The rich keep getting richer (in
Singapore, just look at the evil REITS raising cost of living for
all Singaporeans), the poor keep on struggling just to survive,
of course the anger mounts and society teeters towards
self-destruction.
David Brooks says it like it is. Took the words right outta my
mouth.
The presidential campaign of 2016 was an education in the
deep problems facing America. Angry voters made a few things
abundantly clear: that modern democratic capitalism is not working
for them; that basic institutions like the family and communities
are falling apart; that we have a college educated elite that has
found ingenious ways to make everybody else feel invisible, that
has managed to transfer wealth upward to itself, that crashes the
hammer of political correctness down on anybody who does not have
faculty lounge views.
As Robert W. Merry put it recently in The American
Conservative, “When a man as uncouth and reckless as Trump becomes
president by running against the nation’s elites, it’s a strong
signal that the elites are the problem.”
David Brooks continues to analyze why Trump's nationalistic,
alienating approach is destabilizing and endangering the entire
world :
The last four months, on the other hand, have been an
education in the shortcomings in populism. It’s not only that
Donald Trump is a bad president. It’s that movements fueled by
alienation are bound to fail.
Alienation, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, is a “state
of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible or
fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom,
or even hostility.”
The alienated long for something that will smash the system
or change their situation, but they have no actual plan or any
means to deliver it. The alienated are a hodgepodge of disparate
groups. They have no positive agenda beyond the sort of fake shiny
objects Trump ran on (Build a Wall!). They offer up no governing
class competent enough to get things done.
As Yuval Levin argues in a brilliant essay in Modern Age,
“Alienation can sometimes make for a powerful organizing principle
for an electoral coalition. … But it does not make for a
natural organizing principle for a governing
coalition.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/opinion/alienated-mind-trump-supporters.html
