Peggy Noonan, former Reagan administration speech writer and current Wall
Street Journal pundit has, like most of her peers, been wondering what's gotten
into the unwashed masses lately that makes them such unpredictable voters.
And she's come up with a useful conclusion: The rise of Donald Trump (and similar
iconoclasts in other countries) is due to the gradual division of society into
the protected -- that is, people who make the rules and therefore benefit from
them -- and the unprotected, who don't make the rules and end up getting screwed.
The latter have finally figured this out and have stopped supporting the former.
Here's her latest OpEd piece, in its entirety:
Trump
and the Rise of the Unprotected: Why political professionals are struggling
to make sense of the world they created.
We're in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them
quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican
primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened
and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for
how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or
Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical
person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a
look as if you're teasing him. Trump, they say.
I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes
in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was
going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. "Troomp!" He's
a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience
flick across his face: Aren't you supposed to know these things?
In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.
But actually that's been true for a while, and is how we got in the position
we're in.
Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross
stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most
of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.
But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican
nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving
around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a
preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now
grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.
There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy.
The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful--those who
have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness
of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have
created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.
I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let's stick
with the protected.
They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods,
safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they've
got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers.
Some of them--in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch
or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union--literally
have their own security details.
Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose
any reality. They're insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.
One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration.
It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic
one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.
It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.
Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration
is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European
refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically
and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.
If you are an unprotected American--one with limited resources and negligible
access to power--you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years' experience
of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won't protect you and the
Republicans won't help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The
Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic
for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it
as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners
of the Hispanic vote.
Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration--its impact on labor markets,
financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But
the protected did fine--more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal
immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They
realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that
they were not looking out for the country, either.
The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment--another word
for the protected--nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
Mr. Trump came from that.
Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see
the EU apparatus as a racket--an elite that operated in splendid isolation,
looking after its own while looking down on the people.
In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against Chancellor Angela
Merkel's liberal refugee policy happened on New Year's Eve in the public
square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested
groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that,
but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think
about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims--not a daughter
of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class
girls--the unprotected, who didn't even immediately protest what had happened
to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they're
nobodies.
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of
the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don't have all that much against
those who've been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them
not because they're fortunate but because they're better.
You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it,
where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own
children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose
not to help them through the school liberation movement--charter schools,
choice, etc.--because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional
group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder.
But their children go to the best private schools.
This is a terrible feature of our age--that we are governed by protected
people who don't seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.
And a country really can't continue this way.
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of
normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That's more or less how
America used to be. There didn't seem to be so much distance between the
top and the bottom.
Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You're on your own. Get with
the program, little racist.
Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe
it is the overclass that must re-moralize.
I don't know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role
in it.
Noonan nails the political/social zeitgeist but for some reason misses the
financial side of the phase change: Governments and other protected classes
have borrowed unmanageable amounts of money and are now maintaining their power
by squeezing workers and savers. Corporations lower their costs by shipping
jobs overseas while governments cut their debt service by reducing (or eliminating)
interest rates on the bank accounts and bond funds that once allowed savers
to build capital and retirees to eat.
In this sense, QE, ZIRP and NIRP are a declaration of war on the unprotected,
and as the victims figure this out they're lining up behind to anyone who promises
to 1) raise the minimum wage, limit immigration, and prevent corporations from
moving jobs overseas, 2) break up big banks and jail Wall Street criminals,
and 3) hand out free stuff, paid for by confiscating the ill-gotten gains of
the 1%.
In the US, this produces a political campaign with Donald Trump giving voice
to the darkest impulses of the electorate and both major Democratic candidates
running to the left of Barak Obama.
In Europe, fringe parties of both the right and left are taking over, leading
almost inevitably to a dissolution of the eurozone and a radical scale-back
of the European Union. For starters.
This is starting to look like the French Revolution, with bankers, CEOs and
their favored politicians in the role of Marie Antoinette.