The Winter of Our Discontent

While it would be convenient to blame the current dysfunctional state of American politics solely on Donald Trump, the polarization of America did not start with the former President. He fueled it, to be sure, just as it fueled him. But his ignominious departure from the White House, even if permanent, will not reverse the extreme factionalism that is eroding the foundations of our Republic.

Trump was in fact a symptom of discontent and anxiety that have been festering for decades. The ills that plague American political life – the extremism, the gridlock, the erosion of trust in our institutions – were “made in Washington” by America’s political elites as the direct and logical consequence of decades of policy failures by both parties, compounded by an utter lack of accountability.

The Slow-Motion Train Wreck of Globalism

The root cause of those policy failures is the slow-motion train wreck of globalism – the quixotic crusade of America’s elites to remake the world in our own image. The costs of that fantasy have not been borne equally. Many working and middle-class Americans believe, with ample justification, that they are paying the price while America’s elites enjoy the benefits. It is the former’s sons and daughters that are sent to die in one futile foreign war after another and it is their economic livelihoods that are sacrificed to the false god of globalization.

Nothing illustrates the failures of the foreign policy blob and its Wall Street collaborators more than the last three decades of engagement with China. Fresh from evening prayers at the Temple of Ricardo, our elites thought it would be wise to promote the economic modernization of the most populous nation on Earth by integrating its low-wage economy with that of the US. China: a nation whose self-image places it at the center of civilization, surrounded by barbarians; the hegemon of East Asia until the 19th century; a nation nursing a two century grievance for the humiliations suffered at the hands of western nations. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, China’s entry into the WTO opened up immense new opportunities for Wall Street; pay no mind to the collateral damage on Main Street. China’s American-assisted economic rise put a nail in the coffin of the US manufacturing sector, causing immense long-term damage to US productivity growth and employment. Now, after promoting China’s economic modernization, we find that we’ve created a formidable new security threat. To anyone not drinking the globalist Kool-Aid, all of this was imminently predictable.

The Dead-End Road of Identity Politics

Not content with undermining the economic foundations of the Republic, political leaders of both parties have distracted the American people from the many failures of globalism by driving the nation down the dead-end road of identity politics, exploiting racial and cultural divisions for electoral advantage. The BLM riots and the insurrection at the Capitol gave us a preview of a future informed by the logic of identity – it is the politics of rage against the “other.” It offers us nothing but a cycle of escalating extremism where truth and compromise become quaint anachronisms in an all-or-nothing war between left and right. What is surprising is not that we got Donald Trump, but that it took so long for someone like him to exploit the underlying discontent with the manifest failures of the status quo and the deliberate incitement of the politics of identity.

Political Corruption and Lack of Accountability

Why are our political and economic elites never held accountable for their failures? While there are many honorable and patriotic Americans in both parties, we must confront the fact that Washington is steeped in a culture of political corruption. Our Constitutional architecture has served us well for more than two centuries, but layered on top of that architecture is a system of laws, rules, and practices – gerrymandering and campaign finance in particular – that distort whose voices get heard, who stands for office, and whose policies are adopted. It’s a form of political corruption that’s perfectly legal, but nevertheless injurious to the public good. As a consequence, our two-party system, which in theory incentivizes politicians to move to the center and holds them accountable for the results, instead feeds the extremes and shields our elected officials from responsibility. Our electoral practices are the equivalent of a Facebook algorithm designed to divide and inflame the electorate.

The effect of this corruption is to silence the political voice of those Americans that occupy the broad center of the political spectrum. According to Gallup’s most recent survey of party affiliation, 42% of Americans identify as Independents, while only 29% identify as Democrats and 27% as Republicans. The people of America are far less divided than America’s politicians and the shrill voices of social media, but they are often forced to choose the lesser evil from the zealots on either end of the political spectrum. American voters can have any color they want, as long as it’s bright red or deep blue. In short, our divisions and policy failures are the inevitable outcome of a broken political system that no longer has the ability to serve what James Madison called “the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

With legislative extremism and gridlock the order of the day, the Federal bureaucracy – the deep state – fills the void. Of course, the deep state is only deep in the sense of immovable and unaccountable, rather than hidden. Indeed, it’s completely visible in the form of 2.2 million federal executive branch employees that go to work every day making the policies and rules (i.e., laws) that govern the lives of Americans. No doubt, most are public-spirited and well-intentioned, but none of them are elected, while the policies and laws that they impose by administrative fiat reflect their own views and policy preferences. Our corrupted Congress has outsourced government to an unelected and unaccountable deep state bureaucracy.

Recovering the Vital Center

A vital center provides the only soil in which a democratic republic can flourish. We cannot reverse the growing extremism – we cannot recover that center – without accepting the difficult truth of its origins. We cannot fully heal what ails the American Republic without far-reaching political reforms that empower the voices of reason, promote practical wisdom in our policies, and ensure the accountability of our elected officials at the ballot box. The longer those reforms are delayed, the more difficult it will be to rebuild the vital center, until all that is left are two extremist tribes waging endless war to vanquish their enemies.

Even if Trump makes a final departure from the public stage, if we choose to return to the status quo without addressing the underlying causes of Americans’ discontent, then one day we will find that we have sacrificed government by “reflection and choice” for government by “accident and force.” Our posterity will hold us accountable.