this evasion of talk—it solves nothing. It’s part of the collapse.

The historical demand of the oppressed is inclusion as equal citizens in all the institutions of American life. With identity politics, the demand became different: not just to enlarge the institutions, but to change them profoundly.

In 1999 Thomas Friedman published The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. It was Das Kapital for Smart America. In Friedman’s account, globalization is the organizing system of the post–Cold War era, but, unlike the Cold War, it is the result of technological advances and blind economic forces, not government policies. Rejecting

I don’t think we are dying. No other people in this era of elected authoritarians have been able to get rid of theirs—only Americans. Around the world they were paying attention and took hope. I hate that 74 million of my compatriots voted to keep in power our worst president, who convinced most of them that the election was stolen. The stab in the

But self-government starts in ourselves. The most basic way Americans can acquire what Tocqueville called “habits of the heart” is by killing their Twitter or Facebook accounts and spending time in the physical presence of other Americans who don’t look or talk or think like them. Study after study shows that antagonistic groups begin to lose their

Bill and Hillary Clinton were policy wonks who mashed together idealism with business-friendly ideas for economic growth. Instead of speaking for the working class, the Clintons spoke about equipping workers to rise into the professional class through education and training. Their assumption was that all Americans could do what they did and be like

The change began in 2014. That was the year when the views of some Americans—white Democrats and people with college degrees—took a sharp turn to the left on identity issues. Is bias the main cause of racial inequality? Do slavery and past discrimination still hold Black people back today? Do immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard

now it’s clear that all the important trends began in the seventies. It was the end of postwar, middle-class, bipartisan America.

The winners in Smart America have withdrawn from the national life of their fellow Americans. Christopher Lasch, writing in the early 1990s when this withdrawal was young, called it “the revolt of the elites.” Between meritocracy and democracy, it’s the first that dominates their waking hours, commands their unthinking devotion, and drives them, li