You know that old saying about the fox guarding a henhouse?
So I like to tell a different version of that story with a backstory.
We’re the hens, regular people trying to live our lives.
And we had a guard of the henhouse—it was the government.
It wasn’t perfect but it did a reasonable job of protecting us from each other, guarding
equality, making sure none of the hens were pecking the other hens too much.
And then came along the last 30 to 40 years a fox, and the fox is big business and wealthy
people.
And the fox didn’t like the guard because the fox kind of... wanted the hens to itself.
And so what did the fox do?
Bit that guard in the leg.
It argued that government was bad, “The government was the enemy,” and defunded
government, had fought for lower taxes so government could do less stuff.
Then the guard starts stumbling away and bleeding out.
Off the scene the hens are unguarded, and the fox presents itself to the hens and says,
“What a shame!
Government is just not what it used to be, not protecting you!
Not fighting for you.
It’s so inefficient.
It’s so, gosh, that’s so sad.
Well, let me step in!
I’m rich and I’m here to help.”
Well, rich people and wealthy corporations spent a generation waging a war on government,
defunding government, allowing social problems to fester and allowing their own profits to
soar.
And then, with government weakened, social problems multiplying and their own pockets
full, they reinvent themselves as the new replacement of government, which is—instead
of trickle down economics we now have trickle down change: Let them make their fortune,
and then they’ll just throw some social change down from the mountain.
Well we have to decide in America if that’s the kind of change we want.
But what I do know is if you project that kind of change backwards throughout time we
wouldn’t have created most of the change that we all take for granted today.
I mean if—there would, frankly, have been no New Deal.
There’s be no modern American economy if we had depended on the powerful to throw down
scraps.
Many of the most important things in American life have to be taken from the powerful and
given to the many, and it’s time that we reclaim that heritage again.
I think it’s hard to understand why populism is rising throughout the world without reckoning
with the role of a class of global one-percenters who are remote from their communities, more
connected to each other than to the communities they live in, and seemingly devoted to profit
and returns above all else.
The fascinating and complicated thing about this global populist moment is that it takes
very different forms.
I mean here there’s a very strong racial dynamic to it that is at the heart of it.
There are other places where that’s less of a factor.
In some places it’s about internal racial things.
In other places it’s about immigration.
In some places it’s about all of the above.
But I think what is undeniable in this country is that for 30 or 40 years many people on
the left and right have felt that things were not going right, that the country wasn’t
working for them, that it felt rigged to them, that it felt impossible to secure the life
that they were promised by this country and to give their children something better than
they had.
And that all that while there was a lot of rich-splaining to those people by the American
elite that “No, no, no, things are great!
Trade’s good.
Trade’s great.
It’s going to be perfect.
It’s going to lift everybody up.
Globalization it’s great.
Look, there’s a couple of bumps, but no worries.
And the aggregate all will be well,” I mean, as though anybody lives in the aggregate.
“Tech?
Don’t worry.
Don’t worry about that fact that everything got automated and your jobs all went to Taiwan.
Don’t worry about it.
We’ll be better off on the whole.”
And there was just a lot of this kind of rich-splaining.
I grew up and I remember studying this stuff in college when I took economics classes.
Like I went to the University of Michigan.
I was sitting in Michigan in Econ 101 and I remember getting this lecture on how all
this stuff was for the good, and we'd be better off.
And right around us, all around us in Michigan in 1999 the state was falling apart.
These long tectonic shifts were basically like: work was disappearing, and trade was
not benefitting most people, and globalization was not a walk in the park, and aggregate
effects were not really of any comfort to anybody.
And how was it possible, at the University of Michigan in 1999, with all that evidence
all around us, that we could sit in an intellectual cocoon and explain to ourselves that, you
know, “rising tides lift all boats,” essentially?There is a way in which American elites— and this
is not just a couple of greedy hedge fund billionaires, the American intelligentsia
also has been complicit in a false story about all things working out for people over the
last generation that wasn’t true.
And I think people felt that and revolted against it, and it’s really, really unfortunate
that, particularly in the Trump movement, someone who actually tapped into that intuition
people have (that elites weren't maybe as sincere and fighting for them as they claimed),
that Donald Trump, instead of seizing on that anger and channeling at the institutions and
people who had actually done that, instead in this cowardly and sad and lowly and hateful
way deflected that anger onto Muslims and immigrants and women and people of color and
whatever.
That’s the ultimate and tragic non sequitur of American politics today.
People are correctly, people correctly feel screwed by an economic order that doesn’t
have as much space for regular people to make a life as it used to.
But they have been led by a phony “billionaire” real estate developer to feel as though those
problems were caused not by Goldman Sachs but by black people.
And that is the tragedy of this moment, and that’s why it’s going to take someone
on the democratic side who is actually able to speak to the concerns of regular people
about being shut out.
By the way there’s more shut out people on the democratic voter base than the republican
voter base.
But the democrats I think have struggled to speak in the language of people who feel left
out by the future.
Socially many of the most prominent democrats just they don’t know and live among those
people.
You can have a lot of heart and you can have a good speechwriter but you either live in
a world that has more Goldman Sachs people in it or a world that has more union organizers
in it.
It’s just as your real friends, as your real fellow travelers.
And I think people are actually good at sniffing who’s who and I think the democratic party
needs to get serious about being the party of regular people who feel shut out by this
age.
And that must mean not being the party of Goldman Sachs in any way.