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1-Page Summary of Ship of Fools
Overview
In this article, the author accuses America’s elites of being racist and undermining democracy by supporting immigration. They’re also hypocritical about sexism and demonizing white people. The author blames liberal and conservative members of the elite for these problems because they’ve come to a consensus on economic issues that leaves many Americans feeling like their country is not democratic.
What did Trump do to win the election? Why did he win? How was it that so many Americans voted for him, despite the fact that most people thought he had no chance of winning? In an attempt to answer these questions, Tucker Carlson will discuss why Trump won and what motivated those who voted for him.
Essentially, the idea is that Trump was elected because Americans were fed up with the elites in America’s political, economic and cultural institutions.
Carlson sees many reasons why Americans are fed up with their country’s elites. Here are the top three:
1) Elites blame poor and middle-class Americans for society’s problems while they themselves don’t contribute to solving them.
2) Elites support immigration despite ulterior motives, like cheap labor or votes for Democrats in elections.
3) The Democratic Party has become a party of the rich rather than one that supports the needs of all citizens equally.
Big Idea #1: The upper class doesn’t understand the middle and lower classes.
To understand Trump’s success, you have to look at the historical context of his election. That context can be boiled down to a single phrase: the decline of the middle class in America.
If you look at the statistics, it’s clear that there has been a significant decline in the size and economic power of the middle class. From 1970 to 2015, the percentage of Americans who were in the middle class declined from over 60 percent to under 50 percent of all adults. At the same time, their share of total income earned dropped from 62% to 34%, while wealthy Americans’ share rose substantially from 29% to almost 50%.
This means that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, while more people are stuck in poverty. The rich have also separated themselves from everyone else with their wealth and power.
For example, wealthy Americans tend to live in certain neighborhoods on the coast. These areas include New York City, Washington DC and San Francisco. People who live there are separated from most of their fellow citizens because they don’t have to deal with them on a regular basis. They send their children to elite schools such as Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC or Harvard University where they meet other rich kids. Then, these people enter careers that are also filled with other affluent people like finance and law.
On the other hand, those who are less affluent tend to have a different lifestyle. They live in poorer neighborhoods and don’t attend expensive sports games.
As a result, American elites are out of touch with the rest of America. This leads to problems, as we’ll soon find out.
Big Idea #2: The rich and powerful are not concerned about the poor.
The more we are separated from other human beings, the less empathetic we become. Empathy is built on understanding people and their problems—which is difficult to do if we don’t even see them in our day-to-day life.
When we are separated from other people, they tend to become strangers to us. We don’t know them well and therefore feel indifferent or even contemptuous toward their problems. This has been the case with elites in American society who have not experienced the same problems as poor and middle-class Americans because of a lack of proximity.
