The less-educated masses have a different conception of the future, a vision that is more closed, collective, protective and segmented. When people feel their world is vanishing, they are easy prey for fact-free magical thinking and demagogues who blame immigrants. I’m thinking we have a lot to learn from Theodore Roosevelt, but that’s a topic for another day. Their pain is indivisible: economic stress, community breakdown, ethnic bigotry and a loss of social status and self-worth. From 1945 to 1995, conservative and liberal elites shared variations of the same vision of the future.

Source: New York Times June 28, 2016 07:18 UTC