The ‘Ins’ and ‘Outs’ of American Politics

T his week’s State of the Union address highlighted divisions in American politics — just not the divisions typically highlighted. “These people are crazy,” Donald Trump matter-of-factly told America of the Democrats who stoically sat as he told the story of a family reunion after a judge ordered the removal of a 14-year-old girl from her parents when they refused to call her a boy. When not inappropriately silent, Democrats attempted to shout down the president. Two — Representative Al Green and a guest of Representative Ilhan Omar — were ejected from the House chamber. Senator Mark Warner and some others walked out. The smarter ones boycotted the address entirely.

Commentators on both the left and right saw “two Americas” in the Capitol. Seventy-three years ago, Austrian journalist Willi Schlamm — who’d been a communist at age 16 when he met Vladimir Lenin but later became a virulent anti-communist and anti-Nazi — described the dichotomy on display Tuesday with even greater precision.

Schlamm saw no distinctions of class, education, religion, ethnicity, or even party when he looked at what really divided people. Instead, he gazed upon a world of “ins” and “outs.”

The combative yet thin-skinned Schlamm, who became an American citizen during the Second World War, knew himself well enough to understand that he did not fit in with the in-crowd despite finding a place in Henry Luce’s media empire during the 1940s. Neither does Donald Trump, despite his status as a billionaire who for decades pushed his face without resistance onto gossip pages, book covers, television sets, and movie screens. The people he represents amount to the ultimate “outs.”

Donald Trump serves as the president of the Disunited Outs of America. They agree on one thing: The “ins” neither like nor respect them.

“Now the ‘ins’ are people who would rather die than be ‘out of step’; though they may, of course, have different opinions on this subject or that, they are fully interchangeable,” Schlamm wrote publisher Henry Regnery on May 5, 1953.

He offered Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, and their Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, as examples of such Tweedledee-Tweedledum-ism. Apart from this interchangeability and compulsion for conformity, the “ins” subscribe to an optimism that believes that every problem can be “fixed.”

Schlamm was at once a part of and apart from the intellectual zeitgeist that regarded postwar America as frustratingly conformist. His sociological theory resembled a model offered in 1950’s The Lonely Crowd — explaining that society has shifted from being one of “inner-directed” individuals (guided by an internal compass) to one of “other-directed” individuals (driven more by the opinions of others). It also anticipated William Whyte’s The Organization Man, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes.” Schlamm, characteristically an “out” himself, broke from the homogeneity of those criticizing American homogeneity. He rejected both major political parties and concluded that no American magazine in existence served as a vehicle for the “outs.”

Schlamm characterized the “outs” as people who not only “despise” power but “dread” it. Thus, they show themselves to be largely incapable of exercising it. The former sentence does not quite apply to Donald Trump; the latter explains much. They both more or less describe his most dedicated supporters.

“The ‘outs’ indeed have ‘the apocalyptical hunch,’ a respectful notion that there is an end as surely as there is a beginning, an organic reverence for the grown rather than the manufactured, the private rather than the public, the small rather than the big, the old rather than the new, the beautiful rather than the strong,” Schlamm explained to Regnery.

Schlamm neither despised the “ins” nor regarded the “outs” as superfluous or anachronistic. The world needed both. But in 1953, he felt as though a crusade to drive the “outs” to extinction had nearly reached its terminus. He told Regnery, “Our world is about to burst because the ‘outs’ have been virtually suffocated.”

But — and Schlamm did not recognize this — the more the “ins” kick sand in the faces of the “outs,” the more determined the “outs” grow to fight back and become, if not the “ins,” then at least the group in power. Schlamm explained to Regnery that, tautologically, “The ‘outs’ can never get in.” The elections of 2016 and 2024 seem to upend Schlamm’s sociological theory. That they coincided with a time in which many “ins” exerted maximum anathematization on the “outs” suggested that a breaking point exists in which the “outs” see no other way than to seize the means of power from the “ins.”

In 1953, with conservatives just emerging from the Roosevelt–Truman rout of the previous two decades, Schlamm’s mild ambition for the “outs” involved not electing a president but starting a publication. He counseled Regnery that the “outs” ought to commit to “rally the dispersed, the isolated, the silent, the disgusted” through a magazine.

“You need a much more literary, much more philosophical, much more fundamental, much more radical, much more formidable journal than ‘Human Events’ can ever be,” he advised Regnery regarding the prospect of revamping that newsletter into a full-fledged magazine. “Yours must sing and dance and enthuse; it must have the scope (and the size) to create a climate of its own — the only liveable climate for the forlorn ‘outs.’”

That magazine for the “outs” emerged 30 months later. It was National Review.