The Loud Majority
I. War and Duty
Over 230,000 Americans and 45,000 Britons are dead. The President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom were hospitalized with COVID-19. The originator of the modern democratic order, Great Britain, and its present-day successor, the United States, had been struck a devastating blow. The Chinese Communist Party’s subsequent actions to suppress information, blame others for its origins, and mingle with dignitaries in Davos can only be interpreted as an act of war.
Historically, America has shown its characteristic ‘grit’ in crisis. After 9/11, we mourned, but we understood the attack on the World Trade Center was an attack on our way of life. We were united as Americans, and the attack reminded us of who we were. In his seminal text, Who Are We?, political theoretician Samuel Huntington recounts the story of a NY cosmopolitan woman Rachel Newman in the aftermath of 9/11. Rachel writes,
In my college class Gender and economics, my girlfriend and I were so frustrated by inequality in America that we discussed moving to another country. On Sept. 11, all that changed. I realized that I had been taking the freedoms I have here for granted.
Walmart recorded purchases of 370,000 flags on Sept 10th and Sept 11th in 2001 compared to 16,000 a year earlier. Regardless of political orientation, education, age, sex, class, and religion, Americans knew broadly what America was. America was a place that worshipped hard work, protected the family unit, cherished liberties like speech and religion, and convinced parents that their kids would be better off.
Now, we face a threat from a superpower, with minimal regard for the sanctity of the individual. In America, each person is dignified and fashioned in the image of G-d, thereby granting them inviolable liberties. The state does not define these liberties; these liberties are granted by G-d and protect us from government excess. In contrast, China is the extreme realization of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’. Bentham posited that an invisible panopticon is sufficient to compel persons to submit, if he or she knows he is being observed. China’s panopticon is not invisible — it’s in your face! Everyone knows they are being watched, whether it’s the businessman who has his phone scraped for intellectual property, the whistle-blower doctor who has his social score slashed, or the Uigur mother who has her home seized by a communist apparatchik. Any rights or pleasures you enjoy are granted and defined by the Chinese Communist Party. Policies in China are made based on callous data calculations for the utilitarian good. For example, a one-child policy was enacted to constrain population growth, while a social score was generated to encourage obedience.
The contrast is clear between the humanity of a free United States and the ruthlessness of a calculating China. The clear threat of an enemy can corral patriotism and eradicate group affiliations. Mikhail Gorbachev warned an American journalist in the final days of the Cold War, “We will deprive you of an enemy and then what will you do?” Ultimately, China gave us what we desperately needed — an enemy to shake us out of the decadence of the post-Soviet era and rally us to a noble cause. How did we respond? Did we stand in unity like we did after 9/11?
II. Identity Crisis
Sadly, Americans did not respond with proud displays of patriotism. The brewing cold war with China did not remind Americans of the inherent goodness in our system. Rather, many Americans were subsumed in protests, demanding an overhaul of our institutions, because America is ‘systemically racist.’ I was not expecting a military conflict with China, but I did expect a renewed patriotism in the wake of the crisis.
How did we get to a point that we can’t muster enough unity in a cold war? Are there underlying values that we share as Americans? What did it mean to be an American in the past and what does it mean now? In G.K. Chesterton’s immortal words, America was a ‘nation with the soul of a church.’ While a growing number of Americans are secular, their way of life is deeply informed by Judeo-Christian teachings. Huntington writes,
The Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience and the responsibility of individuals to learn God’s truths directly from the Bible promoted American commitment to individualism, equality, and the rights to freedom of religion and opinion. Protestantism stressed the work ethic and the responsibility of the individual for his own success or failure in life.
Many of the heralded freedoms outlined in this statement are strained today. First, tactics like micro-aggressions and de-platforming are used to silence the opposition and discourage ‘freedom of opinion.’ Second, derision in the university and workplace renders ‘freedom of religion’ increasingly at risk. Any G-d fearing college student faces ridicule from woke peers for suggesting gender is biological. In HBO’s hit parody Silicon Valley, an executive warns the CEO,
You can be openly polyamorous and people will call you brave. You can put micro-doses of LSD in your cereal and people will call you a pioneer. But the one thing you cannot be is a Christian.
Third, the most destructive departure from our Judeo-Christian teachings is reflected in our current understanding of ‘individualism’. Today, people link individualism to autonomy, while earlier generations linked individualism to responsibility. Both progressives and libertarians view the individual as supreme. In fact, anything the individual does is permissible, provided it does not infringe on the safety of another. In his landmark essay, Unsustainable Liberalism, Patrick Deneen writes,
Liberty, so defined, requires in the first instance liberation from all forms of associations and relationships — from the family, church, and schools to the village and neighborhood and the community broadly defined — that exerted strong control over behavior largely through informal and habituated expectations and norms.
Such ‘associations’ with churches, clubs, and the community were perceived as unique strengths in America’s civil society. In his travels to the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville posits, “as long as family feeling kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone.” We are who we are, because of the inherited narratives and traditions of our family, community, and people.
An individual, purged from his attachments to the community, is more likely to look to the state for support. This has caused more Americans to delay having children, file for divorce, and descend into depression. In his brilliant book, Morality, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks demonstrates the dangers of individualism.
…from the 1960s onward, individualism was left as the order of the day, and so it is today. The individual trumps society. The “I” prevails over the “We”. We have the market and the state, the two arenas of competition, one for wealth, the other for power, but nothing else, no arena of cooperation that would bridge the difference between the wealthy and powerful and the poor and powerless….No social animal lives like this. No society has ever survived like this for very long….In the end, with the market and the state but no substantive society to link us to our fellow citizens in bonds of collective responsibility, trust and truth erode, economics becomes inequitable, and politics becomes unbearable.
In the past, American identity boasted a consensus appreciation for its political system, inherited religious norms, and optimism. Now, many are suggesting that America is fundamentally evil and racist. If we do not share a basic understanding of what it means to be an American, we cannot set forth clear priorities and address clear threats, whether abroad or domestic.
Reasonable people can debate which philosophers, from Hobbes to Marx, and which geopolitical trends, from industrialization to immigration, are to blame for this meteoric change in identity. Some will argue that migration into cities and the sexual revolution demolished the family unit. Some will argue that mass immigration, coupled with multiculturalism, ensured a highly divided public. Some will argue that globalization and short-sighted trade deals resulted in the displacement of the working class, deepening economic and cultural divides. Some will argue that post-modern thinking and identity politics demolished any tinge of objective truth.
All of these arguments are true, and great minds have expounded at length on them. This essay focuses less on the trends and philosophies and more on the agents who operationalized the disintegration of American identity.
III. Merchants of Decline
The decadence of the United States was made possible by universities, multi-national corporations, and the expert class. Since the Great Society, these agents have had a profound impact on our culture. This essay will examine their success in propagating divisive and destructive views and propose solutions to minimize their influence over the majority.
The movement of human capital from universities to multi-national corporations to expert positions in the government explains the relatively homogenous views of the elite. In a report on workforce training, Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute reminds us that only one third of Americans earn a bachelor degree by 25. Only 59% of those graduates hold jobs that require a bachelor degree. Some of them then go on to work at a multi-national corporation. After several years, some of them may work for the government and join the esteemed expert class. Ultimately, the majority of the country is governed by a small group of similarly-minded people that are divorced from the problems and mores of the majority.
Universities
American universities produce groundbreaking research and rank among the finest in the world, but they also breed woke activists. We must direct the enormous potential of American universities to productive ends for America. David Goldman, an economist and expert on China, laments in a column for the Asia Times,
Four of the five US doctoral candidates in electrical engineering and computer science are foreign students. If China provokes us to impose a culture of competence on our educational institution, and to reward real achievement instead of the inculcation of self-esteem, it will have done us a greater service than any of our allies at any time in our history.
The clear threat in technological dominance posed by China should catalyze us into action. We have exceptional assets at these universities that are not being utilized by Americans.
The federal government should attack the underlying business model of education to graduate more American engineers. College tuition continues to outpace inflation by several factors. The government should condition aid based on the country’s talent needs. Simply, our nation needs more engineers and less political scienctists, and the government should not back loan origination for any accredited college major. At many colleges, the humanities coursework consists of delusional Anti-American narratives. Further, public colleges should stop inflating their revenues by admitting more foreign students who pay out-of-state rates. They must show preference for students within their own states. Lastly and most importantly, federal funds for research should be conditioned upon a climate for open inquiry. If universities engage in de-platforming, funds should be withheld, as substantive research cannot exist without a commitment to inquiry and truth.
While university is a sensible option for a third of the population, it is unsuitable for the vast majority. Universities cannot be the only mechanism to ensure a productive life. The Americans who do not earn a bachelor’s degree are often saved from the ravings of a radical professor, but their economic prospects are limited. Oren Cass reports that states and federal government subsidize higher education by more than $150B annually. He argues that many of these subsidies can be redirected to Americans who do not enroll at university by providing them adequate job training. He suggests,
positions that combine immediate on-the-job experience with employer-sponsored training offer the best opportunity to enter the workforce and build valuable skills. Such positions receive little to no public support, and employers often have little incentive to create them. A neutral approach for public policy toward workforce preparation would recognize that employers, not universities, often provide the most socially valuable form of training and would redirect public resources accordingly.
Common sense and history have demonstrated that the dignity of work confers valuable benefits by providing one the means to plan responsibly for their family and make sacrifices for them. Universities need to be coerced economically to produce virtuous professionals who understand and appreciate America’s history and traditions. For those that do not attend universities, substantial job training should be made available, so the majority can also be guaranteed a fulfilling and meaningful life.
Multi-National Corporations
While universities provide the ideology and the recruits, multi-national corporations provide the scale. Today’s multi-national corporations obsessively expand into new markets, catering to a global customer at the expense of American interests. For example, in 2018, it was treasonous for Google to move its crown jewel, DeepAI, to China and abandon a contract with the Pentagon. Famed entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, wrote,
How can Google use the rhetoric of “borderless” benefits to justify working with the country whose “Great Firewall” has imposed a border on the internet itself? This way of thinking works only inside Google’s cosseted Northern California campus, quite distinct from the world outside. The Silicon Valley attitude sometimes called “cosmopolitanism” is probably better understood as an extreme strain of parochialism, that of fortunate enclaves isolated from the problems of other places — and incurious about them….By now we should understand that the real point of talking about what’s good for the world is to evade responsibility for the good of the country.
It is difficult to fathom that the most capable and educated workers in America were distressed about Google working with the Pentagon but were complacent about working with the butcherers of Tiananmen Square. According to them, borders are a relic of the past, and deeper integration with the world will eradicate all conflicts. They are more comfortable conversing with colleagues in Singapore and Berlin rather than their neighbors in lower-income neighborhoods.
However, the benefits of a global order, accrue to relatively few ‘cosmocrats’, who comprise of management consultants, financiers, technologists, academics, and international lawyers. The vast majority of America does not benefit from this economically or culturally, as their interests and sensibilities are tied to their local geography. Contrary to libertarian thinking, people do not just abandon their roots and community to seek an oil drilling job in North Dakota. Despite their very few numbers, the ‘cosmocrats’ have been highly effective in amplifying their message and imposing their agenda on the majority.
The propaganda from Silicon Valley is nauseating, recycling platitudes about bringing humans together. Seemingly, if only we can exchange photos with students in Pyongyang, the standoff on the Korean peninsula would end. They have convinced themselves that everyone is fundamentally the same — a blank slate with differences that are learned over time. Charles Krauthammer, the eminent political columnist, called this the mirror image fantasy. He writes,
For the mirror-image fantasy derives above all from the coziness of middle-class life. The more settled and ordered one’s life — and in particular one’s communal life — the easier it becomes for one’s imagination to fail. To gloss over contradictory interests, incompatible ideologies and opposing cultures as sources of conflict is more than anti-political…it is dangerous.
This naivete is the logical consequence of excess comfort and individualism. Only a narcissist can reason that everyone thinks like he does. The narcissist fails to appreciate how important certain things are to certain people like their sacred culture. Silicon Valley will continue to try to obfuscate borders and gloss over underlying problems between peoples. Some are persuaded through superficial virtue signaling, while others like our congressmen are persuaded through the lobbyists of Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.
Contrary to popular opinion, the spoils of these innovative multi-national corporations have not had such a positive effect on the population. We have not seen total factor productivity improvements since the internet, suggesting many of the seeming advances from these companies do not even result in transformative benefits for the country. As Peter Thiel quipped, “we wanted flying cars and got 140 characters.” We must formulate more public-private partnerships to ensure corporations are furthering actual innovation in the ‘world of atoms..not bits’. We do not need a smaller communication device. We need affordable housing. We need advanced cyberwarfare. Goldman writes,
Every single invention of the digital age, from the microchip to the semiconductor laser, to the graphic user interface, to light-emitting diodes, to plasma displays, and to the Internet itself, started with a Defense Department research grant to one of the great corporate labs.
We should direct the massive potential of multi-national corporations to a common American good. We must induce our multi-national companies to be American-first by applying economic incentives like public-private partnerships and prosecuting treasonous activity in the digital age.
Expert Class
In recent years, government has welcomed qualified graduates and former professionals into a growing expert class that formulates policy. This bloated expert class uses empirical studies rather than philosophy and common sense to solve any conceivable problem. They believe that any social ill can be remedied through reason and science. However, science is the study of truth, and a shared moral code must exist to provide space for the truth. Recently, our scientists suggested racism is a bigger problem than COVID-19 and sanctioned outdoor protests. Without truth, science cannot function.
The expert class originated in the Progressive Era under Woodrow Wilson’s leadership. In his book, The Ruling Class, Angelo Cordeville writes,
When Woodrow Wilson was asked in 1914, ‘Can’t you let anything alone?’ He answered with, ‘I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let these things alone that are going downhill.’ ”
Everyone should value qualified opinions. However, I put far more trust in our inherited values from the Bible to guide us on matters of morality. Thousands of experts reference studies that cannot be repeated and peruse peer review journals to arrive at misguided policies that alleviate ‘systemic bias.’ They justify their power based on personality examinations where they are labelled ‘pioneers’, ‘innovators’, and ‘drivers.’
The expert class and the administrative state that they protect have proliferated in recent decades, as more educated people have the facility for politics. However, they do not necessarily have the virtue for it. In a landmark essay, Trumpism, Nationalism, and Conservatism, Chris DeMuth, former head of American Enterprise Institute, observes that the administrative state has expanded considerably in recent decades, while congress has increasingly abdicated its role. He credits the rise of the administrative state to two social developments — ‘high affluence and high technology.’ Affluent societies produce people that bring new and sometimes contrived problems to the table. He writes,
Traditional domestic issues of jobs and economic welfare now jostle with a multitude of new ones concerned with personal health and safety, environmental quality, consumerism, and individual and group identity.
Moreover, social media and universal smartphone penetration “lowered the cost of political organization. The slightest complaint or enthusiasm can now find far-flung allies.” Those who lack the means to mobilize and affect policy rely on their congressional representatives to pursue their interests. Demuth argues, “It is telling that Donald Trump’s two galvanizing issues, trade and immigration, have been matters of extreme policy delegation.” Trump’s bombastic voice represents the grievances of the local working class, whose interests have been neglected for decades by an impotent congress and ambivalent executive agencies. It is bad enough to be ruled by those who you did not elect. It is worse to be ruled by those who do not respect you.
The expert class is competent enough to graduate college, but they are dumb enough to believe any chart or appealing slogan. Take the recent impeachment hearings into Ukraine as an example. Each foreign service offer proclaimed that Ukraine is an important strategic partner and railed President Trump for inviting Russian aggression. A former NSA officer and fellow at Claremont Institute, Michael Anton masterfully exposes the groupthink of these experts,
In what sense are the United States and Ukraine “strategic partners”? What interests do we really have in common politically, culturally, economically, or militarily? To what extent do we really “share” a “vision” or even see the world the same way? And why is it so important to us that Ukraine be “integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community,” which seems to get more fragile and fractured every year, a process that accelerates the larger it becomes?
Words like ‘strategic partners’ belong in a management consulting deck; they don’t mean anything. The senators railing against President Trump for his alleged betrayal of Ukraine could not name three Ukrainian cities. Senator Chris Murphy and Congressman Adam Schiff are the ‘useful idiots’ that the Chinese Communist Party could have only dreamt of. If the Chinese and Russians forge a military alliance, history will be unkind to today’s McCarthyites, led by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi.
Joe Biden’s chief problem is that he is beholden to this expert class. It’s neither his dementia nor the socialist agenda that is most worrisome. Joe Biden is the type of person to believe anything presented by a consultant. This man requested more data before deciding to strike Bin Laden’s home. This man withdrew from the 2016 race because a consultant told him Hillary would beat him. The incoherence in his policies on energy, trade, and foreign policy can largely be attributed to consultant turnover.
IV. Loud Majority
The only way to end this cultural malaise is to restore America as a nation state that respects the borders of the family, community, and nation. Trump’s recent hospitalization with COVID-19 reminded us of how unprepared we are to continue the movement. His personality and conviction create the enthusiasm for nationalism, but we need an ecosystem of thinktanks, broadcasters, administrators, and technologists to preserve the movement. President Trump displayed brilliant instincts that challenged the dogma in Washington DC. He was the first to critique China and re-evaluate our trade deals, restrict immigration in deference to our citizenry, prudently apply our military power in the Middle East, and ridicule critical race theory and political correctness.
Of course, it has not been enough. An imperial China cannot be paralyzed by tariffs on agricultural products. It will require a disciplined approach that constrains China’s capital markets, extends our technological advantages through public-private partnerships, and welcomes China’s considerable enemies into our orbit. Substantial progress has been made on the wall, and Trump was the first in years to limit H1-B sponsorship and immigration while withstanding relentless accusations of racism. However, continued progress will be needed to cultivate American engineers and compel big tech to pay them more rather than hire foreign workers. While we still have troops in Afghanistan, Trump has artfully created a balance of power in the Middle East. The Sunni states, led by Saudi Arabia, have forged an unprecedented alliance with the Jewish state of Israel to counter expansionism from Iran and Turkey. Political correctness remains stifling in today’s discourse, whether in the office, classroom, or church. Trump ended critical race theory trainings in the bureaucracy, but we all know this is not enough. We need to govern for thirty more years to restore American identity, and that requires a class of virtuous people who can translate Trump’s instincts into lasting policies.
Andrew Breitbart’s famous mantra was “politics is downstream from culture.” We neglected culture for far too long and allowed our institutions to be training grounds for woke activism. Overhauling this will be a multi-year project. Paradoxically, it will require a heavy-handed approach from the central government to restore the community.
First, federalism can be effective at managing contending interests and maintaining civil society in peacetime, but it is hopelessly inadequate in wartime. Our collective identity is rooted in the nation — not state. We must draw upon the powerful reserves of identity in times of war. Huntington writes,
Before the Civil War, Americans and others referred to their country in the plural: ‘these United State are…’ After the war they used the singular. The Civil War, Woodrow Wilson said in this 1914 Memorial Day Address, ‘created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness.’
Amidst COVID-19, the federal government should direct its resources to overhaul testing, provide surge hospital capacity, scale virtual health, establish metrics for opening up businesses, and extend liability protection to businesses. Delegating more to the states in wartime is a regression to relics of the past — state-bound loyalties prior to the Civil War.
The Founding Fathers warned that our political experiment is at risk of becoming decadent if it is not guarded by a shared morality. James Madison, said, “we have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves.” Black Lives Matter and the city and state governments who endorse it are not virtuous. They do not appreciate the inherent goodness of America and they continue to rank people according to their skin color, sex, or whichever label is in vogue. Previously, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) charter proudly proclaimed to ’disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure’ as one of its stated goals. Many of our city and state governments accomodated BLM rather than guard the lives of citizens amidst violent riots. In his now famous New York Times Op-Ed, Tom Cotton wrote,
The American people aren’t blind to injustices in our society, but they know that the most basic responsibility of government is to maintain public order and safety. In normal times, local law enforcement can uphold public order. But in rare moments, like ours today, more is needed, even if many politicians prefer to wring their hands while the country burns.
The dogma of federalism must take a backseat in wartime. Heavier involvement from the federal government will be required to protect citizens from the incompetence and amorality of local government.
Second, we should rekindle patriotism and revitalize civil society by stopping the destructive influence of universities, multi-national corporations, and the expert class on our culture. Such an ambitious program requires cultivating a generation of virtuous leaders who will be immersed in the teachings of nationalist thinkers like Yoram Hazony. In Virtues of Nationalism, philosopher Yoram Hazony writes,
There is no moral maturity in the yearning for a benevolent empire to rule the earth and take care of us….True moral maturity is attained only when we stand on our own feet, learning to govern ourselves and defend ourselves…We should shoulder the burdens of national freedom and independence that we have received as an inheritance from our forefathers.
We cannot be the silent majority who relies on Trump for everything. We need to be the loud majority, roaring that America has the will to live on.
