Who Brought us Trump?
Battle is joined …
This might annoy some of you — it is my hasty first thought.
The Democrats have been thoroughly defeated. Deservedly so. They no longer relate to, or reflect, the American working class. Without building such a relationship they cannot regain power. Nor should they.
Yesterday, early on the morning of election day, a friend of mine forwarded an article by Robert Reich who argued that, in order to defeat Trump, Harris needed to focus more on the economy and it’s recent performance. I began my response thus:
“The problem with talking more about the economy is that it highlights the vast wealth/income/consumption gaps that have opened up in America. The headline numbers look good. The experience is very different if you aren’t in that top 20% or so.
When the dust settles I think the Democrats need to ponder a few salient questions:
Why is there such a gender gap in the electorate?
How do they re-connect with the white working class?
Do they want to remain the party of the educated elite?”
This was before the election results poured in.
I had the feeling that Trump might win. The polling suggested that neither side had convinced a large majority. So a slight nudge one way or the other would produce a convincing win.
That’s what happened.
So here we are.
Trump, I think, fits a pretty broad definition of ‘fascist’. I dislike fascists intensely — my father died at a young age due to injuries sustained fighting fascism. Hence my grudge. There is no room for fascism in a modern democracy.
Or, there ought not be.
But there is.
So we have to face the obvious question: why?
I return to my usual hunting ground. Inequality. America has become unsustainably divided along economic lines. Far too much goes to far too few.
History suggests that there will always be an elite able and willing to extract excessively from society at large. That extraction once came mainly through force. The elite was filled with monarchical, militaristic, baronial, and religious thugs who thought nothing of applying force to tread down on average folk and seize an outsized share of social production for themselves.
Democracy was supposed to mitigate this tendency. Since industrialization our modern thugs have been the capitalists who own property sufficient to generate unequal shares of wealth for themselves.
But industrialization brought with it a counter-effect. It concentrated the workers in factories where they could organize and resist exploitation. That resistance eventually produced modern democracy. More to the point it produced redistribution. The fruits of social production were distributed more fairly. Indeed, there was a recognition, however halting, that production was a social and not an individual act.
Fairness then intruded into the usual social equation. Quiescence dominated politics. We imagined we had solved the historical oppression of elitist rent extraction.
History, though, continues unabated. It has a tendency to revert. In our case the reversion came in the form of the neoliberal counter attack against democracy. It was led by a new elite.
Another effect of industrialization was the enormous rise in productivity that created our current prosperity.
It also created our current complacency.
It created such complacency that when the elite plotted to re-establish its extractive capacity a large share of the voting populace could be co-opted against their own long term interests.
This was the success of Reagan and his acolytes.
The uprising was funded by the usual cadre of wealth owners determined to limit what they saw as the predation of redistribution. Their opposition to the social spending funded by taxes on their wealth and income was the motivation for their willingness to enter into alliance with a new and enlarged educated elite — itself a by-product of industrialization.
It was this educated elite that generated the ideas forming the foundation of neoliberalism. That elite was generously funded by the wealthy class. It grew in confidence and power over several decades beginning in the aftermath of World War II. It produced, eventually, an army of consultants, lawyers, doctors, accountants, corporate executives, and academics all richly rewarded by the corporations — directly or indirectly — that rose to dominate the economy. These are the technocrats who rule us. Unelected. And aloof in their self-reference.
Notably this educated elite is self-perpetuating. Each sector of that elite governs itself. It sets the rules for entry into its ranks. It sets the rules of etiquette to be observed by its members. It sets the boundaries for what is accepted knowledge. America has become dominated by a new network of professional guilds determined to protect its members from criticism and even more determined to provide outsized incomes to its members.
Since its modern emergence this elite has grown in power. It has grown in wealth. It has grown apart from the society within which it prospers It now participates fully in elite extraction. It has joined forces with the wealthy class.
Simultaneously industrialization drove other changes. Throughout this same period various groups hitherto left out of the main economic process muscled in. They demanded more space and attention. This had the particular effect of changing the status-quo within sectors most easily entered by out groups. Academia being the most obvious case. Gradually the opinions of these newly absorbed groups came to dominate. The educated elite became unelected advocates of a new social order.
This despite being a traditionally extractive elite.
This odd twist in history is what brings us to today.
We are burdened by an educated elite that is both extractive and self-assertive and yet with what it calls a progressive ideology. It advocates social advance for various subgroups. It advocates tolerance for disparate views. It supports what it calls ‘inclusivity’.
Yet it has, through its extractive behavior, set up a zero-sum game in the economy. It has benefited from its advocacy of free trade. It has benefited from its advocacy of globalization. It has benefitted from deregulation of industry. It has benefited from the roll-back or limitation of the social safety net. It expresses social liberalism. It acts on economic extraction. It has become a contradiction. It is neither progressive nor tolerant. It is repressive. It is exclusive. Despite its protestations to the contrary.
Its extractive behavior has distorted the distribution of wealth sufficiently that we now live in a second gilded age. It has established its self-interest so thoroughly that it has corrupted every aspect of governance in its own favor. Its dominance provides it space to indulge in social engineering and cultural experimentation. Despite its proclamations off progressivism it has become regressive and intolerant of the opinions of the less educated. It has no empathy because it lives apart. It has turned a blind eye to the issues that its extractive behavior has caused. It is deaf to the cries from below.
Imagine the insult inherent in telling a minimum wage worker that she will get ahead if only she works harder. It is rubbish. She knows it. The lie no longer works. The game is rigged from birth.
So the elite lives within its protected bubble. Self referential. Self believing. Disconnected.
And intolerant.
So here we are.
My friends, most of whom belong within the educated elite, are bewildered. Some are distraught. Fascism has slapped them in the face. Their lack of empathy and inaction in the face of growing inequality has come home to roost.
They will survive each of them. They have, after all, benefitted from rising inequality. They are secure.
It is the insecure that rose up against them.
It is the insecure that we need to concern ourselves with.
And that will require a re-appraisal by the educated elite of its role in abetting the rise of fascism in America.
The complacent always pay a heavy price for their self-indulgence.
History will not judge this generation kindly.
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Notes:
- I have said all, or something similar, this many times through the years. I am inured to being laughed at. So I tell you one more time: there is no better marker of elitist self-reference and lack of empathy than the tenured professor of economics who teaches that, in a free market economy, there is no such thing as involuntary unemployment. We need to let those so-called mighty forces of free markets lose within academia. I wonder how much would be left.
- I leave out above the thought that industrialization destroyed the efficacy of thinking about ‘individuals’. Old liberals could theorize about the individual. But that was when it was vaguely acceptable to conceive of someone able to fend for themselves. Agricultural societies fit that bill nicely. Industrial societies not so much. The steady division of labor that underlies our progress implies, equally, a loss of individuality. We all depend on society at large in order to prosper or even to survive. We are not self-sufficient. The algorithmic world is even less individual. We are interconnected not just in the supply of goods and services, but in the flow of information. This requires new ideas of solidarity. It upends an elite built on knowledge because knowledge becomes dispersed and easily available. Perhaps it also portends a reversion to an older property-based capitalism. Ownership of AI is akin to ownership of the mill. The robber-barons are back. And we need to redefine and re-invigorate democracy to mitigate their extraction. I am allowed to hope.
