by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
It’s taken me a
long time to be able to write about the outcome of the 2016 Presidential
election and how the transition from Barack Obama’s administration to Donald
Trump’s is going. The night of November 8 I sat at home alone in front of my TV
gob-smacked at the sheer scope of the defeat not only of Hillary Clinton and
the Democrats but of every principle I hold dear in my political orientation
and have held dear since I had political beliefs at all.
It was the
fourth time in my life my fellow Americans have gob-smacked me with the
awareness of just how Right-wing a country this is and just how strongly many
Americans are motivated to vote against their economic self-interest by the
clever manipulation of race and culture. The other times were 1972, when
Richard Nixon won re-election with 61 percent of the vote — though his
political capital was soon eaten up by Watergate, which essentially was a
series of revelations of just how far he had gone to manipulate the election to
achieve that result — and 1980 and 1984, when the American people elected
Ronald Reagan.
I think the
biggest difference this time was how old I was. When Nixon was re-elected I was
19 years old, and in Reagan’s two elections I was 27 and 31, respectively. I
could look philosophically and say to myself, “This too shall pass. Someday
this country will return to its senses and regain a progressive majority.” When
Trump won in 2016 and the Republican Party held on to its majorities in both
the House and the Senate — essentially gaining complete control of the federal
government and rendering the Democrats basically irrelevant — I was 63, all too
conscious of the fact that even if the Trump phenomenon is reversed and America
once again has a progressive government, it’s not likely to happen until after
I’m dead.
If you’ve been
following my previous blog posts about the 2016 election, you’ll know that my head was well aware that Trump could win the election. I
knew that the historical odds were against the Democrats because, since the
passage of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution in 1947, which
limits the President to two terms, only once has the same major party won the
presidency three times in a row: the Republicans, with Ronald Reagan in 1980
and 1984 and George H. W. Bush in 1988. I had seen the polls showing not only
that Trump was making major inroads into traditional Democratic constituencies,
I’d read the interviews and focus-group reports of how fervently Trump’s
supporters believed in him and his message.
Indeed, I not
only predicted that Trump would win the election, I even correctly figured out
how he would do it: Hillary Clinton would win the popular vote by running up
big majorities in large blue states like California and New York, but Trump
would win the Electoral College, and therefore the Presidency, by eking out
narrow wins in “Rust Belt” states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and
Pennsylvania where huge numbers of people have been put out of work by the
de-industrialization and globalization Clinton and her husband have been
pushing throughout their career in national politics.
But while my
head understood that Trump could win, my heart refused to believe it. Even in the last two weeks — which, according
to the post-election polls, were the crucial time (a huge majority of voters
who made up their minds in the last two weeks voted for Trump) — I was watching
Trump seemingly lose his sanity on national television. I guess I didn’t think
Americans were so boorish that they could elect as President a man who was
almost pure id, who not only showed no sign of grace or compassion but actually
reveled in his lack of grace and
compassion and even took pride in that.
I knew that
there were people in those parts of America between the two big coasts — those
often derided by America’s cosmopolitans as “flyover America” — who admired
Trump because they read his boorishness as a refreshing assault on “political
correctness.” But I had a hard time believing there were enough people like
that to elect him … until they did. Indeed, if you look at the so-called
“county map” of the election, which aside from a couple of narrow strips on the
East and West Coasts and a few pinpricks of blue elsewhere in the country shows
the U.S. as a solid block of Trump red, you’ll get even more depressed and
traumatized by the result.
My age when
Trump was elected has another effect on how I’ve received the news. I have
lived most of my adult life in the expectation that Social Security and
Medicare would be there for me when I got old and I needed them. Now, just as
I’m knocking on the door of the age at which I’d be eligible for those
programs, the federal government is under the complete control of an
ideologically driven political party determined to cut them back drastically
and ultimately eliminate them altogether.
The Libertarian Ideology
And don’t tell
me I’m being too doomy-and-gloomy: I’ve been watching and writing about
politics for at least the last 40 years and I’ve seen the Republican party come
under the sway of a consistent ideology that regards Social Security, Medicare
and all social-welfare programs as not
only wrong but downright immoral. That ideology has many names, but is usually
known as Libertarianism. It was founded in the mid-20th century as a
response to Marxism, and particularly to Karl Marx’s concept of the “labor
theory of value.”
According to
Marx, a piece of iron ore resting peacefully in the ground, doing nothing, had
no real value. It only acquired value when human workers dug it out of the
ground, ran giant furnaces to smelt the iron out of the rock, further refined
it into steel and manufactured useful products out of it. The biggest thing
Marx didn’t like about capitalism was it took money away from the workers and
gave it to capitalists who, Marx argued, had done nothing to create the value
from which they profited.
Libertarianism
grew out of the Austrian school of economics, founded in the 1930’s by Ludwig
von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek. Its basic argument was that Marx was wrong
when he said workers created value. Instead, it argued, the real creators of value were the visionary entrepreneurs
who figured out how to dig iron ore from the ground, smelt it and make useful
things out of it. Where Marx criticized capitalism for driving workers’ wages
down and reducing their income to the bare minimum to keep them alive and
productive, Libertarians thought this was a good thing because it meant the “makers” — the great
capitalist entrepreneurs — were getting the full value of their contributions
to the economy instead of having to share it with the “takers,” everyone else.
The Libertarian
philosophy was popularized by novelist Ayn Rand, who fled the Soviet Union in
1928, established herself as a writer in the U.S. and wrote two major novels, The
Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas
Shrugged (1957), which outlined the basics.
The heroes of these books are fiercely independent entrepreneurs who triumph at
the end against the “little people” who try to take over their innovations and
divert some of the capitalists’ income to help others. At the end of each book,
Rand’s capitalist superhero delivers a long speech expressing her philosophy.
Though Rand said it was morally O.K. for capitalists voluntarily to contribute money to help others, it’s clear from
her overall plots that the capitalists she most admired were the ones who kept
it all for themselves.
While at least
some traditional conservatives join liberals and progressives in expressing
concern over the increasing inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. and
throughout the developed world, Libertarians regard increasing economic
inequality as a good thing — because it means the “makers” are protecting more
and more of what’s rightfully theirs against the “takers.” One of the most
powerful statements of the Libertarian philosophy was given by 2012
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney in a private fundraiser among fellow super-rich
people on May 17, 2012 when he said of his opponent, President Obama, “[T]here
are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe
that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care
for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to
housing, to you name it.… I’ll never convince them that they should take
personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
In the
Libertarian world, no one is “entitled” to food, housing, health care or
anything else. You earn those things in
the capitalist marketplace, and if the market is allowed to work without any
opposition or regulation from government, the greatest rewards will
automatically flow to the worthiest individuals. The statement Republican
President Theodore Roosevelt made in 1903 that many of the corporate leaders of
his time were “malefactors of great wealth” is anathema to a Libertarian.
According to Libertarians, the mere fact that you are rich shows that you are a
superior human being — much the way Puritan theologian John Calvin preached
that only a handful of people, the “elect,” were going to go to Heaven, and the
way God had of showing humanity in general who those people were was through
their material success in this world. Indeed, in Rand’s novels she arranges her
plots so her capitalist superheroes lose all their money through machinations of
less worthy humans — and get it all back again, thereby demonstrating their
physical, intellectual and moral superiority over the rest of us.
One other weird
quirk of Libertarianism, especially the way Ayn Rand preached it, is it is
fanatically anti-environment. Libertarians do not believe in environmental
regulation because they regard it — along with minimum-wage laws, social-welfare
programs, regulations protecting workers’ health and safety, consumer
protections, and laws allowing workers to form unions and bargain collectively
with their employers — as just one more way the “takers” can exploit the
“makers” and essentially steal from them. In fact, Rand seemed to believe that
capitalist entrepreneurialism was so powerful it could literally change the
laws of physics; the hero of Atlas Shrugged,
John Galt, invents a motor that runs on air.
Republicans Become
Ideological; Democrats Don’t
The American
political system has generally resolved itself into two major political
parties, each so-called “broad tent” coalitions whose members had a wide range
of ideologies. Indeed, for years one of the rules of American political science
was that a major party that got too ideological — that positioned itself too
far either to the Left or the Right — would be punished by losing a major
election by a landslide margin and would have to move back to the center to
survive, regroup and eventually win. When I majored in political science at UC
Berkeley and San Francisco State University in the mid- to late-1970’s, that
was the standard explanation for why Barry Goldwater lost the presidency in
1964 and George McGovern lost in 1972.
What we didn’t
know was that the Right-wing movement within the Republican party that had
pushed Goldwater and got him nominated took a very different lesson from his
defeat. That Right-wing movement had actually started in the 1930’s in
opposition to President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and it had already
survived blows that would have killed less dedicated, committed and perseverant
activists. It had survived World War II, during which a lot of its early
adherents had been exposed as isolationists and, in some cases, outright Nazi
sympathizers. It had survived the fall of its first elected official with a
national following, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), in 1954. It survived
Goldwater’s defeat largely by coalescing around someone else who could deliver
Goldwater’s message but soften it up and thereby make it appealing to enough
U.S. voters to win a Presidential election. The someone else was Ronald Reagan,
and in 1980 he did just that.
But recruiting
Ronald Reagan to put a kinder, gentler face on Libertarian conservatism than
Goldwater had was just one aspect of the Right’s winning strategy. They also
shrewdly exploited the two great divisive issues, race and culture, that
emerged during the 1960’s and gave the Right entrée not only into the formerly
solidly Democratic South but also to the working-class white ethnics in the
East and Midwest that had once been bulwarks of the Democratic Party’s base.
Whites who had applauded the New Deal programs when they were their principal beneficiaries suddenly turned
against them when the administrations of John F. Kennedy and especially Lyndon
Johnson started extending them to people of color in general and
African-Americans in particular.
Republicans and
Right-wing independents like Alabama Governor George Wallace saw an opening: if
they could rile up working-class whites by appealing to their racism, they
could break up the New Deal coalition and create a working, enduring Right-wing
majority. They got a boost from another phenomenon of the 1960’s: the rise of a
counter-culture among young people that eventually took the form of sexual
liberation and drug use. Older whites who had sacrificed to send their kids to
college were horrified to see them drifting into the counterculture, and
eagerly voted for Republicans like Reagan who promised to put an end to all
this “permissiveness” and re-impose discipline on young people in general and
college students in particular.
In the 1960’s,
the Republican and Democratic parties reversed their traditional positions on
civil rights. Barry Goldwater started that process when he voted against the
landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act on the basis that, while government should not
discriminate on the basis of race, it also should not tell private businesses
that they could not discriminate. (More
recently, Senator Rand Paul [R-Kentucky] told interviewers that had he been
around in 1964, he wouldn’t have voted for the Civil Rights Act for the same
reason Goldwater didn’t.)
Though Goldwater
lost the presidency in a landslide vote, he carried six states — his own,
Arizona, and five in the Deep South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi
(where he won a whopping 87.1 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 12.9 percent)
and South Carolina. This set the stage for the next Presidential election in
1968, when the nation was torn apart by racial and cultural chaos and Richard
Nixon, the Republican nominee, saw his chance to win by coming forward as the
candidate of “law and order” and what he called “middle America” — i.e., older
white America put off by the ferment of the civil rights movement, the protests
against the Viet Nam war and the sex-drugs-and-rock-’n’-roll lifestyle of the
young counterculture.
Faced with a
major Right-wing independent challenge from openly racist Alabama Governor
George Wallace that threatened to split the Right-wing vote and keep the
Democrats in the White House, Nixon and Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South
Carolina) concocted what became known as the “Southern Strategy.” This
basically flipped the two major parties’ historic stands on civil rights: the
Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, became
the party of racial inclusion, civil rights and voting rights for people of
color.
Meanwhile, the
Republicans — the “Party of Lincoln” — became the home of racism and reaction.
It worked like a charm in 1968 — between them Nixon and Wallace got 57 percent
of the vote to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. (It helped that Humphrey,
like Hillary Clinton in 2016, was the choice of the Democratic party bosses and
his nomination, like hers, profoundly alienated young political activists and
led many of them either to vote for third-party candidates or just stay home.)
What’s more, the
“Southern Strategy” didn’t just win for Republicans in the South; many white
working-class voters in the Midwest who’d become Democrats because they’d
directly benefited from the New Deal programs in the 1930’s resented the
Democrats of the 1960’s for expanding these programs to help people of color.
Thanks to their appeals to race and culture, the Republicans broke the New Deal
coalition and created the Right-wing majority that, with occasional exceptions,
has dominated American politics ever since.
Don’t believe
analysts who have prematurely reported the “demise of the Right.” It triumphed
when Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980 and triumphantly re-elected in
a 49-state landslide in 1984. It held on to the Presidency with George H. W.
Bush in 1988 — the only time since the
passage of the 22nd Amendment limiting the Presidency to two terms
that one major party has won the White House three elections in a row — only to
lose it partly because many Rightists abandoned Bush Sr. as an apostate because
he broke his “read my lips: no new taxes” pledge, and partly because the
Right-wing vote in 1992 was split between Bush and H. Ross Perot, who between
them got 57 percent of the vote to Bill Clinton’s 43 percent.
The Right struck
back against Clinton when the nation gave Republicans control of the House of
Representatives in 1994, largely as a reaction to an unpopular health-care
reform sponsored by Hillary Clinton (sound familiar? Hillary’s constant
reminders during the 2016 campaign that “before it was called Obamacare, it was
called Hillarycare” were some of the dumbest things she said all campaign), and
when they made him only the second U.S. President in history to be impeached
and put on trial before the Senate for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” (Had
Hillary won in 2016 she would quite likely have been the third.)
By the time
George W. Bush won the Presidency — largely due to the efforts of the National
Rifle Association, which swung Tennessee and West Virginia to the Republicans
(had Democrat Al Gore been able to hold on to his home state, Tennessee, he
would have been President and Florida wouldn’t have mattered) — people on the
Right were once again talking about what Bush adviser Karl Rove called
“full-spectrum dominance” of American politics. Partly through the ample
coffers of mega-rich donors like Charles and David Koch, Dick and Betsy DeVos,
Sheldon Adelson and Art Pope, and partly through the incessant Right-wing
propaganda on talk radio and Fox News, the Republicans were able to develop a
huge hard-core following of working-class whites and others profoundly
disturbed by the racial and cultural changes that had been going on since the
1960’s — and ready to vote accordingly.
The result was
that, after Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 (a race he was actually
on his way to losing — John McCain and Sarah Palin were creeping up in the
polls until the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 tanked the
American economy and convinced enough voters it was time for a change), the
Democrats suffered one political defeat after another in the Obama years. As
Right-wing writer Deroy Murdock chronicled in a New York Post op-ed on December 25, 2016 (http://nypost.com/2016/12/25/obamas-legacy-is-a-devastated-democratic-party/):
- Democrats surrendered the White House to political neophyte Donald J. Trump.
- US Senate seats slipped from 55 to 46, down 16 percent.
- US House seats fell from 256 to 194, down 24 percent.
- Democrats ran the Senate and House in 2009. Next year, they will control neither.
- Governorships slid from 28 to 16, down 43 percent.
- State legislatures (both chambers) plunged from 27 to 14, down 48 percent
- Trifectas (states with Democrat governors and both legislative chambers) cratered from 17 to 6, down 65 percent. …
Obama
has supervised the net loss of 959 such Democratic positions, down 23.5
percent, according to Ballotpedia, which generated most of the data cited here.
This far outpaces the 843 net seats that Republicans yielded under President
Dwight Eisenhower.
The so-called “Obama coalition” is a paper tiger that was
able to elect one and only one person:
Obama himself. Otherwise, despite Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote majority over
Donald Trump (which was politically irrelevant because her support was
concentrated in the urban centers on the East and West Coasts, while Trump
dominated overwhelmingly everywhere else, in what urban cosmopolites
insultingly dismiss as “flyover America”), the U.S. is, was, has been since
1968 and overwhelmingly remains a profoundly Right-wing country. That is the lesson what’s left of the American Left needs to
learn from Donald Trump’s victory and the Republicans’ final achievement of the
“full-spectrum dominance” of U.S. politics they have sought for so long.
Hitting
Bottom and Facing Up
It’s a major part of 12-step programs for addiction
recovery that the process starts when you realize you have “hit bottom” and you
can either die or get your life back together and work on getting better. The
Trump election — indeed, the long string of political triumphs for the Right
that began with the Congressional and state legislative elections of 2010 and
culminated with Trump’s win — should be the bottom-hitting moment for the
American Left. This should be the time when we start shedding the illusions we
have surrounded ourselves with and thereby rendered ourselves irrelevant.
First, the Trump victory was largely a Republican coup
d’état. Like Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in
1933, Trump and the Republicans in 2016 took over America by shrewdly
exploiting the anti-democratic features of their country’s constitution.
And I don’t just mean the Electoral College, either — though after a run of 26
elections from 1892 to 1996 in which the winner of the popular vote for
President also won the Electoral College and therefore the presidency, in two
of the five 21st century elections that hasn’t happened. (Also, in
the four elections since the end of the Civil War in which the popular and the
electoral vote have diverged — 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 — it has always been the Democrat who won the popular vote and the
Republican who won the presidency, never the other way around.)
The biggest undemocratic feature of the U.S. Constitution
the Republicans were able to exploit in 2016 is the huge power it gives to
individual states. It is states that set the rules for who may and may not
vote in elections. The great Constitutional amendments that extended the
franchise — the 15th, which allowed people of color to vote; the 19th,
which gave the vote to women; the 24th, which abolished the poll
tax; and the 26th, which lowered the voting age to 18 — are all
framed as limits on the otherwise absolute power of state governments to decide
who is and isn’t qualified to vote.
Through much of the Obama Presidency Democrats sanguinely
expressed confidence that they would build a partisan majority in the future
because of “demographics” — that is, because the percentages of the population
that voted Democratic (young people, poor people, people of color, women) were
growing and the segments that voted Republican (white people, old people, men)
were shrinking. The Republicans had a solution for that: a concerted effort on
the part of Republican governors and state legislators to rewrite election
rules so those voters not likely to vote Republican would not be able to vote
at all.
These sorts of disenfranchisement — an end to same-day
voter registration, eliminating or cutting back on early voting, photo ID
requirements for voters, restrictions on who could turn in a ballot for someone
else, and selective closings of polling places in poor regions and communities
of color — were key factors in swinging several close states Obama won to
Trump. And Trump’s appointment of openly racist Senator Jeff Sessions
(R-Alabama) as his attorney general is an indication that the Republicans are
doubling down on disenfranchisement as a long-term strategy to shrink the
electorate and make sure so few of
their opponents can vote that they can’t threaten Republican dominance at both
national and state levels.
Indeed, Trump’s Cabinet choices are the biggest indication
that, despite his so-called “populist” rhetoric and appeal, he intends to
govern as a hard-core Libertarian ideologue. Despite his pledge during his
campaign to preserve Social Security and Medicare, Trump picked as his
Secretary of Health and Human Services Representative Tom Price (R-Georgia), a
long-term advocate of “reforming” Medicare by privatizing it. As Secretary of
Labor Trump picked Carl’s, Jr. CEO Andrew Puzder, who is against raising the
federal minimum wage and is a strong advocate of replacing human workers with
robots wherever possible.
As Secretary of Education Trump picked Betsy DeVos, a
strong advocate of public funding of private schools and of union-busting
charter schools, who along with her husband largely funded the campaign to turn
her native Michigan from a bastion of union power to a right-to-work state (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/betsy-dick-devos-family-amway-michigan-politics-religion-214631).
As Secretary of Energy Trump appointed former Texas Governor Rick Perry, and as
Secretary of the Interior he’s picked Representative Ryan Zinke (R-Montana),
both strong supporters of fossil-fuel development and opponents of the idea
that humans are causing climate change.
The rest of Trump’s Cabinet appointments (http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a23922/donald-trump-cabinet-appointments/)
pretty much fit the same mold. They’re all either corporate CEO’s, long-time
Republican officeholders or heroes of the social-conservative Right like Health
and Human Services nominee Dr. Ben Carson. They’re united mostly by a
deep-seated hostility to the stated missions of the government departments
Trump has picked them to run. When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in
1933, he followed a similar strategy, which he called Gleischhaltung — one of those indigestible German words that don’t
translate well (it’s usually rendered as “rectification” or “social
agreement”).
It meant that if you didn’t like what a particular
government department was supposed to do, rather than go through the rigmarole
of eliminating it, you simply appointed someone who didn’t believe in its
mission and would run it to accomplish the opposite of what its creators
wanted. That’s what Richard Nixon did in 1973 when he appointed far-Right
Howard Phillips to run the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the
anti-poverty agency created under his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, and it’s what
Trump has done throughout virtually all his Cabinet choices, especially those
dealing with domestic policy.
Also, as political commentator Ronald Brownstein noted (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/trump-is-making-little-attempt-to-reconcile-the-country/511451/),
Trump is totally uninterested in reconciling a divided country. In line both
with the Republican demand for “full-spectrum dominance” of American politics
and Trump’s own personality, which divides the world into “winners” and
“losers” and holds that the winners have the right to dominate the losers and
force them to submit, “Trump has appointed a Cabinet and White House staff that
braid the competing factions of the Republican Party, but offer virtually no
outreach to voters beyond them,” Brownstein wrote last December. “His
nominations for most Cabinet agencies — as well as for the Office of Management
and Budget and the Environmental Protection Agency — point toward Trump
launching a much more ideological crusade to retrench government than he
stressed during the campaign.”
We know from all those state governments Republicans have
taken control of in the last decade or so just what Trump and the Congressional
Republicans will do with their absolute power. They will move to slash
government spending on education and health care. Their replacement for the
Affordable Care Act — if they come up with one at all, since their whole
objection to it is it promised a major expansion of the social safety net the
Republicans have vowed to eliminate altogether — will be a Libertarian concept
of “health savings accounts” in which it will be the responsibility of
individuals, not either the government or private insurers, to save enough
money to cover their own health care, or if they won’t (or can’t) simply to do
without.
The Age of Trump and the Republicans will be one in which
what’s left of America’s labor movement will be so burdened by regulations and
restrictions it will virtually disappear. It will be one in which all controls
on greedy corporations and financial institutions to keep them ripping off
consumers, poisoning or disabling their workers, or polluting the environment
will be abolished. It will be one in which the tax code is rewritten to make America’s
distribution of wealth and income even more unequal than it already is. It will
be one in which the promise of public education to give all Americans equal
opportunity — a promise that has not always been fulfilled — will be explicitly
rejected. And it will be one in which corporations will have the power to
pollute and destroy the environment as much as they please in the pursuit of
short-term profit.
Trump has already targeted all four of President Obama’s
signature accomplishments — the Affordable Care Act, the nuclear arms deal with
Iran, the Paris agreement on climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership
trade agreement — for elimination. That’s why Obama said during a rally last
fall that he was “really, really into making Hillary Clinton the next
President” — because if Clinton had won the election Obama would have had a
legacy. With Trump as his successor, it will be like Obama never served as
President at all. He will be as thoroughly forgotten as Heinrich Brüning, who
served as Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932 and thought he could bring
the rival parties together and unify the country politically. Like Obama,
Brüning never realized that he wasn’t dealing with a normal opposition, but
with a gang of thugs who didn’t care how much damage they did to the country as
long as they got their way in the end, and — after a couple of insignificant
interim appointments in between — Brüning was ultimately replaced by Adolf
Hitler.
America’s progressive community has one weapon against the
full-spectrum dominance of Donald Trump and the Republicans which can be quite
effective if we know how to use it. The
American people like Right-wing policies considerably better in the abstract
than they do when they actually have to live under them. Donald Trump’s
determination to return to the world of the 1880’s in which corporations and
their leaders openly and unashamedly ran the government to their liking is
going to be disastrous for all those white working-class people who thought he
was going to bring back their jobs, all the senior citizens who thought he was
going to protect their Social Security and Medicare, and all the people in his
coalition whom he persuaded to blame the nation’s problems on Mexicans and
Muslims.
In fact, for all the media references to Trump as a
“populist,” what he and the Republicans have in store for the U.S. is a return
to the conditions that generated the original Populist movement in the 1890’s.
As has been proven time and time again, what happens when you let corporations
do whatever they like, including driving down the wages of their workers to
subsistence levels and running the political system to enrich themselves, is
economic collapse. It happened in 1873, 1893, 1897, 1929 and 2008. The workers
who flocked to the polls to make Donald Trump President in 2016 are going to be
disillusioned when they start feeling the pain of his actual policies, and they
could respond by finding someone even crazier and even farther Right.
Or they could move Left. Bernie Sanders won two of his
biggest primary victories in Michigan and Wisconsin, two of the key Rust Belt
states that ultimately carried Trump to the presidency. That’s an indication
that a lot of voters in the states that deindustrialized from the 1970’s
through the 1990’s — and who remembered Hillary Clinton as the wife of the man
who pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and
thereby shipped their jobs to Mexico — wanted far-reaching social change and
were so intent on getting something
different from their government they didn’t really care whether that change
came from the Left or the Right.
But in order to take advantage of Trump’s and the
Republicans’ likely failure, the American Left is going to have to cure itself
of a long string of rotten habits that were previously damaging and are now
potentially lethal. First, the American Left has to develop an appeal to the entire
population, not keep salami-slicing the
American people into narrowly constructed “identity politics” categories. One reason
the Right has been cleaning our clock for the last 36 years is they address
Americans as Americans, not as members
of a race or a gender or a sexual orientation. Political satirist Mark
Russell’s acid joke during the 1972 campaign that the perfect delegate for
Democratic nominee George McGovern was “a disabled Native American Lesbian
lettuce picker on welfare” accurately sums up the limitations of “identity
politics” and the way they have hobbled the Left.
We also have to end the poisonous rancor and mutual
distrust between those on the Left who work through the system — both in
electoral politics and in the kind of organizing and lobbying big groups like
the AFL-CIO, Sierra Club, National Organization for Women and Human Rights
Campaign do — and those on the outside of the system who do direct action,
stage demonstrations and practice civil disobedience. Social change does not
come about exclusively through working within the system. Nor does it come
about exclusively through demonstrating and risking arrest. It takes both. The Right understands this — this is why the
double-pincer movement of the Republican Congressional campaign and the
direct-activist Tea Party was so effective in retaking control of U.S. politics
from Obama and the Democrats in 2010 — while the Left used to in the 1890’s, the 1930’s and at least some of the
1960’s, but has long since forgotten it.
Another thing we have to do if we want an effective mass
Left to exist in America again (it doesn’t now and hasn’t for nearly 50 years!)
is give up all attempts to organize alternative political parties. It’s long
past time for the Green Party, Peace and Freedom and all the other pathetic
attempts to set up mini-parties to close up shop and go out of business. It
made sense to create the Green Party in its birthplace, Germany, because the
German electoral system allows alternative parties to compete for real
legislative power. The U.S. system does not. The Constitution itself and our
practice of single-member winner-take-all electoral districts essentially bakes
the two-party system into our political DNA. The kinds of progressive
office-holders we want to see will get into office in one and only one way: by
running within the ballot access mechanism of the Democratic Party.
Once again, the Right gets this and the Left doesn’t. Every
grass-roots movement of the American Right over the last 50 years, from the
Young Americans for Freedom in the 1960’s to the Tea Party in the 2010’s, has
rejected the idiocy of organizing alternative parties. Instead, they’ve
maintained a laser-like focus on capturing the Republican Party and moving it
ever farther Right — and they’ve succeeded. As a result, they’ve made ideas
like abolishing organized labor and privatizing or eliminating Social Security,
totally beyond the pale in the 1960’s, seem acceptable and reasonable today.
Here, as in so many other things, we need to study the wins of our adversaries
and learn from them.
It is also time to end one of the most pernicious ideas
that has hobbled the American Left: the sheer visceral hatred of the Democratic
Party among what I call the “alt-Left,” those willfully ignorant idiots who
insist that because both the Republican and Democratic parties are committed to
maintaining and protecting capitalism (true), they are the same and it doesn’t
make any difference which one is in power (emphatically untrue). Indeed, over the next four, eight, 20 years or
however long the U.S. government is completely controlled by Republicans, these
alt-Left nitwits are going to learn a hard, long and bitter lesson on just how
different the two major U.S. parties are and how important it is to confine our
electoral work to the Democratic Party, not as the “lesser of two evils” but as
the only viable alternative through which we can contest for electoral power
against the overwhelmingly dominant Republicans.
And if, as was true in the 2016 Presidential campaign, the
Democratic candidate really does appear to be “the lesser of two evils,” we still have an obligation to vote for her. Alt-Leftists are fond
of saying, “The lesser evil is still evil.” What we should be saying is, “The lesser evil is still lesser.” As I
argued during the campaign with my friends who said they could never vote for
Hillary Clinton, sometimes you have to
vote for the lesser evil because the greater evil is so evil it can’t be allowed to prevail. There is no question
that on all the issues I care about — workers’ rights, the social safety net,
the environment, racial and gender equality, Queer rights — this country would
be a lot better off under Hillary Clinton than it will be under Donald Trump.
We can’t sit back and hope that the Trumpublican regime
will collapse of its own accord. We also can’t afford the mistakes the American
Left has been making for the past 50 years. We need to stay organized and
active — not wimp out en masse the way
all too many Leftists did 36 years ago when Reagan was elected — but we also
need to get smart about what we do and how we relate to each other. Donald
Trump’s election was a catastrophe for the Left and for any sane notion of
social justice. We will only compound the tragedy if we continue to make the
same stupid mistakes we’ve been making over and over for the last five decades.
