In writing the chapters on progress, I resisted pressure from readers of earlier drafts to end each one by warning, “But all this progress is threatened if Donald Trump gets his way.” Threatened it certainly is. Whether or not 2017 really represents a turning point in history, it’s worth reviewing the threats, if only to understand the nature of the progress they threaten.26
Life and Health have been expanded in large part by vaccination and other well-vetted interventions, and among the conspiracy theories that Trump has endorsed is the long-debunked claim that preservatives in vaccines cause autism. The gains have also been secured by broad access to medical care, and he has pushed for legislation that would withdraw health insurance from tens of millions of Americans, a reversal of the trend toward beneficial social spending.
Worldwide improvements in Wealth have come from a globalized economy, powered in large part by international trade. Trump is a protectionist who sees international trade as a zero-sum contest between countries, and is committed to tearing up international trade agreements.
Growth in Wealth will also be driven by technological innovation, education, infrastructure, an increase in the spending power of the lower and middle classes, constraints on cronyism and plutocracy that distort market competition, and regulations on finance that reduce the likelihood of bubbles and crashes. In addition to being hostile to trade, Trump is indifferent to technology and education and an advocate of regressive tax cuts on the wealthy, while appointing corporate and financial tycoons to his cabinet who are indiscriminately hostile to regulation.
In capitalizing on concerns about Inequality, Trump has demonized immigrants and trade partners while ignoring the major disrupter of lower-middle-class jobs, technological change. He has also opposed the measures that most successfully mitigate its harms, namely progressive taxation and social spending.
The Environment has benefited from regulations on air and water pollution that have coexisted with growth in population, GDP, and travel. Trump believes that environmental regulation is economically destructive; worst of all, he has called climate change a hoax and announced a withdrawal from the historic Paris agreement.
Safety, too, has been dramatically improved by federal regulations, toward which Trump and his allies are contemptuous. While Trump has cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally uninterested in evidence-based policy that would distinguish effective crime-prevention measures from useless tough talk.
The postwar Peace has been cemented by trade, Democracy, international agreements and organizations, and norms against conquest. Trump has vilified international trade and has threatened to defy international agreements and weaken international organizations. Trump is an admirer of Vladimir Putin, who reversed the democratization of Russia, tried to undermine democracy in the United States and Europe with cyberattacks, helped prosecute the most destructive war of the 21st century in Syria, fomented smaller wars in Ukraine and Georgia, and defied the postwar taboo against conquest in his annexation of Crimea. Several members of Trump’s administration secretly colluded with Russia in an effort to lift sanctions against it, undermining a major enforcement mechanism in the outlawry of war.
Democracy depends both on explicit constitutional protections, such as freedom of the press, and on shared norms, in particular that political leadership is determined by the rule of law and nonviolent political competition rather than a charismatic leader’s will to power. Trump proposed to relax libel laws against journalists, encouraged violence against his critics at his rallies, would not commit to respecting the outcome of the 2016 election if it went against him, tried to discredit the popular vote count that did go against him, threatened to imprison his opponent in the election, and attacked the legitimacy of the judicial system when it challenged his decisions—all hallmarks of a dictator. Globally, the resilience of democracy depends in part on its prestige in the community of nations, and Trump has praised autocrats in Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt while denigrating democratic allies such as Germany.
The ideals of tolerance, equality, and Equal Rights took big symbolic hits during his campaign and early administration. Trump demonized Hispanic immigrants, proposed banning Muslim immigration altogether (and tried to impose a partial ban once he was elected), repeatedly demeaned women, tolerated vulgar expressions of racism and sexism at his rallies, accepted support from white supremacist groups and equated them with their opponents, and appointed a strategist and an attorney general who are hostile to the civil rights movement.
The ideal of Knowledge—that one’s opinions should be based on justified true beliefs—has been mocked by Trump’s repetition of ludicrous conspiracy theories: that Obama was born in Kenya, Senator Ted Cruz’s father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated 9/11, Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered, Obama had his phones tapped, millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote, and literally dozens of others. The fact-checking site PolitiFact judged that an astonishing 69 percent of the public statements by Trump they checked were “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire” (their term for outrageous lies, from the children’s taunt “Liar, liar, pants on fire”).27 All politicians bend the truth, and all sometimes lie (since all human beings bend the truth and sometimes lie), but Trump’s barefaced assertion of canards that can instantly be debunked (such as that he won the election in a landslide) shows that he sees public discourse not as a means of finding common ground based on objective reality but as a weapon with which to project dominance and humiliate rivals.
Most frighteningly, Trump has pushed back against the norms that have protected the world against the possible Existential Threat of nuclear war. He questioned the taboo on using nuclear weapons, tweeted about resuming a nuclear arms race, mused about encouraging the proliferation of weapons to additional countries, sought to overturn the agreement that prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and taunted Kim Jong-un about a possible nuclear exchange with North Korea. Worst of all, the chain of command gives an American president enormous discretion over the use of nuclear weapons in a crisis, on the tacit assumption that no president would act rashly on such a grave matter. Yet Trump has a temperament that is notoriously impulsive and vindictive.
Not even a congenital optimist can see a pony in this Christmas stocking. But will Donald Trump (and authoritarian populism more generally) really undo a quarter of a millennium of progress? There are reasons not to take poison just yet. If a movement has proceeded for decades or centuries, there are probably systematic forces behind it, and many stakeholders with an interest in its not being precipitously reversed.
By the design of the Founders, the American presidency is not a rotating monarchy. The president presides over a distributed network of power (denigrated by populists as the “deep state”) that outlasts individual leaders and carries out the business of government under real-world constraints which can’t easily be erased by populist applause lines or the whims of the man at the top. It includes legislators who have to respond to constituents and lobbyists, judges with reputations of probity to uphold, and executives, bureaucrats, and functionaries who are responsible for the missions of their departments. Trump’s authoritarian instincts are subjecting the institutions of American democracy to a stress test, but so far it has pushed back on a number of fronts. Cabinet secretaries have publicly repudiated various quips, tweets, and stink bombs; courts have struck down unconstitutional measures; senators and congressmen have defected from his party to vote down destructive legislation; Justice Department and Congressional committees are investigating the administration’s ties to Russia; an FBI chief has publicly called out Trump’s attempt to intimidate him (raising talk about impeachment for obstruction of justice); and his own staff, appalled at what they see, regularly leak compromising facts to the press—all in the
first six months of the administration.
Also boxing a president in are state and local governments, which are closer to the facts on the ground; the governments of other nations, which cannot be expected to put a high priority on making America great again; and even most corporations, which benefit from peace, prosperity, and stability. Globalization in particular is a tide that is impossible for any ruler to order back. Many of a country’s problems are inherently global, including migration, pandemics, terrorism, cybercrime, nuclear proliferation, rogue states, and the environment. Pretending they don’t exist is not tenable forever, and they can be solved only through international cooperation. Nor can the benefits of globalization—more affordable goods, larger markets for exports, the reduction in global poverty—be denied indefinitely. And with the Internet and inexpensive travel, there will be no stopping the flow of people and ideas (especially, as we will see, among younger people). As for the battle against truth and fact, over the long run they have a built-in advantage: when you stop believing in them, they don’t go away.28
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The deeper question is whether the rise of populist movements, whatever damage they do in the short term, represents the shape of things to come—whether, as a recent Boston Globe editorial lamented/gloated, “The Enlightenment had a good run.”29 Do the events around 2016 really imply that the world is headed back to the Middle Ages? As with climate change skeptics who claim to be vindicated by a nippy morning, it’s easy to overinterpret recent events.
For one thing, the latest elections are not referenda on the Enlightenment. In the American political duopoly, any Republican candidate starts from a partisan floor of at least 45 percent of the votes in a two-way race, and Trump was defeated in the popular vote 46–48 percent, while benefiting from electoral shenanigans and from campaigning misjudgments on Clinton’s part. And Barack Obama—who in his farewell speech actually credited the Enlightenment for the “essential spirit of this country”—left office with an approval rating of 58 percent, above average for departing presidents.30 Trump entered office with a rating of 40 percent, the lowest ever for an incoming president, and during his first seven months it sank to 34 percent, barely more than half of the average rating of the nine previous presidents at the same point in their terms.31
European elections, too, are not depth-soundings for a commitment to cosmopolitan humanism but reactions to a bundle of emotionally charged issues of the day. These included, recently, the euro currency (which arouses skepticism among many economists), intrusive regulation from Brussels, and pressure to accept large numbers of refugees from the Middle East just when fears of Islamic terrorism (however disproportionate to the risk) were being stoked by horrific attacks. Even then, populist parties have attracted only 13 percent of the votes in recent years, and they have lost seats in as many national legislatures as they have gained them in.32 In the year following the Trump and Brexit shocks, right-wing populism was repudiated in elections in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France—where the new president, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed that Europe was “waiting for us to defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.”33
But far more important than the political events of the mid-2010s are the social and economic trends that have fostered authoritarian populism—and more to the point of this chapter, that may foretell its future.
Beneficial historical developments often create losers together with the winners, and the apparent economic losers of globalization (namely the lower classes of rich countries) are often said to be the supporters of authoritarian populism. For economic determinists, this is enough to explain the rise of the movement. But analysts have sifted through the election results like investigators inspecting the wreckage at the site of a plane crash, and we now know that the economic explanation is wrong. In the American election, voters in the two lowest income brackets voted for Clinton 52–42, as did those who identified “the economy” as the most important issue. A majority of voters in the four highest income brackets voted for Trump, and Trump voters singled out “immigration” and “terrorism,” not “the economy,” as the most important issues.34
The twisted metal has turned up more promising clues. An article by the statistician Nate Silver began, “Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page.” That finding jumped right off the page and into the article’s headline: “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump.”35 Why should education have mattered so much? Two uninteresting explanations are that the highly educated happen to affiliate with a liberal political tribe, and that education may be a better long-term predictor of economic security than current income. A more interesting explanation is that education exposes people in young adulthood to other races and cultures in a way that makes it harder to demonize them. Most interesting of all is the likelihood that education, when it does what it is supposed to do, instills a respect for vetted fact and reasoned argument, and so inoculates people against conspiracy theories, reasoning by anecdote, and emotional demagoguery.
In another page-jumper, Silver found that the regional map of Trump support did not overlap particularly well with the maps of unemployment, religion, gun ownership, or the proportion of immigrants. But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger, which Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown is a reliable indicator of racism (chapter 15).36 This doesn’t mean that most Trump supporters are racists. But overt racism shades into resentment and distrust, and the overlap suggests that the regions of the country that gave Trump his Electoral College victory are those with the most resistance to the decades-long process of integration and the promotion of minority interests (particularly racial preferences, which they see as reverse discrimination against them).
Among the exit poll questions that probed general attitudes, the most consistent predictor of Trump support was pessimism.37 Sixty-nine percent of Trump supporters felt that the direction of the country was “seriously off track,” and they were similarly jaundiced about the workings of the federal government and the lives of the next generation of Americans.
Across the pond, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris spotted similar patterns in their analysis of 268 political parties in thirty-one European countries.38 Economic issues, they found, have been playing a smaller role in party manifestoes for decades, and noneconomic issues a larger role. The same was true of the distribution of voters. Support for populist parties is strongest not from manual workers but from the “petty bourgeoisie” (self-employed tradesmen and the owners of small businesses), followed by foremen and technicians. Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance.39 Brexit voters, too, were older, more rural, and less educated than those who voted to remain: 66 percent of high school graduates voted to leave, but only 29 percent of degree holders did.40
Inglehart and Norris concluded that supporters of authoritarian populism are the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition. Voters who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share. . . . The silent revolution launched in the 1970s seems to have spawned a resentful counter-revolutionary backlash today.”41 Paul Taylor, a political analyst at the Pew Research Center, singled out the same counter-current in American polling results: “The overall drift is toward more liberal views on a range of issues, but that doesn’t mean the whole country’s buying in.”42
Though the source of the populist backlash may be found in currents of modernity that have been engulfing the world for some time—globalization, racial diversity, women’s empowerment, s
ecularism, urbanization, education—its electoral success in a particular country depends on whether a leader materializes who can channel that resentment. Neighboring countries with comparable cultures can thus differ in the degree to which populism gains traction: Hungary more than the Czech Republic, Norway more than Sweden, Poland more than Romania, Austria more than Germany, France more than Spain, and the United States more than Canada. (In 2016 Spain, Canada, and Portugal had no populist party legislators at all.)43
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How will the tension play out between the liberal, cosmopolitan, enlightenment humanism that has been sweeping the world for decades and the regressive, authoritarian, tribal populism pushing back? The major long-term forces that have carried liberalism along—mobility, connectivity, education, urbanization—are not likely to go into reverse, and neither is the pressure for equality from women and ethnic minorities.
All of these portents, to be sure, are conjectural. But one is as certain as the first half of the idiom “death and taxes.” Populism is an old man’s movement. As figure 20-1 shows, support for all three of its recrudescences—Trump, Brexit, and European populist parties—falls off dramatically with year of birth. (The alt-right movement, which overlaps with populism, has a youngish membership, but for all its notoriety it is an electoral nonentity, numbering perhaps 50,000 people or 0.02 percent of the American population.)44 The age rolloff isn’t surprising, since we saw in chapter 15 that in the 20th century every birth cohort has been more tolerant and liberal than the one that came before (at the same time that all the cohorts have drifted liberalward). This raises the possibility that as the Silent Generation and older Baby Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil, they will take authoritarian populism with them.