From The making of America’s fury (Evan Osnos, 2021) pp52-3
The turnout for the election of 2014 was the lowest level of American voter participation since 1942.
Elihu Root, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912, once told an audience of Americans, “Men must either govern or be governed.” A century later, dispirited Americans were effectively recusing themselves from the rituals of governing. And, in the void, the dominant forces in the economy and politics were refining the systems that ensured their success and insulated them from accountability. In Washington, they enjoyed the powers of fundraising, gerrymandering, and influence peddling; in Greenwich, they enjoyed a steady decline in their taxes, and the accumulated advantages of deregulation, lobbying, and compounding wealth. In a 2014 Gallup poll, 7 percent of Americans reported having confidence in Congress, the lowest level that Gallup had ever recorded for any institution. When Washington considered a branding campaign to give it a catchy slogan akin to “Keep Austin Weird,” a survey found that when Americans were asked what words they associated with the capital, the most popular answers were “corrupt,” “educated,” and “arrogant.”
Some in Washington had begun to warn that constituents were unhappy. “These people are getting screwed by Wall Street interests, by the big money, by the establishment, and they don’t like it,” Trevor Potter, the general counsel to John McCain’s 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns, told me in 2014. That spring, the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, had been abruptly deposed by a populist challenger named Dave Brat, who had accused Cantor of protecting crony capitalism. “Most of the party establishment is vulnerable on that issue,” Potter said. (Cantor effectively embraced the accusation; he started work at an investment bank at a compensation of $3.4 million by the close of the following year.)
As I crisscrossed the country in the final years of the Obama presidency, I was often struck by the sheer contempt for America’s political and economic elites. What I saw was not abstract frustration at “big government” or “meddling bureaucrats.” People were acutely, vividly aware of the plutocracy and its self-dealing, and that portrait was altering the political culture of the country, weakening even everyday bonds between people. Social scientists recognized the effect. In studies on the impact of inequality, Nicholas Christakis, a Yale sociologist, found that when people saw flamboyant reminders of unfairness, they cooperated with one another roughly half as often. Disparities “subverted group cohesion, making people less cooperative, less friendly, and ultimately Jess able to work together,” he wrote. Outside of politics, people had an intuitive contempt for conditions that reminded them of structural unfairness. A 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that airplanes with multiple cabins of various classes experienced higher levels of “air rage.” When economy-class passengers boarded the flights through the first-class cabin, rather than through the midsection of a plane, air-rage incidents increased even more. To many Americans, the structures of power – politics, law, economics – looked more and more like one long boarding queue through the first-class cabin.
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