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Preface to the Paperback Edition

BOOKS TAKE YEARS TO WRITE. MINE DO, AT LEAST. The Way Back was published in April 2016, but I had begun it well before that year’s election campaign. I hadn’t been thinking about Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Instead, I had Obama, Mitt Romney and the Republican Establishment in my sights.

I knew that change must come. Like blind and deaf wrestlers, our two political parties were locked in clumsy battle, as spectators shouted warnings that neither ever heard. What both parties missed was how the American Dream had faded. We had thought that this was the country where, whoever you were, wherever you came from, you could get ahead. More importantly, we had believed that this was a country where your children would have it better than you did. And we had been wrong.

When I began to write, Thomas Piketty had just published Capital in the Twenty-First Century, about the rise of income inequality. We had known that we were increasingly divided into different economic classes, but what caught our attention was Piketty’s claim that over time we would necessarily become more unequal still. The book was a publishing sensation, but we soon learned that Piketty had wildly overstated things. His arguments about the inexorable rise of people already in the top income stream rested on implausible assumptions, and he clearly didn’t know much about the United States. The evidence just wasn’t there, as I explain in the appendix. But though Piketty got some things quite wrong, he was correct in noting that we had in fact become more unequal, economically and socially too.

While great inequality is concerning, I thought the more serious problem was income immobility. For the first time in American history, people no longer expected their children to do better than they did, according to the pollsters. Looking back into my own family history, I saw parents and grandparents whose lives were scarred by hardships I could scarcely have endured. What must have driven them was the idea that their descendants would reap what they had sown. But what if they had not anticipated a payoff in the future? What if they had thought their children would revert to the misery of their grandparents? They would have given up.

That was my intuition, at any rate, and for an explanation I turned to neo-Darwinism. Evolutionary biologists such as W. D. Hamilton and Richard Dawkins asked us to take the “gene’s-eye view” of human action, and I thought this explained why mobility matters more to us than equal outcomes in our own generation. As I showed, it’s because our genes may be more heavily invested in our descendants than in ourselves. That seemed to me an original insight, one which explains why the social contract is front-end loaded, with family duties paid forward. We take from our parents, and without repaying them give to our children; and that tripartite contract is repeated over all generations, over all history. We are biologically biased in favor of future generations, so long as we have children. For there is one kind of social justice for families with children, and quite another for a society which like Cronus eats its children.

At the same time, there’s a dark side to neo-Darwinism, for it also explains why aristocracy is the natural default position of any society, why elite Americans would seek to shape our legal institutions in such a way as to secure economic privileges for their own children while constricting mobility for others. It now seems obvious that we have a privileged New Class composed of lawyers, academics, trust-fund babies and high-tech workers, clustered in the Acela corridor, in the “creative class” cities described by Richard Florida, and cocooned from contact with the lower orders. What’s only beginning to be recognized is how its members subscribe to a politics of immobility that prevents the children of the lower classes from rising.

That’s the theme of this book, and to drive it home I showed how the American Dream was alive and well in other countries. A comparison with the country we most closely resemble is particularly surprising, even shocking. The table on page 55 reveals how immobile our society is, compared with Canada, and the figures on pages 135 and 198 show how the difference is located in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of earners. In America, the rich pass on their economic privileges to their children, while in Canada there is much more downward mobility from the top. In America, poverty too is inherited, while in Canada the children of the poor have a good chance of getting ahead.

This difference in mobility couldn’t be explained by pointing to differences in national wealth, since the economies of the two countries are so similar. Other common excuses for American immobility also make no sense. Some have argued that the move to an information economy, with skill-based technological change, explains everything. But then it’s not as if highly mobile Canada is living in the Stone Age. As for free-trade agreements, Canada relies more on them than the United States. Welfare policies don’t explain anything much either, since America has one of the most generous welfare systems in the world.

There is more going on, however, and if Canada has succeeded where America has failed we should look to other differences that have something to do with mobility. And then emulate Canada. That would mean school choice, immigration policies designed to favor the native-born, a strengthened rule of law—all policies that Canada has adopted. They are also more deeply conservative than the corresponding policies in America. Here, the Democrats decry income immobility while supporting policies dictated by their base that limit mobility. Had Republicans taken the issue of economic mobility seriously, they would have called out Democrats for their hypocrisy. It was the issue on which the 2012 election turned, and the Republicans gave it away.

Having lived in both America and Canada, I’ve concluded that few North Americans know much about their own countries. Americans imagine that they live in an essentially capitalist and conservative country, as compared with Soviet Canuckistan. Canadians are apt to think of themselves as so much more progressive than their neighbors to the south. There’s a good deal of self-deception for both. Underneath the comforting images are very different sets of writings, a palimpsest of a liberal America and a conservative Canada. America has one of the world’s most generous welfare systems and very liberal immigration, tax and rule of law policies, while Canada has education, immigration, tax and legal institutions that Donald Trump admires. America’s conservatism is mushy and infected with waste and corruption; while Canada’s liberalism is that of the teenager who hangs out in hip neighborhoods, in jeans his mother pressed this morning, but who always returns home at night.

Socialist Ends, Capitalist Means

At a dinner in fall 2015, I heard a Republican congressman deride some of his Freedom Caucus colleagues as “right-wing Marxists.” Aha, I thought. That’s me. I saw an America divided by class, and thought we were in what Marxist-Leninists called an objectively revolutionary situation. Marx himself had wondered why one didn’t see English radicalism in the world’s most advanced capitalist society. That ran against his theory of history: first feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism. So America should have been primed for socialism when Marx wrote, in 1852. Except it wasn’t, and Marx said the reason for American exceptionalism was that Americans were so mobile. It followed, however, that if ever America became immobile, then we’d expect class consciousness and class struggle. Which is how we’re to understand American politics in 2016.

Trump and Sanders both recognized what had changed. Both wanted a return to a more mobile and just society. They had the same socialist goals but wanted to reach them in different ways. Sanders offered us socialist ends through socialist means, while Trump proposed socialist ends through capitalist means. Because I saw American politics as class warfare, and predicted how this would become the story of the 2016 election, I was a Marxist. And because I saw the way back as a return to free-market principles I was a right-wing Marxist.

“Socialist goals through capitalist means” upset some conservatives, who didn’t want socially just goals no matter how we got there. I think that phrase had originally been suggested by Milton Friedman, though I couldn’t find the reference. But what did it matter? It’s what I thought American voters wanted and needed.

It’s also what the Trump campaign wanted. I say this as one who, with my wife and my friend Bob Tyrrell, provided first drafts of many of Trump’s campaign speeches in the spring and summer of 2016, and who subsequently advised on transition matters. The speech of Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican Convention, which I had a hand in writing, summarized what I had written in The Way Back. The Democrats had complained of American immobility, but it was they who had caused the problem. Trump himself praised my book, which to my mind proved either that he was a splendid fellow or that he had not read it. In any event, I knew that his domestic policies were the same as the ones I had recommended.

We Trump supporters had taken sides in a bitter Republican civil war. The other side, the NeverTrumpers, was composed of a small group of ideological purists who had assembled a checklist of received right-wing ideas. And what were these? They might have been derived from a deep study of John Locke and Robert Nozick, with perhaps a bit of Ayn Rand thrown in for light reading. An advanced degree in Austrian economics would also help. That might take years, but in the end you’d know just what to believe. All good stuff, but if we’re talking about the NeverTrumpers you could mostly just ask what are the most heartless policies around. That would save a lot of time.

The perfect ideological idiot had forgotten to connect his ideas with people. He had forgotten that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. A smarter person might have learned this, but instead the ideologue reviled Trump for appealing to the ordinary American voter. Trump and his supporters were called populists. That was meant as a term of opprobrium. We were kin to Father Coughlin, to David Duke, to all that was nasty in American politics. That was simply an effort to smear us, and when the editor of National Review, Richard Lowry, called us populists in a debate, I turned to him and said, “I do not think I am ill-bred, compared to you; I do not think I am ill-educated, compared to you.”

Sneers at populists were to be expected, however, for in 2016 almost no one had shown much interest in the ordinary voter, except for Trump. And that’s because no one was much interested in the idea of equality. Without much discussion, we had come to accept that we live in a class society and that we are permitted to avert our gaze from great differences in wealth and status. In the past, such indifference would have been condemned by Marxists and by egalitarian liberals, for they regarded equality as a moral imperative that demanded something from us. Now, none of them seemed up to the job.

The classical Marxist dream of universal brotherhood had died in the moral and political bankruptcy of communism. On the progressive left it had been abandoned for identity politics that explicitly deny a common humanity by granting priority to favored groups—minorities, gays, women. There was a telling moment in a 2015 Democratic presidential debate when the candidates were asked to choose between “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter.” One might have thought that only a moral imbecile or a racist would judge people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. But among the candidates only Jim Webb said that all lives matter, and he left the Democratic Party not long afterward.

As for egalitarian liberalism, it was never the firmest reed in America. At the founding it coexisted with slavery, and it’s always been tainted by religious bigotry. In academic milieus it got a boost from the work of John Rawls, but a theory so rational, so esoteric, wasn’t going to leave a firm imprint on very many people. Moreover, Rawls’ “difference principle” encouraged readers to ignore social and economic inequalities unless they affected the least advantaged members of society. In short, the Rawlsian liberal wouldn’t much care about the typical Trump voters.

Concerns about inequality scarcely bothered the meritocratic New Class, which embraced the idea that its members were the chosen people of a new, global information economy, and that those who failed to attend Yale Law School, take out a subscription to The Atlantic or attend workshops at the Brookings Institution had only themselves to blame. The conceit that the answer to the country’s social ills lay in turning the working class into proper little left-wing intellectuals was wonderfully ridiculed by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, but somehow the New Class missed the satire.

Where egalitarianism has any purchase, it’s among religious believers, especially Evangelicals and Catholics, who massively supported Trump. If we believe we’re all made in God’s image, that we all have souls, it’s impossible to deny our common humanity. And without religious belief, the belief in equality is a tough sell. Walter Berns, a conservative thinker, once quoted the opening words of the Declaration of Independence to me. “All men are created equal.” He asked me: Do you think that’s an empirical proposition?

When we look at others what we see are differences, between the long and the short and the tall. In the left’s identity politics, it’s differences between races, ethnic groups, genders. On the right, it might be the nasty IQ debate introduced by people such as Charles Murray, which has permitted the members of the New Class to feel superior to the little brains beneath them. Without religious belief, what else is there?

Among the wiser socialists, that’s led to a new respect for religion as a foundation for their dearest beliefs. Without abandoning his atheism, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was willing to debate Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and announce his openness to the egalitarian content of religious traditions. G. A. Cohen, a Canadian-American philosopher, came to the same realization in If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Similarly, in Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton noted that “it was the fate of the Enlightenment to usher in a civilization in which its pragmatism, materialism and utilitarianism tended to discredit some of the very exalted ideas which presided over its birth.” That’s why today’s clever Marxist is as likely to study the Epistle to the Romans as he is to read Das Kapital. But the New Class paid no attention to any of this. It wasn’t that they were believers, or even that they were atheists. Rather, they had simply stopped caring about equality.

The Republican Workers Party

The NeverTrumpers were right about one thing. On domestic policies Trump was not a doctrinaire libertarian. Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, a higher-up at the Charles Koch Foundation told me his problem with Trump. The developer from Queens didn’t have an entitlement policy. He didn’t plan to roll back Medicare or curb Social Security. But that’s not what most Americans want either. We have a generous welfare policy, as I noted, and all Trump planned to do was make it work better. He proposed to repeal and replace Obamacare, not just repeal it; and he wanted a system that wouldn’t leave people uninsured.

In appealing to ordinary voters, and rejecting rigid Republican right-wing doctrines, Trump had rescued what is living from what is dead in conservatism. What is living is a Republican Party that doesn’t think those left behind deserve their fate. Trump is a nationalist, and what many of his opponents missed is the logic of nationalism: that the needs of Americans take priority over the interests of non-Americans, that what is denied non-Americans must be paid for by what is given to Americans. That’s a lesson as old as the distinction between strangers and brothers in Deuteronomy, but it’s one that right-wing ideologues, with their desire for open borders and their willingness to ship jobs offshore, had failed to hear. They had a perfect fidelity to principle, but an indifference to fellow Americans. And that’s what was dead in conservatism.

Trump’s Republicanism would be a party of “buy American and hire American,” a party for the laid-off coal miner, the auto worker whose job was sent abroad, the child in a terrible school, those who struggle with crime in their inner-city neighborhoods. At the 2017 CPAC Conference he called it the Republican Workers Party. It would be the jobs party. (In time, I hope, it will also be the health-care party.) What it wouldn’t be is the bicycle-lane party, the transgender-bathroom party. He’d leave those issues for the Democrats.

The new party wouldn’t blame those who are left behind, as NeverTrumpers did. With a vituperation that recalled Marx’s contempt for the lumpenproletariat, the writers at National Review described Trump supporters as Oxy-sniffing moral lepers who whelped their children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog. Before long, the mainstream media took up the theme, and a redneck-porn literature was born, one that invited upper-class readers to indulge in their sense of superiority by slumming with the underclass.

How very different this was from the older literature of poverty in America, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Michael Harrington’s The Other America. The earlier writers described the poor with compassion, as fellow Americans. They were the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, honorable people down on their luck. There was no sense of moral superiority in this literature, even with those who might have brought their poverty on themselves. The desperately poor were broken in body and spirit, and while they didn’t belong to anyone or anything they still were our brothers, with whom we shared a common humanity and citizenship. If they lived their lives at a level beneath that necessary for human decency, we were called upon to do something about it. In Harrington’s case, that meant living with them in one of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker hospices, not an experience any of today’s purveyors of redneck porn will have shared.

Harrington described how poverty had persisted during the boom years of the 1950s. In our day, too, we’ve seen poverty coexisting with spectacular wealth gains for others. Similarly, we’re seeing unprecedented longevity for some, alongside climbing mortality rates for others. With new drugs and better medical providers, we’re saving people who in the past would have died earlier from things like heart disease and cancer. That’s how it is in every other First World country, and that’s how it is for African-Americans and Hispanics. But life expectancy for white, middle-aged Americans has recently declined. Anne Case and her husband, Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton, report that had the rate held at 1998 levels, there would have been 100,000 fewer deaths over the next fifteen years for whites aged 45−54. In much of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, life expectancy is lower today than in Bangladesh or Nepal.

How did this happen? The NeverTrumper and the liberal blamed the victims themselves. More generously, Case and Deaton said that the increased deaths are largely a result of despair, social isolation, drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide and chronic liver disease, and that all this in turn could be attributed to higher unemployment and lower wages. In Appalachia, in the heartland, white, working class Americans had lost their jobs and were killing themselves, but at our elite colleges, social-justice warriors were asking them to check their privilege, while Hillary Clinton was calling them deplorable and irredeemable.

If we want to do something about it, Case and Deaton surely pointed us in the right direction. The best remedy for an opioid crisis is jobs. People don’t lose their jobs because they smoke Oxy; they smoke Oxy because they’ve lost their jobs. By voting for a person who called himself the “jobs president,” Republican voters showed that they understood this. They evidently looked past Trump’s moral lapses, and had little interest in a state-led moral rearmament crusade. With David Hume, they likely thought that “all plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary.”

The voters defined the policy challenges for the Trump administration: create jobs and restore economic mobility. That in turn will require the reforms in education, immigration policy, the tax system and the regulatory regime that I describe in this book. Nothing much else ascends to the level of policy. Trump intellectuals said they wanted to make America great again, but “stop being a loser” isn’t a policy; “stop doing stupid stuff” isn’t a reform. Through all of Trump’s self-induced crises they defended him, like Jonahs inside the belly of the whale, swept wherever it might take them. But they didn’t tell us what the way back might be, which was the point of my book. They never told us what to do about decline.

For what, after all, is American greatness? Is it cultural superiority, to match that of France? Is it military might, such as the Soviet Union once had? Is it a foreign policy of liberal imperialism, riding in triumph through Persepolis? Those are the dreams of other people, other candidates, but they weren’t Trump’s dream, or the American Dream, that of a country where one isn’t held back, where all may get ahead, where our children will have things we never had.

And now? As I write, the papers are full of stories about special prosecutors and Russian sabotage. The Democrats talk impeachment, and Republican NeverTrumpers lick their lips at the prospect of a President Pence. It’s more than a little hysterical, but in truth the dream of a Republican Workers Party has faded a little, and that’s not surprising. Everything begins in mystique, said Charles Péguy, and ends in politics. Still, we’ve seen what doesn’t work, the politics of heartless conservatism and hypocritical liberalism, and we know that that’s all over and done with.

—F.H. BUCKLEY

May 26, 2017