Political ideas have a limited shelf life. After WWII, politicians droned on about “the authoritarian personality,” hoping to make sense of what Germany had done. During the McCarthy Era, politicians searched under every stone for “communist sympathizers.” Today, politicians in both political parties―who have agreed on nothing for over a generation―declare we are living through a Populist moment in America. This, too, is an idea with limited shelf life. Populism is a fleeting irrational political movement that a little policy tinkering on behalf of the middle class can attenuate. Guided by the hope that such tinkering is all that need be done, both political parties are now trying to win the support of the middle class. The middle class surely needs help, but our malady in America is not Populism.
The real malady, anticipated by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1840), has been long in the making. The twin and unsustainable developments of the post-1989 world order―globalism and identity politics―are its latest manifestation. Americans of the future, Tocqueville wrote, would increasingly lead split lives: on the one hand, their focus would drift ever upward, toward romantic cosmopolitan dreams of a harmonious peaceful world; on the other hand, their focus would be directed inward towards themselves, to the point of losing sight of their neighbors altogether. What is globalism, if not this romantic cosmopolitan dream? What is identity politics, if not a pretext to build imperviously small and self-enclosed individual worlds in which there is no need for neighbor to work with neighbor to build a world together?
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