Head Scratching.
A lot of us are still scratching our heads. What, really, happened to bring about the unnatural disaster that the U.S. election 2016 is? How did Donald Trump get to be President of the United States? It’s hard not to keep worrying at it, like an irritating itch. So, one more time: Here’s some concluding thoughts that venture into some of the foggier bottomlands of American politics.
Why Are People Angry? One Big Picture View.
First, one big picture view of the problem. Trump is a climax of sorts, of the neoliberal craziness that began to worm its way into the center of our political and economic life with Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. That anti-government, privatize everything mindset continues to wreak incalculable damage in the Anglo-American world. With the economic collapse of 2008 and its aftermath, disastrously rising inequality, and now Brexit in Britain and Trump in the U.S., the chickens are coming home to roost.
Among other things, under the reign of neoliberalism in our politics special interests “captured” the establishments of both mainstream political parties. People are getting it. And they’re mad.
Political campaigns in our current system need a great deal of money to win. Under current law, big corporations and the wealthy families who control them can front that money. In the name of “free speech,” moneyed interests enjoy undue—and undemocratic—influence.
That makes both Republican and Democratic establishments even more beholden to big business and wealthy contributors. The neoliberal mindset that informs both party establishments’ economic and trade policies reflects their dependence on wealthy interests who disproportionately benefit from those policies. This especially disappoints and angers traditionally Democratic voters who look to the their party to represent working families trying to make ends meet.
In the pain and chaos neoliberal experiments leave in their wake, people become yet more vulnerable to demagogues preaching even more extreme versions of the same failed ideas. That’s the simple story, and the irony, of the 2016 U.S. election. But things are more complicated (they always are), so let’s consider more closely those people who voted for Trump and their various reasons why they did.
But Who? Who Voted for Trump?
It’s become a cliché: People who voted for Trump want change. They’ve been left behind by the forces of global capitalism—by the outsourcing of jobs, by automation. They’re being squeezed, pushed down, by the “inevitable” concentration of wealth and growing inequality. They can’t any longer see a better life ahead for their children. They’re angry. And because they’re angry they buy into Trump’s populist rhetoric. They hope beyond hope that he will somehow address the very real problems in America that they sense and feel in their gut more than understand.
There is truth in that caricature, and it’s truth that we all need to pay attention to. They believed Trump when he said he would bring back a better America that they’re losing. We can all relate to that desire, even if we don’t think that Trump is the answer to their prayers. But they aren’t the whole picture.
If some voters, however deludedly, hope that Trump will set right real national problems in our society and economy that directly affect them, others just want to strike out, shake things up. Trump channels anger, and he drew people out to vote their rage. Trump channels fear and hatred of others, and his promises to build walls drew people out to vote their fear.
Yet others consciously voted for Trump as an “agent of chaos” who would “burn down democracy,” who would dismantle our established institutions of effective government. Looking at Trump’s early appointments and actions, this may be the group that’s most closely getting what they want. And then there are the “alt-righters” who want to reel history backward beyond political correctness, feminism, the sixties, and even farther back to an old-new “age where men will be real men again, and women will be really grateful.” This ‘dark enlightenment,'” writes Laurie Penny, “rumbles alongside a massive revival in millenarian end-times fanaticism among the Evangelical Christians who overwhelmingly voted for a man some of them believe is the literal antichrist who will hasten the final return of Jesus and his arse-kicking angels to sweep the righteous to their reward.”
Those believers voted for a climax of evil out of which they think must arise an age (for them, but not for me) of endless bliss. Not very Christian of them, was it?
Yet others more cynical, smarter, lighter on their feet, and perhaps with large resources already, count on being able to cash in on the chaos. “Disaster Capitalism” at its best. Not very patriotic of them, though, is it?
The Sickness in American Civil Life.
Until now it was easier to dismiss the crazies and the evilly venal. They’re always with us, but thankfully usually more on the fringes and under rocks. This time, however, Trump not only pulled them out into the center of our public life but also drew many other more ordinary Americans into the same orbit. A range of Trump voters extends from duped to devilish. That that range has grown wide enough to actually elect Donald Trump President of the United States speaks to a spreading sickness in American civil life.
It’s a Paradox
Of course, in the real world Trump will make all the problems driving the turbulent, frothy tide of anger and despair that washed him into the White House incomparably worse. He is the ultimate agent of those special interests who have been working overtime to sell America down the river.
Trump himself symbolizes inequality. He parades his outsized wealth and publicly exhibits some of the worst, crassest, character structures and outlooks that can be associated with it. He does not represent the strong values that make Americans proud. He openly lies and cheats and gropes women. He’s friends with Russia’s Putin (of all people!), whose hackers meddled in our election to get Trump elected. And now his cabinet picks have ties to Russian oligarchs. All this was (and is) on the daily news, and broadcast around the world. The only positive value Trump represents is the one he publicly flaunts: economic success.
But even beyond all that, he’s poised to lead us in the same wrong direction as we’ve been going, that brought about the very problems that Trump voters want fixed. How does all that make sense?
There’s Even More to the Story
Selling Out Democracy
We should scratch our heads again. What made so many Americans vulnerable to Trump’s twisted message? There has to be yet more to the story. Many hurt financially, as we’ve said, and the financial crisis of 2008 made worse for a lot of families. Media corporations that gorge on public controversy have been whipping up partisan frenzy. The commercialization of everything running rampant over the last several decades leaves individuals and families feeling disconnected and vulnerable.
Partisan warriors who ideologically hate government found a home in the Republican Party and gained control of government. To the best of their abilities they’ve been dismantling and crippling government programs that help people, and selling off the remains under the banner of “privatization.” But the “free market” that our democratic government is being sold into isn’t really free, and it hasn’t been working well for most people.
However inarticulately, on both the right and the left ordinary good people realized that their “representative government” no long represents them. They felt that the American government no longer represents AMERICA—America in the big sense: the America of freedom, of equality of opportunity, of liberty and justice for all.
Of course, that America never really existed, but we’ve been working on it; we’ve kept much of the dream alive; we’ve even made some progress: abolished slavery, gained more equal rights for women, established social safety nets however weak and tattered, instituted protections for vulnerable women and children, guarded the foundations of free speech and religious freedom.
But that America—the values it stands for, the principles written into its Constitution—is being sold down the river. And beyond their partisan differences, both parties are to blame. Voters figured that much out: Special interests—interests that don’t have America’s interest nor those of everyday Americans at heart—”captured” the establishments of both mainstream political parties. People are getting it. And they’re mad.
Without better, more critical, more informed understanding (and how are they going to get that from our current mass media?) some guy who channels that anger, who promises to “make America great again,” who blames immigrants and brands refugees as murderers and rapists, who claims he will renegotiate international trade deals in America’s advantage and re-establish U.S. economic dominance, has a kind of twisted appeal. Much the same thing has been happening across the Atlantic with Brexit.
Buying a Bill of Goods
A lot of people in the United States have been sold a bill of goods. That’s the only way all the evident paradoxes of the 2016 election make sense. It didn’t happen all at once. It was one thing leading to another. That way, slowly, the whole groundwork of our society and culture shifts—and like the frog in a pan of slowly heating water, suddenly it’s too late.
So, we have to go back several decades to get a better sense of how the fiasco of 11-08-2016 unfolded—back to some early Republican party initiatives that mobilized deep-seated resentments to get votes. By then, the Republican party, at its core, had become the party that reliably represents business interests.
The Southern Strategy.
The notorious “southern strategy” of Nixon and Reagan successfully drew many southern traditionally Democratic voters into the Republican fold by appealing to persistent racial tensions and lingering resentments from the American Civil War. (It’s easier believe if you’ve been there. We drove through parts of the rural South a couple of years ago, where Confederate flags proudly fly over people’s yards.) Manipulated emotions pulled often disadvantaged people into the party that reliably represents big business.
Emotions, Fears, Values.
Framing Public Debate. The same thing was happening in other spheres of American life. At the same time as ideologically conservative interests and their extremely wealthy donors (what economist Joseph Stiglitz calls the 1 percent) worked to effectively capture the machineries of government, they also mounted a broad offensive to capture and frame public debate in their own terms.
Wealthy donors and corporations aggressively nurtured the growing conservative movement through the 1980s and ’90s, and into this century. They funneled money into right-wing media (talk radio), think tanks and strategists, and right-leaning professors. They marshaled armies of lobbyists to represented their interests, and of course bankrolled the campaigns of politicians who advanced their policies.
Bringing Universities to Heel. They also worked to bring the universities themselves to heel. They cut public support for higher education and stepped into the breach with corporate funding, private enterprise, and much higher, even crippling, student tuition fees. Education at public universities that used to be nearly free when I attended now carries a hefty price tag. Many students take minimum wage jobs to get through college, and even then graduate to working life with heavy debt. (It worked. Not much in the way of ’60s revolutionary fervor on campuses these days. American public universities today, often run more like corporations than institutes of learning, are not what they were when I was a graduate student in the late 1960s and early ’70s.)
Manipulating Emotions & Values. As with so many successful sales campaigns, this one plays on emotions, fears, values. Republican strategists drew in social and religious conservatives by seeming to embrace their principled and deeply emotion-laden opposition to hot-button issues like abortion, and by championing “family values”—which among other things, for some people, means opposing gay marriage. (I wrote more about all this back in May 2016.)
They also appealed to other values like macho individualism, and to deep strains of anti-intellectualism in American life. They exploited regional differences (heartland communities against “eastern elites”). They called to generalized working-class resentment of impersonal controlling forces, symbolized in the cartoonish figures of crooked lawyers and venal politicians (many examples here of the pot calling the kettle black). Finally (as we just saw with the Southern Strategy), they appealed to persistent racism and xenophobia rooted in history and ongoing economic insecurity.
Even as far-right conservative interests and their super-wealthy backers got control of government, they worked hard to focus public resentment and blame on government. By blaming government, they divert attention away from themselves and the outsized concentrations of the nation’s wealth they were scooping up.
The more wealth the 1 percent control, the better they can game the system to get even more wealth. The more they control government, the less government meets the needs of ordinary people, whose resentment of government grows. Elected government fails the “legitimate expectations and aspirations,” of voters, as George Soros puts it, who then “become disenchanted with prevailing versions of democracy and capitalism.” It’s a vicious circle. Democracy itself has fallen into crisis, as Trump’s electoral win illustrates. (All the more so, given Putin’s involvement, and Trump’s loss in the popular vote count by nearly three million votes).
Basically, the bill of goods I just summarized aims to divide rather than unite. It aims to set one side against another rather than to build a better life for every American on common ground. It aims to further the interests of a few at the expense of the many.
(UPDATE, 2016-03-31: And now, March 31, 2018, more has come to light. The news is full of another story that further reveals further corruption behind Trump’s election and Brexit. The story is complex, but here’s the gist as I get it: The data-mining firm, Cambridge Analytica, headed by alt-right operator and Trump henchman Steve Bannon, illegally harvested personal information from more than 50 million Facebook users to target swing voters, preying on their preferences and emotions to nudge them toward voting for Trump in the U.S., and for Brexit in the U.K. https://qz.com/1240039/the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-is-confusing-this-timeline-will-help/
Both votes, as we know, were very close. Christopher Wylie, the whistle-blower who blew the case open testified before a U.K. parliamentary committee that Brexit might not have passed without that manipulation.)
By Their Fruits (or Faults) Shall Ye Know Them.
Runaway Inequality & Voter Anger
Here’s the upshot: The 2016 election’s tone, its ugliness, its outcome, all took place in a particular context. It’s a context that didn’t just happen. It wasn’t inevitable. It resulted from policy decisions. Those decisions, based on the political snake oil of neoliberal ideology, benefited few and hurt many. And now we see more clearly how manipulative and outright illegal political scheming also plays into the picture.
Growing inequality hand-in-hand with rising despair over government’s inability or lack of will to fix the problem, or even to do much of anything positive for the country, helped make voters more vulnerable to appeals that fanned their fear, anger, and “nativist” anti-immigrant biases. All this set the tone for the 2016 presidential race.
Whatever party holds power in whatever office, people see their elected government stymied with gridlock or wallowing in indifference when it comes to positive measures to improve their lives. This while it actively pursues trade deals and other legislation that benefit the already wealthy and their transnational corporations. No wonder that so many working and middle class voters feel anger and frustration with the establishments of both mainstream parties—anger that Trump appealed to and focused.
Ideas–>Policies–>Consequences.
When you look directly at it, the bill of goods I just described, that so many Americans bought into, is not even credible. And, the proof is in the pudding. It fails.
It leads to the very failures that make so many Americans disillusioned and angry. And yet, many people still don’t seem to connect the ideas with the policies with the consequences. Ideas–>Policies–>Consequences. Why? There has to be a deeper underlying mind-set, world-view, or philosophy at work that fuddles the issue and makes the bill of goods still seem believable in the face of its evident failures.
What ideas about human nature and society made that bill of goods ever even seem reasonable? What notions or ideology underlies the political maneuvering, the policies and
laws, that spurred galloping runaway inequality into its current harmful headlong course to begin with? What guiding principles set up today’s world? It can all be summed up in a word that has become familiar to many over the last few decades: neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism—Political Snake Oil.
George Monbiot (click on the above link) describes neoliberalism as “The ideology at the root of all our problems…that, for most of us, has no name.” It has been assimilated as common sense; it is invisible and pervasive. There seems to be no alternative, and in all this is its power. Yet in reality it’s only as influential as we make it or let it be. Pedaled by far-right and moneyed interests, neoliberalism is a shabby bill of goods wrapped in concealing but flimsy tissues of invisibility and inevitability.
The neoliberal ideology, and the ideas it is rooted in, have done and are doing incalculable damage to our world, our societies, our selves. It is political snake oil, and we’ve bought it—along with much of the rest of the world.
But I think its time is about up. It has failed. Dramatically. Neoliberal thinking has reigned as a philosophy of government over the last three or four decades, and it has not brought about a better world. In fact, it has made thing immeasurably worse.
Even more, the underlying ideas it is based on, that justify it as a philosophy of government to begin with, have gone defunct. Neoliberalism roots in a view of human nature that belongs to a bygone era. We know better now. We need to catch up in our politics and economics, to where we are with today’s more advanced understandings of human nature in nature.
But such deep cultural change takes time. That’s the problem. Climate change, species extinction, resource depletion (to name a few) aren’t waiting for us to get smarter. With so many serious, unprecedented, and developing problems facing today’s world, time is getting short.
(Meanwhile, if you want to read up on neoliberalism in more depth, I can recommend David Harvey’s books, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and The Enigma of Capital, looking at what’s behind the recent collapse of the housing and capital markets in 2008. And I’ll have just a little more to say about neoliberalism as political snake oil in my next post)