Earlier this year, an economist named Branko Milanović published a book called “Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization.” It’s a progress report on the “system” that Friedman heralded. Milanović analyzes global economic data from the past quarter century and concludes that the world has become more equal—poor countries catching up with rich ones—but that Western democracies have become less equal. Globalization’s biggest winners are the new Asian middle and upper classes, and the one-per-centers of the West: these groups have almost doubled their real incomes since the late eighties. The biggest losers are the American and European working and middle classes—until very recently, their incomes hardly budged. [...]
Summers described the current Democratic Party as “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The Republicans, he went on, combined “social conservatism and an agenda of helping rich people.” These alignments left neither party in synch with Americans like Mark Frisbie: “All these regular people who thought they are kind of the soul of the country—they feel like there was nobody who seemed to be thinking a lot about them.” In 2004, the political scientist Samuel Huntington published his final book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.” He used the term “cosmopolitan élites” to describe Americans who are at home in the fluid world of transnational corporations, dual citizenship, blended identities, and multicultural education. Such people dominate our universities, tech companies, publishers, nonprofits, entertainment studios, and news media. They congregate in cities and on the coasts. Lately, they have become particularly obsessed with the food they eat. The locavore movement, whatever its benefits to health and agriculture, is an inward-looking form of activism. When you visit a farm-to-table restaurant and order the wild-nettle sformato for thirty dollars, the line between social consciousness and self-gratification disappears. Buying synthetic-nitrate-free lunch meat at Whole Foods is also a way to isolate yourself from contamination by the packaged food sold at Kmart and from the overweight, downwardly mobile people who shop there. The people who buy food at Kmart know it. [...]
She was right. Obama was expressing a widespread liberal attitude toward Republican-voting workers—that is, he didn’t take them seriously. Guns and religion, as much as jobs and incomes, are the authentic interest of millions of Americans. Trade and immigration have failed to make their lives better, and, arguably, left them worse off. And if the Democratic Party was no longer on their side—if government programs kept failing to improve their lives—why not vote for the party that at least took them seriously? [...]
The conservative marriage survived the embarrassment of Palin’s campaign, which exposed her as someone more interested in getting on TV than in governing. It rode the nihilistic anger of the Tea Party and the paranoid rants of Glenn Beck. It benefitted from heavy spending by the Koch brothers and ignored the barely disguised racism that some Republican voters directed at the black family now occupying the White House. When Trump and others began questioning President Obama’s birth certificate, Party élites turned a blind eye; the rank and file, for their part, fell in behind Mitt Romney, a Harvard-educated investor. The persistence of this coalition required an immense amount of self-deception on both sides. Romney, who belonged to a class that greatly benefitted from cheap immigrant labor, had to pretend to be outraged by the presence of undocumented workers. Lower-middle-class Midwestern retirees who depended on Social Security had to ignore the fact that the representatives they kept electing, like Paul Ryan, wanted to slash their benefits. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan returned to Indiana and Texas embittered at having lost their youth in unwinnable wars, while conservative pundits like Kristol kept demanding new ones—but their shared contempt for liberal élites kept them from noticing the Republican Party’s internal conflicts. In this way, red states and blue states—the color-coding scheme enshrined by the networks on the night of the 2000 Presidential election—continued to define the country’s polarization into mutually hateful camps.
