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In many circles right now, there is a sense of doom and gloom. A dear friend of mine sent me the recent piece, “The Logic of Destruction,” by Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a controversial historian who burst onto the scene in 2010 with Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Recently, he has become a devoted supporter of Ukraine and a ferocious opponent of Donald Trump. Snyder’s recent piece is polemical, not analytical. It reminds me of the immortal words of Karl Marx inscribed on his gravestone in North London: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Snyder’s writing has energy, but it jumps around far too much and fails to resonate with me. Like Marx, he is being simplistic. The immediate actions Snyder proposes to counter chronic problems are unlikely to work. Trump is a product of decades of hurt Americans have voted a second time for Trump. One argument is that voters are either stupid or mistaken and hence have voted for tyranny. Another argument is that voters are wise and that is why they have voted for Übermensch — Messrs. Trump and Elon Musk will, by sheer force of will, reform a failing system. My argument differs from both of the above. I take the view that the system was simply not working for most people anymore. Meanwhile, entrenched elites wantonly engaged in self-enrichment. People were angry and, therefore, voted for Pied Pipers in desperation. Numerous studies reveal that real wages for the middle class remained nearly stagnant for decades. For the working class, real wages declined. Note that the wages of the top 1% grew by 138% from 1979 to 2013, while wages for the bottom 90% grew by a mere 15%. ![]() Since Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan inaugurated the era of gloriously low interest rates in the 1990s and especially in the 2000s, those with assets got richer. After the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 hit, things got a lot worse for the middle and working classes. Many credit the bailout of the banks and lowering of interest rates for avoiding a repeat of the Great Depression. They conveniently ignore that this policy was socialism on the downside and capitalism on the upside. When Covid-19 came around, governments lowered interest rates again and increased spending to keep the economic engines during lockdowns. This pushed wealth, income and educational inequality even further. Even as inequality increased, social mobility decreased. In 2020, human geographers Dylan Connor and Michael Storper published a paper that found intergenerational social mobility in the US had declined over the last century. In 2020, a Brookings paper found that increasing wealth inequality and poor prospects for upward mobility are creating sharp class divides, at odds with the American dream. Since I moved to the US in 2008, I have been noting this trend with unease. On July 4, 2013, I wrote: “Inherited wealth has formed the basis of the class system in the Old World. With increasing wealth inequality, are we seeing the beginning of the old worldification of America?” This piece upset the mother of an American friend from my Oxford days. She believed that my arguments were unbecoming of the festive occasion of Independence Day. By then, I had run out of money in my entrepreneurial adventure and was living with Mexican immigrants in my car mechanic’s garage. For all my Oxford and Wharton education, I was now an Untermensch, a member of America’s economic, if not social, underclass. The years of duress gave me deep insights into the depth of suffering and level of hurt of the left-behinds. By the time I left the San Francisco Bay Area, I could see that years of hurt would lead to a political tsunami. Rents, healthcare, childcare and education already cost an arm and a leg. Policemen, firefighters and teachers working in San Francisco were already living in Truckee, which is over 300 kilometers (nearly 200 miles) away. The reason some people were commuting so far was that homes in posh places in the Bay Area were unaffordable due to the boom in tech salaries. Gentrification and planning restrictions in the Democrat citadel of San Francisco had pushed the middle and lower middle classes out. By 2015, Democrats were increasingly seen as hypocrites who did not care for the working class. Bill and Hillary Clinton were running a dodgy foundation, which was not half as bad as the rumors suggested, but which was certainly far from above board. By now, the Clintons had forgotten their small-town roots and were living it up as America’s power couple, even though Hillary had lost the 2008 Democratic primaries to Barack Obama. Obama promised hope and change, but went along with George W. Bush’s bank bailouts, which led to both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. For all his good intentions, the first black president of the US was unable to fight the tide, and Trump appeared on the scene to take advantage. When I was going to working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhoods all across the US, I witnessed a groundswell of support for this celebrity real estate tycoon and could see the writing on the wall. On July 24, 2016, I wrote: “This is an age of fear, anger, hate and terror. This is the age of demagogues and it soon could be the age of Donald Trump.” In 2025, that continues to be the case. I take the view that even if Trump leaves, someone else will step in to take his place. The US and indeed the world are crying out for a new vision and strong leaders. As long as people continue to struggle and feel hurt, there will be space for the likes of Trump. What can we do in this crazy age? Many of my friends, especially if they are on the younger side, confess that they feel dispirited. Many think the problems we face are both diffuse and insurmountable. Some do not even want to have children because they think climate change will lead to the end of life on Earth. Then there are others who want to follow Snyder’s banner and take to battle. For Snyder, it is a Manichean struggle against autocracy. In 2022, this highly energetic scholar teamed up with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to raise “$1.25 million for anti-drone defense.” Now, he has issued a rallying cry against Trump. I found Snyder’s 2022 fundraising pointless. Bit by bit, Ukraine has been losing the war, and Americans feeling poorer by the day are unlikely to take kindly to spending blood and treasure in faraway lands. We live in an age where people are not only hurting but they also feel lost. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, the smartphone seemed a splendid invention. When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, many of us uploaded photos on his platform and reconnected with old friends. In 2025, that early promise has soured. Tech billionaires are no longer seen as idealists. Instead, they are clearly genuflecting in the court of Trump. Too many of us are addicted to our phones. We do not look each other in the eye and speak about things that matter to all of us. Democracy is fundamentally about citizens figuring out how to run their affairs, not kings or priests telling them what to do. This requires a set of common values and a sense of community. At a time when it costs a hefty sum to fight an election in many countries in the world, people are losing faith in democracy. Roger de Rabutin (1618–1693), better known as Bussy-Rabutin, is supposed to have said, “God is usually on the side of the big squadrons against the small.” Voltaire (1694–1778) supposedly modified this to, “God is on the side not of the heavy battalions but of the best shots.” Today, the public is either on the side of the candidate with the most money or the one with the best “spin” — the modern word for political propaganda. Just as autocracies can implode because of the unaccountability of the big boss, democracies can disintegrate because of interest groups, identity politics and short-term objectives. Why should any US Representatives push for planting redwood trees when their term is a mere two years and reelection requires 60–70% of their time for fundraising alone? Much of the rest of their time these days goes to social media, leaving precious little time for legislation. In fact, some social media managers are sometimes paid more than legislative assistants and even legislative directors, which shows lawmaking is no longer top priority for lawmakers. The issues that matter to us deserve serious attention, deep examination and rigorous thinking. In the aftermath of World War II, the US created the postwar international rules-based system with the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund et al. This system has done much good but is also now far too removed from the lives of most people. The systems created after World War II do not work anymore. They need reform. That reform will not come through clarion calls to action. These systems will only change if we think hard, deep and long about how we live together in society. How do we distribute rights and responsibilities among ourselves, and what responsibilities do we owe future generations? For those on the right, this might be tackling debt and, for those on the left, this might be conserving the environment. An African friend who died recently remarked to me that he had seen the World Bank turn into a maze of red tape run by entitled elites during his lifetime. World Bank employees, particularly from the third world, were often diabolically smug, sanctimonious and self-serving. In his words, “When they come on missions, they are worse than the old missionaries. At least the Jesus-worshippers stayed with the tribes instead of posh expat neighborhoods.” As we talked, looking out at the sun setting over Africa’s red earth, my late friend would chuckle at Jim Yong Kim, the Korean American doctor Obama appointed as president of the World Bank in 2012. Notoriously, Kim hired McKinsey to sort out his fiefdom, paying it millions for spouting pablum and damaging the organization. In December 2024, this glamorous consulting firm agreed to pay $650 million “to settle criminal charges related to its role in the US opioid crisis.” As if hiring McKinsey for ungodly sums of money was not enough, Kim made a show of cost-cutting at the World Bank while frequently hiring a fancy private jet. To make matters worse, Kim would often not even use this plane despite the World Bank paying a fortune for it. Kim personified the hypocrisy of elites claiming to save the world. They have turned into champagne socialists (or “limousine liberals,” as my chief of staff Anton Schauble would say), and people have turned against them. These elites make easy targets for populists — who are often hypocrites themselves. Yet, in this hyperpolarized era, each side is willing to overlook flaws in their own bastards even as they crucify villains on the other side. ![]() Abandoned lush Portuguese mansion in Angola, Shutterstock
If we want to live in functioning democracies, we need institutions that function well and largely do the right thing or at least try to do so. A scorched-earth policy when it comes to institutions is misguided and unwise. We must either reform existing institutions or build new ones after careful deliberations. This colossal effort will require us to talk to each other, share our thoughts and forge communities. This year, that is precisely what all of us at Fair Observer are trying to do. One of the things that we intend to kick off is sharing interesting things we are reading, listening to or watching. Editor-at-Large Alex Gloy has been suggesting we need good nutrition for our minds and, if I may add, for our souls as well. We will only come up with answers to seemingly intractable problems if we ask the right questions. So, after another sleepless night, at 4:00 AM in the dusty national capital of India, I request you send us questions, thoughts, ideas, articles, podcasts, videos or content in any form that could enrich all of us. I cannot conjure all this good content alone. Alex and I could not do this as a duo, and even our entire team could not pull this off together. However, with suggestions from around the world, we will have a balanced diet for our brains. Time for me to sign off and bid you adieu. We very much look forward to hearing from you. My warmest regards, Atul Singh Founder, CEO & Editor-in-Chief [Anton Schauble and Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.] |
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