47 highlighted passages, references are to the Kindle version, Last annotated on June 2, 2017
The thesis of the book was that we were moving toward a future in which facts would be increasingly irrelevant and people would gravitate more and more toward conspiratorial politics. This situation was fueled by the repeated failures of once-trusted institutions to respond to the frustrations of ordinary people. 394
Trained for decades to be little more than good consumers, we had become a nation of reality shoppers, mixing and matching news items to fit our own self-created identities. We rejoiced in the idea that reality was not an absolute but a choice, something we select to fit our own conception not of the world but of ourselves. We are Christians, therefore all world events have a Christian explanation. We hate George Bush, therefore Bush is the cause of it all. And directly feeding into this madness was the actual, real failure of our own governmental system, reflected in a chilling new electoral trend. After two consecutive bitterly negative presidential elections and many years of what was turning into a highly deflating military adventure in Iraq, the American public had reached new levels of disgust with the very concept of elections. People no longer voted for candidates they liked or were excited by. They voted against candidates they hated.*7 At protests and marches, the ruling emotions were disgust and rage. The lack of idealism, and especially the lack of any sense of brotherhood or common purpose with the other side (i.e., liberals and conservatives unable to imagine a productive future with each other, or even to see themselves as citizens of the same country*8), was striking. 411
like frightened adolescents, unaccustomed to the burdens of political power. People saw in the vacuum of governmental competence an opportunity not to take control of their lives, but to step in and replace the buffoons above with buffoon*24 acts of their own. 469
What I hope comes through is that the corruption of the system certainly has had consequences in the population, inspiring popular disgust and rage, with voters keenly understanding on some level anyway the depth of their betrayal. But the form of the public response turns out to be a grotesquerie. It turns out that we’ve been split up and atomized for so long that real grassroots politics isn’t really possible. We don’t respond to problems as communities, but as demographics. In the same way that we shop for cars and choose television programs, we pick our means of political protest. We scan the media landscape for the thing that appeals to us and we buy into it. 487
The media had long ignored the implications of polls that showed that half the country believed in angels and the inerrancy of the Bible, or of the fact that the Left Behind series of books had sold in the tens of millions. But on the ground the political consequences of magical thinking were becoming clearer. The religious right increasingly saw satanic influences and signs of the upcoming apocalypse. Meanwhile, on the left, a different sort of fantasy was gaining traction, as an increasing number—up to a third of the country according to some polls—saw the “Bush crime family” in league with Al-Qaeda, masterminding 9/11. Media outlets largely ignored poll results that they felt could not possibly be true. For instance, there was a CBS News survey that showed that only 16 percent believed that the Bush administration was telling the truth about 9/11, with 53 percent believing the government was “hiding something,” and another 28 percent believing that it was “mostly lying.” 524
A poll in Florida taken in 2004 suggested that some 25 percent of voters worried that their votes were not being counted—a 20 percent jump from the pre-2000 numbers.*38 Even more damning was a Zogby poll conducted in 2006 that showed only 45 percent of Americans were “very confident” that George Bush won the 2004 election “fair and square.” 537
This GOP race is not about policy or electability or even raising money. Instead, it’s about Nielsen ratings or trending. It’s a minute-to-minute contest for media heat and Internet hits, where positive and negative attention are almost equally valuable. 734
Huckabee launched his campaign on May 5th, running on a carefully crafted and somewhat unconventional Republican platform centered around economic populism, vowing to end “stagnant wages” and help people reach a “higher ground.” But emphasizing economic populism is the kind of wonky policy nuance that doesn’t do much to earn notice in the Twitter age. 737
far from being deterred by all of the negative attention, Huckabee shrewdly embraced it. Much like the Donald, Huckabee swallowed up the negative press energy like a Pac-Man and steamed ahead, and was soon climbing in the polls again. Huckabee had stumbled into the truth that has been driving the support for the Trump campaign: That in this intensely media-driven race, inspiring genuine horror and disgust among the right people is worth a lot of votes in certain quarters, irrespective of how you go about it. If you’re making an MSNBC anchor cry or rendering a coastal media villain like Anderson Cooper nearly speechless (as Trump has done), you must be doing something right. 750
In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party’s right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump. 762
Politics used to be a simple, predictable con. Every four years, the money men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they’ve always bought. Pundits always complained that there wasn’t enough talk about issues during these races, but in reality, issues were still everything. Behind the scenes, where donors gave millions for concrete favors, there was always still plenty of policy. And skilled political pitchmen like Christie, who could deftly deliver on those back-room promises to crush labor and hand out transportation contracts or whatever while still acting like a man of the people, were highly valued commodities. Not anymore. Trump has blown up even the backroom version of the issues-driven campaign. There are no secret donors that we know of. Trump himself appears to be the largest financial backer of the Trump campaign. A financial report disclosed that Trump lent his own campaign $1.8 million while raising just $100,000. There’s no hidden platform behind the shallow facade. With Trump, the facade is the whole deal. If old-school policy hucksters like Christie can’t find a way to beat a media master like Trump at the ratings game, they will soon die out. 903
Trump is probably too dumb to realize it, or maybe he isn’t, but he doesn’t need to win anything to become the most dangerous person in America. He can do plenty of damage just by encouraging people to be as uninhibited in their stupidity as he is. 940
Trump is striking a chord with people who are feeling the squeeze in a less secure world and want to blame someone—the government, immigrants, political correctness, “incompetents,” “dummies,” Megyn Kelly, whoever—for their problems. 942
But on another level, she was trying to bring Trump to heel. The extraction of the humiliating public apology is one of the media’s most powerful weapons. Someone becomes famous, we dig up dirt on the person, we rub it in his or her nose, and then we demand that the person get down on bended knee and beg forgiveness. The Clintons’ 1992 joint interview on 60 Minutes was a classic example, as were Anthony Weiner’s prostration before Andrew Breitbart and Chris Christie’s 107-minute marathon apologia after Bridgegate. The subtext is always the same: If you want power in this country, you must accept the primacy of the press. It’s like paying the cover at the door of the world’s most exclusive club. Trump wouldn’t pay the tab. Not only was he not wrong for saying those things, he explained, but holding in thoughts like that is bad for America. That’s why we don’t win anymore, why we lose to China and to Mexico (how are we losing to Mexico again?). He was saying that hiding forbidden thoughts about women or immigrants or whoever isn’t just annoying, but bad for America. It’s not exactly telling people to get out there and beat people with metal rods. But when your response to news that a couple of jackasses just invoked your name when they beat the crap out of a homeless guy is to salute your “passionate” followers who “love this country,” you’ve gone next-level. 954
In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. 1042
While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted. 1058
Trump isn’t just selling these easy answers. He’s also buying them. Trump is a TV believer. He’s so subsumed in all the crap he’s watched—and you can tell by the cropped syntax in his books and his speech, Trump is a watcher, not a reader—it’s all mixed up in his head. He surely believes he saw that celebration of Muslims in Jersey City, when it was probably a clip of people in Palestine. When he says, “I have a great relationship with the blacks,” what he probably means is that he liked watching The Cosby Show. 1798
Even if we take the man off the air, the problem he represents is still going to be there, just like poverty, corruption, mass incarceration, pollution and all of the other things we keep off the airwaves. 1810
He added that he didn’t want to pick a candidate because “I don’t want to help or hurt anybody by giving an endorsement.” For people who are so very pleased with themselves for ostensibly being so much smarter than everyone else, people like Blankfein are oddly uncreative when it comes to deflecting criticism. The people who don’t like them are always overemotional communists. All those young people who are flocking to the Sanders campaign? Dupes, misled by dumb professors who’ve never been to Cuba. And their anger toward Wall Street? Causeless and random, just a bunch of folks riding an emotional pendulum that brainlessly swings back and forth. Don’t take it personally, people are just moody that way. 1895
the impetus for that criminal activity was the willingness of massive banking institutions on Wall Street to buy up those bad loans in bulk. They created a market for those fraudulent loans, bought billions’ worth of them from local lenders, and then chopped up and resold those bad loans to pension funds, unions and other suckers. The “village” didn’t do this. Lloyd Blankfein and his buddies did this. (Goldman just a few weeks ago reached a deal to pay a $5.1 billion settlement to cover its history of selling bad loans to unsuspecting investors, joining Bank of America, Citi, JP Morgan Chase and others.) People aren’t pissed just to be pissed. They’re mad because a tiny group of crooks on Wall Street built themselves beach houses in the Hamptons through a crude fraud scheme that decimated their retirement funds, caused property values in their neighborhoods to collapse and caused over four million people to be put in foreclosure. And they’re particularly mad that they got asked to pay for this criminal irresponsibility with bailouts funded with their tax dollars. What the Clintons have done by turning their political careers into a vast moneymaking enterprise, it’s not a value-neutral activity. The money isn’t just about buying influence. The money also physically moves people, from one side of an imaginary line to another. You will never catch Bernie Sanders standing in a room as a paid guest of a bank under investigation for ripping billions off pensioners and investors, addressing the audience in the first-person plural. He doesn’t spend enough time with that kind of crowd to be so colloquial. The Clintons meanwhile have by now taken so much money that when they stand in a room full of millionaires and billionaires, they can use the word “we” and not have it sound odd. The money has irrevocably moved them to that side of the rope line. On that side of the line, public anger isn’t legitimate, but something to be managed and waited out, just as Lloyd suggests. 1940
this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised. It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average. It’s been well-documented that Trump surged last summer when he openly embraced the ugly race politics that, according to the Beltway custom of 50-plus years, is supposed to stay at the dog-whistle level. No doubt, that’s been a huge factor in his rise. But racism isn’t the only ugly thing he’s dragged out into the open. Trump is no intellectual. He’s not bringing Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn’t learn a thing about physics. Hawking would come out on Day 365 talking about models and football. But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business. That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics? 2084
For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues. 2492
Bill Clinton left office had the world’s highest incarceration rate, with a prison admission rate for black drug inmates that was 23 times 1983 levels. Hillary stumped for that crime bill, adding the Reaganesque observation that inner-city criminals were “super-predators” who needed to be “brought to heel.” You can go on down the line of all these issues. Trade? From NAFTA to the TPP, Hillary and her party cohorts have consistently supported these anti-union free trade agreements, until it became politically inexpedient. Debt? Hillary infamously voted for regressive bankruptcy reform just a few years after privately meeting with Elizabeth Warren and agreeing that such industry-driven efforts to choke off debt relief needed to be stopped. 2507
They’ve seen in the last decades that politicians who promise they can deliver change while also taking the money, mostly just end up taking the money. And they’re voting for Sanders because his idea of an entirely voter-funded electoral “revolution” that bars corporate money is, no matter what its objective chances of success, the only practical road left to break what they perceive to be an inexorable pattern of corruption. Young people aren’t dreaming. They’re thinking. And we should listen to them. 2535
There was a time in this country—and many voters in places like Indiana and Michigan and Pennsylvania are old enough to remember it—when business leaders felt a patriotic responsibility to protect American jobs and communities. Mitt Romney’s father, George, was such a leader, deeply concerned about the city of Detroit, where he built AMC cars. But his son Mitt wasn’t. That sense of noblesse oblige disappeared somewhere during the past generation, when the newly global employer class cut regular working stiffs loose, forcing them to compete with billions of foreigners without rights or political power who would eat toxic waste for five cents a day. Then they hired politicians and intellectuals to sell the peasants in places like America on why this was the natural order of things. Unfortunately, the only people fit for this kind of work were mean, traitorous scum, the kind of people who in the military are always eventually bayoneted by their own troops. This is what happened to the Republicans, and even though the cost was a potential Trump presidency, man, was it something to watch. 2646
If this isn’t the end for the Republican Party, it’ll be a shame. They dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word “American” by insisting they were the only real ones. They preferred Lubbock to Paris, and their idea of an intellectual was Newt Gingrich. Their leaders, from Ralph Reed to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the same haircut—the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube. A century ago, the small-town American was Gary Cooper: tough, silent, upright and confident. The modern Republican Party changed that person into a haranguing neurotic who couldn’t make it through a dinner without quizzing you about your politics. They destroyed the American character. No hell is hot enough for them. And when Trump came along, they rolled over like the weaklings they’ve always been, bowing more or less instantly to his parodic show of strength. 2654
This avalanche of verbose disgust on the part of conservative intellectuals toward the Trump voter, who until very recently was the Republican voter, tells us everything we need to know about what actually happened in 2016. 2709
The most successful trick was linking the corporate mantra of profit without responsibility to the concept of individual liberty. Into the heartland were sent wave after wave of politicians, each more strident and freedom-y than the last. They arrived draped in the flag, spewed patriotic bromides about God, guns and small-town values, and pledged to give the liberals hell and bring the pride back. Then they went off to Washington and year after year did absolutely squat for their constituents. They were excellent at securing corporate tax holidays and tax cuts for the rich, but they almost never returned to voter country with jobs in hand. Instead, they brought an ever-increasing list of villains responsible for the lack of work: communists, bra-burning feminists, black “race hustlers,” climate-change activists, Muslims, Hollywood, horned owls… By the Tea Party era, their candidates were forced to point fingers at their own political establishment for votes, since after so many years of bitter economic decline, that was the only story they could still believably sell. This led 2713
Totally different politicians with completely different ideas about civility and democracy, Sanders and Trump nonetheless keyed in on the same widespread disgust over the greed and cynicism of the American political class. From the Walter Mondale years on, Democrats have eaten from the same trough as Republicans. They’ve grown fat off cash from behemoths like Cisco, Pfizer, Exxon Mobil, Citigroup, Goldman and countless others, companies that moved jobs overseas, offshored profits, helped finance the construction of factories in rival states like China and India, and sometimes all of the above. The basic critique of both the Trump and Sanders campaigns is that you can’t continually take that money and also be on the side of working people. Money is important in politics, but in democracy, people ultimately still count more. 2784
People want more power over their own lives. They want to feel some connection to society. Most particularly, they don’t want to be dictated to by distant bureaucrats who don’t seem to care what they’re going through, and think they know what’s best for everyone. These are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, they came out in this past year in the campaign of Donald Trump, who’d exposed a tiny flaw in the system. People are still free to vote, and some peculiarities in the structure of the commercial media, combined with mountains of public anger, conspired to put one of the two parties in the hands of a coverage-devouring billionaire running on a “Purge the Scum”* platform. 2937
The most serious will surely be this burgeoning movement to describe voting and democracy as inherently dangerous. Donald Trump is dangerous because as president, he’d likely have little respect for law. But a gang of people whose metaphor for society is “We are the white cells, voters are the disease” is comparably scary in its own banal, less click-generating way. These self-congratulating cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population. Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending. 2945
more than 100 million adults to commit to one or the other. Like every TV contest, it discourages subtlety, reflection and reconciliation, and encourages belligerence, action and conflict. Trump was the ultimate contestant in this show. It’s no accident that his first debate with Hillary Clinton turned into the Ali-Frazier of political events, with a breathtaking 84 million people tuning in, making it the most watched political program in American history. 3837
He was unable to stop being a reality star. Trump from the start had been playing a part, but his acting got worse and worse as time went on, until finally he couldn’t keep track: Was he supposed to be a genuine traitor to his class and the savior of the common man, or just be himself, i.e., a bellicose pervert with too much time on his hands? Or were the two things the same thing? 3848
Sure, we’ve had some unstable characters enter the White House. JFK had health problems that led him to take amphetamine shots during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan’s attention span was so short, the CIA had to make mini-movies to brief him on foreign leaders. George W. Bush not only didn’t read the news, he wasn’t interested in it (“What’s in the newspapers worth worrying about?” he once asked, without irony). But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of the familiar alternating power structure, surrounded by predictable, relatively sober confederates who managed the day-to-day. Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead. He takes office at a time when the chief executive is vastly more powerful than ever before, with nearly unlimited authority to investigate, surveil, torture and assassinate foreigners and even U.S. citizens—powers that didn’t seem to trouble people much when they were granted to Barack Obama. 3878
it is the Democratic Party that is shattered and faces an uncertain future. And they deserve it. The Democratic Party’s failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance. The party not only spent most of the past two years ignoring the warning signs of the Trump rebellion, but vilifying anyone who tried to point them out. It denounced all rumors of its creeping unpopularity as vulgar lies and bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the party’s willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance across the American intellectual elite. Trump’s election was a true rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of “the establishment.” The target group included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the media. And we all closed our eyes to what we didn’t want to see. The almost universal failure among political pros to predict Trump’s victory—the few exceptions, conspicuously, were people who hailed from rust-belt states, like Michael Moore—spoke to an astonishing cultural blindness. Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grew accustomed to treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose behavior could sometimes be unpredictable but, in the end, almost always did what it was told. 3896
The People, whose intentions we were wondering so hard about, were all around us, listening to themselves being talked about like some wild, illiterate beast. When 60 Minutes did its election-eve story about the mood of the electorate, they had to call up a familiar Beltway figure, pollster Frank Luntz, to put together a focus group. Luntz’s purpose was to take the white-hot rage and disgust hurled at him by voters on both sides of the aisle during the “focus group” portion, and translate it all into a media-speak during the sit-down. Luntz did his job and gave Steve Kroft his sound-bite diagnosis of The People’s temperature. “That’s not blowing off steam,” he said. “That is a deep-seated resentment.” Deep-seated resentment. There was a catchy, succinct line, over which we could all collectively stroke our chins in quiet contemplation. That’s as opposed to what the voters intended, which was to sock us all so hard for our snobbism and intellectual myopia that those very chins of ours would get driven straight through the backs of our skulls. There was a great deal of talk in this campaign about the inability of the “low-information” voter to understand the rhetoric of candidates who spoke above a sixth-grade language level. We were told by academics and analysts that Trump’s public addresses rated among the most simplistic political rhetoric ever recorded. 3912
Trump’s voters were speaking a language that has been taboo in America for decades, if not forever. Nobody in this country knows how to talk about class. America is like a giant manor estate where the aristocrats don’t know they’re aristocrats and the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered millionaires. And America’s cultural elite, trained for so long to think in terms of artificial distinctions like Republicans and Democrats instead of more natural divisions like haves and have-nots, refused until it was too late to grasp the meaning of the rage-storm headed over the wall. Just like the leaders of the Republican Party, who simply never believed its electorate wouldn’t drop and roll over on command when the time came, we media types never believed all that anger out there was real, or at least gathered in enough force to matter. Most of us smarty-pants analysts never thought Trump could win because we saw his run as a half-baked white-supremacist movement fueled by last-gasp, racist frustrations of America’s shrinking silent majority. Sure, Trump had enough jackbooted nut jobs and conspiracist stragglers under his wing to ruin the Republican Party. But surely there was no way he could topple America’s reigning multicultural consensus. How could he? After all, the country had already twice voted in an African-American 3933
run through American society. But his coalition also took aim at the neoliberal gentry’s pathetic reliance on proxies to communicate with flyover America. They fed on the widespread visceral disdain red-staters felt toward the very people Hillary Clinton’s campaign enlisted all year to speak on its behalf: Hollywood actors, big-ticket musicians, Beltway activists, academics, and especially media figures. Trump’s rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic American myths, the post-racial society and the classless society. Candidate Trump told a story about a conspiracy of cultural and financial elites bent on finishing off a vanishing white middle-class nirvana, first by shipping jobs overseas and then by waving hordes of crime-prone, bomb-tossing immigrants over the border. These elites lived in both parties, Trump warned. The Republicans were tools of job-exporting fat cats who only pretended to be tough on immigration and trade in order to win votes, when all they really cared about were profits. The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsisted politically on the captured votes of hoodwinked minorities, preaching multiculturalism while practicing globalism. Both groups, Trump insisted, were out of touch with the real American voter. Neither party saw the awesome potential of this story to upend our political system. 3944
the Democratic leadership, even as it was increasingly indebted to banks and corporations, never imagined that it could be the target of a class uprising. How could we be seen as aristocrats? We get union endorsements! We’re the party of FDR! We’re pro–civil rights! And so on. 3958
Most of them never learn because most politicians are pathological: 99 percent of them are ruled by drives rather than thoughts. 4040
King told us we were people before we were anything else: white or black, young or old, male or female, rich or poor, born here or born elsewhere. Even if we never came close to realizing it, the notion that we all had to find a way to live together was the organizing principle of our society for 50 years. Many of the people voting in this election never knew anything else. 4072
The so-called alt-right movement, like all movements dreamed up by intellectual revolutionaries, is obsessively concerned with defining itself. As such it has left behind a voluble literature detailing its history and priorities. Earlier in 2016, Bannon’s Breitbart site even published an exultant “Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” written by Allum Bokhari and barnstorming campus villain Milo Yiannopoulos, for the benefit of the soon-to-be-vanquished class of David Brooks/George Will Republicans. This tract outlined the main principles of the new movement, the first apparently being that the thing distinguishing them from skinheads is that they all went to college: Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred. The alternative right are a much smarter group of people—which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright. The Breitbart manifesto was unpleasantly familiar stylistically, and would be to anyone who’s had the misfortune (as I have, having studied in the Soviet Union) to read a lot of Marxist/Leninist writing. 4091
These alt-righters are clearly influenced by Lenin, not in his leveling instincts, of course, but in his tactics. Just like the Bolsheviks, the alt-righters see themselves as the elite vanguard of a much larger population of proles, whom they deign to call “low-information” voters. “Although the alt-right consists mostly of college-educated men,” the piece declares, “it sympathises with the white working classes and, based on our interviews, feels a sense of noblesse oblige.” Or, as Trump would put it: “I love the poorly educated!” Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were internationalists and globalists, the alt-righters are proudly provincial. Their goals are “a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic,” is how Allum/Milo verbalized the idea. Culture over economics is another theme. They dislike modern “establishment” conservatives because, like Clinton Democrats, they embrace a globalist politics that de-emphasizes national identity. They talk a lot about the “preservation of their own tribe.” 4102
Not a conservative? So what? Neither were most of these people. True, they didn’t love government regulations and taxes, but that wasn’t as central to their identity as, well, their identity. The old Bush/Reagan Republicans used identity as a mere palate cleanser for their real political mission, energetic programs of laissez-faire capitalism. Trump made identity the main course. He unleashed something dark and violent in the American psyche. He gave voters permission to disbelieve in a common future with the rest of America and offered the option of confrontation instead. Pull a lever for me, he promised, and you’ll horrify them all. And they did it. Sixty million of them chose it. 4149
In retrospect, the campaign really turned when Bannon came aboard. In classic Leninist fashion, he won the political battle with a strategic surrender, by having Trump publicly denounce almost all of the alt-right’s principles. Trump crisscrossed the country on an “African-American outreach” tour. He went to Mexico and supplicated before President Enrique Peña Nieto, who got to tell Trump to his face he wouldn’t be paying for any wall. And the Trump campaign signaled over and over again that it was open to a “softening” on immigration, a seemingly heretical concept and a betrayal of everything he said during primary season. Asked about Trump’s change of heart, campaign spokesclown Katrina Pierson quipped, “He hasn’t changed his position on immigration. He has changed the words that he is saying.” 4156
Stung by Walter Mondale’s landslide loss in 1984, the new Democratic Leadership Council pushed a “third way” strategy. Founding documents like the DLC’s 1990 New Orleans Declaration—written when Bill Clinton was DLC chair—described a simple pragmatic trade: less bleeding-heart politics, more Democratic presidents. The only “ideas” at the core of the DLC strategy were that Democrats were better than Republicans, and that winning was better than losing. To make Democrats more competitive, they made two important changes. One was the embrace of “market-based” solutions, which opened the door for the party to compete with Republicans for donations from Wall Street and heavy industry. The other big trade-off was on race. The Clinton revolution was designed as a response to Dick Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which was based on dominating among whites from the South who nurtured resentments about the post–civil rights consensus. To win those white voters back, the Clintons “triangulated” against liberal orthodoxies, pledging to end “welfare as we know it” and to punish criminals instead of “explaining away their behavior.” 4182
“The U.S. has unwittingly allowed itself to unilaterally disarm in the domestic war against violent crime,” the group wrote, as part of its argument for a bigger federal role in law enforcement and the expanded use of “community policing.” These moves worked in large part because of the personal magnetism of the Clintons. Bill and Hillary both seemed energetic and optimistic. Much of the world was enthralled by them, this power couple of intellectual equals. They were something modern, with their can-do positive attitude, which was marketed almost like a political version of Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. Moreover, Bill Clinton was nobody’s idea of a plutocrat back then. He was a self-made success story from a hardscrabble background, raised by a single mom in a rural Arkansas town literally called Hope. He was thought of both as an overgrown hillbilly and “the first black president.” Clinton looked like a man of the people. He had to be torn away from campaign stops and chatted up everyone from truckers to waitresses to toll operators. He even had a bad junk-food habit, a quality then-Bill shares with today’s Donald Trump. It helped that Bill Clinton’s first presidential opponent, George H. W. Bush, was a calcified Connecticut aristocrat who had been pampered in power for so long, he didn’t know how checkout lanes worked when he visited a supermarket. They won, and kept winning, their success papering over fault lines building in the party. 4194
