QED: that was most certainly NOT lost on most of his followers, because most were not the least bit concerned about that, in the end. It was cover propaganda for their real ends.
What is happened is the epitome of neoliberalism. There was a part of the social safety net that the previous conservative government planned to remove. A new liberal government took office and rather than cancel those plans (or, god forbid, actually increase the quality or reach of the social safety net) they choose to go along with them and remove that bit of the social safety net.
Although this is a relevant topic, this column is a little disjointed. I suspect the term “neoliberalism” means different things to different people and is not really a coherent philosophy. The original liberalism had a fairly common meaning in different countries in the 18th century - the rise of republics as a reaction to absolute monarchs and sometimes religious dogma, and growing acceptance of science, reason and free market capitalism; later a degree of social safety net. Liberalism in the 19th century, various periods of the 20th century (different in, say, 1923, 1945, 1967 and 1985), and more recently, is not at all the same. As pointed out, in many countries these political terms differ from the American usage. “Liberal” became a toxic label in the US in certain states decades ago, was and is used pejoratively by republicans… but this was largely an American thing.
Neoliberalism? Something newer than original liberalism, over more than three centuries? That’s a long time. It has had many meanings, the column mentions a few, including that of “corporate Democrats” who currently seek a non-toxic term that includes a number of fairly different factions but identifies their tribe. This column does not do a great job of clarifying the term, in part since it means different things to different people at different times.
I don’t agree “neoliberalism” led to the rise of Trump. People voted for Trump for many reasons - his direct style and social media, the assumption he knows a lot about wealth and business strategy and could apply this to improve things, personality cult, entertainment, shocking the bourgeoisie, pretending to value those feeling excluded, Trump’s alleged attention to single issues of importance to many Americans (guns, religion, the judiciary enacting conservative social and economic policies, foreign policy…), dislike of Hilary Clinton or identity politics, a change from the status quo… but Trump did not have a coherent, fixed position on too many issues. Nor is it true Trump accomplished nothing. But Trump’s NAFTA looked like the old one, for all the rancour and fireworks giving more heat than light.
Biden’s immigrant policies and talk of American protectionism do not look light years different from Trump’s. Biden is a corporate Democrat in a fairly familiar form. Hardly the polar opposite of neoliberalism. Most voters are more mainstream than attention-seeking political pundits. They want social services (at least for themselves), want sufficient law and order for protection and to have faith someone has their back, want to receive “their fair share” but don’t think this has yet happened, to the benefit of their political adversaries.
I certainly don’t believe America, with its flourishes and flaws, is remotely a failed state. How would one then characterize countries with much more tenable claims to being unable to provide basic government services? I don’t think Haque’s characterization of Conservatism is helpful or accurate. Of course, definitions of Conservatism have also changed over more than three centuries and from place to place.
But for clarity, let us stick to the given guidelines, where neoliberalism is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending. What Sanders would call “corporate democrats”. But business interests have been influential in every major political party, especially in the US. Economic fashions come and go, currently both parties want to spend too freely while paying lip service to austerity. Protectionism goes in and out of fashion; parties want to win elections and will point fingers when things could be going better.
No electable American politician seriously questions the basis of the capitalist system - Sanders is a millionaire too. Degrees of privatization, tax and environmental protection might differ. Not really by that much. Biden allowed Alaskan oil development because he thought it was economically and politically pragmatic. It does not amount to a sea-change in terms of deregulation or business policy. But it is where most of the votes are, even if many Democrats are unenthusiastic about corporations and might disagree with that decision. When the Republicans use the term “neoliberal”, they simply mean “Liberals” to other them from their perceived political tribe. Yet it is the Conservatives who are complaining most loudly about, say, Silicon Valley. The traditional intellectual basis of libertarianism or classic or compassionate Conservativism - and there is a basis - can sometimes be hard to identify in the newer party.
Anger and perpetual dissatisfaction by itself is not really a political position. One assumes most prefer democracy to anarchy and realize the enormous wealth, position and prestige America generally enjoys, and particularly its curmudgeonly elites, are really the result of compromise, pragmatic law, innovative business, widespread education and sensible traditions. Sure, many legal and health care reforms are needed. But those complaining most loudly might not actually be better off if their wishes were granted. It is not worth paving paradise to put up a parking lot.
I’ll be quite honest that I just do not understand the cognitive blindness that leads people to genuinely fail to acknowledge that the bill of goods their leader sold them is completely at odds with the actions once in office. And that isn’t just Trump and his MAGAts; you can say this about nearly any autocrat and demagogue throughout modern history. I get that from the autocrat’s point of view that once in power why should they be worried about accountability like pathetic democratically elected leaders are but you would think farmers, factory workers, et cetera would be enraged that Trump basically abandoned them in pursuit of his own venal goals, and yet there is still plenty of support among them.
The Biden administration’s policies on immigration and import restrictions are shockingly similar to those under Trump to the extent that—aside from the deliberate and horrific mass separation of children from parents or custodians—they are a virtual continuation of them. Biden is in so many ways the polar opposite of Trump—respectful, empathetic, collaborative, open to negotiation, engaging with NATO and other strategic allies, et cetera—but from a policy standpoint there are a lot of things that are completely within the purview of the executive that have not been changed or challenged.
I have long said that it is not that democracy is superior or more efficient in any particular way to other forms of government but that by giving people a stake in the electoral process reduces a tendency to want to completely overthrow the system from the outside. Bernie made a lot of noise about basically tearing the economic system down and rebuilding it from “free college education” to “breaking up the banks”, but as you point out he has benefitted from this system far in excess of what most people will ever see (Elizabeth Warren, too, even though I believe in her sincerity for change) and he knows that whatever rhetoric he shouts out would be necessarily tempered by the practicalities of governance and legislation. The real problem is when someone comes along and riles people up, either out of a genuine desire to burn the system to the ground or just because they believe it is the best way to profit from it, to the extent that people no longer have trust in democratic institutions and the electoral process. For all that you might criticize presidents from Nixon through Bush the Younger, none of them ever sought to undermine democratic sentiment on anything like this scale. But Trump gleefully tried, and you can bet that DeSantis and a bunch of other would-be generalissimos are taking notes on what works and how to improve it for next time. And the kick doesn’t have to be an economic calamity from neoliberal policies gone awry; it can be pretty much anything that can be stirred into a belief of existential threat.
Stranger
To be fair, I don’t doubt Sanders or Warren’s sincerity. I agree with some aspects of what they say. However, if politics is the art of the possible, Sanders is fully aware that even if elected his agenda would face many challenges and be much watered down. He would still have to compromise with corporate Democrats and other stakeholders. So some of the fury is just sounds. He was recently on the Colbert Show saying he was pleased Biden took some of his positions into account and was proud of their efforts, which still probably won’t go far.
It should not be verboten to discuss, debate or even wish, things like universal health care or reasonable tuitions. Few countries would consider this “socialism”. Every country could improve their governance. Sanders is not a true socialist, however, and in practice would make some changes to tax and services and distribution, but would hardly remake society beyond recognition.
I do not like Trump. I think his practices and policies caused great damage and will do so for a generation. But I know smart people who voted for him for actual reasons. If they value democracy so little that they keep this opinion following more recent events, they just might not be smart people. As a Canadian, I thought I understood the US, more or less, until Trump proved that I didn’t.
Broad social entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are enormously popular across the political spectrum. Whether it is “socialism” or not they are recognized as providing very tangible and necessary resources that benefit the general public in a multitude of ways. (Ditto for education, although I realize that public education has become nearly as controversial as childhood vaccination with nearly no rational basis whatsoever.). The United States government runs one of the largest health care systems in the nation—the Veterans Administration—and while it certainly has problems nobody is calling for closing it down because it is ‘socialist’. There is this weird blindness in the American political discourse about anything that is an entitlement (unless it goes to corporations, and then politicians are reluctant to speak about it in depth for entirely different reasons) regardless of the net benefit to the country as a whole, and this is just going to get worse as we have an aging population and fewer people to care for it.
I know some objectively very smart, well-educated people who were nonetheless vocal enthusiasts for Donald Trump as President, and who still doubt the integrity of the election. (They won’t say it was ‘stolen’, just that there are numerous ‘issues’ even though they can’t actually list them, which is essentially the same thing.) I don’t really understand the sentiment other than they feel that Trump will protect them from some ‘Other’ (immigrants, Muslims, China, ‘wokeness’, et cetera) that will undermine society, even though Trump has been doing as good of a job as a clown can do at trying to tear the beating heart out of the country. It’s like someone trying to stop a bank robbery by pre-emptively burning down the bank building. And Trump isn’t even a good salesman; he literally can’t stay on topic long enough to make a point. Imagine what someone who is studied in propaganda and mass media could do.
Stranger
OK, let me see whether I can get this into coherent form.
That alone doesn’t account for it, no. But I don’t think “peoples’ fears and uncertainties about their place in the national economy” accounts for Trumpism, either. Again, bear in mind that overall the people with the lowest incomes voted 52% for Clinton and only 41% for Trump.
What’s the statistic that really jumps out? It’s not income level. From my previous cite (in post #11):
White voters voted 58% for Trump and 37% for Clinton. Non-white voters, who make up 31% of the electorate, voted 74% for Clinton and 21% for Trump.
And not as drastic, but still more so than income: Women overall voted more for Clinton.
Women were 13 percentage points more likely than men to have voted for Clinton (54% among women, 41% among men)
And again, for in some cases a greater difference than the difference in income: (again from the Pew Research cite):
voters in 2016 were sharply divided along religious lines. Protestants constituted about half of the electorate and reported voting for Trump over Clinton by a 56% to 39% margin. Catholics were more evenly divided; 52% reported voting for Trump, while 44% said they backed Clinton. Conversely, a solid majority of the religiously unaffiliated – atheists, agnostics and those who said their religion was “nothing in particular” – said they voted for Clinton (65%) over Trump (24%)
I don’t think what we’re looking at here is that Trump won because he appealed to “peoples’ fears and uncertainties about their place in the national economy”. The statistics on that appear if anything to point in the other direction. I think what he appealed to was peoples’ fears and uncertainties about their place in the national society.
People who think that society is a zero-sum game – that advantages for one person or group must come at the expense of somebody else – are really vulnerable to this technique. It isn’t necessarily racism in the more standard senses – though there was certainly a good bit of that.
But people who were used to assuming that they were the overwhelming majority – that most people were like them – and who also assume that there is One Right Way to Live and are therefore likely to take anyone saying that it’s fine to live differently as saying, not that there should be multiple ways, but that the way the One Right Way people are living must be Wrong – I think people who think like that feel really insecure about the gains in civil rights made by Black people, by women, by people who don’t fall neatly into gender or sexual-behavior boxes, by people who are members of Other Religions or of none. And also made insecure by the apparent increase in numbers of people not in what they see as their group: in some cases a real relative increase, in many cases a perceived one — because people who were there all along but used to be quiet about it have become increasingly vocal. Because they’re seeing zero-sum, not only in finances, but in what to most people is actually more important at least as long as they’re not starving: societal respect.
And then there are people insisting that the United States isn’t almost always right with an occasional problem that we fixed long ago, and that Christopher Columbus shouldn’t be praised as an unequivocable hero – things that to some are part of the foundations of what they think of as societal respect: that they’re part of and proud citizens of a country that they want to see as founded for all the right reasons and having continued for all the right reasons and being better (zero sum again) than all the other countries. That’s ‘if it’s my country it must be right’ patriotism. The kind of patriotism that’s “My Country. Right the Wrongs*” they don’t understand. They think it’s an attack.
– I don’t know if that was coherent. But it’s as close as I’m likely to get tonight.
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*stolen from a 1970’s bumper sticker.
Being smart doesn’t mean you make better decisions, it just means you are better at justifying bad ones. (even to yourself.)
If you want to understand modern neoliberalism read the magazine The Economist. It stills believes in classic capitalism, markets, free trade, globalism, and all the other stuff British socially liberal, economically conservative politicians have espoused since the 19th century. The dances their columnists do to persevere with these beliefs are concise, well thought out, and mostly a bewildering contrast to the excellent news articles. Underneath it all, the constant whisper floats from the pages: what is the alternative? Well, what is the alternative? If not capitalism, then what? Communism? Hardly. Socialism? Not likely. Social democracy? Define it.
That’s a far better question than the one that Cecil asked. The reality is that economic policy is political policy is social policy, both during the Cold War and after when America was the only true superpower. (The hysteria you see emanating from Washington is the thought that the Cold War is replaying and that American dominance over the world’s economy, politics, and society is fading.)
The establishment wanted to slot the three into separate silos and think about them in isolation, except when they could control social policy by using the first two. (Exporting American “exceptionalism” proved to be more a social policy than a political one.) The difference between liberal policies and neoliberal policies both in domestic and global settings was always on social policies. Neoliberalism in the U.S. was created by conservatives; the internal battles were more about social issues. That’s how Clinton got dragged in. Globalism was the only possible approach to the end of American economic hegemony; the world’s health depended on it. The advent of cheap labor around the world pulled the plug on the American lake; he could not stop the flow of jobs any more than the legendary Thor could drain the ocean by drinking it. Cheap labor produced cheap goods. The shoppers at Walmart were told ten million times that they were destroying their own jobs. The response was “but it’s cheap.”
Of course resentments followed logically from the top-down failures of militarism and the bottom-up failures of a sensible labor policy. Conservatives stoked those resentments for their own political benefit and are now shocked and horrified that the mob no longer respects the establishment. Lunacy ensues. Neoliberalism did not lead to Trumpism. Conservatism did. Cecil’s analysis does a flailing dance around that reality that makes it unreadable. Get a subscription to the Economist instead. I have one despite everything.
I was in full agreement at that point and am unsure the pain was assuaged afterwards.
Being from a socio-economic entity more similar to the UK than the US, the distinction in definitions definitely doesn’t help.
IMHO, this is true.
In addition to this was American supremacy in innovation. Which ran way ahead.
Stolen, as a mantra for myself and my ’smart’ friends, and if I could be bothered a looooooong bumper sticker. American cars have wide bumpers, after all!
OMG. @Ed_Zotti - you just used a little over a thousand words to “explain” something that could be done in one sentence:
For U.S. readers bewildered by the term/label, here in the land of the brave and easily confused we called it Reagonomics.
I mean, in Genesis (KJV) the writer(s) of the description of all of the creation:
From the beginning… to …and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
used 825 words.
Brevity is the soul of wit. Indeed.
To be fair, that’s just an explanation of how the world and universe came into existence.
Economics is much more complicated.
I don’t think you want to take ALL the personal responsibility for racial resentment, but I would take your statement a step further–“almost exclusively” rather than “primarily” driven by racial resentment. Without racism, Trump never emerges from the low single-digit rankings in the GOP primaries in 2015-6. I’ve never bought ANY of this bushwah about economic insecurity blablabla. Trump voters are racists, pure and simple, and side issues are just flimsy disguises for their racism, which they usually don’t even try to hide. I’m appalled by how many Americans identify with racism, but the truth is the truth.
To Trump himself, racism is just a means to an economic end. It’s how he gathers mass support, and he throws a little actual racism (and sexism, and homophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, etc) to his base, red meat to a pack of starving dogs, but he’s all about unfettered dog eat dog capitalism.
Economics is also slightly more complicated than astrology, but astrology has prettier graphics. On a scale Pseudoscience < — > Science both are to the left of center.
This is generally a sound analysis. I agree with most of what you say. I differ a little with this:
Not wrong, exactly. Not new either - labour has always been cheaper in some places than others. But one might reasonably question whether globalism was or is the only possible approach. Certainly intolerance for even moderately higher prices can lead to loss of local manufacturing and businesses, more oil exploration, environmental costs from increased shipping, difficulties in fairly taxing multinational corporations, the rise and possible monopoly of powerful companies (those successfully integrating technology with cost cutting and allegedly subsequently squeezing innovation from competitors), and other woes when prices fail to account for extrinsic costs.
If economists agree on anything, it is that it is not wrong to play to one’s strengths and let other countries do what they do better. By itself this does not mean that other countries should not have good working conditions or fair local wages, that people cannot emphasize quality or value local goods, that politicians could not have done better in promoting innovation rather than a race-to-the-bottom approach to subsidizing relatively small numbers of jobs or seeking commensurate taxes with local income, or that efforts to make retraining accessible and education affordable were always vigourously pursued. Blaming the shoppers at Wal-Mart does not fully account for these failures in leadership. Despite. what American hegemony exists, every other country faces these challenging issues, many have done so more successfully.
That is really just too broad of a brush to be of much use in either determining why Trump has such appeal or how to successfully combat it. Now, if your intent is to say that there is a broad spectrum of what comprises “racism”, and there are a large number of Trump voters who would not identify as being racist or espouse racist sentiments but who are just fine with overlooking patent dog-whistling and backing a candidate who does court openly racist movements and organizations, then sure, you can brand all Trump voters as racist. But frankly, racism is such an endemic problem that is deeply embedded into American society, political system, and even into the Constitution that at some point it is difficult to not have some association with racially-divisive policies or movements unless you are actually advocating for tearing the entire system down and replacing it with some hypothetical egalitarian and ‘color-blind’ system of governance. Given the history of how revolutions tend to go off-kilter very quickly and be taken over by the very people you don’t want in charge, I don’t think that’s a good path, nor is just writing off a substantial plurality of voters who were somehow swayed by a literal confidence man and would-be demagogue.
Stranger
Broadly considered, I’ll accept that. It’s not like I’m positing that every Trump voter has a secret set of KKK sheets that they haven’t worn in public yet, just that they lack the sense of repulsion for his obvious dogwhistling and are willing to tolerate that in a candidate for POTUS. So yeah.
But I do literally mean that without racism, he drops out of the GOP primaries before 2016 is very far along, in about fourteenth place in the polls. Blatant appeals to racism was what got him distinguished from the other GOP contenders, and when some of them tried pointing that out he picked them off, one by one, when they spoke out against him.
I think it’s more accurate to characterize Trumpism by hatred and fear of The Other. For many of his voters, “The Other” means other races, and that’s probably the largest share, but it works the same way for voters whose Others are gays, or trans folk, or women, or atheists or Muslims, or the educated, or whatever.
Yes, I’m using “racism” in the broadest possible sense.