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    Dear Elites (of Both Parties), the People Will Take It From Here, Thanks

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    I first learned about the opioid crisis three presidential elections ago, in the fall of 2011. I was the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s campaign and questions began trickling in from the New Hampshire team: What’s our plan?By then, opioids had been fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in American history for years. I am ashamed to say I did not know what they were. Opioids, as in opium? I looked it up online. Pills of some kind. Tell them it’s a priority, and President Obama isn’t working. That year saw nearly 23,000 deaths from opioid overdoses nationwide.I was no outlier. America’s political class was in the final stages of self-righteous detachment from the economic and social conditions of the nation it ruled. The infamous bitter clinger and “47 percent” comments by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney captured the atmosphere well: delivered at private fund-raisers in San Francisco in 2008 and Boca Raton in 2012, evincing disdain for the voters who lived in between. The opioid crisis gained more attention in the years after the election, particularly in 2015, with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on deaths of despair.Of course, 2015’s most notable political development was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch and subsequent steamrolling of 16 Republican primary opponents committed to party orthodoxy. In the 2016 general election he narrowly defeated the former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who didn’t need her own views of Americans leaked: In public remarks, she gleefully classified half of the voters who supported Mr. Trump as “deplorables,” as her audience laughed and applauded. That year saw more than 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses.In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Biden Needs to Tell Us

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      Sometimes social revolutions emerge from ordinary ideas. In the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers like William Petty, David Hume and Adam Smith popularized a concept called “division of labor.” It’s a simple notion. If I specialize in doing what I’m good at, and you specialize in what you’re good at, and we exchange what we’ve each made, then we’ll both be more productive and better off than if we tried to be self-sufficient.It seems banal, but division of labor was part of a constellation of ideas that liberated our civilization from the savage grip of zero-sum thinking. For millenniums before that, economic growth had been basically stagnant. Many people simply assumed that the supply of wealth was finite. If I’m going to get more of it, it will be the result of conquering you and stealing what you have. In a zero-sum mind-set, the basic logic of life is dog-eat-dog, conquer or be conquered. Property is theft. Predators win.Division of labor, on the other hand, and the other principles that underlie modern capitalism, encouraged a positive-sum mind-set. According to this way of thinking, the good of others multiplies my own good. Steve Jobs got to enjoy a fortune, but I get to enjoy the Mac I’m now typing on and tens of thousands get to enjoy the jobs he helped create.In this kind of society, life is not about conquest and domination but regulated competition and voluntary exchange. Not about antagonism but interdependence. In this kind of marketplace, Walter Lippmann wrote in the late 1930s, “the vista was opened at the end of which men could see the possibility of the Good Society on this earth.”In other words, a dry economic concept like “division of labor” helped inaugurate a moral revolution. A positive-sum society is a more pluralistic and tolerant society because all its members are encouraged to pioneer their own specialty. People are rewarded for their skills and imaginations, not their ability to intimidate. Competition for comparative advantage unleashes untold human creativity, drive, innovation and ambition.The errors and scandals of the early 21st century (Iraq, the financial crisis, etc.) produced a crisis of legitimacy for this brand of liberal democratic capitalism. People lost confidence that the elites knew what they are doing or were serving anybody but themselves. This disillusion led to a concomitant rise in global populism. In 2002 only 120 million people lived in countries governed by what The Guardian called “at least somewhat” populist leaders. By 2019, more than two billion did.Populism thrives on a zero-sum mind-set. The central story that populists tell is: They are out to destroy us. Populist leaders invariably inflame ethnic bigotry to mobilize their own supporters.America’s populist in chief, Donald Trump, exemplifies this mentality. Trump grew up in a zero-sum world. In the world of New York real estate, there’s a fixed amount of land. Trump didn’t have to invent a new concept, just screw the other side. In 2017, the Vox writer Dylan Matthews and his colleagues read all of Trump’s books on business and politics, and concluded that zero-sum thinking is the core of his mind-set. “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win,” Trump and his co-author wrote in “Think Big and Kick Ass.” “That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win — not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”MAGA is the zero-sum concept in political form. What’s good for immigrants is bad for the American-born. What’s good for Black people is bad for whites. Trade deals are exploitation. Our NATO allies are out to screw us. Every day for Trump is an Us/Them dominance game.Zero-sum thinking is surging on the left as well. A generation of college students has been raised on the dogma that life is a contest between groups — oppressor versus oppressed, colonizers versus colonized.This thinking is rising across the globe. Despots are trying to grab territory to increase wealth and glory. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, state- and nonstate violence was higher in 2022 than it was a decade before.Vladimir Putin doesn’t seek to recapture Russian greatness by leading a nation that cures cancer or produces technological innovations; he seeks glory by conquering Ukraine: You lose, I win. Xi Jinping no longer talks of the U.S. and China as friendly competitors; he describes a world in which we are locked in a zero-sum war for supremacy: He wins, we lose. As my colleague Thomas Friedman has noted recently, Hamas could have turned Gaza into Dubai — a land of capitalism, growth and opportunity. But Hamas rejects the whole ethos of modern capitalism for a more primitive ethos: Jews die, we dominate.We all have complaints about the age of go-go globalization, but what’s followed is far worse — global economic competition being replaced by political and military confrontation. And the thugs are winning. Russia now has the momentum in Ukraine. China is growing increasingly aggressive in the waters around Taiwan. Trump is leading in many polls.Many of us greet 2024 with a sense of foreboding. We need Joe Biden to be as big as this year demands. We need a leader who shows that he grasps the scope of global crisis and has a vision for how to return to a positive-sum world of growth, innovation and peace.Personally, I’d ask Team Biden to take a look at Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. A lot of people thought Reagan was too old that year. But he told a bracing story about the global threat and he had a vigorous vision for America’s future. Team Biden is not going to go all Reaganite, but it could promote a liberal version of two of his themes — law and order and the spirit of enterprise.Law and order. We are in the middle of a multifront conflict that pits the forces of civilization against the forces of barbarism. In a civilized world, people create rules and norms to make competition fair, whether it’s economic, intellectual or political competition. Barbarians seek to tear down those rules so thuggery can prevail. Biden needs to position himself as the candidate for law and order — in Ukraine, against Hamas, at the ballot box, on America’s streets and, yes, on the southern border. He has to stand for the rule of law against growing chaos.The spirit of enterprise. One of the great achievements of Biden’s first term is that America is once again a nation that builds things. Manufacturing employment is up. More broadly, the American economy is surging, with fast growth, plummeting inflation, real wage increases. Far from being in decline, the U.S. economy is driving the world.Biden needs to paint a portrait of America’s future not with statistics but with a vision of a way of life. Liberal capitalism involves a set of concrete social actions: starting a business; building better schools; working together with people in companies; rising from poverty to buy a house; raising children not to be culture warriors but workers and innovators.This liberal dream is still ingrained in the nation’s bones. It’s been covered over by several years of bitterness, disillusion and pessimism. Maybe Biden can reach something deep in every American and revive the optimism that used to be our defining national trait.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Wrestling With Inequality, Some Conservatives Redraw Economic Blueprint

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      A growing number of Republican politicians and theorists are challenging party orthodoxy on pocketbook issues, corporate power and government’s role.More Republicans are coming to the view that economic inequality, or a lack of social mobility, is a problem in the United States — and that more can be done to enable families to attain or regain a middle-class life.Though discussions about inequality tend to be most visible among liberals, about four in 10 Republican or Republican-leaning adults think there is too much economic inequality in the country, according to a Pew Research survey. And among Republicans making less than about $40,000 a year who see too much economic inequality, 63 percent agree that the economic system “requires major changes” to address it.But a growing debate among conservative thinkers, politicians and the party base — online, in books and in public forums — reveals a group divided about how, in practice, to address pocketbook issues and the extent to which the government should be involved.“I don’t think just having a bigger government is a solution to a lot of these problems,” said Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum and a fellow with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank widely credited with giving Trumpism an intellectual framework. “But I do think that we could stand to think a little bit more on the right about how to make that 1950s middle-class life possible for people.”These yearnings and ideological stirrings have picked up as both whites without college degrees and the broader working class have grown as a share of Republican voters. (Hillary Clinton won college-educated white voters by 17 percentage points in her 2016 race against Donald J. Trump; four years earlier, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, carried that group.)A notable swipe against longtime Republican economic thinking has come from Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative who served as an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and the opinion editor of The New York Post. The metamorphosis of his worldview is laid out in a recently published book, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.”“I was writing editorials preaching the gospel of low taxes, free trade, et cetera,” Mr. Ahmari said in an interview. But Mr. Trump’s election inspired him to research how “American life in general for the lower rungs of the labor market is unbelievably precarious,” he said, and his politics changed.Mr. Ahmari recently endorsed a second term for Mr. Trump, but he has written that “while ferociously conservative on cultural issues,” he is also “increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the left — figures like Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.”In their own ways, Republican presidential primary candidates are jostling for ways to validate the populist energy and financial unease that Mr. Trump tapped into with a mix of pronouncements and policy promises. Some have set out economic goals that, according to many experts, are hard to square with their promises to reduce public debt and taxes and make deep cuts to government programs — especially now that many Republicans have backed away from calls to cut entitlement benefits.In a campaign speech in New Hampshire this summer called “A Declaration of Economic Independence,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican presidential contender, sharply critiqued China, diversity programming, “excessive regulation and excessive taxes” — a familiar set of modern conservative concerns. Yet he also echoed complaints and economic goals often heard from the left.“We want to be a country where you can raise a family on one sole income,” he told the crowd.“We cannot have policy that kowtows to the largest corporations and Wall Street at the expense of small businesses and average Americans,” he added. “There’s a difference between a free-market economy, which we want, and corporatism.”Critics on the left and the right argue that Mr. DeSantis has failed to clearly define how he would achieve those goals. The DeSantis campaign declined to comment for this article, but he has cited pathways to broader prosperity that include bringing industrial jobs back from abroad, increasing work force education and technical training, removing “red tape” faced by small businesses and aiming for annual U.S. economic growth of at least 3 percent.Though the fissures on the right over economic issues were evident when Mr. Trump upended the political scene eight years ago, the realignments are maturing and deepening, causing fresh tensions as factions disagree on the extent to which inequality, globalization and growing corporate power should be seen as problems.Some conservatives remain more concerned with the trajectory of federal spending and unlocking greater overall prosperity, rather than its distribution.Last year, Phil Gramm, a Republican who steered the passage of major tax cuts and deregulation during his time representing Texas in Congress from the 1970s to the early 2000s, published a book with his fellow economists Robert Ekelund and John Early called “The Myth of American Inequality.” The book — filled with alternative tabulations of impoverishment and living standards — argues that inequality is not high and rising as “the mainstream” suggests.It argues that when including welfare transfers, income inequality has been more stable than government figures suggest, and that the share of Americans living in poverty fell from 15 percent in 1967 to only 1.1 percent in 2017.“The point of the book is to get the facts straight,” Mr. Gramm said in an interview, adding that “we’re having these debates” with numbers that are “verifiably false.” (Some scholars have vehemently disagreed with the authors’ analysis.)Scott Lincicome, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that he largely agreed with Mr. Gramm’s thesis and that Americans were mostly wrestling with “keeping up with the Joneses,” not a loss of economic traction.“In general, folks at the bottom, up to the median, are doing better,” Mr. Lincicome concluded. “They’re not winning the game, but they’re doing better than the same group was 30-plus years ago.”He added: “You know, economists can debate all day long whether we’re better off, worse off overall or whatever. But when you factor in all the factors, I personally think things are fine.”To the extent that these debates have popular reach, the most public face of the revisionist camp may be Oren Cass, an adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 campaign, who has become immersed in a collective project among some right-leaning thinkers to “rebuild capitalism.”Mr. Cass and his allies want to use government spending and power to promote economic mobility with traditionalist goals in mind — like reducing the cost of living for the heads of married, two-parent households.Mr. Cass praised Mr. Ahmari’s book as one that “bravely goes where few conservatives dare tread, to the ideologically fraught realm in which the market appears inherently coercive and capitalism appears in tension with economic freedom.” (Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, is talking at a book event with Mr. Ahmari this month at the National Press Club in Washington.)Many economists and political scientists contend that the ideological realignment on the right is overblown, confused with a broader, hard-to-quantify loyalty to Mr. Trump rather than an explicit ideology giving life to Trumpism.“In a way,” Mr. Ahmari said, his critics — “the people who say, ‘Yeah, sure, you’re just a couple of guys: you, Oren, and a few others at magazines and think tanks’” — are “not wrong institutionally,” as there is little donor support for their efforts.“But they are wrong in terms of voters,” he added.Ms. Stepman of the Claremont Institute says she is personally “more traditional right” than thinkers like Mr. Ahmari but agrees they are tapping into something real.“There is a very underserved part of the political spectrum that is genuinely left of center on economic issues, right of center on cultural issues,” she said, pointing to issues including immigration, gun laws, education, gender norms and more.Gabe Guidarini is one of them.Growing up in Lake Bluff, Ill., in a working-class household where MSNBC often played in the background at night, Mr. Guidarini felt his view that “the status quo in this country is corrupt” was validated by the “anti-establishment” voices of both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump. But he came to the view that “you can’t get away with” social views that stray from progressive orthodoxy and still be accepted by Democrats. Now, at 19, he is the president of the University of Dayton College Republicans.In 2022, he worked as a campaign intern for J.D. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” who aligned himself with Trumpism after his 2016 book was credited for providing a “reference guide” for Mr. Trump’s electoral success. Mr. Vance, an Ohio Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate.In line with Tucker Carlson and some other conservatives, Mr. Guidarini thinks the party “should be taking policy samples from Viktor Orban in Hungary, and what he’s doing with family policies that aim to increase family creation, increase childbirth and make it easier to live a decent life as a working or middle-class taxpayer,” he said. “That’s what’s going to return the American dream for so many people, because to young people — and I feel like a lot of other people in America today — the American dream feels dead.”Mr. Guidarini, like many on the right, is wary of achieving those goals by increasing taxes on the wealthy. But according to Pew Research, more Republican or Republican-leaning adults support raising tax rates for those with incomes over $400,000 (46 percent) than say those rates should go unchanged (29 percent) or be lowered (24 percent). And more than half of low-income Republicans support higher taxes on the highest earners.For now, though, all economic debates are “tangential,” said Saagar Enjeti, a conservative millennial who is a co-host of two podcasts that often feature competing voices across the right.“‘What are we going to do when the Trump tax cuts expire?’ These are not the fights that are happening,” Mr. Enjeti said. “I wish they were, but they’re not. They’re just not.”With consensus on policy solutions elusive and “the culture wars” in the campaign forefront, Mr. Enjeti said, Republicans will mostly rally around what he believes will be Mr. Trump’s simple economic message: “Make America 2019 Again” — a time when unemployment, inflation and mortgage rates were low and, for all of life’s challenges, at least cultural conservatives were in the White House. More

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      Before He Takes On ‘Woke Capitalism,’ Ron DeSantis Should Read His Karl Marx

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      With their new majority, House Republicans are planning to take on “woke capitalism.”“Republicans and their longtime corporate allies are going through a messy breakup as companies’ equality and climate goals run headlong into a G.O.P. movement exploiting social and cultural issues to fire up conservatives,” Bloomberg reports. “Most directly in the G.O.P. cross hairs is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is under pressure from the likely House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to replace its leadership after the nation’s biggest business lobby backed some Democratic candidates.”I wrote last year about this notion of “woke capitalism” and the degree to which I think this “conflict” is little more than a performance meant to sell an illusion of serious disagreement between owners of capital and the Republican Party. As I wrote then, “the entire Republican Party is united in support of an anti-labor politics that puts ordinary workers at the mercy of capital.” Republicans don’t have a problem with corporate speech or corporate prerogatives as a matter of principle; they have a problem with them as a matter of narrow partisan politics.That the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, railed this week against the “raw exercise of monopolistic power” by Apple, for example, has much more to do with the cultural politics of Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk, than any real interest in the power of government to regulate markets and curb abuse. (In fact, DeSantis argued in his book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” that the Constitution was designed to “prevent the redistribution of wealth through the political process” and stop any popular effort to “undermine the rights of property.”)Nonetheless, there is something of substance behind this facade of conflict. It is true that the largest players in the corporate world, compelled to seek profit by the competitive pressures of the market, have mostly ceased catering to the particular tastes and preferences of the more conservative and reactionary parts of the American public. To borrow from and paraphrase the basketball legend Michael Jordan: Queer families buy shoes, too.Republicans have discovered, to their apparent chagrin, that their total devotion to the interests of concentrated, corporate capital does not buy them support for a cultural agenda that sometimes cuts against those very same interests.Here it’s worth noting, as the sociologist Melinda Cooper has argued, that what we’re seeing in this cultural dispute is something of a conflict between two different segments of capital. What’s at stake in the “growing militancy” of the right wing of the Republican Party, Cooper writes, “is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.” It is the patriarchal and dynastic capitalism of Donald Trump against the more impersonal and managerial capitalism of, for example, Mitt Romney.To the extent that cultural reactionaries within the Republican Party have been caught unaware by the friction between their interests and those of the more powerful part of the capitalist class, they would do well to take a lesson from one of the boogeymen of conservative rhetoric and ideology: Karl Marx.Throughout his work, Marx emphasized the revolutionary character of capitalism in its relation to existing social arrangements. It annihilates the “old social organization” that fetters and keeps down “the new forces and new passions” that spring up in the “bosom of society.” It decomposes the old society from “top to bottom.” It “drives beyond national barriers and prejudices” as well as “all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproduction of old ways of life.”Or, as Marx observed in one of his most famous passages, the “bourgeois epoch” is distinguished by the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” Under capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at least compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”In context, Marx is writing about precapitalist social and economic arrangements, like feudalism. But I think you can understand this dynamic as a general tendency under capitalism as well. The interests and demands of capital are sometimes in sync with traditional hierarchies. There are even two competing impulses within the larger system: a drive to dissolve and erode the barriers between wage earners until they form a single, undifferentiated mass and a drive to preserve and reinforce those same barriers to divide workers and stymie the development of class consciousness on their part.But that’s a subject for another day and a different column.For now, I’ll simply say that the problem of “woke capitalism” for social and political conservatives is the problem of capitalism for anyone who hopes to preserve anything in the face of the ceaseless drive of capital to dominate the entire society.You could restrain the power of capital by strengthening the power of labor to act for itself, in its own interests. But as conservatives are well aware, the prerogatives of workers can also undermine received hierarchies and traditional social arrangements. The working class, after all, is not just one thing, and what it seeks to preserve — its autonomy, its independence, its own ways of living — does not often jibe with the interests of reactionaries.Conservatives, if their policy priorities are any indication, want to both unleash the free market and reserve a space for hierarchy and domination. But this will not happen on its own. The state must be brought to bear, not to restrain capital per se but to make it as subordinate as possible to the political right’s preferred social agenda. Play within those restraints, goes the bargain, and you can do whatever you want. Put differently, the right doesn’t have a problem with capitalism; it has a problem with who appears to be in charge of it.There is even a clear strategy at work. If you can stamp out alternative ways of being, if you can weaken labor to the point of desperation, then perhaps you can force people back into traditional families and traditional households. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot stop the dynamic movement of society. It will churn and churn and churn, until eventually the dam breaks.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Turkish Author Ece Temelkuran Sees a Contested U.S. Election Through the Lens of an Attempted Coup

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      Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish author, sees parallels between Donald Trump’s claims of election theft and the 2016 attempt to depose Recep Tayyip Erdogan.This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, which convenes this week in the Greek capital to examine the ways in which self-governance might evolve.When President Donald J. Trump announced in November 2020 that he had been robbed of victory in the presidential election that month, the author and political commentator Ece Temelkuran (pronounced eh-jeh) drew direct parallels with her homeland, Turkey.“Make no mistake, this is an attempted coup,” she wrote in an editorial for The Guardian. “If it were happening in Turkey, the world’s media would not think twice about calling it so.”Ms. Temelkuran spoke from experience. She lived through the July 2016 coup attempt against the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and left the country to avoid the crackdown that followed. Three years later, she published “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship,” a nonfiction book that charted a democratic country’s potential slide into authoritarianism.Ms. Temelkuran was born into a political family. Her mother was a student activist who was imprisoned after a military coup in Turkey in the 1970s and rescued by a young lawyer whom she would go on to marry.When she was 16, Ms. Temelkuran started writing for a feminist magazine and went on to become one of Turkey’s most widely read political commentators.She remains a high-profile commentator today while she lives in Hamburg, Germany, where she is a fellow at the New Institute’s Future of Democracy program.In a recent interview, Ms. Temelkuran spoke of the threats to democracy in the West and in her native Turkey. This conversation has been edited and condensed.Since you published your book “How to Lose Your Country,” a few things have happened. Mr. Trump is no longer in power. Nor is the British prime minister Boris Johnson, who championed Britain’s exit from the European Union. How do you view the world today?I think there’s too much optimism, and also too much pessimism. The optimists think that if they get rid of Boris Johnson or Trump, everything will be back to normal in terms of democracy — that we can just fix a few mechanisms in the democratic machine, and we will be fine after that. I think this is a deeper crisis: a cluster of crises, actually, that we have to look deeper into.The crisis of democracy is very much intertwined with the crisis of capitalism. There is no way out, unless we address the issue of social equality.Ece Temelkuran is an author and political commentator who lives in Hamburg, Germany, where she is a fellow at the New Institute’s Future of Democracy program.Roberto Ricciuti/Getty ImagesYou say democracy in its present form is dead, because capitalism is essentially incompatible with democracy. Can you explain?Right-wing populist movements did not suddenly appear in the last 10 years. We have to go back to the 1980s to understand what really is happening in the world today, especially in terms of democracy.Democracy stands on the fundamental promise of equality and social justice. Capitalism does not promise social justice. If people are not equal in real terms, meaning financially and economically, how can you promise them equality as citizens?Why do you believe that capitalism is at odds with social justice?People pretend as if the rights that workers enjoy — Sundays off, eight-hour work days, etc. — are all thanks to capitalism. In fact, whatever the working classes have achieved or earned has come after a very long and hard struggle against the ruling classes.The depoliticization of society in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to an infantilization of citizens — to their perception of politics as being dirty. This massive depoliticization contributed to the right-wing populist movements of today. That’s why we have all these masses who believe that Trump is the savior, or that Brexit will make Britain great again.Another consequence was that we were made to be afraid of words like socialism, social democracy, regulation, financial regulation. These words became taboo after the 1970s.We’ve ended up in a place where we don’t even allow ourselves to think of a better system than capitalism. It is as if the end of capitalism were to lead to the end of the world.You use the word fascism to describe political realities in the West. That word has serious historical resonance. Why use it?Because I think we should use that word. We were made to believe that fascism was buried in the battlefields of the Second World War. The version that wears boots and uniform was buried, yes. But fascism does not just come in a uniform and boots, marching in goose step. If freedom of speech, freedom of organization, and the rights of the working classes are oppressed, that builds up to fascism.In countries such as the United States and Britain, the democratic establishment is powerful enough to protect itself. But in countries where the political and democratic establishment is not mature enough, you see fully formed oppression. There is no doubt that these are regimes that we can easily call fascism — in Turkey, in India, and in several other countries.Parliamentary democracies aren’t suddenly going to turn Hitlerian, are they?They don’t need to. At the time of Hitler, there was a need to be oppressive and violent because there was a massive union movement in Germany and the rest of Europe, a socialist movement. Nowadays, there is no such thing. So why use violence? They can use post-truths or social media to manipulate people, to spread misinformation and so on.If we can shift global politics to being more progressive, then we can get rid of these movements. At the moment, the center of the political spectrum is empty. Centrist politicians don’t have a story with which to mobilize and organize people. There’s a vacuum.Take French President Emmanuel Macron, for example. Why is he there? Because everybody is so afraid of far-right leader Marine Le Pen. For the last decade, at least, voting has become a tool to protect us from the worst.This is not politics. It’s a survival reaction.Unless the center opens its arms to the left and to progressives, there is no way out for democracy in the world.Turkey was for a long time a model when it came to the transition to democracy in the Muslim world. What’s going on there now?It’s a massive form of dictatorship. But then these dictatorships do not have to use violence. Now they’re using a different political tool, which is this very wide web of political money that spans the entire country. Even the smallest sympathizer to the party is getting this money. They have a good life. If you are part of the party, or in the party circle, you have a life. Otherwise, it’s not just economic transactions that are impossible. You cannot exercise your basic rights as a citizen.There are first-class citizens who are submissive to the party or Erdogan, and the others. The others, as Erdogan has said, are welcome to leave, and they are leaving. There is a massive brain drain from Turkey at the moment. It’s another tragic story. Doctors, nurses, well-educated people, academics: They’re all leaving.What’s the way out?The way out, which Turkish political forces are in a very inadequate way trying at the moment, is coming together: for all the opposition parties, despite their political differences, to come together and, in the interests of democracy, participate in elections. More

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      Opinion Columnists: So You Were Wrong. Or Were You?

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      More from our inbox:Josh Hawley Ran for His Life To the Editor:Re “I Was Wrong” (Sunday Opinion, July 24):Thank you for these columns. Although several seemed slightly grudging, many read as deeply felt self-examinations and sincere efforts to “walk a mile” in the shoes of others.In this age of righteousness on all sides, it takes great courage to approach the pains and the terrors of this world with real humility.What a world this would be if all our leaders — political, journalistic and religious — could allow themselves the sorrow and the glory of thinking, speaking and leading in such a manner!Steve WanghBrattleboro, Vt.To the Editor:The “I Was Wrong” columns were written by some of my favorite gurus. Their honesty and vulnerability in writing these pieces were so emotionally moving, authentic and valuable. Congratulations on putting this together.It meant so much to me, and I have passed the articles on to other colleagues in leadership, as this is what we propose to leaders of organizations in order to build trust. Thank you so much for the decision to do this!Kathy MinardiThe writer is executive director of the Whole School Leadership Institute.To the Editor:I admire Bret Stephens for admitting he was wrong (“I Was Wrong About Trump Voters”). But Mr. Stephens was mostly right.Trump voters were betrayed at least three times. The last time was by President Donald Trump himself; he did nothing for the “unprotected” citizens of the U.S., nor did he even try.Maybe, if Trump voters figure out what they really need and should expect from their government, and where justice is in the culture wars, they will make the right choice in 2024.Anthony J. DiStefanoMilton, Del.To the Editor:So Bret Stephens thinks he was wrong about Trump voters and states, “What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.”No, Mr. Stephens, you were not wrong about Trump voters; they simply did not choose to exercise their critical thinking skills to understand that Mr. Trump is one of the “self-satisfied elite” whose only goal in life is to obtain money and power.Moreover, if they had applied their critical thinking skills, they would have very quickly realized that Mr. Trump is a narcissist, a liar, a cheat and a master manipulator who duped them into believing that he is their savior; a 70-something golden-haired billionaire who lived on Fifth Avenue and now a mansion in Florida and who really cares about them! Really?And despite all of the recent information released from the Jan. 6 hearings, the vast majority simply reject it and continue to support Mr. Trump. So, Mr. Stephens, you were not wrong at all about Trump voters, but you are dead wrong in believing that you were and writing about it.Michael HadjiargyrouCenterport, N.Y.To the Editor:Bret Stephens’s mea culpa is spot on. Now who will really listen with an honest ear and a strategic plan for doing something for the multitudes feeling unheard, unappreciated, misunderstood? Old-fashioned town meetings might be the place to start.Dawn KellerHendersonville, N.C.To the Editor:In “I Was Wrong About Capitalism,” David Brooks suggests that his views on the value of regulation have (finally) changed because “sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before.”While the specific regulations required certainly change with the times (there was, for example, no e-commerce to regulate until relatively recently), the need for well-crafted regulation to rein in the intrinsic detrimental tendencies of the free market, ranging from human exploitation to environmental devastation, is an unchanging truth.Capitalism is like fire; it is a powerful tool that offers transformative benefits to humanity, but, like fire, it must always be carefully managed because it can cause sweeping destruction.R. Daniel Valdes-DapenaCape May, N.J.To the Editor:Re David Brooks’s column:As a Midwestern 87-year-old lefty, I thank you for giving me a tiny sliver of hope in my tired old mind.Would that the ability to open new brain pathways be taught in schools, modeled in the halls of the government system and generally admired.There should be classes in “I was wrong.” It is such a mark of intelligence, and the school systems could redeem themselves from the sin of underpaying generous men and women who cannot break through the traps of the system.I admire you.Sally BrownMinneapolisTo the Editor:Re “I Was Wrong About Al Franken,” by Michelle Goldberg:Senator Franken was swept up in the “one size fits all” frenzy that consumed him predicated, in very large part, on one photo showing a comedian making an attempted joke gone horribly wrong.Even at the time I believed the clamor for his political head was an error. Now, given what has transpired in this nation since that day, and the very distinct possibility that Donald Trump may be his party’s 2024 presidential nominee despite a list of grievances that makes Mr. Franken’s seem as a pebble to a mountain, my belief in the mistaken rush to judgment for Mr. Franken has grown exponentially.I understand the mea culpa of this column. But too little, too late never seemed a more apt reply.Robert S. NussbaumFort Lee, N.J.To the Editor:Re Michelle Goldberg’s column about Al Franken:Thank you for your integrity, rising above pridefulness and acknowledging the costs of abridging due process. We need more of this accountability.Evelyn J. HightowerBlacklick, OhioTo the Editor:Re “I Was Wrong About Facebook,” by Farhad Manjoo:Truth will set you free, but you must be able to recognize it first. Facebook’s cacophony will not help you do that.Edgar PaukBrooklynTo the Editor:I enjoyed the collection of eight admissions from your columnists that they actually realize they were wrong about something. But only eight? This should be a weekly piece, considering how much material there is. I look forward to more of the same.Carl SchwarzNaples, Fla.To the Editor:I got through about three of the “I Was Wrong” columns before realizing that the theme was “I was wrong, but let me equivocate.” I always thought that wrong was wrong; I guess I was wrong (but I can explain).These read like a homework assignment no one wanted to do.Aaron SchurgTraverse City, Mich.Josh Hawley Ran for His Life Oliver Contreras/AFP— Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Video Shows Senator Fleeing Mob He Had Exhorted With a Raised Fist” (news article, July 23):The video of Senator Josh Hawley running for his life as his buddies threatened to become too friendly with him is a perfect symbol of the Republican Party’s cowardice.Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, of course, lead this pusillanimous bunch of big talkers and small men. That our country should be governed, if that is the correct word, by such a spineless group is sad beyond words.John T. DillonWest Caldwell, N.J. More