Chapter Five

Conservative Victimhood

Sore Losers

It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is running for executive office again.

I’m referring, of course, to Stacey Abrams.

Abrams ran as the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia in 2018. She lost a hard-fought election to her Republican opponent Brian Kemp, who was then Georgia’s secretary of state. She lost by about fifty-five thousand votes out of almost four million cast, a margin of 1.4 percent. Abrams immediately rejected the legitimacy of the election.

First she gave a speech announcing that Kemp would become the governor, but making it clear she didn’t consider his win legitimate: “This is not a speech of concession, because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper,” she said. “As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that. But, my assessment is the law currently allows no further viable remedy… I don’t want to hold public office if I need to scheme my way into the post.”¹ She added that “Democracy failed Georgians.”

To this day, even as Abrams campaigns for governor again in the 2022 election, she still refuses to concede that she lost the last one. Half a year after the lost election, she gave an interview to the New York Times explaining at length why she still wouldn’t concede: “It was largely because I could not prove what had happened, but I knew from the calls that we got that something happened. Now, I cannot say that everybody who tried to cast a ballot would’ve voted for me, but if you look at the totality of the information, it is sufficient to demonstrate that so many people were disenfranchised and disengaged by the very act of the person who won the election that I feel comfortable now saying, ‘I won.’”²

Abrams’s case that the election was stolen from her rests on the claim that Kemp abused his power as secretary of state to suppress votes. Her first argument is that his office delayed approving fifty-three thousand voter registrations, disenfranchising them. Her second is that he also disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of citizens by removing them from the list of registered voters. After looking at the facts, I find both allegations exceedingly weak.³

The first charge is especially misleading. Abrams’s account, with the help of media, would lead one to believe that the fifty-three thousand pending voters were prevented from voting, but that’s not true at all. In Georgia, citizens whose registrations are on hold are still allowed to vote as long as they just show a photo ID. Kemp’s office had put their applications on hold to comply with Georgia’s “exact match” law passed a year earlier—as the office sorted out minor discrepancies between information on the voter registration and other government records, people were still allowed to vote. In response, critics claimed that the pending voters were disenfranchised because they may have believed they were unable to vote.⁴ No one alleges Kemp did anything to try to convince pending voters they couldn’t vote; I suppose the claim is that he suppressed their votes by not screaming the law from the rooftops.

Abrams’s second charge of voter suppression is equally unpersuasive. Along with members of the media, she claimed that Kemp had “purged” more than 1.4 million people from voting rolls since 2012. In actuality, he was simply following a law Georgia and eight other states have removing voters from the rolls after long periods of inactivity, a practice upheld by the Supreme Court. The law Kemp was enforcing was actually passed by Georgia Democrats in 1997. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution frequently referred to this practice as a purge, but when it tracked down deregistered voters, they simply said they didn’t care about voting.⁵ Basically, just about anyone who was remotely interested in voting was able to.

The old fight for civil rights involved sit-ins and marches. The new one requires Google searches and photo ID, and apparently that’s too much to ask. Here’s a test you can apply anytime you hear a Democrat call a policy voter suppression: can this supposed Jim Crow law be defeated by googling “how can I vote?” If so, it’s probably not the death of democracy.

What does threaten democracy, though, is for political parties and their candidates to deny the legitimacy of elections. It reminds me of another story.

It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again.

I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.

Conservatives have their own victimhood complexes these days; we are, after all, a nation of victims now. All that differs is whom we see as our oppressors. The worst victimhood narrative that afflicts modern conservatives is their budding belief that any election they lose must have been stolen. Instead of distinguishing ourselves as the party that strives for excellence and rejects the easy path of victimhood narratives, we simply created our own.

I voted for Trump in 2020. I had some policy disagreements with him—for example, I disapproved of his large-scale government spending and his tariff policies—but I voted for him anyway because he refused to apologize for the things that make America great. Like many Americans, I hungered for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence in our nation. To me, that was something worth voting for. Donald Trump was, notwithstanding his shortcomings, the candidate who best embodied American greatness. He was unafraid to stand up for it, and I respected that.

But while Trump promised to lead the nation to recommit itself to the pursuit of greatness, what he delivered in the end was just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican party whole.

When my candidate lost the election, I was dissatisfied, but I also felt a sense of peace. The election was done, and it was time to move on. No one likes a sore loser; that’s one of the worst victimhood complexes of all. Accepting the outcomes of elections and having a peaceful transition of power is part of what it means to be a constitutional republic: sometimes your team loses, but if you accept the result and prepare for the next election, eventually the scales will tip your way again. We fought, we lost, and I accepted the result.

So I was especially disappointed when I saw President Trump take a page from the Stacey Abrams playbook. His claims were just as weak as Abrams’s. She claimed voter suppression, he claimed voter fraud. He filed scores of lawsuits over various claims of fraud, as was his right, but they came nowhere close to changing the outcome in a single state, let alone the several swing states whose results he needed to overturn. In many cases, judges the president himself had nominated ruled against him, a sign of health in our nation’s institutions. Of the sixty-two lawsuits he and his supporters filed, he lost all but one, a minor victory in Pennsylvania that affected few votes. A Supreme Court with a strong conservative majority ruled against President Trump twice.⁶

Top election officials in virtually every state, regardless of party, said they’d found no evidence of any significant level of fraud.⁷ The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a statement saying “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history… There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”⁸ The president fired the agency’s director a few days later.⁹ In a call with Georgia’s secretary of state, the president implausibly claimed to have won every single state—something unprecedented in the nation’s history, and a sign that his claims weren’t grounded in fact.¹⁰ Mike Pence, a man I have great respect for, decided it was his constitutional duty to resist the president’s attempts to get him to unilaterally overturn the results of the election, even in the face of the January 6 Capitol riot.¹¹ Our institutions did hold, in the end. But they shouldn’t have been tested.

I won’t go into the details at length. The fact that all of our governmental institutions so unanimously found no evidence of significant fraud is telling. Furthermore, I’ve talked to many Republicans at all levels of government, and not one has ever presented convincing evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump; very few have seriously tried. I don’t believe that most Republican politicians actually think the election was stolen. Lately, more of them have started admitting that in public.¹²

I recognize that this is not a typical conservative talking point. I’m committed to following the evidence, not blindly rooting for any one person or party. The pursuit of excellence requires that beliefs be determined strictly by evidence, not loyalty to one group or animosity for another. I’m simply not convinced the election was stolen.

As this book went to press, Dinesh D’Souza released a documentary called 2000 Mules, using geolocation data to argue that operatives illegally carried ballots from nonprofits to drop boxes.¹³ As Ben Shapiro has noted, even if ballots were illegally delivered, that wouldn’t make the votes themselves illegal. And I wasn’t convinced of the film’s central claim.

The organization D’Souza worked with, True the Vote, counted someone as a mule if they stopped near a drop box at least ten times and a nonprofit at least five times in the month before Election Day. How near? According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, within one hundred feet. Presumably the hundred feet of wiggle room was meant to account for the inaccuracy of geolocation—but if someone geolocated one hundred feet away from a dropbox could’ve actually been standing right next to it, by the same token, they could’ve been two hundred feet away from it. To prove their method wasn’t picking up lots of false positives, True the Vote should’ve applied it to red states and shown that it identified fewer mules there.

D’Souza really needed substantial video evidence to tie it all together. He claims to have surveillance tape showing the same people stuffing multiple drop boxes, but the documentary never shows that. If he releases this footage, I’ll find his argument more compelling.

Beyond all the court decisions, statements from election officials, and a general lack of evidence of fraud, what I keep coming back to is this: why do I see Republicans insisting that the presidential election was stolen, yet accepting the legitimacy of the congressional ones? It all happens on the same ballot, and Republicans netted twelve seats in the House of Representatives, setting themselves up to easily claim a decisive majority in 2022.¹⁴ Yet I saw some of the very congresspeople who won their races deny the validity of the presidential one.¹⁵ None suggested that their own election had been tainted by fraud in any way. I can’t see how anyone could hold both those views with a straight face. Of course, it’s a free country, and President Trump and those who agree with him should be allowed to argue his case on platforms like Twitter.

At times, the Republican party seems to be moving toward the position that any races it wins are legitimate and any it loses were stolen. That’s not a tenable view. It’s just the preferred conservative brand of victimhood, a knee-jerk kind of sore losing more common to playgrounds than great republics. Republicans could’ve become the one major party that moved beyond grievance and aimed only for greatness; instead we placed grudges about elections at the core of party identity. Once victimhood becomes part of the essence of both parties, it’s just a national identity.

Arguing over the 2020 election is starting to feel a bit like debating Roe v. Wade: if you’re already in one camp, you’re never going to switch to the other. But even those who genuinely believe the 2020 election was stolen should at least be amused by Trump’s comments after losing the 2016 Republican Iowa Caucus to Ted Cruz: “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it,” Trump tweeted at the time. “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Trump added.¹⁶ No word yet on whether Dinesh D’Souza has located Ted Cruz’s mules.

Or consider Mr. Trump’s comments about the 2022 Republican US Senate primary in Pennsylvania, which is headed for a recount as this book goes to press. Trump had the following to say about his endorsed candidate: “Dr. Oz should declare victory. It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they just ‘happened to find.’” He later added: “The Pennsylvania Oz race is ridiculous… Stop FINDING VOTES in PENNSYLVANIA! RIGGED?”¹⁷

So for the purpose of our discussion here about conservative victimhood, forget the 2020 presidential election. Apparently even Republican primaries across space and time are specially rigged against Trump and his endorsed candidates. Maybe Stacey Abrams is a Republican at heart.

Being a sore loser is a danger to democracy no matter which party it comes from. It chills me to see the Democratic Party moving in the same direction. In part in response to the victimhood narrative of a stolen election, Republicans in many states passed a variety of voter reform laws, so far at least thirty-three bills in nineteen states.¹⁸ In truth, many of these reforms strike me as minor tweaks that won’t affect elections much one way or the other; some of them seem to be symbolic gestures that legislators are “doing something.”

But President Biden and other top Democrats call them Jim Crow 2.0.¹⁹ I guess that’s because “the New Jim Crow” was already taken by one of their other victimhood narratives. They apply the Jim Crow label to a number of Republican-led voting reforms, most of them pretty innocuous. Claremont McKenna College professor of government Andrew E. Busch sums it up by saying, “Jim Crow 1.0 entailed widespread murder and violent intimidation, onerous taxes, rigged literacy tests, and a flat prohibition on blacks voting in the primary elections of the dominant party, leading to results such as Mississippi’s 7% voter-turnout rate for African Americans. ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ mean[while], requires that voters show proper identification, vote in the correct precinct, and request their absentee ballot every two years instead of every four. Someday, historians will marvel that anyone ever took seriously the argument that these two regimes bore any relation to one another.”²⁰

The Jim Crow analogies don’t stop there. Democrats are still making hay of it. The latest story is that the filibuster is also a form of Jim Crow when it’s used to stop their own voter reforms.²¹ Presumably Democrats didn’t think the filibuster was a Jim Crow relic when they used it a record-breaking 328 times in the 2019–2020 congressional term.²² I’m not sure whether we’re on Jim Crow 3.0 or 4.0 now. Regardless, the power of the well-worn analogy allowed President Biden to say that the 2022 midterms will be illegitimate if Republicans win: “I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit,” he told a reporter. “The increase [in] the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.”²³

Ironically, Republicans and Democrats are converging. Maybe no one likes a sore loser, but it seems everyone likes being one. The new wisdom for both parties is that any election you win is legitimate, and any you lose must’ve been stolen. Wallowing in this shared victimhood narrative may soothe the sting of defeat, but it’s poison to the rule of law. Republicans were in prime position to reject identity politics, including the game of identifying as a victim, but instead we used stolen election stories as a back door to embracing our own victim identity, pursuing the easy path to power. Fighting fire with fire may sound appealing, but water’s actually the better choice.

It reminds me of the final passage of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “Twelve voices were shouting an anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”²⁴ That, I fear, is the destiny that awaits a nation of victims. We’ll become indistinguishable, someday soon, low creatures yelling the same tired victimhood narratives at each other and filling in the variables of victims and villains with our preferred names.

Sarah Palin’s libel lawsuit against the New York Times exemplified America’s disturbing trend toward mutually assured victimhood. As she’d no doubt say, the Times started it. In 2017, after a Bernie Sanders supporter shot Republican congressman Steve Scalise and several others at a baseball practice, the Times wanted to run an editorial connecting the shooting to conservative violence. It had to make multiple leaps in logic to do so. First, the writer brought up a shooting six years earlier when a mentally ill man wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others, vaguely suggesting that he might have been motivated by a map Palin’s PAC had released putting competitive electoral districts like Giffords’s under crosshairs. Then Times editor James Bennet, dissatisfied with mere insinuation, added multiple lines saying that the map had clearly and directly incited the shooting of Giffords. That claim was utterly false, with no evidence to support it except the Times’ own wishes. It quickly realized its mistake after a conservative outcry and issued a series of corrections, though none mentioned Palin by name.²⁵ A couple weeks later, Palin sued for libel.

But she lost. As the jury deliberated, the district court judge said that no matter the verdict, he would dismiss Palin’s suit because she hadn’t met the very high bar public figures must meet to win defamation cases. A public figure has to prove not just that the defendant made false statements about them, but that they acted with actual malice—that they knowingly or recklessly said something false intending to cause harm. This legal standard was established, ironically, in the landmark case New York Times v. Sullivan.²⁶ The judge said that the Times’ speedy efforts to check and then correct its article mentioning Palin were evidence it lacked actual malice. The jury ended up reaching the same decision as the judge, although, as Palin’s lawyers will no doubt point out on appeal, a few jurors received news alerts on their phones informing them of the judge’s decision as they deliberated.²⁷

Not only did Palin lose; she deserved to lose. What the Times did was sloppy, arrogant, and prejudiced, and it’s understandable that she was angry. But at the end of the day, it did quickly notice and correct its mistake, and defamation law is clear. We value free speech highly in America, and that includes the freedom to harshly criticize the public figures that have so much influence over the direction of the country. As the Court pointed out in Sullivan, with so much speech flying around, it’s inevitable that some of it will be false. To keep spirited debate about public figures going, we have to give them less protection from false claims. The deal in America is that if you want to be famous, you have to have thick skin. Sarah Palin chose to play the victim instead, spending millions of dollars and several years hounding the Times over a mistake it had immediately acknowledged and fixed. She should’ve just moved on.

There are only two ways to win a culture war: defeat the other side, or infect it with your own values. No matter who wins the next few elections, Republicans are losing the culture war, and it’s not just because liberals control the media, universities, Hollywood, or even business. Republicans aren’t just losing to wokeness and its many victimhood narratives. They’re losing because they’ve adopted the tactics and principles of their opponents and, in doing so, stand for nothing but the pursuit of power. Democrats may have been the first to master telling tales of victimhood, but lately Republicans have decided to join them in spinning out stories of persecution. They sacrifice core principles for short-term political gain.

It’s easy to be a sore loser; it’s harder to figure out how to win. The comforting blanket of stolen-election stories allows those who embrace them to avoid self-examination and introspection and place all their electoral shortcomings at the feet of others. This is how the woke left wins—not with a bang, but with a whimper. Not by winning a battle of arguments with the other side, but by getting the other side to adopt its own values and methods without even realizing it, even as they continue to battle one another.

Legitimate Grievances

When I say that a group has embraced the mindset of victimhood, I don’t mean it has no legitimate concerns. Part of my whole point is that many groups of Americans do face real hardships; the question is which mentality best helps us overcome them. One problem with viewing the world through the lens of victimhood is that it forces you to look for an oppressor—it’s easier and more viscerally satisfying to blame people than policies or trends. The mindset of victimhood makes you look for an enemy to punish; the mindset of an underdog makes you look for which parts of the world you can change.

But none of that is meant to be an excuse for ignoring the hardships people face and the legitimate complaints they have. Moving past America’s fixation on victimhood doesn’t require sticking your head in the sand. It’s not about being ignorant of people’s struggles; it’s about opening your eyes to their capabilities. It’s about opening your eyes to your own capabilities.

We can’t let our grievances define us, or let others’ define them. That doesn’t mean we need to pretend grievances don’t exist. Really, the most effective way to help someone move past their victim identity is to demonstrate that you understand where they’re coming from and still don’t see them as a mere victim. I tried to use that mindset in the last chapter—not once did I see black people as victims, but I did try to understand why some of them see themselves that way. Learning the victimhood narrative of the New Jim Crow and how it extended to one of police brutality allowed me to get closer to the heart of things, seeing that addressing violent crime and strengthening families would help the nation move forward. I couldn’t get to the truth without the stepping-stone of seeing that black people really are treated unfairly in the war on drugs; that kernel of truth is what lends plausibility to the larger narrative of black victimhood.

In the same way, conservatives have valid grounds to feel aggrieved, even if they sometimes give them a poor outlet through anti-immigrant sentiment or stories about the 2020 election. In fact, the reason these false victimhood narratives are able to take root is that parts of them are grounded in truth. Many white industrial workers have unfairly lost jobs, just not to immigrants. There was an election that was stolen from President Trump, just not the one many people think.

The election that was stolen from Trump wasn’t the 2020 one that he lost; it was the 2016 one that he won.

No Collusion

The 2016 election wasn’t stolen in a literal sense. Donald Trump was sworn into the office of president of the United States of America. But he was immediately robbed of the ability to execute the duties of that office effectively.

Throughout his campaign, Trump was dogged by allegations that he was “colluding” with Russia to win the election. Much of the media frenzy about this conspiracy theory stemmed from the Steele dossier, which was ultimately discredited. But the sensationalist opposition research did its work in shaping public and governmental opinion. It contributed to FBI investigations of Trump’s campaign that cast a pall over most of his four years in office. When Robert Mueller finally concluded the investigation more than halfway through Trump’s term, by that time it didn’t matter that his report found that the evidence was insufficient to establish criminal conspiracy—Trump was already guilty in the court of public opinion. To this day, liberal media commentators still take it as gospel that Trump’s 2016 win was the product of collusion with Russia.²⁸

Rumors of collusion had been swirling for years, but was Buzzfeed’s publication of the Steele dossier in January 2017 that launched public speculation into the stratosphere.²⁹ The report offered everything a Trump critic could hope for. It had a credible author: Christopher Steele was a former head of the Russia desk for fabled British intelligence agency MI6. It told the story many liberals wanted to be true: it said Russian intelligence had been cultivating Trump as a Russian asset for at least five years and that he’d closely coordinated with them, including by supporting Russian hacking of the Clinton campaign. And, best of all, the dossier had salacious details to make its allegations spread like wildfire. It said that Russian intelligence had Trump under its thumb because it was blackmailing him with tapes of embarrassing sex acts—the infamous “pee tapes.” The Steele dossier was a conspiracy theorist’s dream come true.

Too good to be true, in fact. It turns out that it was just opposition research. Crucial information has surfaced in Special Counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation, which recently resulted in a criminal indictment of Igor Danchenko, the key source behind the dossier. Kimberley Strassel sums up the current state of play in an article in the Wall Street Journal:

It took a year for congressional investigators to reveal the dossier had in fact been commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It took two more years for Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to expose that Mr. Steele had relied on a Russian source who said he’d never expected Mr. Steele to present his info as facts, since most of it was “hearsay.” Two more years on, Mr. Durham’s indictment says this source—Mr. Danchenko—obtained material from a longtime Democratic operative who was active in the 2016 Clinton campaign. Clintonites here, Clintonites there, Trump “scandals” everywhere.³⁰

Danchenko was the main source of the Steele dossier’s information, and he in turn got much of his information from Democratic PR executive Charles Dolan, who had deep ties to both the Clintons and Russia. Dolan later told the FBI he’d just made up a GOP friend as a source for rumors he’d actually heard in the press.³¹

So not only was the Steele dossier funded by the Clinton campaign, but one of its main sources was an actual member of the campaign, who was himself just repeating rumors he’d heard in liberal media outlets. The Steele dossier was a circle of paid-for disinformation reporting on itself to itself, a snake eating its own tail and liking the taste.

But as the saying goes, a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth’s still lacing up its boots. Not only did much of the public treat the Steele dossier’s allegations as fact, but the FBI itself relied heavily on them in applying for and renewing its application for a FISA warrant authorizing it to surveil Carter Page, a member of Trump’s campaign. In part on the basis of the Steele dossier, it even hired an informant to spy on Page.³² A review conducted by the Department of Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, found that the FBI had made seventeen errors or omissions in its FISA warrant applications.³³ The DOJ later declared two of the four FISA warrants invalid.³⁴

The FBI investigation of Trump’s campaign, and later Trump himself, was given the code name Crossfire Hurricane. Its origins are contested and still under investigation. The dominant narrative from media, the FBI, and the inspector general’s review is that the Steele dossier played no role in the launch of the investigation, although it was used during the course of it. Special Counsel Durham is currently leading his own investigation into the origin of Crossfire Hurricane, and he has disagreed with the inspector general’s conclusions about the importance of the Steele dossier.³⁵

What can be known with certainty is that the first two years of Trump’s presidency were beset by a shamefully political and fact-disconnected investigation. Trump’s presidency was bedeviled even before it began by accusations that he’d colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The entrenched narrative of Trump’s collusion with Russia even contributed to his eventual impeachment. The Mueller report, the most impartial assessment we have, found that there was insufficient evidence to conclude Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia to interfere with the election. The report implies that if Trump was guilty of anything, it was of obstructing the FBI investigation itself, not of the underlying crime he was being investigated for.³⁶

So Trump fell into a host of difficulties that consumed his presidency as he raged against an investigation that was motivated in large part by a scam. My party’s candidate won, and he never got a fair chance to do the job because Democrats couldn’t accept that he’d won. That’s my own grievance. For my part, I’m ready to move on. It’s in the past. There are other conservative grievances, though, that we can’t simply move on from, that aren’t in the past.

Left Behind

Liberals often say that conservatives voted for Trump as part of some white backlash against an increasingly diverse nation. I do think the nation has left many conservatives behind, including many white ones, but the problem has nothing to do with race. It’s a changing economy that’s abandoned many Americans. Once we accurately diagnose the source of the hardships aggrieved conservatives face, we can figure out together how to address them.

The heart of the problem is that the US economy is booming, but many workers in our industrial sectors haven’t shared in the good times. Unemployment is at 3.9 percent, but that figure doesn’t include people who have given up on looking for work, and more and more Americans have stopped trying to find jobs over the last two decades. Many of them used to work in manufacturing, one of the only sectors that has failed to add jobs lately. During the 2008 recession the US lost 1.6 million manufacturing jobs that require only high school diplomas, and during the recovery it replaced them with jobs in different places that require more education.³⁷

When faced with past economic disruptions, Americans who lost their jobs eventually relocated to find new ones or changed careers. For many, that’s no longer an option. People without a college education often stay where they are and resign themselves to joblessness as they watch a thriving nation leave them behind.

Classical conservatives ignore this crisis among blue-collar workers because their commitment to growing the economic pie outweighs their commitment to making sure everyone gets a piece. Modern liberals think these particular victims—mainly white working-class Americans in the Midwest and South—are simply a low priority because we should spend our limited resources remedying more problematic injustices. Some liberals even think these displaced workers deserve their fates, a belief in some kind of racial karma where fairness requires that white privilege be balanced by financial hardship. Many white working-class Americans flocked to Donald Trump in 2016 because he at least paid lip service to their plight.

But the election of President Trump still failed to address the underlying issues causing these Americans to struggle. While illegal immigration is a major problem, it’s far from the source of the lean times for US manufacturing workers. Blaming immigrants for lost jobs is a textbook example of the biases imposed by a victimhood mentality. Lambasting immigrants does little for American workers while sowing discord and alienating a growing segment of our population.

Blaming robots isn’t much better. Automation is one factor that displaces some workers from manufacturing jobs, but blaming it prevents us from seeing less obvious issues. Enacting tariffs on foreign goods isn’t the answer to our problems either: while this may provide a short-term boost to American manufacturers, it comes at the cost of making American-manufactured goods less competitive globally, shrinking the entire global economy in the process. That’s one of the economic policies I disagreed with President Trump about. Putting America first isn’t worth much if it means everyone has less.

The real root cause of the problems facing American manufacturers are the conscious policy choices we’ve made to advance America’s economic growth and geopolitical position: perpetuation of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a prioritization of knowledge-based industries over others, and a free trade agenda that grows the global economy for all countries. Don’t get me wrong—these are indeed the right policy choices for America to make. But we also owe it to American workers in our manufacturing sector to acknowledge that their plight is a direct consequence of these policy choices.

Collectively, we’ve sacrificed America’s blue-collar workers to grow the pie for everyone else. We win half the battle if our professional political class and intellectual elites simply recognize this reality. We win the other half by doing something about it.

First, let’s recognize the real causes of manufacturing workers’ difficulties, starting with the strong US dollar. The US dollar is the reserve currency of the world, the backstop currency that citizens and banks around the world trust most. This puts the US in an extraordinarily advantageous economic and geopolitical position. We control the global financial system. We alone can freeze a terrorist’s assets on demand. We alone can borrow inexpensively precisely when other countries would face difficulty. This is an incredibly precious position, and one that we as a country should be careful not to lose.

However, these policy choices—even if right for America overall—have unfair distributive consequences at home. The US dollar’s status as the reserve currency of choice creates constant global demand for it. Because they’re always in high demand, our American dollars allow us to purchase goods from other countries cheaply, while their weaker currency makes it harder for them to buy goods from us. American consumers benefit from being able to buy cheap imported products, but American manufacturers pay the price by being forced to export products that may be too expensive to compete in the global market.

It would be a mistake to retreat from policies that expand the size of the overall economic pie, like ones favoring free trade or promoting research-driven American innovation. Global free trade allows each country to focus on where it has a competitive advantage, enriching all countries who capture the benefit of those efficiencies. American leadership in technological innovation is therefore good for America and the world: we’re able to focus on our competitive advantage in the knowledge economy, while supplying the fruits of those industries to consumers around the globe. America’s position on the global economic stage is strengthened, not weakened, by focusing most on our greatest relative strength compared to other nations.

We should be proud of our strength in innovative, knowledge-based industries. But we should also recognize that it comes at a cost, and that we’ve asked the manufacturing industry to bear too much of that cost by giving knowledge-based industries more favorable treatment to encourage their growth. We favor them, for instance, by using our strong patent system to protect intellectual labor, government support that amounts to a subsidy since it allows producers of ideas to make more money.

We focus more on regulating producers of goods than protecting them. We currently ask them to bear most of the costs of fighting climate change by placing strict environmental regulations on factories. Even if limiting climate change is worthwhile, society gets to choose who ends up paying for it. Just as having a strong dollar is a policy that benefits America as a whole at the expense of its manufacturers, environmental regulation benefits us all, but we once again ask manufacturers to shoulder the costs. Those costs ultimately fall on blue-collar workers who belong to physical industries that struggle more than more profitable, less-regulated knowledge-based ones.

So we should keep a strong dollar, a policy of free trade, and our growing focus on a knowledge economy. Those weren’t mistakes. At the same time, we have to recognize who bears the costs: American manufacturers and the workers they employ. This unfairness is amplified by the consequences of American technological innovation. While advances in automation have reduced the cost of producing goods (in ways that can be shared with the consumer in the form of lower prices), workers in the manufacturing sector face declining wages and job security.

Most workers in America’s manufacturing sector were taught by their parents’ generation that if you work hard and make your contributions, you’ll be rewarded eventually. It’s the promise of a Horatio Alger story. It may have been true a century ago, but the modern economy makes that promise a lie. While left-behind workers in the Rust Belt may not be able to articulate exactly why they’ve fared poorly despite doing their part, they certainly know it to be true. And they’re frustrated that the intellectual elites fail to recognize the consequences of their policy choices, even as those same elites are increasingly woke to other injustices that are decades or centuries past.

Our twenty-first-century economy has left American manufacturing workers behind, and our politicians and pundits say it’s wrong to recognize that fact. There’s always someone more deserving of help than white guys, no matter how destitute. They’re always the lowest priority. They watch their proud cities waste away into ghost towns as coastal elites tell them to apologize for their privilege.

If half of the battle is to recognize the problem, the other half is to give American manufacturers back what they’re owed. We need to do more to help blue-collar workers thrive in the world our policies have created instead of acting as if they’re the inevitable victims of progress. Maybe you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, but people deserve more; they’re not just means to an end, no matter how good the end. As a nation, we can’t take peoples’ livelihoods from them then just point to the rising GDP. Part of moving on from America’s various victimhood complexes involves making sure everyone’s got a fair chance to find their way back to their feet.

The right way to go isn’t to subsidize the manufacturing industry through tools like tariffs, which reduce the overall economic pie. Instead, we need to bring these displaced workers into the new economy and reward them for doing so in new ways—addressing the crisis of shortages in teachers, elder care workers, and other much-needed service-oriented jobs. We can start by radically overhauling our patchwork system of job-retraining programs, which is currently inefficient and ineffective.³⁸

To understand how to create a well-oiled job-retraining machine, we need to think about why so many Americans have left the workforce and stayed in increasingly desolate communities instead of pursuing the traditional options of relocating or retraining. Part of the answer is that it’s more difficult than it used to be to move to areas with higher wages thanks to increased land and zoning regulations. Studies suggest that even relatively modest housing deregulation would make housing in wealthy areas of the country much more accessible. Another part of the answer is that occupational licensing laws have proliferated in recent years—in the 1950s, 5 percent of all US workers had to meet a licensing requirement before practicing their trade. Today, 33 percent do. We need to make sure jobs with licensing requirements really need them to keep people safe. We can’t let the market alone determine who gets to be a doctor, but we can allow it to choose who gets to be a hairdresser.³⁹

Removing unnecessary regulations that prevent workers from finding new careers will help, and we should pick that low-hanging fruit, but in the end we will have to rethink how our country educates people in order to make it easier to reeducate them. These days, a college degree is more necessary than ever to get a job in virtually any industry. Manufacturing workers who dropped out of college decades ago and find themselves unemployed today are reluctant to spend several years as a middle-aged college student. They fear that they’ll spend time and money in school only to see younger graduates hired instead.

These are reasonable fears, and to assuage them we’ll have to take up the difficult task of reshaping America’s colleges. That’s something we have to do anyway as part of rededicating ourselves to a merit-based culture. I take that task up in the next part of the book.

The Missing Shade of Red

I became a conservative in sixth grade. That’s a little young to be getting into politics. It was my dad’s fault. He might not appreciate taking the blame, since he’s liberal. We can say it was Jack Welch’s fault, then.

Jack Welch was a guy I heard a lot about growing up, a guy who seemed to have a lot of control over my family’s destiny, although he knew nothing about us. He was the CEO of General Electric, where my dad had worked as an engineer for twenty years. Welch turned GE’s share price into a one-way rocket ship, a fact that made him beloved among shareholders. But his employees felt more fear than love. Jack Welch was legendarily good at cutting costs. He didn’t really take a chiseled approach; he preferred the chain saw.

I remember one night my dad came home and told my mom what they’d said to him at work that day. “Look to your left, look to your right. After the layoffs, only one of you will be left here.” It was a scary proposition. We were a comfortably middle-class family with two incomes, but the threat of layoffs hung over our head after that, a sword of Damocles that would change our lives in an instant whenever it finally fell. Both parents worked harder, and, like Jack Welch, we cut costs wherever we could. My mom no longer had time to drive me to basketball games and my brother to soccer, so she switched us both to tennis.

Meanwhile, my dad tried to make himself indispensable. He heard there was a shortage of patent attorneys at GE, so he found a company program that would pay for him to pursue a degree in law through taking night classes. But that meant my dad had to work a full-time job while also going to law school at night, in addition to finding time to do the copious reading. On top of all that, he had to do an extra hour-and-a-half commute to school each night.

Since both my parents were working more, my brother and I usually tagged along with one or the other. My mom was a geriatric psychiatrist, so I ended spending a lot of time at nursing homes during her extra hours. I’d do my piano practice there, which became a hit with the patients. The Alzheimer’s patients especially loved listening to me practice. My time playing for them inspired me to pursue a therapy for Alzheimer’s as my first major project at Roivant, although it wasn’t meant to be.

On other days, it was my dad who took me in the car with him on his long drive to his law classes. I’d sit in the back of the classroom while my dad sat closer to the front. I remember my surprise at how actively my dad participated, and the fact that I was so proud of him for doing it, while at the same time being ever so slightly embarrassed at his thick Indian accent. I didn’t really follow much of those exchanges, but my dad would explain the gist of them during the long ride home late at night, and I’d mull it over as I looked out at the stars.

He got most animated when discussing two guys in particular—Clarence Thomas and, above all, my dad’s arch-nemesis Antonin Scalia. My dad loved complaining about them. I quietly wondered how much he actually detested them, since those were the only opinions he ever made me read. I had no idea who Scalia was, but I decided that if he was so important in my dad’s mind, he must’ve been a pretty cool guy. I slowly started making whatever argument was the opposite of my dad. Typical preteen move. So I became a conservative because I was a bratty kid taking Scalia’s side against my dad.

That’s the cute little story I give in interviews, at least. There’s a kernel of truth to it. But, looking back on it, the financial insecurity my family faced and watching my parents do whatever they could to fight it played at least as big a role as those Scalia opinions. A bigshot CEO had casually made us live under the constant threat of layoffs, but those days watching my mom put in extra hours at the nursing homes, those nights watching my dad take on law school… it convinced me that our destiny was in our own hands, that our fate wasn’t ultimately up to other people. Other people may get the opening move, but hard work and the choices we make determine victory. That’s what being a conservative always meant to me.

Once I looked past the standard story I usually tell, I realized that there were other moments during that time that pushed me toward the conservative worldview.

In sixth grade I’d had a teacher, Mr. B, who had a real bone to pick with me for some reason I couldn’t explain. I’d get bad grades on assignments where I’d obviously done nothing wrong. After my parents got home from a conference with him, it turned out the problem had something to do with race; he kept telling them they focused too much on math and science and closed the conversation with a lecture starting “This is what’s wrong with you people.” To tell the truth, I thought they did spend too much time making me take torturous supplemental math tutoring, but that still didn’t explain the bad grades. The upshot of it all was that my parents transferred me to a different school, where I spent some time being bullied for being the new kid.

The bullying took a darker turn once I got into high school, where most of the kids were bigger than me, partly because many of them had been held back a grade or two. When I was in eighth grade, I was making my way in a rush from one class to another, dutifully carrying my large stack of books as I always did, when I approached a staircase. That’s when a big black kid thought it would be amusing to push a nerdy high-achieving Indian kid down the stairs. Whether our races were relevant, I don’t know, but I’ve learned that others think it’s part of these stories. It was a traumatic incident physically—I ended up having hip surgery later that year. Middle school had taught me to stand up to social bullying, but the moment I learned to do that, it was physical force that confined me. No more basketball or tennis for a long while.

So it’s true that I became a conservative during middle school, in those years when I took long car rides to and from law school with my dad. But it wasn’t just the conversations with my dad that did it. It was also everything else that was going on in my life at the same time.

I didn’t select conservatism from an intellectual menu of options. It started as the emotional choice of a teenager. Part of it was the emotive choice to stand up to my dad. But part of it was also a psychological defense mechanism for a thirteen-year-old who was drawn to a worldview—and even an identity—that centered on self-reliance rather than dependence. A teenager who didn’t want to be weak, even though he sometimes was. A teenager who didn’t want his family to feel vulnerable, even though they sometimes were. My path to conservatism was an emotional choice first, a reasoned one second. Though I have some trouble admitting it to myself, it was, at its core, a psychological defense mechanism against being victimized myself at a vulnerable time. By Mr. B. By the kids in middle school. By the black kid who pushed me down the stairs. By the white guy that might have fired my dad.

Psychologists say that people don’t arrive at their moral beliefs through reason, but through emotions, and they just use reasons to justify those emotions.⁴⁰ I buy that. I’d like to think I’m an exception to that rule, but I’m probably not. My own journey to becoming a conservative traversed the path of, I guess, victimhood. Maybe that’s why I so badly want conservatism itself to become the path of deliverance from it.

That’s why I take it personally when I see conservatism becoming just another brand of victimhood. It feels like a betrayal. To me, conservatism always stood for the idea that you’re responsible for your own life, but everywhere I look these days, I see conservatives blaming other people for their problems. We preach personal responsibility, but we no longer take it.

It reminds me of the illusion I experience whenever I look at the sky from my backyard on a rare clear night. I see countless stars and believe that they exist just because I see them—even though they may not, because a faraway star burns out long before its light stops traveling across the galaxy to reach Earth. Like I read somewhere, all we ever see of stars are their old photographs.

I call myself a conservative, and I still feel like one at my core. But maybe I’m just basking in old light from a star I first saw when I was in sixth grade. Like all dead stars, there’s now a black hole left in its wake, devoid of meaning, devoid of content, pulling people in with the gravitational force of grievance and then trapping them in victimhood’s grasp. Unlike stars, though, ideologies can be reignited.

One of David Hume’s famous thought experiments is called “the missing shade of blue.” Hume was a die-hard empiricist who thought you could only imagine ideas that were based directly on sensations you’d experienced. One counterexample bothered him: if he saw a spectrum of shades of blue, from light to dark, but one shade in the middle was missing, Hume was certain he could imagine exactly what the missing shade of blue looked like, even though he’d never seen it before.

What haunted Hume can save me and other conservatives who feel lost these days and wonder what the Republican Party stands for. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to imagine the missing shade of red. I look to the past, and I see all these different shades of conservatism that influenced me: Scalia’s dogged originalism, Reagan’s resistance to government regulation, Trump’s insistence in American greatness. But when I look at modern conservatism, there is only a void, an absence of content covered with the thin veneer of victimhood. When I listen to conservative pundits and politicians, they offer only grievances, not meaning. They define conservatism only as the negation of liberalism, which is no definition at all. There is nothing in my experience that tells me what it really means to be a conservative these days.

But maybe Hume was right. Maybe we can imagine the missing shade of red even if we’ve never seen it before, even if no one’s ever seen it before. We have to look to the past, to all the shades of conservatism we have seen, and find a way to extend them into the present. Even when I don’t say it, that’s the way I think of much of my writing on America. I’m searching for the missing shade of red.