In America, power is somewhere other than where you are
Who runs the world? Beyonce says girls. Bernie Sanders says billionaires. Donald Trump says China. Unions say big corporations. Big corporations say start-ups. Start-ups say regulators. Regulators say politicians. Politicians say donors. Donors say the grass roots.
If anything unites America in this fractious moment, it is a widespread sentiment that power is somewhere other than where you are.
Confusion is justified in an era of extraordinary power shifts.
The machinery of globalization sucks up jobs from one place and spits them out in another. A digital revolution increasingly runs our lives, using algorithms we cannot understand. Some of the world’s poorest countries have been made into America’s fiercest competitors. Demographic change — the “browning and graying” of America — transforms and sometimes inflames places like Yuma County, Ariz., where nearly three-quarters of retirees are white and less than a quarter of young people are. America drifts toward being the first former majority-middle-class society in history. A gender revolution empowers millions of women, fails to deliver for others, and with many workingclass men struggling, turns swaths of the United States into what one writer calls a “middle-class matriarchy.”
When you listen to people in various walks of American life, it is striking how these forces have combined to foster an anxiety of impotence.
The 2016 presidential election is shaping up to be one of the most unpredictable in the modern age, especially for corporate donors and the party establishment.
Some members of the establishment, most notably David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, have recently sought to explain the new dynamic to their colleagues by arguing that the power, this time around, belongs to the grass roots, not Washington insiders and their donor patrons.
Yet Sanders and Trump are thriving precisely by persuading voters that Washington insiders and donor patrons have all the power.
Similarly, activists in the Black Lives Matter movement will tell you that power in America lies with the police. Meanwhile, many police officials fret that scrutiny by activists has returned too much power to the street, with murders rising as a result.
Media companies look with envy and fear at digital-age rivals like Netflix and Amazon, and their power to develop edgy programs like “Transparent,” about the travails of a modern family as sexual and gender lines blur.
Meanwhile, the world of new voices and faces stares back at Hollywood and, seeing that all the Oscar acting nominees are white for the second year running, concludes that the power is somewhere else.
In the business world, big companies seem to think the power lies with start-ups. General Electric has been running a hilarious series of ads, portraying the insecurity of a stodgy enterprise in an age of 10-person firms with billion-dollar valuations.
In the advertisements, a young man named Owen has landed a job as a G.E. coder, disappointing both his digital-native friends and his parents. The company just announced a move to Boston from Fairfield, Conn., in an effort to be “at the center of an ecosystem” — a Silicon Valley word — of high-technology companies and universities.
But the start-ups don’t seem to think of themselves as powerful.
“What, little old me?” is the posture of some of the most influential companies of our time. Airbnb denies that it is a hotel company, even though it orchestrated the stays of 1.3 million people on New Year’s Eve alone.
Like Uber and TaskRabbit, Airbnb calls itself a “platform.” This idea implies that the real power is with the customers and the hosts or drivers or laborers — and, above all, with the old world of regulators and taxi unions and labor lawyers whom these new firms view as the Goliath to their David. Today everyone, in fact, seems to think they are David.
Confusion is justified in an era of extraordinary power shifts