A good adaptation of a book of substance can bring to mind what we have in common with, for example, the aristocracy into which Tolstoy was born, which he ruthlessly exposed in his masterpiece. In the U.S., we, too, emulate and indulge a minute percentage of the super wealthy elite whose combined income exceeds that of 90% of other Americans altogether. Sitting in our middle class living rooms and bedrooms, watching a gala like the Golden Globes on television, we might as well be serfs. A useful point of reference: Pierre, the character we are meant to care most about in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” owns 40,000 of them.

Yet Pierre, like his peers Andrei and Nikolai, is obsessed with a problem endemic to those at the top of the lopsided pyramid in which Americans also live: They are young men who cannot decide what to do with their lives. Andrei, like many men at the ball, assumes it is enough for women to concern themselves with arranging social gatherings, marrying their daughters off, raising families, and in some cases handling the religious obligations in the family unit, like his sister, Maria. Her brother Andrei would like to have bigger fish to fry, but the only route open except indolence, in his own eyes and in the narrow vision of those surrounding him in “War and Peace,” is gaining renown by going to war and winning military honor.

When a work of art, like this more than decent adaptation of “War and Peace,” draws
us into its world, it inevitably makes us think about our own. In the U.S., we have often elected the scion of a wealthy family for president, FDR and JFK, to name only two. They may have had nothing better to do, but as Democrats, they thought of the presidency as a way to improve the lives of all Americans.

We had Mitt Romney, the scion of a wealthy family, running for president on the Republican ticket in 2012; and in 2016, it looks like we are going to have another one, Donald Trump. Unlike FDR and JFK, however, these rich men with nothing to do run for the presidency out of a sense of entitlement. They feel they are entitled to add the presidency of the United States to their trophy cabinets. Once elected, however, it is apparent that their main idea is to go to war and otherwise rule in a dictatorial fashion.

I can understand better why these scions of the wealthy families of America appeal to their peers, who wish to dabble in politics with their billions, than I understand the Republican base that so lionizes them. Our Republican base in the U.S. is comprised of a class, like the serfs of Russia prior to the Russian Revolution, millions of people who will slavishly vote (well, serfs served: they did not vote) for someone whose motives and values they do not understand in the least and whose policies will actually do them harm. One of the few ways to climb out of the lowest strata of society in the U.S. is to join the military. Another way is to win the lottery: 35% of Americans think that is the only way to become wealthy. Perhaps these largely poor, vulnerable voters in the Republican base imagine Donald Trump or Mitt Romney would behave just as they would if they were rich, but in this fantasy they are wrong.

It is the lesson of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” that those who are obliged to work for a living will never understand the decadence and indolence, the self-entitlement and narcissism of a man (or woman) like Romney or Trump—willing to send the sons and daughters of the 90% to fight an unnecessary or unwinnable war just so he will have something to do.

Of course, young men with nothing better to do is a definition of ISIS in our era as well. In “War and Peace,” the same men who fuel the drunken debauches led by Anatole and his kind end up on the battlefield putting their penchant for mayhem to good use, whether they fight for the French or the Russian cause–which is, in each case, the glory one man has convinced others he is entitled to.