This is what a revolution feels like - from the wrong side

This post was written just after the election, then appeared as an op-ed in the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

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What Trump's populist supporters want is a revolution.

They feel left out of the big social and economic trends of the last 40 years: globalization, knowledge work, diversity. They feel deeply alienated from the coastal elites, who thrive in this new environment, who flaunt not only their wealth but also their tastes and moral codes - internationalism, foreign foods ("cheese-eating"), open homosexuality. The more those elites gain, the more marginalized the rest of the country feels.

These revolutionaries have lost faith in the system. In the 1950s, those in small towns already felt alienated from the Eastern intellectuals and experts, but also proud of the progress of science and the economy, and confident that the benefits would flow to all. Now large numbers of people, especially away from the coasts, have lost that confidence. "Progress" continues, "experts" keep inventing things, but all that they experience is that their lives are disrupted and their status diminished. And they want it to stop.

They see Trump as someone who will break the system.

It really doesn't matter what he says; what matters is that he doesn't care what the elites think. The experts say that globalization brings economic good; Trump tells his supporters it doesn't. The experts say that things are getting better; Trump tells them things are getting worse. What Trump tells them is much closer to their experience than what the experts say.

I am part of the meritocratic elite, the aristocracy of the current period -- the educated class that has profited nicely from globalization and the knowledge economy. Of course I don't feel like an aristocrat: I'm not at all (think I) like those foppish prigs on "Masterpiece," who ride their horses over peasants in their path. I work for human rights and social justice; I vote for those who would increase my taxes in order to strengthen social programs for the poor.

And yet in the important ways I, and my meritocratic friends, are indeed like all aristocrats. We have high status and self-confidence, while the revolutionaries have been losing all that for decades. And if truth be told, we harbor scorn for a large part of the country who, as Obama once put it, "cling to guns or religion"; or whom Hillary Clinton lumped into a "basket of deplorables."

I hear constantly my colleagues marveling at the stupidity, the ignorance of Trump's supporters, or dismissing them as racist and so not worth talking to. Some of us are kinder than others to the downtrodden, but the revolutionaries make no distinctions among us.

We aristocrats are naturally horrified by Trump. We know from our expertise and rational analyses that his policy proposals are destructive, and we feel disgusted by his crudeness and hostility. But that is what elites have always felt in the face of revolution. The French aristocracy were offended by the vulgarity of the uneducated mob; so has every aristocracy at every historical turn. The Eastern establishment felt pretty much as horrified by the radicals of the 1960s, with their long hair and loud music, as they do about Trumpists today. Revolutionaries are deliberately ugly and hostile and crude. Their leaders always relish sticking fingers in the eyes of established leaders, and revel in provoking outrage.

In this election Clinton represented the continuation of what has been going on for the last 50 years -- a perfect embodiment of the current establishment, everything that the revolutionaries reject. She is a wonkish expert, has been in government forever, deeply connected to international financial moguls; she made promises for improvement, but they are the same promises that everyone has made over all that time. Even her gender represented a culmination of the long elite push for moral change in roles.

I myself voted for Clinton with considerable enthusiasm. I believe deeply in the ethic of diversity and progress that she represents. But I also think she did not understand the revolution, and its roots.

The revolutionaries were not calculating their material self-interest, and are not interested in incremental improvement. The current system makes them feel lost and overwhelmed and excluded, and they voted to break it.

Revolutions fail most of the time: they become repressive or chaotic, and often turn on their own supporters. The exceptions are rare. Once in a long while a true revolutionary, someone who has led the charge against the elites - Nelson Mandela, for instance - turns out to be a transformative leader. Once in a long while, leaders emerging from the elites, like FDR, seemingly safe protectors of the existing order, break the system themselves and reconstruct it. Much more often, however, revolutionaries turn out to be more like Robespierre or Mao, perpetuating destructiveness. Trump seems more likely to be a destroyer than a positive leader.

Those of us who are caught on the wrong side of this revolution will have a very unpleasant time. Aristocrats and elites do not get treated well by revolutionaries. Many things we love will be destroyed; we will have to bow our heads, humble ourselves, give up privileges, mute our views. True, the world will probably get worse for everyone, including the revolutionaries, but that's the way history works.

My main hope is this: The counter-forces are quite strong. Large parts of the advanced industrial democracies - especially urban areas -- really have become something like successful multicultural societies over the past half century. And cities are growing rapidly all over the world.

There has been a tremendous development in capacities for dialogue and collaboration. We need to build on those engines of change in civil society, while the national political sphere is blocked.