The Apprentice

Americans are more united than ever in their distrust of government, big business, the military, and other institutions—and of one another.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/31/opinion/american-politics-trust-institutions.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lk4.XQNh.jjz5UtJffvpQ&smid=url-share

As we close out 2024, something important is unfolding in America that hasn’t happened in many years: We’re more united in our outlook about our country’s institutions. There is rising and perhaps unexpected alignment between Americans of different walks of life, from left to right… What we are experiencing in our society now is a reorientation of many of our existing political divides. Organizations, professions and institutions that were recently trusted by at least one side of the political aisle have come in for greater scrutiny, with new bipartisan alignment on skepticism.

Vegging out with family for Christmas break I watched the story of Trump’s apprenticeship under Roy Cohn. It did not inspire confidence. Trump, I learnt, was not merely a dissolute buffoon, on the model of Boris Johnson. Under Cohn’s tuteledge, young Donald Trump became seriously evil—not just bribing local politicians, blackmailing bureaucrats, and stiffing contractors, a requirement for doing business in Trumplandia, but betraying his brother, his wife, and Cohn himself.

Trump’s supporters, however, were willing to overlook his egregious evildoing because they believed that the US had become a crime-ridden hellscape in a state of economic collapse that only Trump, as he himself said, could fix. They voted for Trump because he was, as they saw it, a Big Man who would cut deals on their behalf, take down institutions, and beat the crap out of their oppressors. He was vicious, cynical, mean, and vindictive, but these were just inevitable concomitants of strength and they wanted a strongman to provide for them and protect them. They would overlook is sins and accept collateral damage.

What we are seeing in the United States today, though, is not so new. It echoes what is happening all over the world: an assault on the modern state as we know it… Eviscerating modern state institutions almost always clears a path for a different type of political order, one built on personal loyalties and connections to the ruler. The German sociologist Max Weber had a word for this type of regime: patrimonialism, based on the arbitrary rule of leaders who view themselves as traditional “fathers” of their nations and who run the state as a family business of sorts, staffed by relatives, friends and other members of the ruler’s ‘extended household’. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/31/opinion/trump-assault-government-americans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lk4.s-Z1.lZ3o_J9t31GI&smid=url-share

I’m not surprised by Trump’s patrimonialist program. It’s the way business was done in the gritty, mobbed-up city where I was born. Nothing was as it seemed, as I learnt from the working-class white ethics at my first job, my initiation into adult life. The real business of the world was done by Big Men in back rooms, through informal procedures, money passed under the table, and a transactional tally of favors and ‘gifts’. Formal institutions were a front, politicians were crooks, cops were on the take, government was a racket, and taxes were tribute to bureaucrats lining their pockets; doctors were quacks, lawyers were shysters, and all experts were fakers out for the buck. Idealism, honesty, impartiality, fairness were all just myths for children.

My college classmates report that whenever I talk about getting to college in the Midwest, I describe it as having ‘died and gone to heaven’. I knew it wasn’t perfect, that there was hypocrisy, bigotry, and meanness there too. But there was still the recognition that things should, and even could, be honest, fair and impartial, that formal institutions weren’t just a racket, and that people should be open, explicit, and fair in their dealings even if they sometimes weren’t.

I thought that this marked the difference between upper-middle-class generic Americans and the white ethic working class or the lower classes generally. And I was right. In the US college graduation is a class market and the less educated have less social capital—less trust in people and institutions and less public-spiritedness—than Americans on the other side of the diploma divide. But the gap has narrowed.

I thought that the ethos of the educated upper-middle-class would trickle down as working-class Americans became better off and assimilated, as ethnicity washed out and tribalism disappeared. But instead the cynicism of the lower classes has percolated up and social capital has drained away.

It’s easy to see why working-class Americans distrust government and other institutions, why they have no confidence in experts, and why they are angry at ‘elites’. Formal institutions have not served their interests, scientists, academics, and technocrats are an alien class as remote from them as colonial administrators were from the natives they ruled, and the contempt of elites is palpable. It is easy to see why they want to take down the Establishment.

It is not so easy to see why people who are themselves professionals have come to distrust experts or why ‘elites’ want take down a system that has served their intersts. Nevertheless, even though the Establishment has been good to them it hasn’t been, by their lights, good enough. A recent study reveals that Gen Z respondents, on the average, believe an annual salary of $587,797 [sic] and net worth of $9.47 million are necessary to achieve ‘financial success’. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/12/04/gen-zs-benchmark-for-financial-success-is-a-600k-salary/

I’m not surprised. When I discuss the paradox of choice in class I give students a survey to determine whether they are maximizers, who go for the gold, or satisficers, who aim for good enough. In fact, satisficing is the best strategy for maximizing one’s own utility. Maximizers, who consider all possible options in order to choose the optimal become baffled and stymied; and working to achieve the best possible outcome they incur transaction costs that eat up the benefits. Yet my students were, by and large, maximizers who affirmed ‘whenever I’m faced with a choice, I try to imagine what all the other possibilities are’ and ‘I never settle for second best’.

After growing up in Trumplandia, I am a deep satisficer. I never expected to earn an annual salary in six figures, much less $587,797 per year, and am delighted with my decent academic salary. In voting, I do not look for outstanding candidates: I look for good enough—and any Democrat will do. I love the Establishment because where I come from the alternative is the Mob.

I can forgive working-class Americans who voted against the Establishment, which didn’t serve them well, but it is harder to forgive ‘elites’ for whom good enough wasn’t good enough and who, through their indifference and defection, brought in Trump and his mob.