Like a Greek chorus, my Republican friends warn that “the America we’ve known and loved will be gone” if Kamala Harris is elected president. They are half right. Neither Harris nor Donald Trump is seeking to restore the traditional values and ideals of freedom and opportunity that have made our country exceptional. Both candidates reject our foundational ideal of a self-reliant people in favor of a politics of entitlement and grievance.
Just as hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, the candidates pay lip service to our traditional value of opportunity – the freedom to see how far your talents might take you. That rhetoric still resonates in the American psyche. Harris speaks of an opportunity economy; Trump vows to bring more jobs back to our shores. But those words are window-dressing in their larger message that assumes success hinges less on talent and ambition than the corrupt ability to game a rigged system. Transforming conspiracy theory into conventional wisdom, both argue that if things aren’t working out, the fault is in malign dark forces, not ourselves.
Neither candidate seeks to unleash the animal spirits that made America the richest and freest country in the history of the world. Instead of inspiring us to fight for ourselves, they promise to be our champions, using tariffs, tax credits, and other powers of the state to solve our problems for us. In their view, America has become a nation of creditors owed vast debts by the government. Everyone, except maybe Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, are due reparations.
They are telling us this because it is what we want to hear. Growing numbers of Americans don’t want to take responsibility for their circumstances. They seek to blame someone else and demand that others improve their lot.
This mindset has not sprung from the ether; politicians have long promised voters a free lunch. It is not unmoored from reality; there are powerful forces that can limit individual effort. But in recent years, these elements have risen to the forefront of American politics – especially after the Great Recession of 2007-09 delivered a crippling blow to our historic belief in a brighter future.
Since then, Democrats have spoken to these fears through an identity politics that casts large swaths of the population – especially minorities and women who together constitute the vast majority of people – as victims.
Rejecting Ronald Reagan’s can-do vision of our country as a shining city on a hill, Trump’s grievance-based populism reflects the triumph of this view across the land. Yes, Americans are angry at each other, but our real beef seems to be with the entire world that refuses to give us milk and honey.
Sadly, this view seems much more prevalent among native-born citizens with deep roots in our country rather than the immigrants who flock here because hard work still pays off. Tellingly, the ability of newcomers to make a better life here, to gain admission to top schools, to build and run thriving businesses, or just find work that pays a decent wage, is largely dismissed in our culture of complaint.
The dangers of this culture are manifold. History shows that government cannot fix our problems. For all their limits, free markets and a by-the-bootstraps mentality have been the great engines of our prosperity, not state and federal programs that can only redistribute the profits of labor. The problems roiling Europe show what happens when countries run out of other people’s money. That’s the canary in the coal mine.
Ironically, victimhood and entitlement make it almost impossible to fix our problems. Massive spending, first by Trump (in fairness, as a response to COVID) and then by Biden (to buy votes and create a “legacy”), fueled the inflation that voters rail against. Yet, neither Harris nor Trump are offering serious plans to reduce our deficit, much less our soaring debt. Calls for sacrifice are off the table.
Americans are not facing a choice this November between two competing visions, but about the pace of our decline. Harris would turbo-charge the Biden administration’s push to make government the be-all and end-all of our lives, perhaps even completing our transformation from a dynamic engine of growth into a tired welfare state like those in Western Europe. This will not end the good life in America; there are plenty of happy Belgians. Well-educated professionals – the What me, Worry? liberals – are thriving, insulated in their gated communities and high-rise buildings from the consequences of the leftwing policies they support that are hollowing out the working class. But year by year, Harris will continue to deliver death blows to American exceptionalism.
Trump would slow these changes, reducing regulatory strangleholds here and there without fundamentally changing the course we are on. He won’t and can’t do that because, as necessary as a correction may be, the voters don’t want it.
This sad state of affairs recalls the journalist H.L. Mencken’s observation more than a century ago that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
J. Peder Zane is a RealClearInvestigations editor and columnist. He previously worked as a book review editor and book columnist for the News & Observer (Raleigh), where his writing won several national honors. Zane has also worked at the New York Times and taught writing at Duke University and Saint Augustine’s University.
