flanked at a horseshoe rangment of tables by the vice presidents of major japanese corporations. tensions were particularly high with japan s nuclear-armed neighbor north korea so i expected their questions to be about that. instead they asked what had happened that summer in charlottesville, virginia. who were these people marching through the streets? why had trump said there were good people on both sides? what they were really asking, i sensed, was a more fundamental question. is that you? is that america? i offered the usual explanations for the 2016 election, the combination of the criticisms of the clinton campaign, the news media, the bizarre twists that came together to elevate trump. the fact that there had been no massive shift in public opinion to the right but rather a radicalization on the right. i watched them listen skeptically. these men lived in cold reality. numbers on the balance sheet. they couldn t indulge an america that was experimenting with insanity. their ent
they couldn t indulge an america that was experimenting with insanity. their entire lives had been shaped by american power. we provided for japan s defense and nuclear deterrent. we implicitly steered its foreign policy. we wrote the rules of global capitalism that had allowed them to thrive. we developed the technologies that were reshaping how their companies managed information. we shaped the culture of international business that led us to be sitting there wearing business suits in a hotel conference room that could have been anywhere. they could tolerate acts of temporary insanity the invasion of iraq, for instance. they could weather the results of our excesses, the financial crisis, for instance. but they could not gamble on a country that had elevated someone like trump, who praised fascists marching in the streets and steered the national discourse into the depths of conspiracy theory. that was more dangerous than north korea, and nothing i could say was going to convince t