What Intellectual Elites Don’t Understand About the Trump Movement

America is full of decent people. You find them everywhere, especially in the private sector, small business and in the rural areas as well as smaller cities. But government, academia and media — especially the higher up you go — are another story. It’s the opposite. This is the unrelenting tension of our culture, the thing for which we don’t really have a name, but is causing the metaphorical pot to boil over. We have bad, even psychotic, people in charge of the intellect — schools, universities, government pseudo-research (because it’s all politicized now), and law (today’s lawmakers make Caligula look like Jefferson). It’s tempting to hope that the best of America can be saved by itself. The Trump movement, nearly a decade old now, tapped into that beautiful hope.

But just as every individual needs a head, a brain and a coherent code of life-serving ethics, so too does a culture. As Ayn Rand used to say, men of the mind are critical. Her famous book Atlas Shrugged projected what happens to the world when the mind (not the workers) go on strike; everything falters and ultimately collapses. Philosophy, the humanities, law, academia, media, (real) science and (severely limited) government matter just as much as truck drivers, the trades, small business and ordinary family, community and individual lives. The two — the mind and the workers, if you will — cannot sustain a war with each other indefinitely without some kind of a crisis, crack up or explosion. It’s impossible to predict exactly the form of the crisis or crack up. But it WILL happen and has already started.

It’s never hopeless. But to defeat evil, you must see everything accurately, and with 20/20 clarity. Evil is weak, stupid and self-destructive–but ONLY when the good side asserts itself with unwavering moral, intellectual clarity.