Henry Farrell | Vox

The “Intellectual Dark Web,” explained: what Jordan Peterson has in common with the alt-right

2018-05-10T14:02:17-04:00

Jordan Peterson, author of Twelve Rules for Life. | Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star/Getty Images

Bari Weiss, an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, created a stir this week with a long article on a group that calls itself the “Intellectual Dark Web.” The coinage referred to a loose collective of intellectuals and media personalities who believe they are “locked out” of mainstream media, in Weiss’s words, and who are building their own ways to communicate with readers.

The thinkers profiled included the neuroscientist and prominent atheist writer Sam Harris, the podcaster Dave Rubin, and University of Toronto psychologist and Chaos Dragon maven Jordan Peterson.

The article provoked disbelieving guffaws from critics, who pointed out that cable news talking heads like Ben Shapiro have hardly been purged. Many words could be used to describe Harris, but ”silenced” is not plausibly one of them.

Some assertions in the piece deserved the ridicule. But Weiss accurately captured a genuine perception among the people she is writing about (and, perhaps, for). They do feel isolated and marginalized, and with some justification. However, the reasons are quite different from those suggested by Weiss. She asserts that they have been marginalized because of their willingness to take on all topics and their determination not to “[parrot] what’s politically convenient.”

The truth is rather that dark web intellectuals, like Donald Trump supporters and the online alt-right, have experienced a sharp decline in their relative status over time. This is leading them to frustration and resentment.

Members of the intellectual dark web want to be at the center of intellectual debate. But the center has shifted.

To understand the unhappiness of dark web intellectuals, you have to go back in time. The past few years have seen extraordinary changes in how left-wingers, liberals, and liberal centrists understand themselves. But go back a bit further and marriage equality for gay people was a controversial issue, and women’s rights and the status of African Americans in American life were the targets of intellectually lazy speculation.

Precisely because we have changed so much, we have forgotten how bad things used to be. For decades, contrarianism on questions of race and gender — ranging from opposition to certain feminist projects or to affirmative action, to flirtation with the idea that black culture and even black brains were intrinsically inferior — was part of the intellectual mainstream of the center. Andrew Sullivan published an entire issue of the New Republic devoted to presenting, and debating, Charles Murray’s claim that black people were, on average, less intelligent than white people.

Leon Wieseltier, who ran the New Republic’s book section as an independent barony, sought to exercise a droit du seigneur over female employees, as we learned last year. Slate, famous for its contrarian #slatepitch pieces, published several essays by William Saletan on race and research, which credulously accepted the arguments of J. Philippe Rushton, a race-obsessed researcher linked to the racialist Pioneer Fund and white nationalist New Century Foundation.

Sullivan, Saletan, and others justified themselves by claiming that they were disinterested inquirers pursuing the scientific truth, even if it led them to deeply uncomfortable conclusions. Their enthusiasm for discomfort did not then extend, however, to examining the awkward politics beneath their own contrarianism. As Philip Kitcher, the famous philosopher of science, suggested back in 2001 in Science, Truth, and Democracy, there is an “epistemic bias” in favor of the sorts of arguments these thinkers embraced.

The repeated outbreaks of fascination with the question of whether women and racial minorities are inherently unequal were not quite the product of the disinterested pursuit of the truth, Kitcher argued; otherwise, the same unpleasant questions would not keep appearing in radically different pseudoscientific forms. Instead, the recurrent interest stems from public and elite eagerness to believe that discrimination against women and minorities was justified.

This was reinforced by individual intellectual incentives to cultivate contrarianism for the sake of fame, or, as Kitcher describes it, the “temptation to gain a large audience and to influence public opinion by defending ‘unpopular’ views” — views that, in truth, mirrored widespread societal prejudices.

Not only was it considered acceptable for pundits to speculate about the limitations of other races or women, or to engage with the nastier corners of the intellectual right, but it was often seen as a good thing — a sign that one was tough-minded and decidedly not beholden to 1960s-era leftism. Hence, intellectual centrists prided themselves on their political independence from both sides of the political spectrum but were often more at pains to distinguish themselves from the left than from the right.

Now, this has all changed radically. Centrist liberals still have many political blind spots. But writers who suggest that black people are relatively more likely to be stupid are likely to have a much rougher time of it than in the 1990s or the aughts. The same is true for men who call for women who have had abortions to be hanged by the neck until dead.

A group united mainly by its disdain for “multiculturalism”

These changes explain why Weiss and her arm’s-length comrades in arms feel so embattled. What they all share is not a general commitment to intellectual free exchange but a specific political hostility to “multiculturalism” and all that it entails. In previous decades, their views were close to hegemonic in the intellectual center.

Arthur Schlesinger, for example, feared that multiculturalism might weaken America’s vital center (although he also acknowledged the cultural threat from the right). Structural arguments about the oppression of black people and women didn’t often make it into mainstream publications. Now, the hegemony has been overturned.

The traditional safe spaces for pseudoscientific speculation have been taken over, almost literally. The New Republic — which Ta-Nehisi Coates has asserted had perhaps two black staff writers or editors in its heyday and was certainly overwhelmingly white — is now being edited by the leftist multicultural barbarians. Slate has moved away from reflex contrarianism toward a more robust liberalism. And William Saletan, to his genuine credit, has written a serious mea culpa for his previous flirtations with race-IQ theorizing.

Today, contrarianism on race and gender is liable to get fierce pushback in the publications of mainstream liberalism. Intellectual ties to the right can win you toleration if you are David Frum, Ross Douthat, or David Brooks. You may be recognized as a member of a minority that needs to be acknowledged, and as a possibly unreliable ally against Donald Trump Republicanism. However, you are unlikely to enjoy real love or deep acceptance.

In absolute terms, dark web intellectuals enjoy far more access to the mainstream than genuine leftists. But in relative terms, they have far lower status than their intellectual forebears of 20 or even 10 years ago. They are not driving the conversation, and sometimes are being driven from it. This loss of relative social status helps explain the anger and resentment that Weiss describes and to some extent herself embodies. It’s hard for erstwhile hegemons to feel happy about their fall.

There is also an irritating but genuine grain of truth deep beneath the layers of whining. Campus leftists and their allies in the media are often no more open to alternative perspectives than the New Republic white male elite of two decades ago; they can behave badly too. But where dark web intellectuals veer from analysis of that phenomenon into self-pity is in their consistent tendency to treat all skeptical criticism of their purported commitment to truth-seeking as further symptoms of political correctness gone mad.

How great is the distance between the intellectual dark web and the hard alt-right?

Weiss is largely sympathetic to dark web intellectuals. Still, she is obviously troubled by the new movement’s tendency to embrace right-wing conspiracists such as Pizzagate rumormonger Mike Cernovich, lite-alt-righter Milo Yiannopoulos, and the frothing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Dave Rubin justifies this to her by saying that they don’t now want a statement of principles but are “just a crew of people trying to have the kind of important conversations that the mainstream won’t.” In Weiss’s description, dark web intellectuals are “committed to the belief that setting up no-go zones and no-go people is inherently corrupting to free thought.”

However, intellectual openness is not the only possible reason the dark web is flirting with the dark enlightenment. Recent political science research suggests that Trump’s popularity in the 2016 presidential election was based on “status threat.” Members of high-status groups that had lost prestige were more likely to be receptive to Trump’s rhetoric.

And it is less well appreciated is that the online alt-right orchestrated by Cernovich, Yiannopoulos, and others had origins quite similar to the somewhat more respectable dark web types that Weiss’s piece describes. Gamergate united men’s rights activists, white nationalists, and neoreactionaries around indignation over the inroads that women and minorities had made into video game culture, previously dominated by young white men.

Weiss lists some of the colorful metaphors that dark web intellectuals use to describe their conversion experience: “going through the phantom tollbooth; deviating from the narrative; falling into the rabbit hole.” They’ve had “a particular episode where they came in as one thing and emerged as something quite different.” However, they, and she, systematically avoid using one obvious and common metaphor for their experience: taking the red pill.

Gamergaters commonly talk about how they used to feel a vague sense of unease and oppression, until, like Neo in The Matrix, they took the red pill and could see the vast invisible structures of race and gender norms that imprisoned them. As Steve Bannon told Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek, Gamergate was a potent gateway drug to the extreme right: “I realized Milo [Yiannopoulos] could connect with these kids right away. … You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”

Dark web intellectuals would probably resent any comparison to Gamergaters. They think they operate on an entirely different plane of thought. However, the political and social resemblances are obvious. Dark web intellectuals too have seen their culture invaded by women and minorities. They also have resentments to be capitalized on, and a commitment to rationality that can all too easily be transformed into a commitment to rationalizing their less salubrious political desires.

It would not be surprising to see many of the people discussed in Weiss’s piece defect to the forces of darkness over the next couple of years. Instead, it would be surprising if some did not.

Henry Farrell is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. Find him on Twitter @henryfarrell.

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This year’s economics Nobel winner invented a tool that’s both brilliant and undemocratic

2017-10-16T10:30:05-04:00

Richard Thaler, pictured in 2004. | Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis/Getty Images

Richard Thaler, of the University of Chicago, just won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for his contribution to behavioral economics — the subfield known for exploring how psychological biases cause people to act in ways that diverge from pure rational self-interest.

Policymakers are more likely to know him for a different reason. Together with his co-author, Harvard Law’s Cass Sunstein, Thaler is responsible for developing and popularizing the notion of “nudges” as a policy tool. Over the past decade, policymakers around the world have taken up Thaler and Sunstein’s ideas, setting up government nudge units and other programs intended to guide people toward choices that are in their best interests. Nudging has become fashionable.

Nudges can be used by both businesses and government to shape the behavior of employees, customers, and citizens. A classic nudge would be when a company automatically enrolls employees in a decent 401(k) plan — but lets them opt out of contributing, if they wish. The non-nudging status quo would require the employees to actively decide to sign up for a retirement plan. Studies have demonstrated that opt-out framing leads to higher enrollment.

Thaler and Sunstein argue that nudging is a win-win. Unlike traditional regulation, it doesn’t force people to make choices that they don’t want to make. Yet unlike a “laissez faire” approach it doesn’t assume that people should be left to make their own choices free of outside interference. Instead, their approach structures choices so that people are going to be nudged into making the choice that is probably best for them. In Thaler’s description:

if you want to get somebody to do something, make it easy. If you want to get people to eat healthier foods, then put healthier foods in the cafeteria, and make them easier to find, and make them taste better. So in every meeting I say, “Make it easy.”

So what’s not to like?

The problem — as Carnegie Mellon’s Cosma Shalizi and I have discussed elsewhere — is that government-by-nudging amounts to a kind of technocracy, which assumes that experts will know which choices are in the interests of ordinary people better than those people know themselves. This may be true under some circumstances, but it will not be true all of the time, or even most of the time, if there are no good opportunities for those ordinary people to voice their preferences.

Traditional forms of democratic policymaking rely on expertise too, but they have better correction mechanisms than nudgeocracy, since people who are sufficiently angry at a particular rule may have the incentive to complain and organize against it. Nudgeocracies, in contrast, are insulated from the feedback that would help them get things right.

This is even clearer if we call nudgeocracy by another name. Chris Hayes has written on Twitter about what he describes as the “hassleocracy” — the tendency to make something a hassle, so that fewer people will do it. Hayes was writing about the ways that Republicans make it harder for many groups to vote — mandating voter ID’s, and the like — but his description applies just as aptly to insurance companies doing everything they can to stop you from filing claims, or magazines that make it very easy to subscribe, but require you to notarize, and sign a form in triplicate, with the asservations of seven witnesses in red ink, if you want to stop the subscription from automatically self-renewing. (Thaler and Sunstein briefly discuss that example.)

Structuring choices to make things that you want people to do easy, and things that you don’t want them to do look like hassle carries over to contexts very different from the benevolent paternalism that Thaler favors.

Behavioral economics has inspired new approaches to policymaking

Nudgeocracy is a natural spin-off of Thaler’s economic arguments. Departing from standard microeconomics and game theory, behavioral economics takes it for granted that real-life decision-making is flawed in systematic ways, and that people often do not recognize what is in their best interest. (And even when they do know, they may find it hard to exercise appropriate self-restraint to make the right call.)

These insights lead to very different policy prescriptions than traditional economics. If you believe that human beings are perfectly rational, you can leave them alone to make the choices that will best satisfy their needs and self-interest. If, in contrast, you believe that human beings’ ability to know and act upon their interests is flawed, then you may want to help them make the choices that are best for them (so long as you are a benign administrator), even if those are not the choices that they would make unaided.

However, you face a potential ethical problem. By deciding what is good for people, rather than letting them decide for themselves, you take away some of their autonomy. You also run the risk of being wrong. Perhaps the choice that you think is best for the majority of people is obviously wrong for some minority of them.

This is why Thaler and Sunstein opt for nudging rather than benevolent dictatorship — or, less dramatically, for a system of governance in which legislatures pass laws designed by technocrats that force people to do the “right” thing. You do not compel people to make the right choices. Instead, you set up their choices so that they will find themselves guided to make the “right” choice unless they have strong alternative preferences. Creating a default option, as in the 401(k) example, is one option.

All of this sounds innocuous and even compelling, given that even neo-classical economists admit, when they are forced to, that human beings are not perfect calculating engines.

The “choice architect” does not always know best

Indeed, there are many circumstances under which nudges are a good idea. But the fad for nudgeocracy has hidden implications. Thaler and Sunstein describe the philosophy that underlies nudging as “libertarian paternalism” — libertarian because it lets people make the choices that they want to, paternalist because it provides them with a father’s guiding hand. Behind nudgeocracy lies the assumption that daddy knows best.

For Thaler and Sunstein, daddy is a “choice architect” — a skilled and intelligent technocrat who uses good data, good social science and his own intelligence to figure out what people would really want to do, if only they were as smart and well informed as the choice architect.

The problem is that daddies — consider those stern yet kindly men who smoke pipes and deliver shopworn aphorisms in in deep and manly voices — may have good intentions but don’t necessarily know best at all. They themselves may not have good information about what their charges want, what they should want, or how their charges will respond to nudges. Their understandings of their underlings or users may be skewed by preconceptions or poor information.

In one study, a power company tried to “nudge” its customers into consuming less energy, by telling them how their power consumption compared to their neighbors, and telling power hogs that they had room to improve. The nudge worked as intended for environmentalist Democrats, but non-environmentalist Republicans instead took it as license to increase their power consumption.

Of course, the choice architect has tools to try to remedy misinformation and misperceptions. Sometimes Thaler and Sunstein suggest that the choice architect can figure out what people should choose by simple introspection — “Libertarian paternalists would like to set the default by asking what reflective employees … would actually want.” Sometimes, they argue that the choice architect can carry out experiments, varying choices to see what consequences they have for human behavior. Choice architects could also turn to other sources of information such as surveys, or focus groups.

It is not clear, however, that choice architects will get good information from any of these sources. After all, choice architects are almost by definition going to be political, social, or business elites, and people are very often unforthcoming to those who can control their choices, fearing retaliation if they say the wrong thing.

Even when people provide honest information, it is not clear that the choice architects will have much incentive to listen to them if they say things that the choice architects don’t want to hear. Thaler and Sunstein do not really talk about whom the choice architect is supposed to be responsible to, perhaps because they want to talk both about the private sector (in which the architect must ultimately be responsible to owners or shareholders), and the public sector (in which the architect is a bureaucrat, and therefore responsible, directly or indirectly, to politicians). This means that they have little to say about the role of accountability in ensuring that choice architects accept new information, where it is available, and use it well.

Hard-and-fast rules can lead to democratic pushback. Technocratic “nudges” may not.

The above is another way of saying that nudgeocracy has a big weakness: It is not very good at receiving and incorporating feedback. Thaler and Sunstein have a lot to say about how choice architects can provide better feedback to ordinary people, but they have little to say about how ordinary people can provide feedback to choice architects. This is hard to see if your starting point is economics. While markets provide all kinds of feedback, standard micro-economic models assume that market actors have complete information over all the possible ways that other actors might respond to them; from that perspective, the idea of a genuinely unexpected response is a big stretch.

It is much easier to understand if you start instead by comparing nudgeocracy to traditional democracy. If “libertarian paternalism” sounds oxymoronic, so too does the way that traditional democracies run: through coercion. A democracy is a society in which the choices of a majority of citizens are binding on everyone else. These choices may be made directly or indirectly, and through a variety of mechanisms. The makeup of the majority may also vary, but what does not vary is that the choices are binding — those in the minority are forced to abide by them. This is why democracies are coercive — and why some libertarians dislike them. You do not have the option not to pay taxes; nor can you opt out of Social Security.

There are never-ending debates over the benefits and disadvantages of democracy. However, relatively little attention is paid to the informational advantages that coercion provides in a genuinely democratic setting.

Imagine that you live in a democratic system that imposes some new rule that requires you to do something that you don’t want to do — say, wear a seatbelt in your car. This rule will be visible to you, since you will be punished if you break it. If you are very unhappy with this rule, you can use your democratic voice. If you can persuade enough of your fellow citizens, you can then push to have the rule overturned.

That’s a natural feedback mechanism. Democratic coercion may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it builds a feedback loop through which suboptimal rules can get fixed.

Nudgeocracy, in contrast, lacks such a loop. First of all, the rules governing choice are likely to be unobtrusive. Much of the time, people won’t even be aware that they are being guided to a particular choice. In contrast to what happens in a coercive regime, people will be less likely to know to complain, or to mobilize against choice architectures that guide them to decisions that aren’t the best decisions they could make. Even when they do complain, it is not clear that their complaints will make a difference, since the choice architects might or might not be publicly accountable.

Of course, even the best democracies are not always responsive. (Notoriously, it is easier to mobilize against rules that have high costs for a small number of actors — like anti-pollution rules for power plants — than rules that have low costs for a very large number of actors.) Nonetheless, the closer that political systems approach true democracy, the more responsive to the public they are going to be. Nudgeocracy, even in its ideal form, lacks such accountability, and instead relies on a variety of more or less adequate technocratic substitutes.

In short, we may expect that bad laws and regulations — “shoves,” we might say — will generate protest or noncompliance. A bad nudge, in contrast will either escape notice, or be sidestepped by those who do notice it. We can expect such a system to be worse at self-correction than a system that combines traditional coercive rules with democratic accountability.

Both moderates like Steve Teles and progressives like Suzanne Mettler have argued that stronger nudging is likely to lead to weaker citizenship. Mettler is worried that it threatens to turn citizens into consumers. For democratic government to be of the people, by the people, for the people, people have to have a clear view of what government is doing, she argues. Nudging, in contrast, may produce efficient policy goals but leaves citizens uninformed and without real agency.

She singles out policy measures such as a stealth Obama tax cut that was intended as a stimulus to boost the economy. This cut was designed to be unobtrusive, so as to nudge people to spend more instead of saving. This may have made it more effective, but it also made it politically invisible to citizens. Teles agrees with these criticisms, and in a minatory passage, foresees “a prostrate citizenry—one insufficiently mobilized to actually challenge deep structural inequalities, let alone to explicitly recognize who has leased its consent.”

Advocates of “nudges” have thought more about economics than about politics

This does not mean that nudging is useless. It does suggest that it should be used only under limited circumstances. One can imagine two circumstances where nudging could work.

One is where there is some default decision that is a) non-obvious to people (or at least difficult for them to stick with even if it is obvious), b) the best plausible decision when you think about it more carefully, and c) does not have any complicated feedback effects. Here, it may be reasonable to guide people toward making the “right” decision, although choice architects still have to be careful.

This description strongly echoes what advocates of nudges say about when their approach should be deployed. But what they do not recognize is that the scope for such nudges is much smaller than it appears at first to be. In a profoundly interconnected society, even apparently simple choices can have complex and unpredictable consequences. As scholars like Scott Page (and Shalizi and I) have argued, technocratic experts are likely to be less able to foresee and account for those consequences than groups that draw on a wider set of diverse perspectives and forms of background knowledge.

In short, for complex issues, democracy (when it can usefully draw upon diversity) is likely to trump technocracy (which draws on more sophisticated, but narrower expertise). Thaler and Sunstein, for example argue that nudges can help us deal with climate change, since global climate is the “outcome of a global choice architecture,” where market pressures and the lack of feedback mean that people often make collectively bad choices. They suggest that experts can design a better choice architecture based on incentive schemes.

But as the different responses of Republicans and Democrats to power saving schemes illustrates, apparently straightforward incentives can backfire, or interact in complex and unforeseeable ways with other factors shaping human behavior. Technocracy may end up being as much part of the problem as the solution

The second is where there are a variety of other “choice architects” — possibly in the private sector — already working hard to shape people’s decisions to selfishly benefit themselves rather than the people making the choices. For example, investment planners who receive commissions for selling specific investment plans have an obvious economic incentive to shape their clients’ choices so as to maximize their own commission income rather than the long-term value of the investments. In such situations, “benign” choice architecture decisions can help keep people from making bad long-term choices.

Here, though, again, there are difficult problems. Purportedly “protective” structures can become magnets for bad actors who will want to influence, infiltrate and reshape them to malign ends. At this very moment, the Trump administration is turning the machinery of the regulatory state to the Republican Party’s ends — for example, by frustrating efforts to guide people toward good health care plans. It is easier for bad actors to undermine or subvert nudges (which are typically semi-formal policies) than to undo binding coercive rules (which need to undergo a complex review process and possible court challenges before they can be changed).

In short, nudge theorists have failed to consider the political consequences of their work. This is understandable, given that their ideas emerged from intramural fights within economics. The argument that Thaler and Sunstein wanted to start — and, in a sense, are still conducting — are with libertarian-leaning economists who do not understand why rational self-interested beings would need others to tell them what they ought to do.

But the truly hard questions don’t come from market fundamentalists. The greatest challenges to nudge theory comes from people who want to know what nudges mean for democracy, for accountability, and for relations between citizens and their governments. That’s a conversation that Thaler and Sunstein have at best started to engage with.

Henry Farrell is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He is an editor of the Monkey Cage.

How the Chris Hayes book Twilight of the Elites explains Trump’s appeal

2016-10-12T17:32:30-04:00

Gates at Brown University. For whom will they open? | Yiming Chen/Getty

Chris Hayes’s book Twilight of the Elites came out to respectful reviews and respectable sales in 2012, yet the book’s real moment is right now. Better than any other book, it explains why Donald Trump appeals to many voters, and why the political establishment has such a hard time understanding his success.

In the book, Hayes, the host of an MSNBC show and an editor at large for the Nation, argues that many middle-class people on both the left and right have come to believe that the system is unfair. Elites – including politicians, business figures, and prominent journalists — work to protect the privileges they and their kids enjoy. The gap between the mythology of America —that people can rise to the top through hard work and talent — and the reality of an unequal country is generating a political crisis, in which people lose their trust in institutions and become radicalized. (Full disclosure: Hayes is a friend, and I read and commented on an early version of the book.)

The crucial insight in Twilight of the Elites is that economic inequality is not just a statistical relationship, in which some people earn more and others earn less. It is also an engine that transforms institutions — the rules, regulations, and practices that every country needs. Elites — the people at the top — have financial, political and social resources. They are able to use these resources to reshape institutions to protect themselves and their children. In contrast, many middle-class people increasingly think that America’s institutions are a rigged game where the powerful and connected have a dealer’s edge.

Hayes talks about class, but in the ways that the German sociologist Max Weber and his student Robert Michels do, rather than Karl Marx. Class and social status are entangled, so that people think about the world not only in terms of what they have but in terms of their relative status with respect to others.

Hayes spends a lot of time talking about how inequality is like a mathematical fractal — it keeps reproducing the same patterns the further you get in. People who are in the top 1 percent view themselves as middle class because they compare themselves to the 0.1 percent, and the 0.1 percent are insecure vis-à-vis the top 0.01 percent.

Meritocracy is how elites justify their existence

The Twilight of the Elites argues that the mythology of meritocracy holds all of this together. In a meritocratic system, people who have greater merit rise to the top. The idea of meritocracy tells elites that they deserve their superior position because they work harder and have greater natural ability than ordinary people. Meritocracy has opened up elite institutions like Harvard and Princeton, which used to discriminate systematically against Jews and African Americans and not admit women. Now they are nominally open to everyone.

The problem is that openness in theory does not translate into openness in practice. Hunter College High School, in New York, which Hayes attended, admits kids on the basis of a ferociously competitive entrance exam. Nonetheless, over time this system has grown to favor some kids over others. If your parents are well off, they can pay for you to spend weekends with specialized tutors prepping for the test. If they are not, you have to take your chances. The consequence is a sharp drop over time in the number of Latino and African-American children attending Hunter. Meritocracy is blind to the fact that some people face structural disadvantages and others do not.

Hayes acknowledges that meritocracy has advantages over the system of special privilege for white Protestants that it replaced. However, he says that it is unsustainable in the long run. Riffing on Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy,” which holds that all democratic institutions will end up being run by an internal elite, Hayes proposes what he calls the iron law of meritocracy. He argues that the equality of opportunity that meritocracy promises will inevitably be overwhelmed by inequality of outcome. The people who do well from meritocracy will invest the proceeds from their success in working the system to make sure that they and their kids have the resources they need to continue to do well.

In the US today, the wheels of meritocracy are falling off

As America becomes more unequal, it’s ever harder to claim that it is a meritocratic country. It still looks like one to the people at the top, who continue to prosper. However, their view of the world is increasingly at odds with the view of people below, who like the idea of equal opportunity but don’t believe it is working.

The people at the top and the middle class are increasingly distant from each other. Elites don’t understand the challenges and frustrations of middle-class people. (As Hayes puts it, “Power narrows the vision of the powerful.”)

But many middle-class people don’t believe elites when they say that the system is working well. They see institutions that are failing and corrupt. They interpret the government’s response to the economic crisis as evidence that well-connected people will get bailed out while other people are screwed over. They do not trust the traditional press anymore, and are able to find alternative sources of information that may often be wrong but at least reflect their understanding that there is something basically wrong with American politics.

While poorer people have always been at a disadvantage in the American system, middle-class people have historically had more faith in it, yet they are increasingly finding their expectations frustrated.

Trump’s anti-establishment campaign speaks to the frustrated and stalled

Hayes’s book suggests there are a lot of people who think that the system is broken, and that they can be politically mobilized. Donald Trump’s appeal is based on the claim that he is an anti-system politician. Unlike other politicians, he is prepared to tell it like it is, and to stick it to elites. Unsurprisingly, many elites, including elites within the Republican Party, are aghast. Senior Republicans are quietly rooting for Trump to lose. Core members of the intellectual wing of the party have publicly expressed their shock and abhorrence.

But does this actually explain support for Donald Trump? After all, it’s hardly rare for politicians to claim that they are running against Washington. There is some reason to believe that it does have explanatory power.

Hayes argues that the angriest voters are not going to be the people at the bottom, but the people in the middle, who used to expect that they and their kids could do well through enterprise and don’t believe that anymore. Experts have disagreed over whether Trump supporters are richer or poorer than the average. Yet emerging evidence is beginning to portray a more nuanced portrait of Trump’s supporters than those earlier takes.

Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup, has used survey data on nearly 113,000 Americans to ask what really drives Trump support. He finds that support for the mogul turned politician is concentrated in the middle-income categories; in contrast, those who are relatively rich and those who are relatively poor are less likely to support him. Furthermore, economic insecurity is a huge factor – those who worry about their economic future are much more likely to vote for Trump. Rothwell builds on work by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren at Harvard to find that people in living in areas with weak mobility for kids from middle-class families are more likely to vote for Trump.

These findings are only the start of what is likely to be a long debate. Nonetheless, they support Hayes’s argument. People seem to be more likely to support an anti-system candidate like Donald Trump when they have a middling income, when they feel economically insecure, and when they live in places where middle-class kids have worse prospects for getting ahead.

Trump promises to reform a "rigged" system

The issues that Hayes talks about are at the heart of Trump’s political identity. Trump claims he is fighting against “special interests” that have “rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit,” describing Hillary Clinton as a “puppet” supported by “[b]ig business, elite media and major donors … because they know she will keep our rigged system in place.” In the debate on Sunday, Trump kept referring to Clinton’s “friends” among America’s financial elite, insinuating that she had gotten rich through doing favors for them.

Of course, Trump isn’t the first politician to rail against elites. However, he is the first presidential candidate for a major party in recent memory to gain populist credibility because elites are lining up to rail against him. This likely explains why Trump’s core support — including some people who are not core Republicans — has been so impervious to attacks from traditional sources of authority. His supporters plausibly see these attacks as evidence that the corrupt establishment is targeting Trump because it fears he will really change things.

Trump’s life story — or, more precisely, his imagined life story — corroborates this mythology. He presents himself as a self-made man who has succeeded on his own merits, and skirts around the financial support he received from his father. If you want to return to an America where people succeed on their own merits rather than being done down by a rigged system, and don’t gag easily when asked to swallow dishonest brags, Trump might seem like the kind of candidate you want to support.

Hayes’s book misses one big thing

Hayes’s book describes how meritocracy is breaking down, and how American elites and middle-class people are increasingly disconnected from each other. He captures many of the fears and anxieties that are at the heart of the Trump phenomenon. However, there is one crucial factor that his argument doesn’t get — the role of racism and xenophobia. Hayes hoped in 2012 that discontented people on the left and right might find common cause in pushing for institutional reform. Although he wrote about how meritocracy is blind to inequalities of race and income, he had little to say about the relationship between anti-system anger and racism.

It is impossible to talk about Trump’s anti-system populism without talking about racism and xenophobia. Trump blames elites for what is happening to America, but he also blames people who are not white Americans. He uses vicious slurs against Hispanics and Muslims, and claims that African Americans live in self-made urban hellscapes.

But to point out the presence of tribalism in Trump’s appeal doesn’t mean that the decay of meritocracy is unimportant. People who say that Trump’s popularity is explained by racism and people who say it is the product of economic frustration, can easily end up talking past each other. Populist resentment mean that many people are looking for someone to blame, and systematic racism means that the targets of blame are very likely to be African American, Hispanic, and Muslim.

If we lived in a counterfactual world where US levels of racism were the same as they are here, but where people believed that US institutions were basically fair, it would be much harder for an anti-system politician like Trump to succeed, since he would have fewer angry people to whip up into a frenzy.

However, this does mean that Hayes’s hopes for a progressive coalition of angry populists from both left and right were almost certainly misplaced. Any crisis of belief in American institutions and elites that is big enough to have political consequences will almost certainly offer ample opportunity for people like Trump to mobilize white conservative voters beneath a banner of racism and xenophobia.

One useful point of comparison is the United Kingdom, where the new Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, is trying to turn the Brexit vote into a political opportunity for her party. In her annual speech to the Conservative Party convention last week, she offered a vision of Britain that would “build on the values of fairness and opportunity,” creating a Britain “where everyone plays by the same rules and where every single person — regardless of their background, or that of their parents — is given the chance to be all they want to be.”

May says that the biggest problem of unfairness is between the rich and powerful, on the one hand, and their fellow citizens, on the other, and that it is time to reject the ideology of the libertarian right and use government to correct unfairness and injustice. Her government also wants to close its borders to immigrants and shame businesses that employ foreign workers.

In short, the UK Conservatives are turning to a less bombastic version of Trumpism, in the belief that it will allow them to steal traditional Labour voters and build a winning coalition. Their formula includes both an acknowledgment that market competition doesn’t let people rise on their merits and an appeal to xenophobia. As the independent public intellectual Rich Yeselson has said to me in email, this is One Nation Conservatism — but for white natives only.

It is certainly possible that US politicians could mount a similar appeal, although US demographic facts would make it a much tougher climb. In four years, a more disciplined and intelligent candidate than Trump might be able to fill the market gap that Trump has identified, and expand his electoral coalition to include many moderates. It would be deeply unfortunate if Hayes were correct that the decline of the elites offered a major opportunity to remake politics — but if such an opportunity is only available to a torch carrier for the xenophobic right.

Henry Farrell is an associate professor of politics and international affairs at George Washington University. He blogs at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and at Crooked Timber.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.