Initiating a new social contract.

• Position: American Thought

"... We live in a 'post-truth world,' where only personal opinion matters and objective fact have been replaced with 'narratives.'"

DOES ANYONE remember The Social Contract written by 17th-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, which underlies the legitimacy of governments, including our own. Noting that Rousseau treats compact and contract as synonyms, he states that "... Instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right." He adds: "Under bad governments, this equality is only apparent and illusory.... The social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too much."

It is this inequality, which has grown enormously over the last 40 years, that underlies the current unrest in our country. Rousseau was writing primarily about wealth but, today, one also must include the inequality in education, medical care, and the well being that wealth brings.

The media has chosen to call the unrest that led to the election of Donald Trump "populism," with its decidedly negative leftwing connotation in the U.S., but Trump has company: Marine Le Pen (who heads France's National Front), Silvio Berusconi (the media mogul and former prime minister of Italy), and others around the world are on the rise, and they are anything but left wing. Even Deutschland has its Alternative for Germany party. Michael Muller, the center-left social democratic mayor of Berlin, has said that its ascent would be interpreted by the rest of the world as a "return of the right and the Nazis in Germany."

In the U.S., we have the Alt-Right. In August 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called it a new label for white supremacy, leading Richard Spencer, who directs the National Policy Institute, to claim, according to The New York Times, that the days after the Clinton speech were "the greatest week we ever had." Spencer maintains that "Race is real; race matters; and race is the foundation of identity." His group was a strong supporter of Pres.-elect Trump. Should the Alt-Right be classified as part of the new populism?

However you define it, populism in the U.S., as put by Wolfgang Munchau in the Financial Times, is a reaction to "an out-of-control financial sector, uncontrolled...