A Coda to the Election of 2024

A Coda:

A short and much abbreviated political history is in order to answer one simple question:

Was it inevitable that the end of Reaganism and the neoliberal suppression of democracy was brought about not by an uprising from the left, but by an uprising from the right?

Put alternatively and deliberately provocatively: is Trump’s sweep to power not a surge of democratic resistance to the oppression of a self-interested elite, and not the anti-democratic devolvement towards autocracy as so frequently suggested by the Democrats?  

Perhaps.  Were it not for Trump’s persona and predilections, definitely.

The Democrats, throughout the long darkness of the neoliberal era, were drawn into becoming a partner in the implementation of the policies designed to bleed the middle and lower classes dry.  They allowed the steady slippage of democratic resistance to the will of the capitalist class not to interfere with their search for power.  A search that required them to mimic and then absorb the ideas of the wealthy.  Thus their abandonment of opposition to globalization, to their deregulation of finance, and then their willingness to change the rules governing welfare. 

These were acts not of resistance, but of compliance.

So cowed were the Democrats back in the 1980s by the sweep of Reagan’s electoral victories that instead of developing a method for defending the quasi-social democratic constructs of the New Deal, they sought to find ways to insinuate themselves into the new order.  They wanted to become Republicans-lite.  By the time the 1990s rolled around this re-invention had taken place and most of the principles of neoliberalism had found their way into the Democratic canon.  The goal was not to defeat neoliberalism, but to accommodate it and to soften its harder edges.

This surrender opened the door to an overwhelming change in the nature of the party and its membership.  As its old industrial core was deconstructed by globalization, offshoring, financialization, and the steady shift from an economy based on mass production in manufacturing towards an emphasis on non-unionized services, its absorption of the ideas of neoliberalism made it more attractive for more socially minded professionals.  Most of whom worked in those burgeoning services.

This movement coincided with the rapid expansion of the college educated class whose ranks flooded into those same professions.  There was a growing supply of well educated and yet socially aware graduates who were economically secure but culturally progressive.  This was the inception of the Democratic party as that of the educated elite and its emphasis on identity and the expansion of various forms of justice, rather than on older notions of class coherence.

The Democrats abandoned the working class in order to embrace the professional and technocratic class. 

An inevitable consequence of this change was that the Democrats slowly became the party of the establishment.  It forswore radical policy departures or remedies.  It began to ignore the growing gulf in inequality and turned its attention instead to the pursuit of the maintenance of broad based growth under the rubric of ‘a rising tide lifting all boats’.  That the tide favored some more than others was set aside as unfortunate but necessary to forestall the increasingly agitated politics of the Republican party in the 2000s.

The converse shift in membership took place within the Republican Party.  As the Democrats became ever more representative of the educated and professional elite, and as that elite espoused more culturally openness and change — its own economic security allowed it such a focus — the Republicans began to harbor, not just its traditional socially conservative elements but an increasing number drawn from the working class whose own social conservatism over-rode their older economic progressivism.  

Once this re-alignment had been completed, economic radicalism had taken root within the party of Reagan and drove popular resistance to the cultural and social changes being advocated by the Democrats.  

From the aftermath of the Great Recession through the pandemic and up to the recent bout of inflation the two parties continued to adapt to their newfound roles.  The Democrats became the bastion of neoliberalism because the educated elite benefited massively from those policies.  The Republicans became the home of resistance to progressive cultural reform and resistance to globalization, free trade, corporate aggrandizement, and the predations of Wall Street.

Their roles thus reversed the two parties were riven through with contradictions.  The one was socially and culturally conservative but economically radical.  The other was socially and culturally progressive but economically conservative.  Neither was ideologically coherent.  So their identities devolved toward, and revolved around, establishment versus populism.  

And once the repression of neoliberalism reached a breaking point, as it did during the painfully slow recovery from the Great Recession, the wave of populism released in angry reaction came from the populist party.  Reagan’s party.  It drove Trump into power in 2016 and then again, with more emphasis, in 2024.

With neither party truly committed to democracy because the one was sturdily neoliberal and the other was radically populist, norms were bound to be tossed overboard.  For one to pretend to defend democracy whilst refusing to confront a corrupt Supreme Court or to reform the political system was absurd.  For the other to pretend to defend the working class whilst being led by a bevy of self-interested plutocrats is equally absurd.  Yet that was the inevitable result of decades of complacency and decay begun back in 1980.  And it was the election we just lived through. 

The end of Reaganism has come from the right.  And the left is reduced to bewilderment.  Albeit economically secure bewilderment.