![]() In the digital marketplace of ideas, where most of us now get our news, falsehoods go viral while facts go begging. But the last four years have revealed its hollowness. “Truth Trumps Lies.” That motto, needling yet reassuring, has been a popular hashtag ever since Donald Trump’s election in 2016. His book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Nicholas Carr is a writer covering technology, economics and culture. In a manner that John Adams might have found satisfying, we have learned that internalized constitutional norms matter more than any external checks. And, finally, when it mattered, election officials, at a distance from the White House, conducted a fair vote. The armed forces declined to embrace Trump’s proposed occupation of liberal cities over the summer. He tried hard, but Trump ultimately couldn’t find a prosecutor to indict Joe Biden and his family. ![]() What really mattered, in the end, was a different set of checks, upheld not by a document but by people: namely, the independence of federal prosecutors, the neutrality of the armed forces and the independence of the electoral system. Congress and the judiciary asserted limited control at best even impeachment turned out to be just another party-line vote. Before Trump, it was widely thought that the written Constitution and its fabled “separation of powers” had spared the United States from a similar fate.īut over the past four years, we’ve watched constitutional checks repeatedly fail to control the president, trumped by party loyalty. That’s the fate that befell, among others, the Roman, Spanish, German and Russian republics. Most republics, even the best of them, have struggled when confronted with a nationalist leader who shows up in bad economic times, blames everything on immigrants and foreigners, and promises to restore greatness. We’ve learned something important about America’s resistance to an authoritarian takeover. Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University and the author, recently, of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. What is the infrastructure that allows the hardships of so many to remain invisible? But how long has it taken us to confront this reality? The astonishment among white cultural elites (myself included) at the extent of police brutality until cellphone video cameras came along leaves me questioning what our democracy is actually built on. George Floyd’s killing and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement this past summer means it is no longer possible to ignore the centuries of violent dehumanization of Black people in this country. Those of us in the cultural elite are inexcusably unaware of the challenges and perspectives of many others in this country who feel they are not getting what they deserve. We are removed not just from rural residents. The shock at the closeness of the 2020 race suggests we are still unaware of the depth of this resentment. I became aware just how surprised many in the cultural elite were about the challenges facing rural communities and the fact that many people living in these places feel they are not getting their fair share of attention, resources or respect. When Donald Trump won in 2016, partly by tapping into this resentment, people turned to me for answers. There is a deep well of people in this country who are sure the system is not working for them, and we seem to be only coming around to recognizing how deep it goes.įour years ago, I published a book about the feelings of resentment many rural people in Wisconsin felt toward the urban elite. By cultural elite, I mean those of us who create the knowledge and the media content people consume, as well those of us in positions of political and other decision-making power. The past few years have taught me just how removed the cultural elite in the United States is from many of the other people in this nation. ![]() She is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Cramer is professor of political science and chair of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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