By Kevin D. Williamson
Summers also seems to get the Democratic political moment—which is, I assume, why he gives no indication that he is running for anything. The Democrats have invested far too heavily in an increasingly narrow and exclusive (exclusive being the last thing you want to be if you’re running for office) model of identity politics and, as Summers observes, in the politics of envy. He insists on the unfashionable truth that the phenomena that made billionaires of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos were, on the whole, better for the people of the United States, who also were enriched by the businesses those men built and the innovations they brought to market. That the Democrats are so focused on economic resentment rather than economic aspiration is particularly bananas at this particular juncture in political history, when their party, once dominated by farmers and blue-collar workers, has overtaken the Republicans as the Alex P. Keaton party—the natural political home of educated, affluent, upwardly mobile urban and suburban professionals.