We Can Try To Explain America’s Dysfunction Without Sliding Into Conspiracy Theories

A response to an article in ‘UnHerd’ that takes the wrong approach

I generally like UnHerd. I write for UnHerd. I hope to write more for UnHerd in the future. I like many of the other people who write for UnHerd.

But last week, UnHerd ran a really conspiratorial article that I didn’t like, and I want to explain why.

It’s by David Samuels, a seasoned journalist who has written cover stories for some of the most important outlets in the world. The article’s task ostensibly is to explain America’s “crack-up,” by which Samuels means the strange situation we find ourselves in: the country is, by many metrics, as strong as ever, “a global hyper-power that continues to lead the world in innovation, with flagship companies such as Google, Apple and Meta continuing their reign as the most valuable human creations on Earth.” And yet there are many signs of unrest and other forms of strife — a lot of people appear to be freaking out.

Early on, Samuels writes:

Imagine a time-traveller from any decade in recent memory arriving in America in January 2024: they would encounter a country that would appear to have gone nuts. Millions of migrants stream illegally into the US at the highest rates in history, while the government in Washington prohibits border states from enforcing Federal law. Meanwhile, major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are routinely paralysed by angry demonstrators whose causes change from month to month (this month’s cause is “intifada”). Questions like “should doctors perform surgery on children to change their gender?” and “is it ok for the President of Harvard to routinely plagiarise the work of other authors?” are now seriously debated by reputable media outlets.

Samuels’ explanation for all this chaos? A shadowy cabal that controls every aspect of our daily lives.

It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but if I am it’s not by much: 

Americans now find themselves living in an oligarchy administered day-to-day by institutional bureaucracies that move in lock-step with each other, enforcing a set of ideologically-driven top-down imperatives that seemingly change from week-to-week and cover nearly every subject under the sun.

The new American system has little in common with the process of balancing regional interests through the two-party system, as described by 20th-century American political scientists. Today, power flows from the top down, from a set of fantastically wealthy billionaires, to a national administrative class, and to a new layer of non-profit administrators, foundation executives and NGOs, which in turn employ a floating class of hundreds of thousands of grant-makers, organisers, case-workers and protesters who serve as the shock troops of the Democratic Party. In this role, they regiment the party’s identity-driven interest groups while receiving large amounts of funding from the billionaire class and the Federal government — thereby enabling the Party to serve as the broker between the oligarchs and the “disenfranchised” poor.

There’s a useful heuristic to help determine how credible a given theory involving humans is: is it actually about humans? Like, does it invoke human nature? The political orientation of the theory in question doesn’t matter. For example, when fringe lefties claim that indigenous societies were peaceful utopias that lived in prolonged harmony with both other human groups and the natural world, does that. . . make any sense, given human nature? It doesn’t. I’m not saying this heuristic is dispositive, but it’s a good starting point.