Naturally the rise of Trump, the 2016 election, and questions of causality come to mind. Was it the “brahminization" of liberals then—or the 2008 crash or Iraq war that I have made much ado about— that brought us Trump? 1. No. 2. But yes, sort of, indirectly. 3. Regardless of Trump and electoral outcomes, there are other reasons we should care about these trends, namely human lives and well-being.
1. No. I am not saying that Democrats’ or liberals’ moving away from the working class is the reason Donald Trump won in 2016. I am not saying if only Hilary had campaigned in working-class Wisconsin. Or, if only Bernie had been the nominee (I’m not sure he would have won, by the way). Or, if only we had taken up “class war” we would not have gotten beat by the “culture war.” Or, if only we (or any society) had had some economic fairness that would have inoculated us from any bad idea, violence, or cult leader. Or if only the Democrats had pushed free-college-for-all that that would have dried up all the white grievance out there. Or, if only those Proud Boys had Medicare-for-all they wouldn’t have stormed the Capitol. Nor am I claiming that diehard Trumpers yelling voter fraud have coherent analyses of NAFTA and the WTO on their mind when they occasionally storm the Capitol. That mythical left-behind, white-working-class, economically anxious voter story has been overplayed. For one, all types of white--upper, middle, working, educated, uneducated, men, women, Catholic, Protestant--voted for Donald Trump in 2016 (and 2020). Two, much of the working class comprises people of color who have experienced decline and/or impoverishment even worse than their white counterparts--as racist structures exacerbate classist structures--and most of them did not vote for Trump in 2016 (although in 2020, Trump did shave off a few of their votes, which merits further inquiry). Furthermore, Trump’s election and Trumpism more broadly have roots deeper than the past fifty years’ deindustrialization: e.g. the electoral college and other counter-majoritarian fundamentals in the Constitution; white supremacy and anti-black racism; nativism; war fever and jingoism; settler colonialism, “manifest destiny,” imperialism, and resource expropriation; corruption, hucksterism, bravado, and lying. And so, I hesitate to draw any simple lines of causation regarding the 2016 election.
(In his recent piece “Backlash Forever” for Dissent, historian Gabriel Winant focuses on the famous “hardhat riot” of 1970, where building trades union members (a historical and potential left/Democrat constituency) beat up anti-Vietnam war protestors (a left constituency) in New York City. Someone like Chuck Schumer, looking back, saw that the Democrats had become too radical and that was why white ethnic communities eventually became the “Reagan Democrats.” A leftist, on the other hand, might argue that if only class analysis had been kept front and center--the New Left of the 60s shed some of the class analysis from the 1930s --then that coalition of the building trades union folks and anti-war protestors might have held together. Winant reminds us that history includes all types of contingencies and that no constituency is bound to vote one way or another, or move one way or another. An aggrieved (white) working class does not necessarily have to run into the arms of Reaganism or of fascism. So we can entertain counterfactuals--"what if we had only…?”--but we can’t predict other outcomes with any certitude.)
2.. But at the same time, yes, I believe that the liberal-assisted socio-economic rot helped make Trump possible. The landscape was ripe. “Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse,” writes economist Thomas Piketty, at the very beginning of his new book Capital and Ideology. Corporate dominance, malfeasance, and truth-bending predate our current age to be sure (and will continue after Trump to be sure), but corporations and their bought-off politicians have risen to much greater power the past several decades, and even more so since Citizens United. In 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page studied 1,799 policy issues and determined that “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." We all sadly have come to accept a certain garden variety of (legal) corruption in the system. But then the big crash happens—and no one is held accountable--and that deepens the sense that the deck is stacked, the game is rigged, which is true. The game is rigged. It deepens the sense, for many, that the Republicans and the Democrats, that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are the same, which is less true. They are not the same. I am not saying that Trump and his followers represent some coherent response to these ills. Trump, of course, is the embodiment, part-manufacturer, the beneficiary of these ills. And with Iraq, for instance, I don’t see direct causation. Trump had no consistent policy on Iraq (nor did he need to as he was debuting The Apprentice then). Die-hard Trump supporters, I presume, mostly supported the Iraq war, and so I don’t see them as angry that the nation was duped into it--maybe angry that they missed out on it? But what Iraq and the 2008 crash and subsequent bailouts hammered home was: only power and force matter, the truth does not matter, the rich and powerful can get away with anything, and our storied institutions are not that impressive. We are then left in a stark nihilism, which “is not a condition in which values disappear. It’s a condition in which values are toppled from their foundations” (says political scientist Wendy Brown paraphrasing Nietzche). Within this nihilist milieu, some people will organize for justice in spite of it. Some don’t see the absurdities and think the system is working just fine, maybe sheltered by their privilege, until they do see them and are surprised by them and then want to go back to “normal.” Some cynically advance their agenda on the waves of such nihilism all the while pretending this is normal. Some just check out because they see none of their actions mattering in the end. And, with “none of it mattering” and with such violent American roots as those mentioned above, some rally behind the biggest liar, corporate marauder, and bully out there. Unsurprisingly, in his four years, Trump oversaw even greater transfers of wealth from the working to the ruling class. He was the ultimate con man playing the ultimate con.
Trump did get many of us to talk seriously about fascism. Certainly, Trump was a grotesque mutation of our politics. That mutation and its logical culmination (for now) that stormed the Capitol should shock us. We should remain horrified. We must thoroughly condemn such fascistic trends and organize against them. However, we must note that Mussolini’s definition of fascism was "the moment when you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between political and corporate power." And so, by at least one definition, from the original fascist Il Duce himself, we had been flirting with fascism for some time, well before Trump. Or, to put it another way, we thus far have avoided classical totalitarianism, but we have been living under what political theorist Sheldon Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism" for some time:
Unlike the Nazis, who made life uncertain for the wealthy and privileged while providing social programs for the working class and poor, inverted totalitarianism exploits the poor, reducing or weakening health programs and social services, regimenting mass education for an insecure workforce threatened by the importation of low-wage workers. Employment in a high-tech, volatile, and globalized economy is normally as precarious as during an old-fashioned depression. The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement….Downsizing, reorganization, bubbles bursting, unions busted, quickly outdated skills, and transfer of jobs abroad create not just fear but an economy of fear, a system of control whose power feeds on uncertainty, yet a system that, according to its analysts, is eminently rational….[Instead of politics dominating economics as it does in classical totalitarianism] economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.
Tangentially, I do not presume all Trump voters, or conservatives in general, to necessarily be more racist than all liberals. For sure, Trump was a rabid racist espousing racist ideas and enacting racist policies, and his most rabid followers are racist and/or are willing to tolerate such racism in exchange for tax cuts or federal judgeships or other short-term political gains. But, racism as the cause is an unsatisfactory explanation, and in general, we should be wary of any monocausal explanations. I agree with Clinton administration-exile, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich who writes in The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It:
Racism and xenophobia were proximate causes of Trump’s 2016 victory and they continue to contribute to his support. But, racism was not and is not the underlying cause, however much the oligarchy may want Americans to believe that racism was responsible for Trump.
(A word on liberals’ own racism, later.)
3. Regardless of whether you agree with my second point--that liberals are to blame too for making Trump possible--I think widening inequality and liberals' role in that inequality is a worthy moral, existential, and material question, transcending (but including) presidential politics and electoral outcomes.
There have been similar liberal approaches to and reproaches of the other “populist” shock of 2016: Brexit. To be sure, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and the other “leave” mouthpieces used racism, jingoism, and outright lies in their appeals to voters, including working-class voters, to push their cynical agenda. In my opinion, I think the “leave” campaign and vote was wrong-headed. I would have voted “remain” if it were up to me. I am for more international cooperation. I believe our species’ survival requires international, cross-border cooperation. In theory and in rough practice, I am for a “European union.” For a united nations. However, while there were some social democratic and peacemaking impulses in the slow build-up to what would become the EU (described at length, compellingly, in Tony Judt’s Postwar, for instance) and while the EU is much more egalitarian than the US, we should not pretend that it is just a little, equitable, cosmopolitan, peace-and-love-and-kumbaya model of democracy. The same cross-border investor-to-investor, capital-mandated, bank-driven order--with a capital-serving monetary policy--that dominates the US and the globe dominates the EU. Workers, for sure, have much more security in the EU than in the US and other parts of the globe; Britain and its workers have much more muscle than most other countries and workers, who would have had more legitimate complaints against the EU than Britain; and the Brexiteers do not represent a coherent response to the EU’s capital-labor power imbalances. But, I believe painting all "leave" voters as just racist brutes is self-serving and misses some of the point. And, it will continue to miss the point in the future if the status quo is left untouched or, as has been the liberal response to Brexit, reflexively worshipped. Valid arguments (including left arguments) against the EU must be taken into account as people try to hold together or reconstruct some type of European union.
The same incredulous reaction by the international, liberal, center/center-left establishment toward Trump and Brexit--that obtusely asks “How could this have happened?”--treats its left flank with the same incredulity. And often with the same disdain. Thomas Friedman set the record straight in 2016 when he said that it was no longer “Democrats vs. Republicans.” It was “Web People vs. Wall People." In predictable fashion, Friedman put Bernie Sanders supporters in the same category not only as his ‘99 Seattle protesters but also with Trump loyalists. They are the wall people. To use a term that has been grossly over- and misused, “They’re all populists.” “Right wing populist” or “left wing populist”—populist is the term used to brand them all.
The actual Populists, however, emerged in the late 1800s as a movement of mostly farmers and some urban workers to challenge the corrupt monopolistic railroads companies, banks, bonanza absentee “farmers,” and unchecked corporate power in the first Gilded Age. They would eventually challenge, too, the unchecked and indifferent power of the two major political parties. “Populist” was a name they gave themselves, endearingly, not pejoratively like how today’s intelligentsia uses the term. Some decades later, in the middle of the 20th century, as a new professional academic class reigned, historians like Richard Hofstadter helped turn populism into a dirty word in works such as The Age of Reform and “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” And so, the populists of the 1890s--and by extension, the New Deal coalition populists of the 1930s and the populists of Hofstadter’s day--came to be seen as anti-elite, anti-intellectual, backwards, racist, nativist. The same for today’s populists. We liberals thus are able to reduce all their rabble-rousing to psychology, to pathology.
Yes, William Jennings Bryan, who carried the national populist mantle in the 1896 presidential election (within the Democratic party), would go on to argue the wrong side in the Scopes monkey trial and say many other stupid things in his career. Yes, Thomas Watson, who originally helped build a cross-racial coalition of farmers, would go on to become an infamous racist. Yes, there were some anti-Semites and nativists in the populist lot. But, these caricatures along with Hofstadter’s official history have obscured the larger, on-the-whole positive legacy of the original populists. These negative connotations and general misuse of the term (by all, including leftists) prevail in today’s mainstream discourse, as historian Thomas Frank details in his latest book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. Yes, the populists of the late 1800s were anti-elitist, but the elites of both parties had their boots on poor people’s necks. The populists, yes, were often anti-intellectual, but professional political economists advocated for the gold standard, for instance, i.e. a serve-the-rich monetary policy that held the day until 1933. Official academic agrarians pushed for more mechanization and only greater crop yields in the name of profits (soil and families be damned). The most prominent social scientists of the day promoted bogus race science that justified the racist social order. Anti-black racism, anti-Semitism, and nativism were very prevalent among most elites, too. Populist platforms of the 1890s meanwhile included: the direct popular election of US senators, the use of initiatives and referendums, an end to the gold standard, a graduated income tax, public ownership of the railroads, public ownership of the telegraph and telephone lines, and an eight-hour workday for factory workers. These ideas were not taken seriously by Republican and Democratic elites at the turn of the century. Especially after northern Republicans had abandoned reconstruction, there were few substantial differences between the two parties.
Even with how US history is taught today, there is often either contempt for or condescension towards the populists, towards those working people. Textbooks downplay or dismiss the working-class populists and then laud the middle-to-upper-class enlightened “Progressives” who followed. The progressives did much good, yes, but their legislative victories were made possible by the earlier organizational, movement work of populists and labor unions. Also, white middle-class progressives were not devoid of their own race and class prejudices. And so, while populism was not without its contradictions, racial or otherwise, it was much more integrationist than other movements, than other parties, than much of the rest of society. Black populists joined white coalitions, but they also represented a force unto themselves, as detailed in Omar Ali’s In the Lion’s Mouth, for instance.
If this were only semantics or just a know-it-all history teacher’s “Actually, did you know...” correction over the term “populist,” it would not be worth discussing. But it is more than semantics. These forged negative connotations and this conflation of all “populists” right and left--and their subsequent dismissal--is power in action. It is a power over not only the historical narrative but also over our current discourse. It is a power that dismisses any criticism and that can shut down, sometimes violently, any calls for change.
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