Soli Özel in The Ideas Letter:
“Everything in Trumpworld happens twice,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote recently—“the first time as performance and the second as reality.” He was commenting on the deployment of the U.S. National Guard and U.S. Marines in Los Angeles against protesters challenging President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. If Trump’s victory in 2016 was performance, the aftermath of his 2024 victory is reality. And that reality, now manifest daily, is one that most liberals, leftists, or middle-of-the-roaders had not fully anticipated, despite warnings.
Among the most prescient, consistent, and insistent critics to warn the United States of its own frailties was the historian Christopher Lasch.
Some observers were blinded by their belief in the rootedness and resilience of the country’s institutions, its liberal political tradition, and the irreversibility of progress. Others failed to fully appreciate how money would corrode the American political system and would so deepen cultural-cum-class polarization. But beginning several decades ago, Lasch identified the growing divide between the educated managerial elites and the bulk of the lesser educated public.
Writing of “an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself),” he argued that it “seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or ‘alternative’ institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.” American democracy would deteriorate based on “the routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart.”
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