There are few things to match the bitterness of a family argument. Under the right conditions — usually long-deferred disputes — 95 percent agreement can crumble under the weight of a 1 percent disagreement. Tucker Carlson's polemic against "elites" who ravage defenseless communities for their own benefit risks yet another fissure on the right between people who in more normal times usually find themselves in "violent agreement."
This recasting of the conservative-libertarian split over how to prioritize our thinking about society and economy has plenty of good evidence on both sides. Free markets and rising GDP have delivered the goods: rising standards of living here and abroad. Obesity and diabetes have replaced food shortages and starvation as the world's most prevalent nutrition-related problems and at home we've essentially eliminated consumption poverty. At the same time, many American families and communities feel squeezed between the abrupt arrival of a competitive, global market and intensifying social distress at home in the form of family dissolution, educational failure, and drug addiction. The body politic has a case of flu and populism is its nagging cough.
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