Sublime

The winners in Smart America have withdrawn from the national life of their fellow Americans. Christopher Lasch, writing in the early 1990s when this withdrawal was young, called it “the revolt of the elites.” Between meritocracy and democracy, it’s the first that dominates their waking hours, commands their unthinking devotion, and drives them,

“Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil.” A demagogue can become a tyrant, but it’s the people who put him

Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption

In retrospect, the evidence pointing to the 2016 election as the first regeneracy of the Millennial Crisis seems unmistakable.

The social foundation of this era was an urban industrial working class. That class comprised many migrants from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe, or their children and grandchildren, and southern whites who were struck by the Depression but actually had never recovered from the Civil War. They were either already organized or organizing

Palin kept looking for a second act that never came. She suffered the pathetic fate of being a celebrity ahead of her time. For with her candidacy something new came into our national life that was also traditional. She was a western populist who embodied white identity politics. In her proud ignorance, unrestrained narcissism, and contempt for the