The work that really drove this home for me was “A Century of Protest,” a 2018 video feature produced by the New Yorker magazine that was comprised of footage of protests throughout American history. When I watched the video—after sitting through an advertisement from Prada—I saw some fifty-eight different clips of historical footage covering everything from suffragette marches of 1913 to the big 1987 ACT UP protest, with a special emphasis on the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, and present-day Black Lives Matter confrontations. Communists and even the Ku Klux Klan were represented in this all-inclusive roll call of protest. But mainstream organized labor was not. In this version of history there is evidently no room for the AFL-CIO’s enormous 1981 Solidarity Day rally on the National Mall, or for the Flint sit-down strike, or for the Memphis sanitation workers, or for red-shirted teachers in Arizona. The old WPA mural has been airbrushed over. *
One explanation for this omission, no doubt, is the much-commented-upon defection of white, working-class voters from the Democratic Party to Trump’s Republicans. For a certain kind of Democratic partisan, this development has had the predictable consequence of rendering unsayable anything that smacks of traditional class grievances. Talk about the deindustrialization of vast parts of the country, the decimation of unions, the destruction of small towns by monopoly forces, and this kind of person hears “Trump voter.” The enlightened liberal shuns such people. They are to be scolded, not championed.
Then there is the straightforward element of class. When affluent suburban lawns advertise a form of liberalism that has been cleansed of solidarity with workers, the self-interest of the gesture is obvious. When a history of protest is sponsored by a luxury fashion company, the results are, as they say in France, overdetermined.
This pattern of erasure has muddled liberal conversation on economic issues for years. Take the critical matter of trade: On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump made a point of loudly (if incoherently) criticizing the nation’s trade agreements, deals that had been strongly opposed by labor unions but also happened to be the proud, defining achievement of the global-minded centrist wing of the Democratic Party. Trump was obviously using the issue to drive a wedge between the Democrats and one of their biggest constituent groups. At the time, however, liberal pundits pretty much ignored the matter.
Once Trump had won, a panicked punditburo swung into action, insisting in a crescendo of consensus that trade had little to do with the country’s deindustrialization; that it was pretty much all due to technological factors; that what happened to manufacturing workers was therefore unavoidable. After the dust had settled, many commentators changed their mind on this question, quietly acknowledging the disastrous consequences of ill-crafted trade deals. But what matters for our purposes is the initial reaction, which was virtually unanimous and unfolded along the same lines as in 1896: the rationality of working-class grievances had to be denied. 12
The outcome of the 2016 election, the same punditburo insisted, could not and must not be explained by reference to economic factors or to long-term, class-related trends. Yes, lots of Trump voters said they were motivated by economic concerns; yes, Trump talked about economic issues all the time; and yes, the economic stagnation of Trump-voting areas is obvious to anyone who has gone there. And also: every time our post-partisan liberal leaders deregulated banks and then turned around and told working-class people that their misfortunes were attributable to their poor education … every time they did this and then thought to themselves, “They have nowhere else to go” … they made the Trump disaster a little more likely.
But to acknowledge those plain facts was to come dangerously close to voicing the intolerable heresy that the D.C. opinion cartel dubbed the “economic anxiety” thesis—the idea that people voted for Trump out of understandable worries about wages or opioids or unemployment or deindustrialization. The reason this was intolerable, one suspects, is because it suggested that there was a rational element to certain groups’ support for Trump and also that there was something less than A+ about the professional-class Camelot over which the Democrats presided for eight years. Just as in 1896, the rationality of certain low-class voters was ruled out from the start.
My point here is not to suggest that Trump is a “very stable genius,” as he likes to say, or that he led a genuine populist insurgency; in my opinion, he isn’t and he didn’t. What I mean to show is that the message of anti-populism is the same as ever: the lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice. The difference today is that enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism.
* * *
IN 1966, AFTER losing a race for a California state senate seat, the political prankster Dick Tuck went on TV to concede and griped, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”
Today the humor behind Tuck’s legendary line is not so funny. Rebuking the people for delivering awkward election results became a serious, mainstream exercise after 2016. I mean by this something distinct from the social-science worries about populism that I discussed in the introduction: this was a red-hot moral rebuke of the millions. America was a wicked land and its people were bastards: racists, sexists, facilitators of evil who actually deserved the postindustrial and opioid-saturated bleakness of their red-state lives. *
It started with Hillary Clinton’s disastrous decision, while campaigning in September 2016, to describe certain Trump supporters as “deplorables” and “irredeemables” because they were “racist, sexist, homophobic,” and so on. Clinton, of course, was a practicing politician; she realized her blunder immediately and clarified that her dispute was with Trump himself and not the rank-and-file American.
Mainstream liberal commentators, on the other hand, never looked back. “Resentment is no excuse for bald-faced stupidity,” was Garrison Keillor’s assessment of the results, published in the Washington Post two days after the election. If working people were no longer moving upward in life, he continued, they had only themselves to blame. Maybe they should “encourage good habits” and make sure “the kids aren’t plugged into electronics day and night” instead of “whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance.”
In an essay published a few days later, Slate columnist Jamelle Bouie suggested that it was “morally grotesque” to “insist Trump’s backers are good people.” The instantly famous title of his effort was, “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter”; his subtitle declared, “They Don’t Deserve Your Empathy.”
Writing in the Boston Globe a month later, NYU professor Charles Taylor insisted that Trump voters should feel “shame” for their ignorance. Republicans believed all manner of falsehoods, he thundered, “and still this imperviousness to fact pales next to the racism and xenophobia and misogyny—in other words, the moral ignorance—that Trump’s supporters wallowed in.”
As the ignominy of Trump’s supporters expanded, the saintliness of his vanquished opponent gleamed ever brighter. Writing in the Guardian the week after the election, the literary scholar Sarah Churchwell insisted that what happened in November 2016 was in no way attributable to any shortcoming of Hillary Clinton. “It is time to stop suggesting … that Clinton failed us,” she announced. “The truth is, we failed her.” In not electing Clinton president, the people themselves had fallen short.
None of these were the views of radicals. Each of these statements—and I chose these from hundreds of similar expressions of moral disgust—was the product of a reputable writer or a high-ranking academic, published or broadcast by an established news outlet. It was our country’s best-informed opinionators who were most determined to believe in the essential monstrousness of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Why did these liberals adopt this ferociously anti-populist line so quickly? There were many conventional explanations for Trump’s catastrophic win other than the general wickedness of the Americ
an people. Surely some role was played by Trump’s stand on trade and his rhetorical commitment to social-insurance programs, both highly unusual positions for a Republican, which might have made voters more willing to take a chance on him than they would have on, say, Mitt Romney. There were his promises of populist-style reform, none of them sincere, but which sometimes sounded genuinely good. I mean, who doesn’t despise the “power structure”? Who doesn’t want to “drain the swamp” of Washington? Who doesn’t want their mortgaged farm or their postindustrial town or their crumbling neighborhood to be made “great again”? 13
But acknowledging that some Trump voters might be desperate and otherwise decent people became a thing unsayable in the small world of America’s opinion class. * The total depravity of those people was the only acceptable explanation. Hillary Clinton had used the word “irredeemable” to describe some Trump voters, and her moralistic judgment far outlived her campaign. Trump’s rise was not about politics, it was about sin, and it was the task of progressives to scold the unrighteous for their iniquity.
To scold … and conspicuously withhold forgiveness. In what was surely the strangest Trump-era fad of them all, various high-minded progressive commentators announced that they so hated the world that they were never, ever going to absolve those who had trespassed politically against them. Reasoning in 2019 that “conservatives spat in our face and elected an abusive, racist, misogynist criminal,” the author and blogger Amanda Marcotte advised against forgiving rank-and-file Republican voters. Should liberals just let matters slide as we had allegedly done with people who voted for George W. Bush, she asked rhetorically,
Or should progressives impose social consequences, declining friendships and putting a chill on family relationships, in order to send the message that supporting Trump was not OK and will not be shrugged off as a harmless lark?
Blacklisting was one of the weapons to which this ferocious moral crusade inevitably turned. First, liberal thought leaders called upon private businesses to shun Trump administration employees when those worthies left government for the private sector; then, at almost exactly the same time, centrist Democrats tried to deploy this powerful new weapon against the party’s left wing, with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announcing that it would refuse to do business with any political consultancies that worked for challengers to Democratic incumbents. 14 Neither of these episodes, let us note, was an attempt to stop Washington’s notorious “revolving door,” only to prevent certain kinds of people from passing through it. To be sure, I have no sympathy for Trump officials who are prevented from cashing in after their “service” is completed. What I find shocking is how comfortable liberals have become with the weapons of the boss.
A minor yet telling illustration of this newfound comfort came up a few years ago when Lena Dunham—a much-celebrated TV star who spoke at the 2016 Democratic convention—happened to be delayed in an airport somewhere. While wandering the concourses, Dunham decided to contact corporate management and turn in some airline employees she thought she overheard making transphobic remarks—and doing all of it on social media, so the whole world could admire her as she snitched. “At this moment in history we should be teaching our employees about love and inclusivity,” she tweeted. I was struck by that “our employees” line: not only did Dunham take for granted that her followers had employees but that employment is a relationship in which “love and inclusivity” are handed down by bosses to workers.
Needless to say, Dunham was applauded for her action; Teen Vogue opined that “it’s important to recognize the importance of standing up to transphobia.” 15
Indeed it is. But might there have been a different way to go about it, a way that showed more ideological patience? I can’t help but think that Dunham would have achieved a better result had she actually introduced herself to the transphobic people in person and talked it over with them. * Urging a boss to punish a worker for an overheard remark is the kind of officiousness that people sometimes resent.
Similarly, scolding people for having morally obtuse politics may be the very worst way to get them to change those politics. As of this writing, Trump voters have remained remarkably loyal to the man they chose in 2016, far more loyal than voters for other politicians who (like Trump) turned out to be incompetent or corrupt. One reason for this stubbornness, I suspect, is the constant hailstorm of rebuke and shame that has been directed against those voters from on high for the last four years. In other words, the scolding style may actually have served to confirm them in their dreadful choice rather than to persuade them to move away from it. 16
What is certain is that the liberalism of scolding will never give rise to the kind of mass movement that this country needs. It is almost entirely a politics of individual righteousness, an angry refusal of Goodwyn’s “ideological patience.” Its appeal comes not from the prospect of democratizing the economy but from the psychic satisfaction of wagging a finger in some stupid proletarian’s face, forever.
* * *
WHAT THESE EXAMPLES show us is a generation of centrist liberals collectively despairing over democracy itself. After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of “the people” altogether. 17
America was founded with the phrase “We the People,” but William Galston, co-inventor of the concept of the Learning Class, urges us to get over our obsession with popular sovereignty. As he writes in Anti-Pluralism , his 2018 attack on populism, “We should set aside this narrow and complacent conviction; there are viable alternatives to the people as sources of legitimacy.” 18
There certainly are. In the pages of this book, we have seen anti-populists explain that they deserve to rule because they are better educated, or wealthier, or more rational, or harder working. The contemporary culture of constant moral scolding is in perfect accordance with this way of thinking; it is a new iteration of the old elitist fantasy.
The liberal establishment I am describing in this chapter is anti-populist not merely because it dislikes Donald Trump—who is in no way a genuine populist—but because it is populism’s opposite in nearly every particular. Its political ambition for the people is not to bring them together in a reform movement but to scold them, to shame them, and to teach them to defer to their superiors. It doesn’t seek to punish Wall Street or Silicon Valley; indeed, the same bunch that now rebukes and cancels and blacklists could not find a way to punish elite bankers after the global financial crisis back in 2009. This liberalism desires to merge with these institutions of private privilege, to enlist their power for what it imagines to be “good.” The wealthy liberal neighborhoods of America have become utopias of scolding because scolding is how this kind of concentrated power relates to ordinary citizens. This isn’t “working-class authoritarianism”; it’s the opposite. Those people on top, this kind of liberalism says: They have more than you because they deserve to have more than you. Those fine people dominate you because they are better than you.
* * *
PERHAPS THE MOST lasting distinction between populism and its opposite is one of mood. Populism was and is relentlessly optimistic—about people, about political possibilities, about life, and about America in general.
Anti-populism is all about despair. Its attitude toward ordinary humans is bitter. Its hope for human redemption is nil. Its vision of the common good is bleak. Its dark mood gives us books with titles like In Defense of Elitism and Against Democracy.
Its darkest moments of all come when it contemplates climate change. I have in mind a much-discussed op-ed the New York Times ran in December 2018, some two years after the election of Donald Trump shredded the tidy worldview of the Learning Class. The article I’m thinking of was not a political statement per se, but the philosophy professor who wrote it, Todd
May, is a well-known anti-Trump activist on the campus where he teaches. To me, his essay’s appearance on the nation’s most prominent liberal op-ed page felt like a political act, like the final verdict of a dejected elite on a stubborn population that refuses to heed its admonitions … that revels in falsehoods and that persistently chooses ridiculous demagogues over responsible experts.
May’s subject is human extinction—whether it should happen or whether it shouldn’t. The professor phrases his indictment of mankind with a certain delicacy, but it’s impossible to miss his point. We are a harmful species, he charges, “causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit” the earth. He names climate change and factory farming as the worst of our trespasses, and declares that “if this were all to the story there would be no tragedy. The elimination of the human species would be a good thing, full stop.”
But there are other considerations, the professor admits. People do some worthwhile things. Also, it would be cruel “to demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives.” May’s answer, ultimately, is to have it both ways: “It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off and yet would be a tragedy.”
This kind of highbrow pessimism, this barely concealed longing for the death of the species, is an attitude you come across all the time these days in enlightened liberal circles. 19 It is the inevitable flip side of the moralistic politics I have described in this chapter: the wages for our sins; the recompense for our irredeemable stupidity.
The People, No Page 21
