Yascha is absolutely right that it is time for Democrats look into the mirror and ask some hard questions. However, the soul searching needs to be expanded beyond the political establishment and into the ruling class in general, including the institutions that Persuasion is associated and allied with. I have read columns after columns by Persuation that skirt the deeper issues beyond the loss of trust in ruling elites by average Americans. None has been willing to look into the mirror themselves. It is simply not enough to bemoan the loss of high trust American society of yesterday without diagnozing the why and explore the how to restore it. It is simply not enough to protect democracy without understanding what democracy is for. The social and cultural reality of our time require us to reflect more deepely and innovate more daringly than the rulign elites have heretheto been willing to. This election should be a wake-up call for the elites if they wish to stay relevant.
Entirely agree. However history should warn us that the high elite ruling class whenever they have become so detached from the earthy realities of the majority, do not wake up. They simply double down on abuses of their power.
I think the existence of Persuasion (and The Free Press and The Dispatch and others) will probably do more than any specific advice you offer. You, by your talents and training, seem to be a proposer of Grand Theories. You handicap the fore- and back-sliding of Democracy at the level of nations and the whole world. I sometimes find these things fascinating and explanatory -- depending on the quality of the ideas and the writing -- but how often are they actually predictive? Not often, I think.
My view is closer to ground-level and what's missing here is sensible information. The problem is not the lack of trust in our sense-making institutions. I don't want or need to take their word for anything, I just want them to do their jobs of making sense, leaving me to decide based on my lying eyes and common sense how skeptical to be about what they're saying. That they have abandoned that vocation for activism -- on all sides of the political spectrum -- is to my mind our biggest structural problem and why these new publications give me a modicum of hope.
I'll try to explain a bit better, though as I indicated, I'm not much for Grand Theories. I have no need to "trust" the media or the CDC in the sense of considering them authoritative. I would like to trust them like I trust my grocer to not intentionally short-change me. I'll check the restaurant bill every-so-often for items that I didn't order, but since I rarely find any I can save time and effort by generally accepting them as is. It's a Bayesian thing -- every time an assumption proves right or wrong affects my confidence in it going forward. That's why at this point I wouldn't trust the New York Times for baseball scores (if they publish baseball scores and if I read them). I'll listen to the CDC and read the Great Barrington Declaration and, taking into account the arguments and the backgrounds of the authors and the attitude that comes across and whatever else I perceive, decide what to do (I'll also take into account the gravity of the decision, the likelihood that I can figure it out and the effort needed to do so). I don't have the desire to outsource my decision making or to believe I can know things that I really can't.
That's why I wrote here recently of my skepticism towards your democracy-handicapping and have written similarly about other cases of people getting all worked up over things of whose truth and significance they have no reason to be confident -- which description covers at least 95% of our political discourse. Perhaps if the sense-makers were to rediscover the value of professional ethics and personal probity (i.e. trustworthiness), we could dial all that down.
- i think it’s fair to characterize my family as historically center right or maybe even right.
- Everyone went never Trump or democrats when Trump emerged, except one.
- One family member - my brother - voted for Trump and was adamantly pro-Trump. It caused a pretty deep rift among the family and especially siblings.
- My wife is from Lviv and moved to the USA at a young age after the Soviet Union fell. They were fleeing violence from the early version of the FSB. This violence culminated with a machine gun being held to my wife’s head when she was five years old.
- This can get deeply personal really quickly. And it did, even with a brother.
- There was a year or more - maybe two - where I did not speak to my brother (and vice versa).
- I genuinely believe that many of the reasons I voted for Biden ended up not being honored. As a lawyer, I found the abuses of the democratic processes to often be just as egregious as Trump’s — they were often just more subtle and less obvious to anyone that did not have a close eye on the federal agencies and did not have experienced context for what is normal and what is decidedly not normal. Was it as bad as the worse of Trump’s abuses? Maybe not. But it often seemed far more extensive. I don’t know if this was Biden or just people slipping stuff past an old man who couldn’t monitor everything. But it deeply disturbed a lot of liberal leaning lawyers I know.
- This deeply angered me because it’s not what I voted for. I still respected the Biden, particularly in light of his masterclass performance on Ukraine.
- Nonetheless, I spent these past few years seeking to learn. As part of trying to restore my relationship with my brother, I worked hard to try to understand Trump’s appeal.
- You know what? Trump is often remarkably on point in so many ways. But this is a “vibe” or “intuitive” level understanding rather than the kind of deep policy knowledge that most of us are accustomed to in leaders.
- Thing is…Trump’s instincts identified a lot of problems that a lot of people who were engaged in group think on fundamental issues just missed or dismissed or didn’t talk about.
- Here’s an example: Globalism. It’s clear that in the aggregate it’s good for the USA. But - as a nation and society - we didn’t take its localized costs seriously enough.
- How many decades did one administration after the other spend oxygen talking about job retraining to help the rust belt out? But no one really worried about the total absence of middle class jobs in the rust belt to replace the jobs that were lost.
- The expectation - clearly - is that people would move to find their new job and opportunity. Except that there is absolutely no data to suggest this is a remotely reasonable expectation. Most people spend most of their life living very close to their birthplace and if they move away, they tend to move back.
- At best our approaches to address the localized costs of globalism were largely doomed to fail. At worst, we never really cared.
- Many Medicare and Medicaid budget cuts that occurred over the years were just screwing hospitals by discounting what the government paid them. As a result, hospitals receive payments that are below their cost of providing care. There are areas of the country that predominantly rely on Medicare and Medicaid. This quickly drove these hospitals under, resulting in dramatically reduced availability to healthcare, shortened lifespans and had the additional benefit of gutting what was often the primary employer in the area. In short, it causes concentrated devastation.
- This kind of so-called budget cut became big-time in 1997. But the two parties do go back to this trick from time to time.
- The area in question that is most affected? You guessed it: Trump Country. This is one of the reasons why rural care is abysmal in the USA.
- Yes there is frustration about shouldering defense for NATO without much help. But I am not sure how deep that frustration really runs.
- I do not think people fully understand the extent to which we also subsidize the healthcare for the globe.
- The WTO is supposed to protect patent rights. i.e., the monopoly pricing power afforded by patent rights. Except, after agreeing to this construct, every other country runs around and puts in place a single payor system or other mechanism to cap prices or regulate prices. And apparently these devices that gut the purpose of creating worldwide patent protections are not a problem under the WTO because it’s domestic policy.
- So who is left holding the bag? The U.S. The sole sucker left supporting a free market structure designed to fund R&D into much needed pharmaceuticals. This kind of research is incredibly expensive and even the U.S. buckles under the strain of paying for the planet’s pharmaceutical R&D costs. It’s also not just prescription costs. Because drug costs are the primary driver in other - more material components- such as inpatient / outpatient care and in long-term care. In these kinds of context, it’s hidden as a hard to find sub-bullet, such as doctor administered drug. Or some such. But it’s a huge driver in the cost of US healthcare differential vs other countries.
- The numbers here are staggering and people would be frothing at the mouth if they fully understood the cost internalized by the U.S. to keep research going for the globe.
- But while people may not fully understand the ins and outs, 1/3rd of Americans have stopped taking their prescription drugs because they can’t afford them. People do understand this kind of stuff. And they do understand being unable to retire because it requires saving an exorbitant amount just to die with grace and dignity.
- They know something’s different and this isn’t how it used to be.
- In addition; this also impacts American companies. Where did American manufacturing go? Well. It didn’t have to go anywhere. Except part of the WTO is that there aren’t supposed to be subsidies. Except lots of countries can quite cheaply nationalize healthcare and they don’t have to worry about a socialist reform breaking the market because the U.S. is there to keep the market functioning. All the benefits of socialism with none of the risks or costs of human propensity to break the market with a command and control approach.
- The kicker? Their companies now operate without the cost of healthcare as an expense. BOOM. They can immediately produce high quality products at lower prices than American manufacturing.
- All of a sudden there is this big sucking sound in the middle class as American companies have to move manufacturing offshore to stay alive.
- Huh? So the U.S. subsidizes the world and supports the WTO while the world turns around and plants a big knife in the U.S. back. And somehow this is all fine under the WTO? Okie dokie.
- But the U.S. retaliating economically for this kind of behavior? That’s a problem under the WTO. Because of course it is.
- I don’t know that Trump fully understands this stuff. He certainly hasn’t messaged it well. But this is really only part of the picture and it’s pretty god damned egregious.
-People often aren’t going to be able to figure out exactly how they are getting screwed. But they are also often intelligent enough to intuitively know when they are getting screwed.
- That’s America First. That’s MAGA. That’s why this movement is here to stay until things get fixed in a way that is more equitable for Americans.
- When I worked through a lot of those stuff, well, suddenly voting for Trump seemed a whole lot less crazy.
- Do I like Trump? No. Have I voted for Trump? No. But the Trump movement - as a political and economic movement devoid of its cult of personality - makes a helluva lot of sense.
- It’s time for the world to pay their own way. The U.S. is done doing it. Honestly, everyone is
lucky there is a pacifist element to isolationism bc this quickly sends steam flying out of the ears.
- Perhaps at first it was about the Cold War. Then maybe it was all in pursuit of establishing of a new world order of peace and utopia. Funded by America because otherwise we would never get there. Kind of sounds like that well-intentioned adventure in Somalia that had nothing to do with foreign policy interests and ended with Blackhawk Down.
- At any rate, I think the U.S. is done subsidizing the leisure and budget flexibility of other nations. Rightfully so.
Yascha is correct. His book is correct. All that the Democratic Party needed to do was offer a candidate that was competent and moderate. The list of don’ts is long. Don’t warn about threats to democracy while undemocratically selecting a candidate. Don’t lie about the president’s health. Don’t be too cozy with the spy agencies. Don’t abuse the justice system. Don’t spend like maniacs and load future generations with debt. In short, just be less of a threat than Donald Trump. The fact that the managerial class cannot do what should be the easiest task in the world justifies mistrust of them.
I agree completely with your essay. I feel that the Democratic party, along with many of the most respected institutions of the country, has been captured by an extremist fringe of the cultural left. I hope that Trump's victory leads liberals to recognize the threat posed by their own identitarian fringe.
As always, a clearheaded take from Yascha Mounk. We really do have the mistakes of the Democratic party to thank for these results - another four years of Trump's incorrigible narcissism, his vile, hateful discourse and no doubt attempts to corrupt our democratic institutions, with congress behind him. I hope that, this time around, the Democratic party will learn from its mistakes and start running candidates and campaigns that actually inspire a majority of Americans again and align with their common-sense values. There are so many Americans who voted for Trump who would have been happy to vote for a Democrat instead, if only the Democrats hadn't made themselves so unelectable. (For the record, I voted Democrat down the ballot but wrote in alternatives for Pres/VP because I saw Harris for what she was, a Trump enabler).
Thank you for calling out the refusal for so many to step outside of their own political silos. I could see this cultural division in US public discourse dangerously deepening in 2000/2001. At that time the silencing of anyone who raised questions about where the US was headed, from any political background, was both self righteous and fierce.
How much of this conflict and division is rooted in unresolved historical injustices and how much in present day hyper capitalist’s imposed social iniquities remains a challenge to analyse.
You’re right that Democrats need to take a hard look at themselves, and above all, at the motivations of those who support him (which I discussed in my own essay Understanding Trump’s Enduring Appeal, published three days before the election).
That said, what we’re witnessing is much larger than this election or any specific politician. If history is our guide, we won’t escape the turmoil, regardless of who holds office. The details and pace may vary, but the cyclical pattern remains: birth, chaos, death, rebirth. Perhaps the words of the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold (from 1855) describe our uncertain and turbulent times more accurately: we are "wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”
And in this liminal space, we find ourselves caught in a social upheaval. The tug-of-war is between those determined to preserve the old national-industrial-religious order and those pushing for a radically different future. Inevitably, we are heading into a new Dark Age.
I think you're right that the American academic and professional elite were less resistant to the tyranny of political correctness that triggered the loss of trust you highlight than their European counterparts, but this is partly due to the sclerotic paralysis of European institutions -- they just CAN'T change as fast and as recklessly as the American ones (unfortunately) did. But there is another component to this that you omit, and that is probably at least as important as the woke stuff. That is the degree of just plain ignorance in the American public more generally, which far exceeds the degree of ignorance in any developed country. The American school system is a complete disgrace, but that isn't an independent variable, it's autocorrelated. The institution as a whole (including textbook publishers, teachers' colleges, unions, etc.) homeostatically resists all concerted efforts -- of which there have been many -- to raise its educational standards.
This is because unlike Japan or any European country, the US is and always has been, from early in the 19th century if not before, a peasant country; the overwhelming proportion of immigration came and still comes from the peasant strata of European (and now worldwide) societies. I don't think this election (or the whole trajectory leading to it that you describe) can be understood in isolation from this particular aspect of American exceptionalism -- which underlies BOTH the woke excesses that triggered the loss of trust AND the Trumpian overreaction to them.
While I agree with much of this article, to my mind it fails to consider what I think to be the essential problem here. America has just elected to the presidency, for the first time in our history, a man who has long since proven to be utterly disdainful of the democratic process, the Constitution of the United States, and the rule of law.
To do so, for whatever reason that any one of us may find sufficiently compelling is to deny the very idea of America. Our failure here is that we have failed, as a nation, to educate ourselves and our children to the nature of the country we were founded to be.
That portions of our founding ethos were flawed cannot be questioned, but the basic purpose of the nation the Founders created was to discover if ‘We the People’ could together find enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up. That we have signally failed to do, and so we have elected a man who has never in his public life shown any of those characteristics. No amount of excusing any one of us simply because we are unhappy with our lot in life is sufficient.
As Americans we were promised only the chance to maintain the great idea of America - to ask, as John F Kennedy reminded us, not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country. In electing Donald Trump we are asking our country to promise to do something for us without doing anything for the preservation our country’s great promise, That is the nature of our failure.
"America has just elected to the presidency, for the first time in our history, a man who has long since proven to be utterly disdainful of the democratic process, the Constitution of the United States, and the rule of law."
They elected someone who was open about it, but just the latest in a long string of people who are actually disdainful of the democratic process. I think you wildly underestimate how sick ordinary people were of 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss'. I think part of his appeal is that he is too stupid and incompetent to actually get anything done, which is a bonus if you believe that the ratchet only ever moves one way, regardless of who is nominally in charge.
Well, let’s look at the presidents I’ve known. Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, two George Bushes, Barak O’Bama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump. Hard to imagine a group of men so ill defined as ‘new boss same as the old boss.’
In any case, people who blame politicians for their unhappiness always forget that ‘we the people’ put them there. As the cartoon character Pogo once noted, “We have met the enemy, and they is us."
Oh, please. Mounk neglects to factor in the money poured in by billionaire technocrats such as Peter Thiel, the lies of right-wing media who, for many deliberately ignorant Trump voters, is their only source of information, and Russian bomb threats at polling stations, which may have cost thousands of votes. Don't blame the Democrat party, or any party, for that matter. Parties can only attempt to persuade, not control. The majority of voters exercised free will and voted for fascism, perhaps ignorantly. We may not have another chance in 4 years. Democracy may be gone.
Dein Kommentar trifft den Nagel auf den Kopf. Allerdings frage ich mich verzweifelt, ob der Begriff des Populismus das Problem der gegenwärtigen Entwicklung wirklich tauglich beschreibt. Ich denke, es wäre an der Zeit diese Frag einer gründlichen Kritik zu unterziehen. Ich sehe einen tiefgreifenden gesellschaftlichen Wandel, der hervorgerufen ist durch das, was man fälschlich und verharmlosend "Digitalisierung" nennt, das aber in Wirklichkeit nichts anderes ist, als "Kybernetik". Wer oder was hier tatsächlich steuert zu untersuchen und beim Namen zu nennen, das wäre eine intellektuelle Tat. Nichts desto weniger: herzlichen Glückwunsch, lieber Yascha, zu Deiner Analyse!
When we talk about the absolute need for the Democrats to reinvent their party, we should also consider whether the Republicans have reinvented their party for the long term or become a cult of personality for the short term. Evidence for change in both parties will come as soon as the 2026 mid-term elections.
Yascha is absolutely right that it is time for Democrats look into the mirror and ask some hard questions. However, the soul searching needs to be expanded beyond the political establishment and into the ruling class in general, including the institutions that Persuasion is associated and allied with. I have read columns after columns by Persuation that skirt the deeper issues beyond the loss of trust in ruling elites by average Americans. None has been willing to look into the mirror themselves. It is simply not enough to bemoan the loss of high trust American society of yesterday without diagnozing the why and explore the how to restore it. It is simply not enough to protect democracy without understanding what democracy is for. The social and cultural reality of our time require us to reflect more deepely and innovate more daringly than the rulign elites have heretheto been willing to. This election should be a wake-up call for the elites if they wish to stay relevant.
Entirely agree. However history should warn us that the high elite ruling class whenever they have become so detached from the earthy realities of the majority, do not wake up. They simply double down on abuses of their power.
I think the existence of Persuasion (and The Free Press and The Dispatch and others) will probably do more than any specific advice you offer. You, by your talents and training, seem to be a proposer of Grand Theories. You handicap the fore- and back-sliding of Democracy at the level of nations and the whole world. I sometimes find these things fascinating and explanatory -- depending on the quality of the ideas and the writing -- but how often are they actually predictive? Not often, I think.
My view is closer to ground-level and what's missing here is sensible information. The problem is not the lack of trust in our sense-making institutions. I don't want or need to take their word for anything, I just want them to do their jobs of making sense, leaving me to decide based on my lying eyes and common sense how skeptical to be about what they're saying. That they have abandoned that vocation for activism -- on all sides of the political spectrum -- is to my mind our biggest structural problem and why these new publications give me a modicum of hope.
I'll try to explain a bit better, though as I indicated, I'm not much for Grand Theories. I have no need to "trust" the media or the CDC in the sense of considering them authoritative. I would like to trust them like I trust my grocer to not intentionally short-change me. I'll check the restaurant bill every-so-often for items that I didn't order, but since I rarely find any I can save time and effort by generally accepting them as is. It's a Bayesian thing -- every time an assumption proves right or wrong affects my confidence in it going forward. That's why at this point I wouldn't trust the New York Times for baseball scores (if they publish baseball scores and if I read them). I'll listen to the CDC and read the Great Barrington Declaration and, taking into account the arguments and the backgrounds of the authors and the attitude that comes across and whatever else I perceive, decide what to do (I'll also take into account the gravity of the decision, the likelihood that I can figure it out and the effort needed to do so). I don't have the desire to outsource my decision making or to believe I can know things that I really can't.
That's why I wrote here recently of my skepticism towards your democracy-handicapping and have written similarly about other cases of people getting all worked up over things of whose truth and significance they have no reason to be confident -- which description covers at least 95% of our political discourse. Perhaps if the sense-makers were to rediscover the value of professional ethics and personal probity (i.e. trustworthiness), we could dial all that down.
- i think it’s fair to characterize my family as historically center right or maybe even right.
- Everyone went never Trump or democrats when Trump emerged, except one.
- One family member - my brother - voted for Trump and was adamantly pro-Trump. It caused a pretty deep rift among the family and especially siblings.
- My wife is from Lviv and moved to the USA at a young age after the Soviet Union fell. They were fleeing violence from the early version of the FSB. This violence culminated with a machine gun being held to my wife’s head when she was five years old.
- This can get deeply personal really quickly. And it did, even with a brother.
- There was a year or more - maybe two - where I did not speak to my brother (and vice versa).
- I genuinely believe that many of the reasons I voted for Biden ended up not being honored. As a lawyer, I found the abuses of the democratic processes to often be just as egregious as Trump’s — they were often just more subtle and less obvious to anyone that did not have a close eye on the federal agencies and did not have experienced context for what is normal and what is decidedly not normal. Was it as bad as the worse of Trump’s abuses? Maybe not. But it often seemed far more extensive. I don’t know if this was Biden or just people slipping stuff past an old man who couldn’t monitor everything. But it deeply disturbed a lot of liberal leaning lawyers I know.
- This deeply angered me because it’s not what I voted for. I still respected the Biden, particularly in light of his masterclass performance on Ukraine.
- Nonetheless, I spent these past few years seeking to learn. As part of trying to restore my relationship with my brother, I worked hard to try to understand Trump’s appeal.
- You know what? Trump is often remarkably on point in so many ways. But this is a “vibe” or “intuitive” level understanding rather than the kind of deep policy knowledge that most of us are accustomed to in leaders.
- Thing is…Trump’s instincts identified a lot of problems that a lot of people who were engaged in group think on fundamental issues just missed or dismissed or didn’t talk about.
- Here’s an example: Globalism. It’s clear that in the aggregate it’s good for the USA. But - as a nation and society - we didn’t take its localized costs seriously enough.
- How many decades did one administration after the other spend oxygen talking about job retraining to help the rust belt out? But no one really worried about the total absence of middle class jobs in the rust belt to replace the jobs that were lost.
- The expectation - clearly - is that people would move to find their new job and opportunity. Except that there is absolutely no data to suggest this is a remotely reasonable expectation. Most people spend most of their life living very close to their birthplace and if they move away, they tend to move back.
- At best our approaches to address the localized costs of globalism were largely doomed to fail. At worst, we never really cared.
- Many Medicare and Medicaid budget cuts that occurred over the years were just screwing hospitals by discounting what the government paid them. As a result, hospitals receive payments that are below their cost of providing care. There are areas of the country that predominantly rely on Medicare and Medicaid. This quickly drove these hospitals under, resulting in dramatically reduced availability to healthcare, shortened lifespans and had the additional benefit of gutting what was often the primary employer in the area. In short, it causes concentrated devastation.
- This kind of so-called budget cut became big-time in 1997. But the two parties do go back to this trick from time to time.
- The area in question that is most affected? You guessed it: Trump Country. This is one of the reasons why rural care is abysmal in the USA.
- Yes there is frustration about shouldering defense for NATO without much help. But I am not sure how deep that frustration really runs.
- I do not think people fully understand the extent to which we also subsidize the healthcare for the globe.
- The WTO is supposed to protect patent rights. i.e., the monopoly pricing power afforded by patent rights. Except, after agreeing to this construct, every other country runs around and puts in place a single payor system or other mechanism to cap prices or regulate prices. And apparently these devices that gut the purpose of creating worldwide patent protections are not a problem under the WTO because it’s domestic policy.
- So who is left holding the bag? The U.S. The sole sucker left supporting a free market structure designed to fund R&D into much needed pharmaceuticals. This kind of research is incredibly expensive and even the U.S. buckles under the strain of paying for the planet’s pharmaceutical R&D costs. It’s also not just prescription costs. Because drug costs are the primary driver in other - more material components- such as inpatient / outpatient care and in long-term care. In these kinds of context, it’s hidden as a hard to find sub-bullet, such as doctor administered drug. Or some such. But it’s a huge driver in the cost of US healthcare differential vs other countries.
- The numbers here are staggering and people would be frothing at the mouth if they fully understood the cost internalized by the U.S. to keep research going for the globe.
- But while people may not fully understand the ins and outs, 1/3rd of Americans have stopped taking their prescription drugs because they can’t afford them. People do understand this kind of stuff. And they do understand being unable to retire because it requires saving an exorbitant amount just to die with grace and dignity.
- They know something’s different and this isn’t how it used to be.
- In addition; this also impacts American companies. Where did American manufacturing go? Well. It didn’t have to go anywhere. Except part of the WTO is that there aren’t supposed to be subsidies. Except lots of countries can quite cheaply nationalize healthcare and they don’t have to worry about a socialist reform breaking the market because the U.S. is there to keep the market functioning. All the benefits of socialism with none of the risks or costs of human propensity to break the market with a command and control approach.
- The kicker? Their companies now operate without the cost of healthcare as an expense. BOOM. They can immediately produce high quality products at lower prices than American manufacturing.
- All of a sudden there is this big sucking sound in the middle class as American companies have to move manufacturing offshore to stay alive.
- Huh? So the U.S. subsidizes the world and supports the WTO while the world turns around and plants a big knife in the U.S. back. And somehow this is all fine under the WTO? Okie dokie.
- But the U.S. retaliating economically for this kind of behavior? That’s a problem under the WTO. Because of course it is.
- I don’t know that Trump fully understands this stuff. He certainly hasn’t messaged it well. But this is really only part of the picture and it’s pretty god damned egregious.
-People often aren’t going to be able to figure out exactly how they are getting screwed. But they are also often intelligent enough to intuitively know when they are getting screwed.
- That’s America First. That’s MAGA. That’s why this movement is here to stay until things get fixed in a way that is more equitable for Americans.
- When I worked through a lot of those stuff, well, suddenly voting for Trump seemed a whole lot less crazy.
- Do I like Trump? No. Have I voted for Trump? No. But the Trump movement - as a political and economic movement devoid of its cult of personality - makes a helluva lot of sense.
- It’s time for the world to pay their own way. The U.S. is done doing it. Honestly, everyone is
lucky there is a pacifist element to isolationism bc this quickly sends steam flying out of the ears.
- Perhaps at first it was about the Cold War. Then maybe it was all in pursuit of establishing of a new world order of peace and utopia. Funded by America because otherwise we would never get there. Kind of sounds like that well-intentioned adventure in Somalia that had nothing to do with foreign policy interests and ended with Blackhawk Down.
- At any rate, I think the U.S. is done subsidizing the leisure and budget flexibility of other nations. Rightfully so.
Yascha is correct. His book is correct. All that the Democratic Party needed to do was offer a candidate that was competent and moderate. The list of don’ts is long. Don’t warn about threats to democracy while undemocratically selecting a candidate. Don’t lie about the president’s health. Don’t be too cozy with the spy agencies. Don’t abuse the justice system. Don’t spend like maniacs and load future generations with debt. In short, just be less of a threat than Donald Trump. The fact that the managerial class cannot do what should be the easiest task in the world justifies mistrust of them.
I agree completely with your essay. I feel that the Democratic party, along with many of the most respected institutions of the country, has been captured by an extremist fringe of the cultural left. I hope that Trump's victory leads liberals to recognize the threat posed by their own identitarian fringe.
As always, a clearheaded take from Yascha Mounk. We really do have the mistakes of the Democratic party to thank for these results - another four years of Trump's incorrigible narcissism, his vile, hateful discourse and no doubt attempts to corrupt our democratic institutions, with congress behind him. I hope that, this time around, the Democratic party will learn from its mistakes and start running candidates and campaigns that actually inspire a majority of Americans again and align with their common-sense values. There are so many Americans who voted for Trump who would have been happy to vote for a Democrat instead, if only the Democrats hadn't made themselves so unelectable. (For the record, I voted Democrat down the ballot but wrote in alternatives for Pres/VP because I saw Harris for what she was, a Trump enabler).
Thank you for calling out the refusal for so many to step outside of their own political silos. I could see this cultural division in US public discourse dangerously deepening in 2000/2001. At that time the silencing of anyone who raised questions about where the US was headed, from any political background, was both self righteous and fierce.
How much of this conflict and division is rooted in unresolved historical injustices and how much in present day hyper capitalist’s imposed social iniquities remains a challenge to analyse.
You’re right that Democrats need to take a hard look at themselves, and above all, at the motivations of those who support him (which I discussed in my own essay Understanding Trump’s Enduring Appeal, published three days before the election).
That said, what we’re witnessing is much larger than this election or any specific politician. If history is our guide, we won’t escape the turmoil, regardless of who holds office. The details and pace may vary, but the cyclical pattern remains: birth, chaos, death, rebirth. Perhaps the words of the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold (from 1855) describe our uncertain and turbulent times more accurately: we are "wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”
And in this liminal space, we find ourselves caught in a social upheaval. The tug-of-war is between those determined to preserve the old national-industrial-religious order and those pushing for a radically different future. Inevitably, we are heading into a new Dark Age.
I think you're right that the American academic and professional elite were less resistant to the tyranny of political correctness that triggered the loss of trust you highlight than their European counterparts, but this is partly due to the sclerotic paralysis of European institutions -- they just CAN'T change as fast and as recklessly as the American ones (unfortunately) did. But there is another component to this that you omit, and that is probably at least as important as the woke stuff. That is the degree of just plain ignorance in the American public more generally, which far exceeds the degree of ignorance in any developed country. The American school system is a complete disgrace, but that isn't an independent variable, it's autocorrelated. The institution as a whole (including textbook publishers, teachers' colleges, unions, etc.) homeostatically resists all concerted efforts -- of which there have been many -- to raise its educational standards.
This is because unlike Japan or any European country, the US is and always has been, from early in the 19th century if not before, a peasant country; the overwhelming proportion of immigration came and still comes from the peasant strata of European (and now worldwide) societies. I don't think this election (or the whole trajectory leading to it that you describe) can be understood in isolation from this particular aspect of American exceptionalism -- which underlies BOTH the woke excesses that triggered the loss of trust AND the Trumpian overreaction to them.
While I agree with much of this article, to my mind it fails to consider what I think to be the essential problem here. America has just elected to the presidency, for the first time in our history, a man who has long since proven to be utterly disdainful of the democratic process, the Constitution of the United States, and the rule of law.
To do so, for whatever reason that any one of us may find sufficiently compelling is to deny the very idea of America. Our failure here is that we have failed, as a nation, to educate ourselves and our children to the nature of the country we were founded to be.
That portions of our founding ethos were flawed cannot be questioned, but the basic purpose of the nation the Founders created was to discover if ‘We the People’ could together find enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up. That we have signally failed to do, and so we have elected a man who has never in his public life shown any of those characteristics. No amount of excusing any one of us simply because we are unhappy with our lot in life is sufficient.
As Americans we were promised only the chance to maintain the great idea of America - to ask, as John F Kennedy reminded us, not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country. In electing Donald Trump we are asking our country to promise to do something for us without doing anything for the preservation our country’s great promise, That is the nature of our failure.
"America has just elected to the presidency, for the first time in our history, a man who has long since proven to be utterly disdainful of the democratic process, the Constitution of the United States, and the rule of law."
They elected someone who was open about it, but just the latest in a long string of people who are actually disdainful of the democratic process. I think you wildly underestimate how sick ordinary people were of 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss'. I think part of his appeal is that he is too stupid and incompetent to actually get anything done, which is a bonus if you believe that the ratchet only ever moves one way, regardless of who is nominally in charge.
Well, let’s look at the presidents I’ve known. Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, two George Bushes, Barak O’Bama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump. Hard to imagine a group of men so ill defined as ‘new boss same as the old boss.’
In any case, people who blame politicians for their unhappiness always forget that ‘we the people’ put them there. As the cartoon character Pogo once noted, “We have met the enemy, and they is us."
Oh, please. Mounk neglects to factor in the money poured in by billionaire technocrats such as Peter Thiel, the lies of right-wing media who, for many deliberately ignorant Trump voters, is their only source of information, and Russian bomb threats at polling stations, which may have cost thousands of votes. Don't blame the Democrat party, or any party, for that matter. Parties can only attempt to persuade, not control. The majority of voters exercised free will and voted for fascism, perhaps ignorantly. We may not have another chance in 4 years. Democracy may be gone.
Re. Trump & his trigger rhetoric, cp. George Lakoff https://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2016/lakoff_trump.html
Dein Kommentar trifft den Nagel auf den Kopf. Allerdings frage ich mich verzweifelt, ob der Begriff des Populismus das Problem der gegenwärtigen Entwicklung wirklich tauglich beschreibt. Ich denke, es wäre an der Zeit diese Frag einer gründlichen Kritik zu unterziehen. Ich sehe einen tiefgreifenden gesellschaftlichen Wandel, der hervorgerufen ist durch das, was man fälschlich und verharmlosend "Digitalisierung" nennt, das aber in Wirklichkeit nichts anderes ist, als "Kybernetik". Wer oder was hier tatsächlich steuert zu untersuchen und beim Namen zu nennen, das wäre eine intellektuelle Tat. Nichts desto weniger: herzlichen Glückwunsch, lieber Yascha, zu Deiner Analyse!
When we talk about the absolute need for the Democrats to reinvent their party, we should also consider whether the Republicans have reinvented their party for the long term or become a cult of personality for the short term. Evidence for change in both parties will come as soon as the 2026 mid-term elections.
Elon will trash JDV and become emperor. Practice bowing.