The Way Back. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ explained by pointing to differences in national wealth, since the economies of the two countries are so similar. Other common excuses for American immobility also make no sense. Some have argued that the move to an information economy, with skill-based technological change, explains everything. But then it’s not as if highly mobile Canada is living in the Stone Age. As for free-trade agreements, Canada relies more on them than the United States. Welfare policies don’t explain anything much either, since America has one of the most generous welfare systems in the world.

      There is more going on, however, and if Canada has succeeded where America has failed we should look to other differences that have something to do with mobility. And then emulate Canada. That would mean school choice, immigration policies designed to favor the native-born, a strengthened rule of law—all policies that Canada has adopted. They are also more deeply conservative than the corresponding policies in America. Here, the Democrats decry income immobility while supporting policies dictated by their base that limit mobility. Had Republicans taken the issue of economic mobility seriously, they would have called out Democrats for their hypocrisy. It was the issue on which the 2012 election turned, and the Republicans gave it away.

      Having lived in both America and Canada, I’ve concluded that few North Americans know much about their own countries. Americans imagine that they live in an essentially capitalist and conservative country, as compared with Soviet Canuckistan. Canadians are apt to think of themselves as so much more progressive than their neighbors to the south. There’s a good deal of self-deception for both. Underneath the comforting images are very different sets of writings, a palimpsest of a liberal America and a conservative Canada. America has one of the world’s most generous welfare systems and very liberal immigration, tax and rule of law policies, while Canada has education, immigration, tax and legal institutions that Donald Trump admires. America’s conservatism is mushy and infected with waste and corruption; while Canada’s liberalism is that of the teenager who hangs out in hip neighborhoods, in jeans his mother pressed this morning, but who always returns home at night.

       Socialist Ends, Capitalist Means

      At a dinner in fall 2015, I heard a Republican congressman deride some of his Freedom Caucus colleagues as “right-wing Marxists.” Aha, I thought. That’s me. I saw an America divided by class, and thought we were in what Marxist-Leninists called an objectively revolutionary situation. Marx himself had wondered why one didn’t see English radicalism in the world’s most advanced capitalist society. That ran against his theory of history: first feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism. So America should have been primed for socialism when Marx wrote, in 1852. Except it wasn’t, and Marx said the reason for American exceptionalism was that Americans were so mobile. It followed, however, that if ever America became immobile, then we’d expect class consciousness and class struggle. Which is how we’re to understand American politics in 2016.

      Trump and Sanders both recognized what had changed. Both wanted a return to a more mobile and just society. They had the same socialist goals but wanted to reach them in different ways. Sanders offered us socialist ends through socialist means, while Trump proposed socialist ends through capitalist means. Because I saw American politics as class warfare, and predicted how this would become the story of the 2016 election, I was a Marxist. And because I saw the way back as a return to free-market principles I was a right-wing Marxist.

      “Socialist goals through capitalist means” upset some conservatives, who didn’t want socially just goals no matter how we got there. I think that phrase had originally been suggested by Milton Friedman, though I couldn’t find the reference. But what did it matter? It’s what I thought American voters wanted and needed.

      It’s also what the Trump campaign wanted. I say this as one who, with my wife and my friend Bob Tyrrell, provided first drafts of many of Trump’s campaign speeches in the spring and summer of 2016, and who subsequently advised on transition matters. The speech of Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican Convention, which I had a hand in writing, summarized what I had written in The Way Back. The Democrats had complained of American immobility, but it was they who had caused the problem. Trump himself praised my book, which to my mind proved either that he was a splendid fellow or that he had not read it. In any event, I knew that his domestic policies were the same as the ones I had recommended.

      We Trump supporters had taken sides in a bitter Republican civil war. The other side, the NeverTrumpers, was composed of a small group of ideological purists who had assembled a checklist of received right-wing ideas. And what were these? They might have been derived from a deep study of John Locke and Robert Nozick, with perhaps a bit of Ayn Rand thrown in for light reading. An advanced degree in Austrian economics would also help. That might take years, but in the end you’d know just what to believe. All good stuff, but if we’re talking about the NeverTrumpers you could mostly just ask what are the most heartless policies around. That would save a lot of time.

      The perfect ideological idiot had forgotten to connect his ideas with people. He had forgotten that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. A smarter person might have learned this, but instead the ideologue reviled Trump for appealing to the ordinary American voter. Trump and his supporters were called populists. That was meant as a term of opprobrium. We were kin to Father Coughlin, to David Duke, to all that was nasty in American politics. That was simply an effort to smear us, and when the editor of National Review, Richard Lowry, called us populists in a debate, I turned to him and said, “I do not think I am ill-bred, compared to you; I do not think I am ill-educated, compared to you.”

      Sneers at populists were to be expected, however, for in 2016 almost no one had shown much interest in the ordinary voter, except for Trump. And that’s because no one was much interested in the idea of equality. Without much discussion, we had come to accept that we live in a class society and that we are permitted to avert our gaze from great differences in wealth and status. In the past, such indifference would have been condemned by Marxists and by egalitarian liberals, for they regarded equality as a moral imperative that demanded something from us. Now, none of them seemed up to the job.

      The classical Marxist dream of universal brotherhood had died in the moral and political bankruptcy of communism. On the progressive left it had been abandoned for identity politics that explicitly deny a common humanity by granting priority to favored groups—minorities, gays, women. There was a telling moment in a 2015 Democratic presidential debate when the candidates were asked to choose between “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter.” One might have thought that only a moral imbecile or a racist would judge people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. But among the candidates only Jim Webb said that all lives matter, and he left the Democratic Party not long afterward.

      As for egalitarian liberalism, it was never the firmest reed in America. At the founding it coexisted with slavery, and it’s always been tainted by religious bigotry. In academic milieus it got a boost from the work of John Rawls, but a theory so rational, so esoteric, wasn’t going to leave a firm imprint on very many people. Moreover, Rawls’ “difference principle” encouraged readers to ignore social and economic inequalities unless they affected the least advantaged members of society. In short, the Rawlsian liberal wouldn’t much care about the typical Trump voters.

      Concerns about inequality scarcely bothered the meritocratic New Class, which embraced the idea that its members were the chosen people of a new, global information economy, and that those who failed to attend Yale Law School, take out a subscription to The Atlantic or attend workshops at the Brookings Institution had only themselves to blame. The conceit that the answer to the country’s social ills lay in turning the working class into proper little left-wing intellectuals was wonderfully ridiculed by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, but somehow the New Class missed the satire.

      Where egalitarianism has any purchase, it’s among religious believers, especially Evangelicals and Catholics, who massively supported Trump. If we believe we’re all made in God’s СКАЧАТЬ