Trump tweets New Year’s greeting to his many enemies
Donald Trump sent New Year's greetings to his "many enemies" in a backhanded tweet on Saturday in which he gloated…
Why the surprise? Two dire candidates ran the most clueless US presidential campaigns in modern history and, as in any badly played game, one of them eventually had to stumble into the winner’s circle. Donald Trump kept himself clinically detached from concerns about mere facts while Hillary Clinton remained regally detached from the interests of mere people who happened to comprise the Democratic Party base. Unsurprisingly, only Hillary was made to pay.
Exquisitely ironic is the fact that Hillary lost while winning the popular vote, as Democrat predecessor Al Gore did in 2000. Democratic Party honchos, of whom she was one, did nothing in the long interim to try to repair this archaic system, and she suffered for it.
Also unrepaired is the scandalous vulnerability of the American voting system, a festering problem protected by a fierce cultural aversion to anyone who sounds like a sore loser. Voter suppression, ranging from gerrymandering to removal of minorities from registration lists, is commonplace. Strict photo ID laws aim to disenfranchise minorities and the poor who vote principally Democratic. Hillary likely lost Wisconsin on this account.
Tampering with ridiculously flimsy electronic voting machines is immune from prosecution because no officials bother to investigate. The authorities are only interested in electoral interference when odious Russians are accused, but the likeliest culprits are homegrown. Still, vote manipulation alone could not account entirely for Trump’s triumph.
A key clue is that Clinton split the unionized worker vote with Trump in the rustbelt state of Ohio, which went Republican along with formerly Democratic states (under Obama) Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Bernie Sanders aptly concluded that Hillary lost because working people felt she was not on their side. Too few of tens of millions of Americans living on the economic edge could believe that Clinton understood, let alone cared, for the troubles they faced – often working several jobs, barely making housing costs, watching prices outpace incomes, fretting over their children’s futures, and observing the American Dream that elites prattle about swirl down the drain.
The esteemed status “middle class” meant different things when Hillary employed the term and when Democratic primary opponent Sanders invoked it. Sanders aspired to restore a bygone New Deal period when most Americans realistically could aspire to, if not always attain, middle class living standards. Hillary, scornful of Sander’s progressive programme, pitched her appeals to what was left of a shriveling middle class of professionals, business people and money managers. The middle class, by the most generous income estimates applied by the Pew Research Center, shrank from 61 per cent in 1971 to 50 per cent in 2015.
For Hillary only the suburban middle and upper middle class mattered. Anyone tumbling or languishing lower on the social scale were dubbed “deplorables” – much like 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney derided 47 per cent of Americans as basically worthless. In cash terms, Romney was not far wrong. The lower half of Americans own virtually nothing and most are in debt, partly from having bailed out rich people like Romney. Since the 1970s, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities attests, the incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of households stagnated while the top 1 per cent soared. Obama did nothing, and Hillary promised nothing, to reverse the trend. What does a rational voter do?
In national mythology there is no such thing as a ‘working class.’ Decent pay and benefits in the early postwar decades enabled most working class people to self-identify as ‘middle class’ or “lower middle class.” These people are awakening to their real roles as disposable sacrifices to elite visions of a neoliberal market-worshipping world. The trade deals Trump denounces gutted many lives. So working class voters whom smug Democratic Party apparatchiks figured had nowhere else to go finally opted for a billionaire blowhard whom they hoped would sabotage the system that is hurting them. The Clintonian Democrats valued these hard-pressed citizens no more than did the Republican business class who abandoned them for China and Mexico.
A paradox imperiling most democracies is that they must contain a major party of the wealthy dedicated to hijacking the state for anti-democratic purposes. Try to detect a single policy by US Republicans or UK Tories that does not line their members’ pockets, cut their taxes and shift costs onto everyone else. Yet where does an agitated citizen turn for remedy? The searing contempt with which elites in both US parties view a working class they no longer believe they need is so deeply engrained they scarcely are aware of it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne in The House of Seven Gables reflected pertinently on witch hunts “which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who take it upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.” Democrat spokespersons are busy blaming perfidious Russians, third party candidates and lazy voters, but they have no one to blame for the loss but themselves for their passionate embrace of the conman’s creed of the market above all. There is some room in neo-liberalism for a middle class of minions to mammon, only at half the present size. Americans will not settle for it without a fight. The Democrats, accordingly, require and no doubt will resist radical rethinking heading into the 2018 midterms. The only positive thing to say about Trump in the meantime is that it will be extremely easy for him to exceed expectations, though we wouldn’t bet on it.
The writers are authors of No Clean Hands and of Parables of Permanent War.
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