By Amy Chua, New York Times, Feb. 20, 2018
Image from article, with caption: Supporters of President
Trump's travel ban in Los Angeles this month
By now we all understand that America is in the grip of political tribalism.
[JB emphasis]We lament and condemn this phenomenon even as we voraciously
engage in it. But by fixating on the symptoms, we remain blind to the root
causes. America is being ravaged by predictable, destructive political dynamics
that follow from the combination of democracy and a market-dominant minority.
Most Americans assume that democracy and free markets go hand in hand,
naturally working together to generate prosperity and freedom. For the United
States, this has largely been true. But by their very nature, markets and democracy
coexist in deep tension.
Capitalism creates a small number of very wealthy people, while democracy
potentially empowers a poor majority resentful of that wealth. In the wrong
conditions, that tension can set in motion intensely destructive politics. All over the
world, one circumstance in particular has invariably had this effect: the presence of a
market-dominant minority — a minority group, perceived by the rest of the
population as outsiders, who control vastly disproportionate amounts of a nation’s
wealth.
Such minorities are common in the developing world. They can be ethnic
groups, like the tiny Chinese minority in Indonesia, which controls roughly 70
percent of the nation’s private economy even though it is between 2 percent and 4
percent of the population. Or they can be distinct in other ways, culturally or
religiously, like the Sunni minority in Iraq that controlled the country’s vast oil
wealth under Saddam Hussein.
Introducing free-market democracy in these circumstances can be a recipe for
disaster. Resentful majorities who see themselves as a country’s rightful owners
demand to have “their” country back. Ethnonationalism rears its head. Democracy
becomes not a vehicle for e pluribus unum but a zero-sum tribalist contest. This
dynamic was also at play in the former Yugoslavia, in Zimbabwe, in Venezuela and in
virtually every country where there has been a market-dominant minority.
For most of our history, it seemed as though we were relatively immune to dynamics
like these. Part of the reason is we never had a market-dominant minority. On the
contrary, for 200 years, America was economically, politically and culturally
dominated by a white majority — a politically stable, if often invidious, state of
affairs.
But today, something has changed. Race has split America’s poor, and class has
split America’s white majority. The former has been true for a while; the latter is a
more recent development, at least in the intense form it has now reached. As a
result, we may be seeing the emergence of America’s own version of a market-dominant
minority: the much-discussed group often referred to as the coastal elites
— misleadingly, because its members are neither all coastal nor all elite, at least in
the sense of being wealthy.
But with some important caveats, coastal elites do bear a resemblance to the
market-dominant minorities of the developing world. Wealth in the United States is
extraordinarily concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people,
many of whom live on the West or East Coast. Although America’s coastal elites are
not an ethnic or religious minority, they are culturally distinct, often sharing similar
cosmopolitan values, and they are extremely insular, interacting and intermarrying
primarily among themselves.
They dominate key sectors of the economy, including Wall Street, the media,
Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And because coastal elites are viewed by many in the
heartland as “minority-loving” and pro-immigrant, they are seen as unconcerned
with “real” Americans — indeed as threatening their way of life.
What happened in America in 2016 is exactly what I would have predicted for a
developing country pursuing elections in the presence of a deeply resented market-dominant
minority: the rise of a populist movement in which demagogic voices
called on “real” Americans to “take back our country.”
Trumpism is part of a global pattern, but Europe’s right-wing nationalist
movements aren’t the only or even most apt comparison. American politics today
has as much in common with the developing world as it does with Europe. Time and
again, vote-seeking demagogues with few political credentials have swept to power in
developing countries by tapping into deep-seated resentment toward a market-dominant
minority. President Trump is neither the world’s first “tweeter-in-chief”
nor the first head of state to star on a reality TV show. That would be Hugo Chávez of
Venezuela.
Venezuela, too, has a market-dominant minority: the light-skinned, insular elite
that historically controlled the country’s corporate sector and its staggering oil
wealth. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Chávez swept to victory in 1998 on an anti-establishment
platform, attacking the mainstream media, the “rotten oligarchs” and
a slew of “enemies of the people.” He won over millions of the country’s have-nots
with unscripted rhetoric that struck elites as vulgar, outrageous and often plainly
false. But Venezuela’s majority saw in Mr. Chávez a leader who looked and spoke like
them.
Seeing coastal elites as a market-dominant minority is sobering. In my research,
I’ve found no examples of countries successfully overcoming this problem. On the
contrary, all over the world, when this dynamic takes hold of a nation’s politics, a
result has been an erosion of trust in institutions and in electoral outcomes.
Countries lurch toward authoritarianism, hate-mongering and an elite backlash
against the popular side of democracy.
Signs of all these developments are present in the United States. As to the latter,
right before the 2016 election, a book review in The New Yorker discussed “the case
against democracy,” including proposals to impose knowledge tests on voters
(something Latin American elites have been writing about for a long time). The
review quoted from a book by Jason Brennan, a libertarian political philosopher at
Georgetown, who wrote that “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from
voting might be just what poor blacks need.”
This is not the way forward. If any way out exists, it will have to be both
economic and cultural. Restoring upward mobility should be viewed as an
emergency. Upward mobility is what made America different from developing
countries that have disintegrated. Research shows that zero-sum political tribalism
is worst under conditions of economic insecurity and lack of opportunity.
But the emergence of coastal elites as an insular minority is also rooted squarely
in the breakdown of national unity — in the fracturing of our country into two (or
more) Americas in which people from one tribe see others not just as the political
opposition, but as immoral, evil and un-American. America desperately needs
leaders with the courage to break out of the tribalist cycle, but where are we going to
find them?
Amy Chua (@amychua), a law professor at Yale, is the author, most recently, of
“Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.”
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