Category Archives: News commentary

President Obama has a lengthy commentary in the Economist, which that magazine-that-calls-itself-a-newspaper says is an “open letter to his successor. The Economist also describes the essay as “centrist,” as it criticizes Bernie Sanders’ leftism as much as, if not more than it criticized Trump.

But the article isn’t really centrist. Instead, Obama is defending the liberal (in a classical sense of the term) consensus in favor of free trade, relatively open borders, and mostly free markets. That is what liberals believed in during the nineteenth century, and it is what both the liberal and conservative elites believe today, which is why neither Bill Clinton nor George Bush questioned these ideas.

This election year, in fact, is the first time in many decades–perhaps more than a century–that a candidate who challenged these ideas won a major party nomination for president. While Trump openly challenged the open borders ideas, Sanders gained a lot of votes by challenging the free-market ideas. Brexit and similar votes in Europe show this isn’t unique to the United States: many people are feeling disenchanted with the liberal consensus.

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America needs less democracy to avoid tyranny, says Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine. America “suffers from too much democracy,” agrees Richard Cohen in the Washington Post.

Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor, writes Charles Pierce in Esquire. James Traub in Foreign Policy calls Trump and Brexit supporters “ignorance masses” and says it’s time for the “elites to rise up” against them, or at least to “un-delude them,” perhaps in re-education camps.

These elites act like crybabies who don’t get their way. They use bad names for anyone who disagrees with them. They say they know best and anyone who disagrees must not (as Traub puts it) “believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history.”

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In a reversal of stereotypes, “Democrats have become a party of the wealthy” admits Fredrik deBoer in the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Republicans–much to the chagrin of some Republican “elites”–have become a party of the working class.

The Antiplanner was reminded of this when I saw a report saying that 29.4 percent of Americans were now “upper middle class,” which the report defines as having incomes of $100,000 or more for a family of three (or roughly $82,000 for a family of two, $115,000 for a family of four, etc.–see page 3 of the report). This highlights something the Antiplanner has said several times before: the real social divide in America is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but between the 30 percent and the 70 percent. Specifically, about 30 percent of working-age Americans are “knowledge workers,” and generally have college degrees, while 70 percent do physical labor, and generally don’t have college degrees.

As the Antiplanner has previously noted, there is a lot of confusion about the term “middle class.” Surveys show that nine out of ten Americans consider themselves to be middle class, but in fact, six of them are wrong. Class is not distinguished by income, though it certainly influences income. The Antiplanner spent the first 20 years of my career earning a very low income, but I was college educated with college-educated parents and definitely had middle-class attitudes (never mind the fact that many of my peers scorned the “middle class” even as they formed a part of it).

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