By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, November 14, 2019
The contradiction at the center of American politics in Anno
Domini 2019 is this: The ruling class does not rule.
The impeachment dog-and-pony show in Washington this week
is not about how Donald Trump has comported himself as president (grotesquely)
any more than early convulsions were about refreshed Democratic interest in the
Emoluments Clause or the Hatch Act. President Trump is a throbbing irritation
to the sensitivities prevailing in ZIP code 94957, but even the impeachment
fight is only a skirmish in the tribal proxy war that goes back to the founding
of our republic.
The ruling class very strongly preferred Hillary Rodham
Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. Donations from people associated with
Goldman Sachs to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign outnumbered those to Trump’s campaign
70 to 1. (Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona was a larger recipient of Goldman
Sachs–affiliated money in 2016 than was Trump.) Among bankers at large,
Clinton’s donations led Trump’s 7 to 1. Among people affiliated with Harvard,
Mrs. Clinton’s edge was 200 to 1. Facebook money favored Clinton 100 to 1;
Apple money favored her 135 to 1; Google favored her 76 to 1; Exxon Mobil
favored her 4 to 1; Walmart favored her 3 to 1. Mrs. Clinton led Trump 4 to 1
among securities and investing donors, 20 to 1 among lawyers and law firms, 4
to 1 among those in the film and television business, 3 to 1 among those in health
care, and 3 to 2 among real-estate people. Which is to say, Mrs. Clinton was by
far the preferred candidate of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the Ivy
League, Big Business, medical staff, lawyers, and real-estate developers, to
say nothing of government workers and their unions.
And even with all that support, and even as she ran up
her totals in a handful of large and lopsidedly Democratic states, Donald Trump
won a majority of the voters in a majority of the states.
Consider this from the point of view of New York City or
Palo Alto. Mrs. Clinton’s cause was more popular than was Trump’s in 2016, even
though the “national popular vote” is meaningless from a constitutional point
of view. Mrs. Clinton’s cause was much, much more popular in the economically
vibrant metros whose populations are more extensively educated and
significantly more economically productive, contributing more to economic
growth. A third of Mrs. Clinton’s voters were urban, but only 12 percent of
Trump’s were. College-educated Americans, who compose about a third of the
electorate, favored Mrs. Clinton by 21 points in 2016, whereas nongraduates
favored Trump by 7 points. A Clinton voter of any race in 2016 was about 50
percent more likely to be a college graduate than was a Trump voter; a white
Clinton voter in 2016 was about twice as likely to be a college graduate
as a white Trump voter.
The Democrats talk a good game about representing the
poor and the left-behind, but it is worth keeping in mind which class’s ox
actually was gored in 2016: It was Harvey Weinstein’s class and Sergey Brin’s,
that of law partners and Harvard Business School graduates, Wall Street
operators and hospital administrators — much more management than labor. The
real class dynamic at work sometimes shows its face in Democratic complaints
about “poorly educated whites” and the implicit (often exaggerated) blue-state
subsidy to the red states. Understanding the actual social dynamic at work
there makes the political bitterness easier to understand, as is the story,
only partly flattering, the metropolitan progressives tell themselves: “We run
the businesses that create the jobs and pay the taxes and make the economy
grow, we have the money and the education, we are the innovators — why shouldn’t
we rule?”
To which rural Americans, conservatives, and Trump voters
might answer: “Because those are not the terms of our agreement.”
* * *
From the very beginning, the fault line in American
politics has run between the more densely populated, urban, and economically
developed communities and the less densely populated, rural, and agricultural
ones. This has been complicated by many factors: During the founding era,
slavery presented financial and political questions as well as moral ones, with
the slave states wanting their captive populations counted for purposes of political
representation but not for purposes of taxation. In the modern era, the
urban–rural split that once characterized the country at large has been
replicated within many of the states, with the farming people of, e.g., the
Texas Panhandle seeing their economic, cultural, and political interests as
being quite distinct from those of their fellow Texans residing in Austin or
Houston. Similarly, the middle of Pennsylvania is not very much like
Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, and the Central Valley of California may as well be
10,000 miles from Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In the 18th century, these differences were mitigated —
though by no means solved — by the Madisonian truce. The federal apparatus
relied to a limited extent on mass democracy — but, critically, on local
mass democracy, in House districts across the country. The states themselves
were given equal representation in the Senate irrespective of population. The
Electoral College insulated the presidency from direct exposure to mass national
democracy. All of this was aided by a conception of the U.S. government that
endowed it with limited powers and duties, reserving other powers to the
states. (“States’ rights” is and always has been a nonsensical expression; the
states do not have rights, but powers.) Silently superimposed on
this geographical and demographic framework is John Adams’s theory of
“balanced” government, in which democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical
(which is to say, executive or presidential, in the U.S. context)
elements work in complementary or rivalrous fashion with one another to produce
government that is sufficiently robust and energetic to pursue necessary
federal ends but not so unified that it is able to supplant liberty with
tyranny.
As the federal government has grown in reach and power,
it necessarily has become more central to American life. The federal government
is not only the navy and the postal service; most of its spending today is in
the area of income support and redistribution (through direct payments and indirectly
through medical benefits), which makes it intimately involved with our private
lives and with household economy. The presidency has mutated and turned
metastatic, with the president becoming a sort of ersatz Roman emperor whose
main importance to public life is no longer administrative but ceremonial and
sacramental.
And so Trump’s victory in the Electoral College
occasioned a moral and spiritual crisis among his rivals, who believe
themselves and their class to be entitled to political power.
The cultural tug-o’-war over the presidency is the great
American tribal competition in its most concentrated form. The metropolitan
elites see the opposite tribe as backward, uneducated, superstitious, addled by
religion and race hatred; the rustics and conservatives see the metropolitan
elites as meretricious, decadent, and somehow less than authentically American.
The question that has occasioned the impeachment of Donald Trump is not whether
the president is legitimate but whether his tribe is legitimate. When the rival
tribe is understood as being fundamentally illegitimate, then no government
arising from that tribe can be understood as legitimate, either, and neither
can the political processes that empower that tribe over its rivals.
And legitimacy is really the question that is in front of
us. Consider the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, in which a
Texas statute was nullified by the Court because the justices concluded that
the only possible justification for the law at hand was illegitimate (in this
case, bigotry against homosexuals) and hence without “rational basis.”
Irrespective of your views about gay rights or the desirability of anti-sodomy
statutes, it should be perfectly obvious that such high-handed dismissal of a
common (nearly universal until about five minutes ago) view of the world, along
with its moral and religious underpinnings, raises the cultural stakes of
presidential politics in a way that a disagreement over health-insurance
regulation does not. With the current reach and configuration of the federal
government, occupying the White House not only gives one tribe or the other an
opportunity to pursue ordinary policy interests but also to in effect make
compliance with its metaphysical assumptions (religious or otherwise)
mandatory, with obedience enforced at the point of federal bayonets. This makes
the cultural de-escalation of the presidency impossible and renders inevitable
the continuing aggrandizement of the office, its power, and its occupant. That
is how the “chief magistracy” occupied by Washington, Adams, and Jefferson
evolved into an imperial cult, which is what the American presidency has
become.
The truce is broken, our politics has descended into
restrained (for now) tribal warfare, and the presidency has been remade into a
weapon of mass domination.
If you think this is all about a telephone call to Kyiv,
look again.
No comments:
Post a Comment