“Populism is people taking authority back from institutions they no longer have faith in.
These dynamics help explain why, for example, political and media elites have been so troubled by Trump’s skepticism of U.S. intelligence findings regarding Russia’s interference in the country’s presidential election. They trust government institutions, and they are alarmed by Trump’s lack of trust in those institutions. Likewise, many of Trump’s supporters aren’t troubled by Trump’s skepticism because they too are skeptical of the government.
.. Lack of belief in system + economic and societal fears + loss of trust in institutions = populism, or at least the potential for populism. “Populism is people … taking authority back from institutions they no longer have faith in,” he told me, and it’s now ascendant not just in the United States, but in countries like France and Germany as well.
My concern with Trump’s team of generals
My issue with having a foreign policy Cabinet consisting of general officers and Goldman Sachs alums
All of the public opinion data shows that as public trust in institutions has waned, trust in the military has remained high. And this, in turn, has led to the militarization of foreign policy.
.. because of the gap in trust, the Pentagon commands an ever-growing share of the foreign affairs budget. This means it exercises operational control over a large swath of activities that heretofore were probably not thought of as being under the purview of the Defense Department.
.. In the long term, it is dangerous to signal that the best way to become secretary of state is to have achieved the rank of a general officer. There are a lot of other dimensions of foreign policy that go beyond military statecraft. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not a coincidence that the best secretaries of state over the past 40 years — George P. Shultz and James A. Baker — were originally secretaries of the Treasury
.. A team of generals might be talented, but it’s also one-dimensional.
.. appointing general officers to Cabinet-level positions could be a way to restore faith in government. And maybe they will do a great job and, like Washington or Cincinnatus, ride off into the sunset. Or it could just convince the public and the politicians that the only route to a policy principal position is not just service, but a lifelong career in the military.
.. the most talented former general would be serving an unpredictable, dangerous gasbag of a president. Failure is likely. In which case, Trump will have proven to be a true egalitarian, and have eviscerated public faith in the last outsized institution in America.
Dancing in a Hurricane
right when our physical technologies leapt ahead, many of what the Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker calls our “social technologies” — all of the rules, regulations, institutions and social tools people needed to get the most out of this technological acceleration and cushion the worst — froze or lagged.
.. When President-elect Trump wants to be heard he now gets his message out directly from his New York penthouse through Twitter to 15 million-plus followers at any hour of the day he pleases. And the Islamic State does the same from a remote province in Syria.
Can Trump Save Their Jobs? They’re Counting on It
The Carrier plant here is plenty profitable. But moving to Monterrey, where workers earn in a day what they make here in an hour, will increase profits faster.
.. For workers like Mr. Roell, 36, who started at Carrier just weeks after receiving his high school diploma and never returned to school, the problem is not a shortage of jobs in the area. Instead, it is a drought of jobs that pay anywhere near the $23.83 an hour he makes at Carrier, let alone enough to give him a toehold in the middle class.
When he drives to work each day before dawn, Mr. Roell passes warehouse after warehouse of giants like Walmart and Kohl’s with “Help Wanted” signs outside promising jobs within. The problem is that they typically pay $13 to $15 an hour.
.. But nearly all that growth occurred in the service sector — hotel and food-service jobs, or health care technicians, or workers in the warehouses Mr. Roell drives past
.. Rexnord’s plan to pull up stakes even after the Carrier situation suggests businesses will not bow to the threat of bad P.R.
.. across developed economies more national income is going to capital, that is, owners and shareholders, rather than labor. “We’ve seen this in many countries with different political systems,” he said. “It’s a winner-take-all world.”
.. Just the hope that Mr. Trump will try to reverse the long decline in their neighborhoods, their living standards and even their longevity is an emotional balm.
.. Instead of bias, what animates these voters, whatever their race or political orientation, is a profound distrust and resentment of wealthier, educated Americans, a group they say lacks a connection to them and does not care about their economic situation. And to them, Mrs. Clinton seemed at least as elite as Mr. Trump, if not more so.
.. To them, it’s not only the country that’s in bad shape. So are the institutions that once provided structure to working-class life in America. Many Carrier workers are regular churchgoers, but Ms. Hargrove said she was deeply troubled by how priests abused children, or how the police shot suspects even though their arms were raised in the air.
.. “I’m as left-wing as you can find, and I thought Trump was full of it,” he said. “But everybody is tired of the same old politicians. It could have been Captain Kangaroo and he might have won.”