Populism always runs the risk of blaming the suffering of the many too squarely on some perfidious other.
Elitism always runs the risk of blaming the suffering of the many too squarely on the perfidy of the many.
Conservatism is supposed to stand for individual responsibility, and so conservatives have, historically, veered more toward the excesses of elitism. We’re now in a populist age, in which conservatism has been fiercely jerked in a populist direction by President Trump. As a result, the debates on the Right are starting to get interesting.
“Entire populations revolting against leaders who refuse to improve their lives,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a provocative monologue on his show last Friday. Carlson made the case that the woe of Middle America is real and that it is caused by “ruling class indifference” and misdeeds rooted in, among other things, a religious devotion to markets.
This was mere “victim-politics populism,” conservative writer David French replied at National Review. Yes, the working class is suffering, and yes the elites bear some blame, but “the primary responsibility for creating a life of virtue and purpose rests with families and individuals,” French noted. “In fact, it is still true that your choices are far more important to your success than any government program or the actions of any nefarious banker or any malicious feminist.”
Plenty of other conservatives, including Ben Shapiro, Yuval Levin, and JD Vance have jumped into the discussion, which has included some soul-searching on the Right’s faith in markets to deliver the best outcomes. On a deeper level than this market skepticism, though, was the question French addressed about victimhood and responsibility.
Conservatives often talk about “agency” when we discuss the poor and the suffering in dysfunctional circumstances. We worry that if you spend too much time explaining the “root causes” of crime, or the environmental contributors to out-of-wedlock birth, you are “denying agency” to the suffering classes you’re talking about and playing “victim politics.”
Most women who end up as single mothers, the argument in its most reductive form goes, could have avoided that fate by making better decisions. Same for most men who end up in prison. We can’t deny that people have the power to make better decisions.
“This is still a land where you can determine your own success,” French wrote, “more than can any political party or group of nefarious elites.”
This is an important message of individual responsibility. And it’s true — to some extent.
But if we bracket for a moment President Trump’s tendency to blame everything on the nefarious elites, it’s also true that conservatives tend to overstate our ability to determine our own outcomes. In doing so, we understate the role that circumstances have in shaping outcomes.
We conservatives talk about the primacy of family, so we should consider what parents do. Parents take great efforts and make great sacrifices to put their children in good schools and in good programs for sports, music, or art. We aim to live in a good neighborhood and often to expose the kids to as much of the varied splendor of the human and natural world as possible. We try to make the home a loving and educational place. Our choices of decor and music are often influenced by this same desire: to place our children in an environment that maximizes the odds they can grow up as happy and successful adults.
So however much we talk about self-determination, we act as if a person’s environment has a massive effect on their chances in life. If we didn’t think so, we’d just say, “Hey kid, do the right thing,” and skip all the hard work.
I spent much of the last two years writing “Alienated America”, a book that pins the working-class woes — wage stagnation, a retreat from marriage, deaths of despair — on the erosion of local community. The closure of the factories is a huge element in that, but the closure of the local diners, the bowling leagues, and most of the all the closure of the churches are the core problem here.
This argument has incurred the charge that I’m denying agency to the rural working class. Maybe the charge is a little true. When I look at people who grow up in alienated places, thin on the crucial institutions of civil society that give the rest of us not only support and modeling, but also purpose, I see them as being afflicted with alienation.
It’s not that our individual decisions don’t matter. It’s that the right environment makes it easier to make good decisions, as Megan McArdle often puts it.
And it’s not that family isn’t of pre-eminent importance as French states. It’s that human families aren’t made to be alone. Parents, of all people, know how much they rely on neighbors, friends, in-laws, grandparents, pastors, teachers, coaches, and so many others in order to do the job of raising kids well. That’s why one chapter in my book is titled “It Takes a Village.”
So if the root cause of working-class woe is community erosion, where does this leave the ruling class that Carlson blamed? They’re not blameless, that’s for sure. It’s not that the ruling class should be doing more to prop up local communities. By definition, that can’t be done through centralized action.
The problem is that the elites have refused to share their most important assets with the rest of the country. To Carlson’s argument that the elites “don’t care” about the struggling places, French retorts, “In 2017, Americans gave more than $410 billion in charity.”
But cash isn’t the most valuable asset the elites have. That would be the tight-knit communities in which they’ve enmeshed themselves: strong public schools, elite private schools, wealthy neighborhoods, alumni networks, and so on. Increasingly, the elites have cloistered themselves, and class-based segregation is on the rise.
We could also point to the social movements and the government policies that have kneecapped civil society. This includes the Left’s war on religious institutions, but also the Right’s occasional hyper-individualism (“I did build that!”), and the market’s fierce efficiency and intolerance of “sentimentality.”
The elites bear blame for the suffering of the working class. But it’s not that the ruling class isn’t doing enough for the average guy. It’s that the system set up by the elites isn’t allowing him to live out his life in the way humans are supposed to live: in a family, supported by a community.
