By AMY CHUA
By now we all understand that America is in the grip of political tribalism. 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?
‘Courtesy New York Times’
