Andrew Sullivan

Here we are. Today might well be the day when Trump seals his coronation as the Republican presidential nominee for this year’s election.

Wow.

How did this happen?

If you get a chance please read Andrew Sullivan’s long article: “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny” in the latest issue of New York Magazine. I think he nails one part of the argument. Trump is a consequence of a sequence of events. He isn’t an isolated or disconnected phenomenon. He fits perfectly within a pattern that, whilst unusual, is entirely predictable. At heart Sullivan argues that ‘democracies end when they are too democratic’.

Sullivan, predictably, spends a lot of his article railing against the various pressures that have have produced so much anger within a section of the American electorate: he lists practically everything from globalization to the rise of gay rights. All of these diverse events or issues have not just to the debilitation of the old white working class, but have added humiliation as well. I offer this article as an example. It urges us to shame dumb white Trump supporters. It argues that “the white working class are not victims”. White workers apparently are privileged. Such bias and vitriol leads naturally, as Sullivan points out, to the bizarre possibility that minority students at an Ivy League college can consider themselves less privileged than those workers.

Really?

It is absurd on its face. It takes not much thought to realize the utter perversion of reality embodied in that notion. Yet such thoughts exist. And they exist at the pinnacle of our educational system.

No wonder those workers rally to Trump no matter what he says or does. They have been abandoned by society. They have no interest in it. They have been told they ought to be excluded. Why? Because they are who they are.

Were this attitude cast towards any other sections society it would be repudiated and rejected in the most strident of terms.

Thus far I am in agreement with Sullivan.

Where I quibble is towards the end of his article where he introduces the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel “It Can’t Happen Here”. He uses characters from the novel to provide context and to illuminate the present. In particular he quotes a journalist lamenting the rise of fascism here in America:

“I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip [the extremist leader] is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”

Exactly. Failure of the elite. Those whom Lewis calls “the Respectables”. They are the cause of failure. They are the root of the collapse of democracy.

Sullivan then shifts to today and says this:

“An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance. The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.”

Here’s my quibble:

Where was Sullivan, very clearly a member of that failed elite, culpable as anyone for missing the rising tide of anger, someone who lived and rose to fame as a poster child of the opinionated educated class, where was he? How did he not see what was going on?

Lewis puts the key word into the mouth of his fictional journalist: “plutocracy”. Sullivan slides by it. He casts blame on the national debt, amongst other thing, as if that was a primary cause of the degradation of our workers. No it wasn’t. Nor was it the failure to prevent 9/11. Nor was it the lying and conniving behind the error of the Iraq war.

It was the relentless, overpowering, and ultimately total redirection of American economic policy towards the enriching of an exclusive few. It was the allowance of widespread and brazen rent seeking. It was in the total unwillingness to exact retribution for the financial crisis from those culpable. It was in the near total failure to rise to and help the whose lives were destroyed by Wall Street’s avarice. It was in the argument that we can no longer afford to support the poor, the sick, the young, or the elderly because of the crisis, whilst, at the same time, allowing those who cause the crisis to continue blithely untroubled.

It wasn’t, as Sullivan seems to argue, the result of some befuddled and confused elite who made a pile of mistakes. It was the direct result of deliberate action made with a clear head and an equally clear understanding of the consequences.

To put it more bluntly: the degradation of American workers was not some careless accident or unforeseen consequence. It was done with a purpose and an iron will.

And, after today, we will have our self-referential and self-serving elite to thank for the near certain nomination of Trump as the leader of the Republican party.

This populist moment, that Sullivan so abhors, is not the end of democracy. Not at all. It is a cry for help. Horribly misdirected though it be. If Trump is the only channel through which voters can get the attention of the elite then so be it. I am horrified it came to this. But rather than expend long articles on the notion that democracy can be too democratic for its own good, perhaps our elite ought to ponder whether there is actually a democracy to be undone. Perhaps it has already been undone. Perhaps its too late to be concerned about the demise of democracy. Perhaps its has been corrupted and perverted before now.

For just as much as democracies end when they become too democratic, plutocracies end when they become too plutocratic.

I will wait patiently for Sullivan to address the pressing question: how do we re-establish balance and put an end to the greed of our elite?