong institutionalist at a time of bitter distrust in institutions, a believer

in gradual progress faced with violent impatience. She has dozens of good ideas for making the country fairer, but bringing
Americans together to support the effort and believe in the results is harder than ever. Clinton lacks Obamas rhetorical power,
his philosophical reach. Her authority lies in her commitment to policy and politics, her willingness to soldier on.
As she ended our conversation in the hotel basementshe had to get to the evenings fund-raiserI asked how she could
hope to prevail as President. She talked about reminding voters of results, and of repeating a consistent story. Then, as if
she found her own words inadequate, she leaned forward and her voice grew intense. If we dont get this right, what were
seeing with Trump now will just be the beginning, she said. Because when people feel that their government has failed them
and the economy isnt working for them, they are ripe for the kind of populist nationalist appeals that were hearing from Trump.
She went on, Look, there will always be the naysayers and virulent haters on one side. And there will be the tone-deaf,
unaware peopleshe seemed to mean litistson the other side. I get all that. But it really is important. And the Congress, I
hope, will understand this. Because the games they have played on the Republican side brought them Donald Trump. And if
they continue to play those games their party is going to be under tremendous pressure. But, more important than that, our
country will be under pressure. I asked her if she thought that, after the Trump explosion, Republican leaders were ready to
reckon with the damage. I hope so, she said. Im sure going to try to have that conversation with them. Yeah, I am.
--------------------------------------//-----------------------------------------------------

How the candidates see Americas place in the world

This week The Economist explains blog looks at the American presidential candidates' positions on major policy issues. This
is the last of four short explainers about one specific area

FOREIGN-POLICY wonks often complain that their field only rarely affects American presidential elections, and then usually in
times of war. But in 2016 the sharply contrasting world views of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and her Republican
rival, Donald Trump, have become symbols of much larger divides, revealing much about the candidates values. How do the
two contenders approach geopolitics?

Advisers and former colleagues say that Mrs Clinton shares a traditional view of America: as a force for good and with a special
duty to guarantee global norms. Yet they caution against assuming that Mrs Clinton will be much more hawkish in her actions
than Barack Obamanot least because some intractable problems will dominate her in-tray, starting with Syria. In presidential
debates the Democratic nominee talked of pushing for a no-fly zone and safe havens in Syria. But in a leaked speech that she
gave to bankers in 2013, she noted the risks of creating a no-fly zone, which would require destroying Syrian air defences,
some in heavily populated areas; a big and risky task. In Asia Mrs Clinton will have to address North Koreas aggressive moves
to develop its nuclear arsenal. The Democrat has backed tougher sanctions on North Korea and building elaborate anti-missile
defence systems with Japan and South Koreaall steps that alarm China. In contrast Chinese leaders were quietly pleased
when the presidential campaign saw Mrs Clinton forced to disavow an ambitious free-trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP), that would bind 11 Asia-Pacific nations, not including China, more closely with America. President Hillary Clintons
relations with Russias autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, would begin in a glacial statenot least because the Clinton campaign,
backed by American spy chiefs, accuses Russia of trying to meddle in the presidential election by stealing and leaking e-mails
from top Democrats.

Mr Trumps scorn for facts makes his precise world view hard to pin down. But over the years he has signalled some basic
principles, starting with an un-Reaganesque contempt for democracy. He has praised the Chinese governments violent
suppression of protests in 1989 and lauded Mr Putin for his very strong control over his country. He has suggested that
Americas obligation to defend NATO allies might be conditional. He has promised to bomb the shit out of Islamic State,
without explaining what that means, and regretted that American troops did not seize and keep Iraqs oilfields. Theres more: he

says he will renegotiate the nuclear-arms deal with Iran and press China into dealing with North Korea. And he called climate
change a hoax and promised to cancel billions of dollars in payments to programmes designed to lessen it.

If Mr Trump has a core philosophy when it comes to world affairs, it is suspicion of free trade. He has vowed to renegotiate the
NAFTA trade pact with Canada and Mexico and to put the TPP deal on hold in his first days as president. He would order his
treasury secretary to declare China a currency manipulator, calling the yuan deliberately undervalued, though that charge is
clearly out of date, given that China has recently spent to prop up its currency. Trump advisers vow that tariffs will be used to
eliminate deficits with foreign trade partnersthough that flies in the face of economic theory about Americas inherent
advantage as the issuer of the worlds main reserve currency. The only real certainty about Mr Trumps foreign policies is that
he knows what his voters want to hear: that America holds a winning hand, if only it is ruthless enough to play it. If elected, Mr
Trump would struggle to fulfil half his promises. But given the geopolitical chaos a President Trump threatens to unleash,
disappointed voters in America will be the least of the worlds worries.

-------------------------//--------------------------------------

The slow death of white America

By Marc Bassets, elpais.com

octubre 11, 2016

We see more deaths due to overdose than before, Sly says. Though maybe, he adds, we are better now at diagnosing
them.

It is difficult to find someone in this mining region in the Appalachians who does not have a family member or friend with a drug
problem, especially when it comes to painkillers, which they can get with a medical prescription.

No freeways connect this county to the outside world. There are no supermarkets stocked with fresh fruits or vegetables, and
no opportunities to earn a living unless its thanks to government subsidies. The most isolated region in the country, the whitest
and most rural of the United States, is slowly dying and not just because of an overdose.

I have a funeral tomorrow, says Martin West, the county sheriff. A young man with some problems. There are two boxes at
the entrance of the office that invites visitors to deposit pills and syringes anonymously for disposal.

Besides serving as sheriff, West is a Protestant pastor. As an agent of peace, his mission is to chase down crime: nine out of
10 cases he works on involve drugs. As a preacher, he must console the families destroyed by an epidemic that has
contributed to a sharp rise in mortality among whites aged 45 to 54. Life expectancy for men in McDowell was 64 years in 2010,
18 years fewer than their counterparts in Fairfax County, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that sits 560 kilometers away.

Shop windows in Welch and in other nearby towns along US Route 52 are boarded up. An abandoned school with a music
room, a piano and its last score. A hotel in ruins. Houses whose interiors are overgrown with vegetation. These are the remains
of a glorious past, when the county was home to 100,000 residents, years when coal was to Welch what the car is to Detroit.

Today, 18,000 people live in McDowell. There are no dealerships and, since Wal-Mart closed last winter, there are no big
stores either. Wal-Mart, with its low prices and endless sales, is blamed for destroying the fabric of small shops and urban
centers throughout rural America. Yet, paradoxically, when Wal-Mart closed its doors, it dealt a second blow, perhaps the
hardest, to McDowell County. Now, residents have to travel more than an hour over sinuous highways to nearby counties to
shop.

Store closed at 7pm. Thursday January 27, 2016, says a note taped to the door of the boarded-up Wal-Mart center. It reads
like a death certificate.

Paradoxically, when Wal-Mart closed its doors, it dealt perhaps the hardest blow to McDowell County

It was the center of social life in the county, says Linda McKinney. She and her husband, Bob, manage a food and clothing
bank that helps 1,200 to 1,800 people 10% percent of McDowell residents every month. Wal-Marts departure also affected
the bank; the giant store donated left-over food.

One-third of McDowell residents lives in poverty, according to the US Census Bureau. Annual incomes per capita reach
$14,813 (13,300), half of what the rest of the nation makes. McKinney attributes the high mortality rate to a lack of exercise
and poor nutrition because the area lacks supermarkets that could provide fresh foods.

We are not different from other parts of the world, except for one fact: we do not have a middle class, says Harold McBride,
McDowell County president. As people migrate to other counties, McBride says, they take away the social glue needed for this
community to recover.

Entrance to the McDowell County sheriffs office in Welch, West Virginia. EDU BAYER / VIDEO: EL PAS
Republican candidate Donald Trump does not excite this Democratic county but no one here can forget that H
illary Clinton took
for granted the fact that many coal miners would lose their jobs, in a statement Appalachian residents interpreted as a
declaration of war against them.

In the reception hall of Widener Funeral Home, a headline from T

he Welch News reads: Carfentanil: A New Factor in the US
Opioid Crisis. Kenneth Widener, who works in the family business, says the number of deaths due to overdose is still a small
fraction of the total. But when we show up in the news, he explains, they always show the worst home and the worst-looking
person.

Driving through back roads among idyllic landscapes, Sabrina Shrader, a tireless fighter for the good name of this land, recalls
her childhood in McDowell, where she lived until she was 13 years old. She participated in the c ampaign launched by Bernie
Sanders, Clintons rival in the Democratic primaries, and she is running for a West Virginia Legislature seat for Mercer County.
I am an Appalachian Christian, says Shrader, who shows pride in her identity and peppers her sentences with Bible
references.

Davy, a town of 400 residents located next to a railroad line, is home to the Wingates: Adam, his wife Heather, and their two
children. Adam Wingate immigrated to the United States from Lebanon when he was five years old. A local family adopted him.
Wingate is a miner and he has been out of work for four months.

There is no way I want my kids to stay here, he says. He has found needles in the park nearby.

Heather Wingate remembers the car accident she had when she was 22 years old. The doctor prescribed 180 painkillers.
Here, she says, good people do bad things.

English version by Dyane Jean Franois.

According to economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the rise in mortality among middle-aged whites is not happening in any
other developed country or among other ethnic groups in the United States.

These men and women fill the ranks of Donald Trump supporters. His populist nationalist message has helped the Republican
candidate connect with voters who feel displaced by globalization, scorned by elites, and put at a disadvantage in a country that
is growing increasingly more diverse.

As Anne Case wrote, they are an audience that feels increasingly invisible.

McDowell County, West Virginia is the county with the third-highest rate of premature death in the United States, according to
County Health Rankings from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, a study that measures where residents
are most likely to die before the age of 75.

The other two counties with the highest mortality rates are on Indian reservations in South Dakota.