The
world is taking its revenge against elites. When will America's wake
up?
Thomas Frank
Tuesday 19 July 2016
16.15 BST
Despite
the shocks – Brexit, Trump, Dallas – a complacent political class
shows no sign of changing its venal ways. The consequences will be
dire
A snapshot of
America in the middle of June 2016. It is several days before the
first great shock of the summer, the Brexit vote, and here in
America, all is serene. The threat posed by Senator Bernie Sanders
has been suppressed. The Republicans have chosen a preposterous
windbag to lead them; the consensus is that he will be a pushover.
For all the doubts and dissent of the last year, the leadership
faction of the country’s professional class seem to have once again
come out on top, and they are ready to accept the gratitude of the
nation.
And so President
Barack Obama did an interview with Business Week in which he was
congratulated for his stewardship of the economy and asked “what
industries” he might choose to join upon his retirement from the
White House. The president replied as follows:
… what I will
say is that – just to bring things full circle about innovation –
the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital
pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I
find really satisfying.
In relating this
anecdote, I am not aiming to infuriate because the man we elected in
2008 to get tough with high finance and shut the revolving door was
now talking about taking his own walk through that door and getting a
job in finance. No. My object here is to describe the confident,
complacent mood of the country’s ruling class in the middle of last
month. So let us continue.
On the morning after
British voters chose to leave the European Union, Obama was in
California addressing an audience at Stanford University, a school
often celebrated these days as the pre-eminent educational
institution of Silicon Valley. The occasion of the president’s
remarks was the annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit, and the
substance of his speech was the purest globaloney, flavored with a
whiff of vintage dotcom ebullience. Obama marveled at the smart young
creative people who start tech businesses. He deplored bigotry as an
impediment that sometimes keeps these smart creative people from
succeeding. He demanded that more power be given to the smart young
creatives who are transforming the world. Keywords included
“innovation”, “interconnection”, and of course “Zuckerberg”,
the Facebook CEO, who has appeared with Obama on so many occasions
and whose company is often used as shorthand by Democrats to signify
everything that is wonderful about our era.
Everyone was down
with the international entrepreneuriat in those sunny days. Less than
a week after Obama’s salute to them at Stanford, Hillary Clinton
paid a visit to an innovative co-working space in Denver and rolled
out a plan for rewarding this very same cohort of clear-eyed,
tech-respecting citizens. “Today’s dynamic and competitive global
economy demands an ambitious national commitment to technology,
innovation and entrepreneurship,” declared the “briefing” her
campaign released on that occasion; to make that commitment, Clinton
proposed deferring the student loans of young people who start
businesses … because I guess the promise of tech riches isn’t
incentive enough.
It felt so right,
this Democratic infatuation with the triumphant young global
professional. So right, and for a certain class of successful
Americans, so very, very obvious. What you do with winners like these
is you celebrate them. Winners need to win. Winners need to have
their loan payments deferred, to have venture capital directed their
way by a former president. That all these gestures might actually
represent self-serving behavior by an insular elite does not appear
to have crossed our leaders’ minds in those complacent days of June
2016.
But by the time of
Hillary Clinton’s speech the happy, complacent mood was already
beginning to crumble. Just a few days before her salute to tech
winners came Brexit, a blunt and ugly rejection of some of her
cohort’s most cherished ideas. A short while later came the FBI’s
pronouncement on Hillary Clinton’s email practices, removing the
threat of prosecution but not the aura of outrageous misbehavior. And
then, like a drumbeat of horror, came a series of police shootings of
black men, followed quickly by the murder of five policemen in
Dallas. Over it all hung the fear that these events might somehow
propel this unthinkable man, Donald Trump, into the White House.
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The world of
accepted ideas was coming apart, and no one caught the new mood
better than the New York Times’s David Brooks, a man who has spent
his career describing the inner lives of the nation’s prosperous
white-collar elite. Ordinarily a dealer in witty aphorisms and
upper-crust humor, Brooks now wrote a column entitled “Are We On
the Path to National Ruin?” in which he speculated darkly about the
possibility of fascism in America. “The crack of some abyss opened
up for a moment by the end of last week,” he wrote. “It’s very
easy to see this country on a nightmare trajectory.”
Brooks-in-despair is
a pitiful sight, and one can’t help but sympathize. But what’s
really remarkable about the response to these shocks of people like
him has been their inability to acknowledge that their own satisfied
white-collar class might be part of the problem. On this they are
utterly in denial and whatever the disaster, the answer they give is
always … more of the same. More “innovation”. More venture
capital. More sharp young global Stanford entrepreneurs. There is no
problem that more people like they themselves can’t solve.
Consider the New
York Times think-piece on the Brexit that ran on 7 July. It mocked
the British government for being dominated by a tiny, incestuous
circle of friends, but then reassured readers that things simply
aren’t like that here in the USA: “It’s as if President Obama’s
inner circle consisted almost entirely of his friends, neighbors and
fellow Harvard graduates,” supposedly an impossibility. I had to
read that passage over again and again to understand it, so great was
the cognitive dissonance. President Obama’s inner circle does
consist of his fellow Harvard graduates; encouraging Obama to appoint
such people and documenting their adventures in government has been a
pundit obsession for years. Applauding Bill Clinton for doing the
same with his Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law friends was also once a
standard journalistic trope.
And now, here it
comes again. David Brooks, trying to see a way out of the “national
ruin” that hovers over us, turns back to the foundational story of
how our best and brightest rose to the challenge at the turn of the
last century:
New sorts of
political leaders emerged. In city after city, progressive reformers
cleaned up politics and professionalized the civil service. Theodore
Roosevelt went into elective politics at a time when few Ivy League
types thought it was decent to do so.
Would it change
Brooks’s mind to show him one of his own columns praising the man
who now presides over our drift to “national ruin” for doing
exactly what Brooks here suggests – ie, bringing many Ivy League
types into politics with him? I doubt it, any more than it would be
to ask Obama himself to take the problem of stagnant blue-collar
wages into consideration before declaring, yet again, his admiration
for the deeds of the global entrepreneuriat.
It’s easy to see
the problems presented by a cliquish elite when they happen
elsewhere. In the countries of Old Europe, maybe, powerful
politicians sell out grotesquely to Goldman Sachs; but when an
idealistic American president announces that he wants to seek a
career in venture capital, we have trouble saying much of anything.
In Britain, maybe, they have an “establishment”; but what we have
in America, we think, are talented people who deserve to be on top.
One wonders what kind of a shock it will take to shake us out of this
meritocratic complacency once and for all.
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