How did we get to a world where rich people are saying
that former factory workers in upper Wisconsin are being
sold a bill of goods by globalists? What’s going on that the
elites are the most tribal now?
Part of the reason I think we’re in the shitty position that we’re
in is that our elites will not preach what they practice. Rich
people tend to live pretty bourgeois lives. Most successful peo-
ple in this country wait till they get as much education as they
can, then they get married, then they have kids, and it turns
out if you follow that basic bourgeois kind of lifestyle, you’re
going to be OK. The economic gains from marriage are in some
cases greater than and often equal to the gains from going to
college, but it’s part of the gestalt of the new elite class not to
tell people to get married. They love talking about going to col-
lege, but they feel like it’s too judgy to say maybe you should
get married. I think this is one of the best examples of how
our elites are contemptuous of the values that got them rich.
They’re terrified of preaching them to other people.
National Review came out against Trump during the
campaign, despite the fact that he was advocating some
policies the magazine has been preaching for decades. He
won anyway. Is Trump actually what we’ve been asking
for all along?
My position has long been that Trump is not the author of all
of our problems—he’s a symptom of our problems—but he’s
making a lot of those problems much worse.
I think what Trump has done is break the blood-brain bar-
rier between politics and entertainment in a way that will
not be repaired for a very long time. I was saying in 2016 as
late as July that if Tom Hanks or Oprah or one of those guys
parachuted in, they could have probably won the election,
because everyone hated Hillary and everyone hated Trump.
Both parties managed to nominate the one candidate that
had a chance of losing to the other. It was a choice between
two different crap sandwiches on different kinds of bread.
What Trump has proved is that you can have a completely
thumbless grasp on the Constitution, you can encourage
members at your rallies to commit violence against people,
you can say the most despicable things, so long as you’re
entertaining.How do we revive our institutions or create new ones that
are actually worthy of our trust and confidence? If you
start from 1968, the government has only been lying to
us more and more: Vietnam, surveillance, etc. Or else it’s
incompetent. How do we reinvest these institutions with
something like trust and confidence?
There’s not a lot of policy prescription in the book, but one of
the things I think screams out from it is just simply this idea
of pushing as much power as possible down to the most local
level. I think some of the paranoia about globalists is bullshit;
I think some of it is totally fair; and I think some of it is wrong
but understandable. You have to take the complaints on a case-
by-case basis. But one thing that’s indisputable is there’s a
widespread view that either Washington or some other powers
that be are making too many decisions about our lives. If one
community wants to ban stinky cheese, let them. Why does the
[Food and Drug Administration] have to do it?
If you push power down to the most local level possible,
one of the benefits you get is that people know who the powers
that be are. They know their names....You’re still gonna have
culture war fights, but the winners have to look the losers in
the eye the next day. That breeds a certain sense of humility;
it breeds a certain sense of live to fight another day. Instead,
what we have is these idiotic national coalitions that want to
impose one way of living on the entire country.But does the average Trump voter want to take responsibil-
ity for his own life?
Look, I have no problem giving the people their fair share of
blame. The Democrats are very good at this, and they’ve been54 OCTOBER 2018
“In the state of nature, the way you deal with
a stranger is you hit them over the head with
a rock. In the modern world the way we deal
with strangers is we try to sell them rocks.”