American politics is awfully confusing these days.
You’ve got pundits like Tucker Carlson, pretending to be conservatives yet criticizing President Trump’s policies, siding with Iran, and fawning over Vladimir Putin.
You’ve got newspapers like the New York Times, pretending to be progressive yet celebrating Hitler-loving creeps like Nick Fuentes.
What’s going on?
To figure it out, forget the old and irrelevant distinctions between left and right, or between Republicans and Democrats.
The only fault line that matters these days is between resentment and resilience.
On one side are those who blame everything on everyone else.
Can’t land the sort of high-paying job you’re convinced you deserve? Feeling priced out of the tony Brooklyn neighborhood you’d love to call home?
No worries! It’s not your fault for not being smart enough, or not working hard enough, or failing to understand that a four-bedroom apartment on a tree-lined street right off Prospect Park isn’t a universal human right.
There’s nothing you can do, goes the gospel of resentment, because you don’t really have any agency at all.
The game is rigged, and you’re not in control of your destiny.
You are, as Bob Dylan once neatly put it, only a pawn in their game, the “they” being the dastardly billionaires who must be crushed for the rest of us to breathe free.
This whiny, supine, and fundamentally un-American way of thinking gave us Zohran Mamdani, whose ideas revolve around the magical solution of making everything free somehow.
It also gave us Fuentes, whose preoccupations are just the same but whose prescriptions are much darker and more ruinous.
These two young men may claim different ideological affiliations, but they’ve much more in common than they’d like to admit — including support for the Palestinians, world champions at blaming everyone but themselves for their terrible choices.
Both believe America is rotten and unfair, and that the only way to fix it is to burn it all down first and worry about the rest later.
On the other side of this divide are resilient folks who have very little time and patience for the language and logic of victimhood.
They know we have problems, but they also understand that this is America, and the one key feature of this great and godly country is that it gives everyone a fair shot.
Don’t like the way your employer is practicing partisan politics rather than journalism? Quit, start your own publication, and if you’re good enough (hey there, Bari Weiss!), you’ll soon have a much more valuable media company on your hands.
Have a decent idea and the skill to pull it off? Build something worthwhile (here’s looking at you, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum!) and, who knows, you might just sell it for tens of billions of dollars one day.
If you think these are just exceptions to the rule, fairy tales that have little to teach us about real life in real America, take a quick look at the stats: Adjusting for both inflation and changes in household size, the median income in America has soared by 40% since 1970, reaching a historical peak of $83,730 in 2023.
Which, put bluntly, means that, all yowling about affordability aside, things in America are looking kind of rosy.
But don’t bother America’s spiteful sore losers with such good tidings.
While the resilience crowd focuses on building — strong families, thriving communities, and successful companies — the resentment crowd harbors dark fantasies about punishing their enemies and rewards any blowhard who promises to make the guilty pay.
One side believes that you deserve everything and must work for nothing; the other, that you deserve nothing and must work for everything.
Which side will win? To answer the question, grab a book of American history and turn it to just about any page.
This nation had known its fair share of shadowy figures who were experts at playing the blame game.
From Father Coughlin to Louis Farrakhan, we’ve had no dearth of demagogues who rose by telling their followers that their lives, their liberty, and their happiness had all been stolen by nefarious others, usually the Jews.
These villains have all vanished from the limelight because America, bless it, was founded on sturdier principles.
America’s first millionaire, Benjamin Franklin, captured them best.
“I find that the harder I work,” he reportedly quipped, “the more luck I seem to have.”
Remember that the next time some bitter bum tells you his misfortune is all your fault.