There’s the self-satisfaction of the populist right (“the common sense of the people has been expressed”) and a great deal of liberal hand-wringing (“the turkeys just voted to expand Thanksgiving”).
Thankfully, there’s another angle.
In a recent episode of his Foreign Policy podcast, Why Are Poor Americans Voting for the Party of the Rich? Columbia University historian Adam Tooze went straight for the jugular.
Why, for the first time in at least half a century, did a majority of the 25% of Americans making less than $50,000 per year vote for the candidate who directly challenges their well-being?
To be clear, this is precisely what happened.
The main policy proposals of the incoming administration involve the forced deportation of thirteen million undocumented people.
While this satisfies the racist need to cause pain to “outsiders”, it flies in the face of government welfare policy that keeps food prices low and the profits of agribusiness high.
Food is relatively cheap in the US, not least because it is harvested by people working for wages at or below subsistence levels.
From the employers’ perspective, it helps that many of these people are undocumented as it tends to make them more compliant. Their survival is dependent on food assistance and other elements of the threadbare US safety net.
The incoming administration’s deportation plans threaten to disrupt this system. They’re based on slogans about undocumented migrants taking American jobs. This is doubly risible because there are currently more than 8.5 million unfilled positions in the United States.
The other pillar of this new temple is the promise to raise tariff barriers around the United States, especially against China. There is no need to get into the economic weeds about this bad idea.
If one is interested, extensive literature on the topic has been written by people who have successfully completed Intro to Macroeconomics.
However, for those not into spending their life minutes that way, tariffs invariably increase prices. Trump seems unconcerned about the importer paying tariffs, not the exporters in the country of origin.
This scheme is both grossly inflationary and constitutes a gigantic tax increase that will primarily be borne (once again) by people whose spending is mainly on consumption (i.e. poorer people).
Once again, in the United States, people in the bottom segments of the income distribution have been convinced to vote against their short-term economic interests.
How is it that this came about?
In part, it’s a matter of ideology. The right has spent decades distracting Americans’ attention from their immediate economic circumstances to the prospect that Latino drug dealers will overrun the country.
There is an interesting distinction between European and American politics. In the EU, the cartel party system has lasted longer than in the US.
Yet, there are exceptions: the collapse of cartel systems in Italy, Greece, and (to a lesser extent) Spain.
The British voted for Brexit, but the Tories still evince their usual craziness and haven’t been fully colonised by the Reform Party yet.
Likewise, in Germany, although the CDU/CSU has been cooperating with far-right parties in the European Parliament, Alternative für Deutschland hasn’t yet coopted them.
Tooze highlighted another element of the story, one that has also been traced in Europe but defines American politics.
Voters habitually think of political divisions in materialist terms. There are rich people and poor people, and they have different economic interests.
The former tend to vote for parties that defend wealth, such as the Republicans, while the latter tend to vote for the Democrats, hoping for more or less moderate redistribution policies.
The British historian argues that there is a third group (Tooze calls it the “professional-managerial social class”) of credentialed professionals occupying positions of administrative and institutional authority.
These people exercise control over the people, starting with a college-educated teacher running your kindergarten class.
This class fulfils the function of a generalised super-ego, disciplining people (read: white, which means without higher education). They’re like parents pointing out the things one shouldn’t do: Driving is bad for the environment, get your shots, or you’ll get sick, don’t be racist, etc.
Resentment of this discipline expresses itself in the fetishisation of people like Donald Trump, who A) is wealthy and B) can get away saying whatever he likes without having to listen to some know-it-all (often a woman) trying to rein in his libidinal excesses.
Adam Tooze argues that this is not anti-materialist but an expression of “a very specific set of resentments deeply embedded in the actual existence of many working-class Americans every day of the week”.
The existence of this managerial class is not a new idea.
John Kenneth Galbraith (among others) pointed out the rise of a managerial class, the technocrats who ran large firms on a day-to-day basis, to free up entrepreneurial types for creative leadership.
Somewhat later, the Yugoslav writer Milovan Đjilas noted the formation of a similar class as one of the characteristics of modern communism.
Society requires what Herbert Marcuse termed “surplus repression,” social norms and restrictions that generally go beyond the baseline repression of instinctual desires characteristic of human society.
This is a characteristic of disciplinary societies in general, and it works best when it is presented as a best practice.
Problems arise when the capacity of late capitalist economies to generate growth diminishes, coupled with the rise of political movements willing to make clear that those restrictions don’t apply to the wealthy.
At another time, this might have improved the left’s fortunes.
However, US politics is currently arranged so that the rich’s desire for increased accumulation has become symbolically fused with the poor’s desire for a return of the repressed.
It is not clear how this situation can be resolved. To a great extent, it is an American problem because it is an outgrowth of the collapse of cartel politics of a kind that most of Europe has yet to experience.
The Trump Administration will likely disrupt the normal functioning of economic and political institutions worldwide, setting Europe up for a similar fall.
Think of something at the level of the 2008 debt crisis and how it inspired today’s populist turn but runs even further to the right.
It will be a whole new regression of bad.
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Photographs courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
