Why He Won

Ever since the 2016 election, pundits and others who follow politics have been trying to answer two basic questions: What happened? Why did he win? My personal attempt to answer these questions has been shaped by my time at a college where the student body and faculty lean left. What follows here is a collection of experiences I’ve had that make me think: “this is why he won.” They are presented briefly, with minimal analysis. I don’t believe they provide the whole picture of President Trump’s 2016 victory, and I’m not even certain they are too significant. But they have seemed true enough to me.

On election night, I watched the returns in the basement common room of North Residence Hall with some friends. The reactions ranged from confidence in Secretary Clinton’s victory to an uneasy feeling that a surprise might be in the making. One acquaintance left to scream and cry outside the building. I understand strong emotions, but this struck me as verging on the absurd. News coverage described a Clinton campaign that was hesitant to concede even in the face of apparently long odds. Clinton did not give her concession speech until late the following morning. Those reactions by the campaign and the candidate struck me as arrogant: an extreme disbelief that Clinton could have lost to Trump. They also highlighted what seemed like a complete inability to understand why anyone might find even a little redeeming value in Trump.

A friend later described Hamilton as a liberal blue dot “in a sea of red racism.” While he is probably right that Hamilton is more liberal than its general surroundings, I was put off by the broad brush stroke, calling the area racist so easily. No evidence was presented, not even a single anecdote which might be extrapolated to the population. Just “a sea of red racism.” Painting one’s political opposition as racist or sexist or homophobic, as so often happens, is an easy way to explain away more complicated factors. It reduces people’s opinions, emotions, and experiences to a single dirty word which can easily be dismissed. This story, like others, makes me think “this is why he won” because it displays an inability to delve into the roots of others’ political convictions.

I heard an argument that old people should not be allowed to vote because they won’t be around long enough to see the effects of their votes. I strongly disagree with this, but I didn’t think “this is why he won” until I heard, as an aside, that it was even more OK because older voters are Trump voters anyway. Silencing a group by disenfranchising them in the political process which is supposed to foster agreement out of discord is not the way forward for a society. Like the previous story, it gives people an out: don’t listen or find agreement, just remove the right to vote in the first place.

In a conversation about West Virginia, a friend was dismissive to the extreme. As he discussed the opioid epidemic ravaging the state and the rest of the Rust Belt, he was cool to the suffering and the lack of opportunity in these areas. He described people living there as hicks and idiots, and questioned why they didn’t just learn to code, as if getting such a job was a magic wand which can fix all such ills. In a separate discussion, he exuded great compassion for illegal immigrants and the challenges those communities face. I wondered why he was able to display such compassion for only one group of people and not another.

A professor asked a class for thoughtful, fact-based reasons why the United States should not have states. A number of well thought-out, rationally debatable answers followed. But one student responded simply, “Alabama.” It was humorous, sure, and I chuckled, but it was also a sign. That answer was neither thoughtful nor fact-based, but it also wasn’t an attempt at humor. It played off of a preconceived notion (mostly northeasterners’) of the South. (A later show of hands showed that nobody thought of him- or herself as a southerner.) The answer displayed a sizable amount of elitism and a disdain for those hillbillies down there who vote Republican. Rather than a plausible argument against having states, it served as an argument for them, since it might be good that the attitudes behind such snide comments cannot be imposed on other states, including Alabama, as long as they exist--especially since the disconnect between so many of the people in the different parts of our country is extreme.

Each one of these vignettes can be discussed, perhaps for hours. I also completely understand that these stories are divorced from the context that might add nuance. That, however, is less important than thinking about how each of them makes people feel. For if voters think the small experiences they encounter in their daily lives should influence their votes, then those are part of what decides elections. I know I will keep on gathering these stories as we ramp up into the 2020 election cycle. Without trying to build a grand thesis about what happened in 2016 and why, I think it's important for me and all of us to understand how the little situations and comments we experience in our lives may not only reflect, but also affect, the broader political environment.

Down Goes the Unicorn

The past couple of years in venture capital have taught us that a unicorn isn’t just a mythical animal. There has been an influx of “unicorn” startups, especially in Silicon Valley. Venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term in 2013 to describe a private company with a valuation of more than one billion dollars. There are reportedly more than 400 unicorn companies around the world, according to CB Insights. Airbnb, DoorDash, WeWork, and Uber are a few American unicorns that have attracted investors with their disruptive natures. The buzz and excitement surrounding unicorns have led to something of an untouchable status for these companies. However, some unicorns do not live up to their expectations. WeWork’s failed initial public offering (IPO) is a prime example of this. It convincingly sold its concept of the shared office space to investors such as SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, who quickly bit with a couple billion dollars of investment money. While unicorn startups wow at first sight with their innovation, the hype around them quickly dies out once they become larger.

Many prized unicorns seem to impress people with their ability to infuse technology into their core business product. This kind of technological prowess attracts the attention of investors who believe that tech companies are the companies of the future. Uber, Lyft, and Slack are some of the most recent unicorns to have gone public. All three companies, post-IPO, have seen their market capitalization drop significantly from their IPO valuations, PC Mag reports. With the promise that these unicorns show, what could be the reasons for their post-IPO losses? A constant pattern with unicorns seems to be that they build up so much hype, and garner so much investment money, before they can even start scaling their products to the mass market. In addition, these companies are not able to accurately project how their products will perform in the future, especially given the disruptive nature of technology. The promise that unicorns show in the beginning is not always sustained when they get larger and go public.

The current state of unicorn companies post-IPO leads to speculation about their futures. How can these promising startups sustain the momentum they had in previous funding rounds? Before we can even answer this question, we should think about the nature of companies such as Uber and DoorDash that simultaneously compete in two different markets. For example, Uber does not seem to have the market pricing power to pay drivers less or charge riders more, so it is difficult to achieve sustainable profitability. The business models of some of these companies could be what are hurting their profitability. This lack of profitability is difficult to explain, because the services of Uber, DoorDash, and Slack are so valuable to millions of people. Since they are valuable services, we can be sure that people will continue to use them. But it might take a long time for these companies to become very profitable, if profitable at all.

The Elegant Economy of Michel Houellebecq’s "The Elementary Particles"

Michel Houellebecq, the preeminent author and literary celebrity from France, has a myriad of things said about him. Some feel it appropriate to call him the greatest author alive. Others call him a hack. The Elementary Particles, the novel that established Houellebecq’s preeminence, is the subject of a lot of commentary as well. But what seems to be generally unaddressed is the novel’s sheer efficiency. In 262 pages of characteristically unflinching confidence, Houellebecq manages to address the destabilization of materialist philosophy by contemporary particle physics, the cultural legacy of the Sixties, the legacy of the postmodernists, sex positivity, pluralism, academic politics, the future of marriage, reproduction, death, the beauty of life, a latent desire in Western civilization for annihilation, the human predicament, and what seem like a thousand other things. The novel also manages to tell at least two entire life stories, concisely capturing the essential dynamics of these lives with only a modest amount of detail or “data.” The three main elements that I think have enabled its incredible thematic density are the quality of Houellebecq’s prose, the retrospective narration by his characters, and the qualities of the main characters.

Houellebecq’s prose is not florid, nor is it so austere as to be comparable to Hemingway. Houellebecq favors quality over quantity. This can be understood with reference to a hysterical realist, like David Foster Wallace, for whom quantity is itself a quality which can be used to produce some sort of effect upon the reader. In Houellebecq’s work, a sentence is written economically, with only the necessary words. In order to reduce the need for clarification, he avoids specificity that verges on the esoteric. Houellebecq does not write postmodern novels, and The Elementary Particles is accordingly a straightforward read. What enables him to make effective use of these strategies is the fact that his prose is simply fantastic, and evidences a writer of immense natural talent. Houellebecq’s writing is brutal and coldly efficient. Paragraphs cut aggressively, and the pages bleed with subtext. In an excruciatingly indifferent deadpan voice, Houellebecq delivers profound anguish, builds towering monuments of potential redemption for characters, and then decimates them without hesitation.

The efficiency of The Elementary Particles is greatly contingent on the reader’s ability to truly understand lengthy narrative arcs with only a few points of reference. Many events in the main characters’ lives are related at a point in time which affects their views of them in important ways, with some retrospective commentary. This mode of story-telling connects things across time and space, making possible an extrapolation of a character’s development over time. From recollections of only a few events, the principal dynamics that define a character’s life can be deduced. A full human being can be understood, down to their fundamental volitions, by an examination of these very few things--many of which don’t seem at all like significant landmarks in a life.

The dense intellectual dialogues in The Elementary Particles explore topics including quantum physics, molecular biology, the mechanics and ethics of reproduction, morality, metaphysics, scientific validity, literary studies, and many other things. In presenting these dialogues, Houellebecq uses his two main characters, half-brothers Michel and Bruno. Both are highly intelligent and well educated. Michel is a molecular biologist, very well-versed in philosophy, with origins in physics. Bruno studied literature and the other humanities, with a focus on the existentialists. The two brothers have very interesting intellectual lives on their own. However, when they occasionally meet and have these conversations, the dialectic between them is precisely what the narrative requires. They spar as two sides of the same miserable coin. One is confined to the murkiness, uncertainty, and multiplicity of the obsessive study of a few cultural moments, while the other scurries with a horrible diligence across the cold, gray plains of pure empiricism.

There is a lot to be said about a book that seems to say a lot of things, some of which the author may not even believe in. And my intention was never to dissect Houellebecq’s novel. My aim is to point to an underappreciated characteristic that allows the novel to succeed and to reach so many people. My second wish is that you will read it.

The Logic Behind the Red-Blue Divide

I spent my formative teenage years living in my “hometown” Brazil, a country where politics aren’t simply divided into a blue-or-red category. Conversations about politics centered less on your political affiliation, and more on your stances on particular topics. So when I came back to the United States in 2017 to attend college at Hamilton, I was, to say the least, shocked by the tensions in political discourse among students and faculty. The political strain seemed to arise, at least on this campus (and I assume it is similar at most liberal arts colleges), from the lack of politically diverse discussion. I noticed this lack only when I finally realized that my opinions fell on the center-right side of the American political spectrum, and only when I began using the word “conservative” to identify myself did I realize the implications that my political identity had in a primarily liberal institution.

Initially, I was confused about why this stance seemed to upset, irritate, or anger so many of my peers. My opinions seemed delegitimized and ignored the moment I’d say I was conservative or center-right. I didn’t understand why my political affiliation caused students and faculty to, in a general sense, “take it personally.” I was astonished by the idea that your political perspective is so deeply entwined with your identity as a person.

But after I stumbled upon the Wall Street Journal’s “Red and Blue Economies” (9/2019) analysis, I began to better understand why politics are taken so personally in America. The analysis points out that Republicans and Democrats tend to live in two completely different economies--and it wasn’t the one I was expecting to encounter, the stereotyped “Republicans are all old, rich men” narrative, which informs the “that’s why Democrats are the only ones who care about the poor” claim. On the contrary, almost two-thirds of the nation’s gross domestic product comes from Democratic congressional districts (63.6 percent). Brookings Institution data also show that the share of GDP produced in Republican districts is actually shrinking. Democrats are far more dominant in (at least by this standard) high-producing districts than Republicans. Similarly, while the median household income was about the same for each party’s supporters a decade ago, it has since grown dramatically by 17 percent in Democratic districts while falling 3 percent in Republican ones. The analysis goes on to explain why this economic divide has come about, noting that “blue industries” are doing better financially than red ones. Nearly three-quarters of the jobs in digital and professional industries are situated in Democratic districts. By contrast, Republican districts hold larger shares of the nation’s declining industries, including agriculture, mining, and low-skill manufacturing jobs. Many of these don’t require a higher-level degree and pay significantly less. And the tendency of Republican voters to be in poorer districts is a large factor in the increasing divide. 

The parties were historically more geographically intertwined, but the 2010 Tea Party movement more or less completed the gradual displacement of Democratic House members in rural districts in the Midwest and South, while the 2018 midterms expelled Republican members from many suburban ones. The red-blue educational disparity is another prominent factor in explaining the parties’ division, as people with college degrees are far more concentrated in Democratic districts than in GOP ones.

In conclusion, this analysis paints a very realistic picture of why Democrats and Republicans have such a difficult time having civil discourse and listening to each other’s opinions. They reside in very different worlds, and the financial stereotypes attributed to each party no longer reflect the reality. 

People’s backgrounds and where they are from undeniably inform the political stances they’re more likely to side with, and the data support that analysis. If you’re from New Jersey or Massachusetts, your political opinions are probably informed by different financial and educational backgrounds than what inform the views of someone from rural Texas. Understanding these broad differences is crucial if we’re trying to diminish political polarization and reduce tensions in discourse between Republicans and Democrats. At the same time, candidates will be using this information for a different purpose, to shape their audience outreach, and it’ll probably work. Donald Trump probably won’t be appealing to the same citizens as Bernie Sanders or another Democrat.

It’s difficult for people to see problems in the same way when their very different backgrounds inform their reality, and given that Republicans and Democrats statistically speaking have starkly different backgrounds, it makes sense that they will have different ways of viewing issues. Before you enter discourse with someone whose political affiliation or perspective is opposed to yours, keep these data in mind. It’s especially easy to take politics personally when your political orientation was probably quite influenced by your financial, educational, and geographic reality. Enter the conversation with an open mind, being aware that the other person’s opinion was probably shaped by the same factors as yours, just in a different way.

A Special Kind of Political Scientist

There’s a reason why political science departments include political philosophy, and Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) is a good example of it. His work began with “theory,” then went on to examine how the American system functioned. The Founding and the Constitution held a special interest for Kendall as a way of fully understanding politics in his lifetime. And he certainly didn’t leave political philosophy behind.

Nor did he leave questioning behind—learned, relentless questioning. A sustained opposition to intellectual hypocrisy and complacency was among this remarkable political scientist’s main qualities. It has been aptly noted that Kendall had “no time for sentimentality, woolly thinking, or self-serving ideas.” Going along to get along, suppressing major concerns in the interest of careerism or friendship, were simply foreign to him.

And so, it seems, were intellectual closure and finality. “Perhaps Kendall’s greatest virtue,” one scholar has suggested, “is that he constantly argued with himself; more than once in his mature years, he had the humility to ‘start over,’ changing his intellectual position in response to some challenge to his habits of thought.”

Kendall was also a profoundly political man who aimed to make his fellow American conservatives more effective. He hoped for the conservative movement’s success despite some differences with it, especially on the size and scope of government. Kendall thought seriously about how he might help to clarify leading principles for conservatives—in part because he thought the right’s other leading intellectuals were mostly “false teachers” and a “poor lot.”

Along with his sophisticated learning in political philosophy and his in-depth study of our country’s constitutional traditions, Kendall felt a strong identification with Middle America. He would, I think, have understood both the current crisis in our polarized polity and the right’s current base quite well.

While Kendall’s intellectual life had an indomitable integrity, his life in general, as the historian of American conservatism George Nash has remarked, was one of “restless eccentricity.” Yet despite his combativeness, his drinking problem, and his tendency to spend too much time writing letters and the like (it isn’t hard to imagine him on social media), what Kendall did publish was excellent.

He did not produce a major work of his own, except for his highly original and much-respected doctoral dissertation on Locke. But more directly relevant to American politics were such articles as “The People Versus Socrates Revisited,” “The Two Majorities” (presidential and congressional), “The Social Contract: The Ultimate Issue Between Liberalism and Conservatism,” and “Conservatism and the ‘Open Society.’ ” They all, and others, could have been the basis for entire books. In reading these essays, you sense that the issue has been rigorously analyzed and brought to a fresh conclusion or restatement. Kendall’s prose was elaborately constructed yet unpretentious, clear, often colloquial.

Favorable in his early years toward a radically democratic majoritarianism and in some respects a radical leftist, Kendall after World War II grew increasingly conservative and in particular more committed to the Constitution’s checks and balances, to its implicit requirements for geographically dispersed and durable—not nationwide and short-term—majorities in order to enact major public policy. He also preferred congressional, as against either presidential or judicial, power.

Another major theme was public virtue and citizenship. Rejecting the behavioralism that he feared was already predominant among political scientists in his Yale department and elsewhere, Kendall similarly came to reject the widely held view that the American founders envisioned self-seeking, mutually frustrating clashes between factions or interest groups as the essence of politics. He argued that the Founding was more communitarian, envisioning (imagine!) “a virtuous people” rather than a merely pluralistic and self-interested one.      

Also central to Kendall’s work was his belief in something called “public orthodoxy.” As he wrote: “by no means are all questions open questions; some questions involve matters so basic … that the society would, in declaring them open, abolish itself, commit suicide … ” He warned that a nation’s total ideological openness to the extent advocated in, for example, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty would make politics descend “into ever-deepening differences of opinion, into progressive breakdown of those common premises upon which alone a society can conduct its affairs by discussion, and so into the abandonment of the discussion process and [thus] the arbitrament of public questions by violence and civil war.”

Willmoore Kendall remains a compelling figure. There is a special timeliness in his personal story (one reason I’m writing a biography of him) and his dynamic thought.

Dr. Frisk is a Resident Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute.

A Will to Meaning

It may be argued that no event has indelibly marked modern history as much as the tragedy of the Holocaust. As historians struggle to preserve the concentration camps where these atrocities were carried out, the experiences of those who survived have been forever recorded in art, literature, music, and popular culture. With these permanent reminders of what was perpetrated behind the drawn curtain of the Nazi regime, it is necessary to commit oneself to their study; for, as George Santayana famously wrote, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

One cannot be blamed for falling into a melancholy when absorbed in any work related to the Holocaust. Along with the grievous disregard for human life in the Stalinist regime and other communist states, the Holocaust represents one of the worst losses of human life in modern history. Literature on the subject ranges from the harrowing Night, by Elie Wiesel, to the graphic novel Maus and countless other works of fiction and nonfiction.

Viktor Frankl, the eminent psychiatrist, wrote Man’s Search for Meaning soon after he was liberated from a concentration camp. Throughout the work, which initially details his experiences at concentration camps that were not as visible as the infamous Auschwitz, Frankl illustrates both how horrendous the experience of the Holocaust was and his search for meaning in the suffering omnipresent in the camps. His conclusion, which is as powerful as it is provocative, is that humans, because of the powers of their deliberative minds, ultimately exist in order to find and extrapolate a meaning in their lives. This understanding is rooted in a form of existentialism, which does not despair of existence but rather searches for a feeling of validity in life.

This principle is opposed to earlier modern understandings of why humans exist. Sigmund Freud, with his belief that humans were perpetually propelled by insatiable primal instincts, maintained that they had a “will to pleasure,” in which achieving pleasure and avoiding pain is paramount. This, coupled with Freud’s understanding of the life and death drives, renders existence an inevitably and almost unintentionally hedonistic experience. Friedrich Nietzsche, and the psychologist Alfred Adler, argued instead for a “will to power.” In this concept, which is somewhat ambiguous, humans strive to exercise their power over other humans. In contrast to these two principles, Frankl proposed a third concept that goes beyond the principles of Freud and Nietzsche: a “will to meaning.”

Deeply rooted in his experiences surviving the Holocaust, Frankl’s will to meaning seeks to make the best of any negative experience by focusing on the good that may yet come. He connects this idea to the Greek word “logos,” which he understands as meaning reason. Everyone has some form of meaning in their lives, Frankl contends. Even during the Holocaust, he was motivated to survive by the desire to publish a manuscript he had lost to the Nazis, and many others endured simply with the hope of seeing their loved ones again. Developing his sentiments into a coherent system of thought, Frankl then proposes “logotherapy,” psychiatric therapy that strives to help individuals identify some form of meaning in their lives.

Logotherapy holds that there is meaning in existence even in the worst possible situations, like the Holocaust, and that even if humans cannot find sufficient meaning in a given place or time, they are still usually capable of altering their conditions, or at least their perceptions. This is a powerful idea, even in situations that are quite removed from Frankl’s context, the Holocaust. At a time when college students feel increasingly lonely and isolated, the idea that there is meaning in their existence may very well be comforting.

It is true that there is plenty of bad in the world and in existence, as exemplified by the Holocaust and many of the serious issues we face as a nation and society. Yet it is also evident that there is still plenty of good in the world today – the smell of petrichor, the satisfaction of academic recognition, and the gentle caress of a loved one. There will always be positivity, and there will always be negativity. One cannot successfully block out the bad in the world without also precluding oneself from the good. Thus, one must accept that there is both good and bad in existence in order to live a full life. This delicate balance may be best achieved by finding a meaning in life, and with this meaning in hand, life will be fruitful and enjoyable.