Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
If there’s
anyone out there who still thinks Donald Trump is a “populist,” the two big
things he’s dealing with the U.S. Congress about right now — his sweeping
“America First” budget proposal and the Paul Ryan “American Health Care Act” he
enthusiastically endorsed, only to see it ignominiously pulled on March 24 from
a floor vote it was certain to lose — provide the definitive evidence that he
isn’t. Indeed, Trump is exactly the sort of politician the original Populists
of the 1890’s were fighting against: a
super-rich man who bought his way into office and is running the government for
the direct financial benefit of himself and his super-rich friends.
Trump’s
identification with “populism” has somehow survived his actions in office. His
very first executive order reversed an Obama-administration interest rate cut
at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) — meaning that Obama was trying to
make it easier for people to buy homes and Trump made it harder again. Then
Trump reversed a rule that would have forced managers of retirement funds to
run them for the retirees instead of for their own benefit, a clear message to
people in the financial industry that Trump plan to let them rip off their
clients as much as they want. Some “populist”!
It got even
worse when Trump started picking his Cabinet officials and the people he was
going to have run the various federal agencies. Despite his much-ballyhooed
promise that he would leave Social Security and Medicare alone, he appointed as
Secretary of Health and Human Services Congressmember Tom Price, a long-time
advocate of privatizing both. He put Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a
disbeliever in human-caused climate change fond of suing the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) and cutting and pasting his lawsuits from oil industry
documents, in charge of the EPA. Indeed, Trump emphasized his fealty to the oil
and gas industry, and to fossil fuels in general, by appointing former
Exxon/Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State and former Texas Governor
Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy.
Trump picked
Wall Street attorney Jay Clayton to run the Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC), which is supposed to protect individual investors from market rip-offs,
and he said he got advice on the appointment from Jamie Dimon, CEO of Citibank.
To run the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Trump picked Scott Gottlieb,
former consultant to Vertex and other drug companies whose products he’s
supposed to be regulating. Who knew that when Trump promised to “drain the
swamp,” he’d be packing his administration with the dregs?
Trump’s basic
hostility to most of what the government does is widely shared by his party —
which is why, despite exaggerated reports of hostility between him and
Congressional Republicans, most of what they’ve done has been in lock-step.
Quite simply, Trump has adopted whole-hog the extreme economic Libertarianism
of the current Republican Party. His actions since he took office have answered
the question, much asked during his campaign, of just when he thought America
was “great” and what was the era to which he wanted to return to “make America
great again.”
It’s the 1880’s,
the time just before the Populist movement emerged, in which offices in the
U.S. government (especially the Senate, which was still elected by state
legislators instead of directly by voters) were openly bought and sold,
financial and industrial capitalist “robber barons” ran amok, wages and farm
prices were relentlessly driven down, workers had no health or safety
protections, the economy regularly collapsed in what were then called “panics”
(later “depressions” or “recessions”), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
corporations were “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment and declared
minimum-wage laws and organized labor illegal, African-Americans who had been
enfranchised by Reconstruction were pushed back into second-class citizenship,
and the environment wasn’t even considered a political or social issue.
The original
Populists emerged in the 1890’s precisely to oppose at least some of those
policies. They were wildly split on race — some white Populists wanted to
enlist Blacks and other U.S.-born people of color as partners in the movement,
while others were racist and regarded them as a threat — and they pretty
generally opposed immigration for the same reason Trump and his voters do: they
regarded immigrants as a workforce that would take their jobs away. (Trump’s
idea of America’s golden age on immigration is considerably later than the
1880’s: the period from 1924 to 1965, in which a restrictive quota system
ensured that most documented immigrants to the U.S. would be European and
therefore the U.S. would remain a white-majority country.)
But on most of
the economic issues, the 1890’s Populists took positions diametrically opposed
to Trump’s, his party’s and his voters’ today. They wanted more government regulation of private business, not less.
They wanted education, utilities, transportation and other basic services to be
publicly owned, not privatized. They wanted an aggressive government that would
look out for the interests of the ordinary people and rein in the power of the
giant corporations who were combining into huge trusts and grabbing virtually
absolute economic power.
And they got at
least part of what they wanted under a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who served from 1901 to 1909 and had
his faults — he was an imperialist in foreign policy and was personally racist
— but was a stronger opponent of corporate power than anyone who’d been in the
White House before him. In 1903, Roosevelt mediated a labor battle between coal
companies and the United Mine Workers and tried to broker a fair settlement
instead of automatically taking the side of the owners against the workers. He
launched the first serious efforts by the U.S. government to protect public
lands and restrict corporate devastation of the environment. And in 1908, he
signed into law the Railway Act, which not only established government
regulation of interstate railroads but also created the system of “rule-making”
by which executive regulatory agencies are granted the power to create “rules”
that enable them to do their jobs without constantly having to run to Congress
for new authority.
Undoing
130 Years of Protecting Ordinary People
This history
lesson is important to understand both the breadth and the longevity of the worker,
consumer and environmental protections President Trump and the Republicans in
Congress and his administration plan to undo. Their program is based, not on
the actually lived experience of America in the era of industrial and
post-industrial capitalism, but on a fanatically held ideology that believes
that the rich are inherently superior to the rest of humanity; that they are
therefore entitled to most of the wealth and income of a society; and that
attempts to tax or regulate them are thus not only bad public policy but
downright immoral.
This ideology,
which today is generally known as Libertarianism, can be traced at least as far
back as John Calvin, the religious leader who founded Puritanism. Calvin
preached that only certain individuals were worthy of going to Heaven, and
God’s way of revealing who was “predestined” for Heaven and who was condemned
to hell was their material success (or lack thereof) in this world. In 1851,
eight years before Charles Darwin first published the theory of evolution in
his book The Origin of Species, British
philosopher Herbert Spencer put out a book called Social Statics that, along with his later writings, outlined a
philosophy that came to be known as “Social Darwinism.” Social Darwinism held
that the evolution of the human race was still going on, and by their skill at
making more money than their fellows the newly rich of the late 19th
century were showing their superiority as a species.
But
Libertarianism as we know it today is basically the product of three people
from the mid-20th century: economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich
A. Hayek and novelist and essayist Ayn Rand. They saw the Soviet Union
degenerate into tyranny following the 1917 Russian Revolution and reached the
conclusion that any attempt to interfere
with the freedom of capitalists to do whatever they wanted would produce a
similar result. When the Soviet Union emerged as U.S.’s principal enemy
following the end of World War II, their ideas became popular with many
Americans. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1948) and Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) became best-sellers and foundational texts
for the U.S. conservative movement.
The basic tenet
of Libertarianism is that the individual reigns supreme and that no one has any
responsibility to help or care for anyone else. As Rand put it in what has
become the Libertarian creed, “I will not live my life for any other person,
nor ask any other person to live his life for mine.” Libertarians also believe
that all socially created value comes not from workers, but from the
entrepreneurs (the “makers,” Rand called them) who create the industries in
which they work — and therefore the “makers” are entitled to the full value of
what those industries produce. Much of Libertarianism was developed as a
spit-in-the-eye response to the theories of Karl Marx, who among other things
lamented that left alone, without any government or social control, capitalists
would inevitably drive workers’ wages to subsistence levels — i.e., they would
pay their employees the bare minimum they needed to survive.
Libertarians
believe that driving workers’ wages to subsistence levels is a good thing. While progressives, liberals and even some
more traditional conservatives lament the increasing inequality of wealth and
income in the U.S. and throughout the developed world, Libertarians believe
that the more economically unequal a society is, the better, because it means
the “makers” are getting the lion’s share of what their genius produces and all
others, slammed by Rand as “moochers” or “takers,” are getting the pittances
they deserve.
Thus,
Libertarians believe that programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and
the subsidies under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (so-called
“Obamacare”) to help lower-income people buy health insurance are not only bad
public policy, but are downright immoral. That’s because they believe that
taxation is theft, and taxing the rich to redistribute money to the not-rich is
particularly evil. Libertarians say that if rich people choose voluntarily to help not-rich people through private charity,
that’s morally O.K. (though Rand made it clear in the plots of her novels that
the rich people she liked best were the ones who didn’t do that), but they believe that when government
taxes the rich to pay for social programs for the not-rich, it is literally
enslaving the rich to the not-rich.
Libertarians
believe there are only three legitimate functions for government: 1) To
maintain a military so the nation can defend itself against foreign enemies. 2)
To maintain a criminal-justice system so individuals and corporations can be
defended against threats to their lives, liberties and properties. 3) To
maintain a civil-justice system so conflicts between individuals — including
corporations, which like the U.S. Supreme Court in 1886 they regard as the
moral equivalents of flesh-and-blood human beings — can be resolved peaceably
through legal process instead of violence.
Another aspect
of Libertarianism is its intense reverence for “The Market” as the sole
determinant not only of commercial but intrinsic worth. Libertarians believe that if something can’t prove its worth in the commercial marketplace — if
it can’t be sold for more money than it costs to make, and in the process
enrich the capitalist who bankrolled its production — it simply doesn’t deserve
to exist. That, along with their idea that taxation is theft and taxing the
rich turns them into slaves to the not-rich, is why Libertarians oppose public
broadcasting and government funding for the arts and humanities.
This reverence
for “The Market” also shapes the Libertarian attitude towards health care. They
regard health as an industry like any other, selling a product that people
ought to be able to access only if they
can afford to pay for it. That’s why the “American Health Care Act,” the
Republican alternative to the Affordable Care Act, which recently flopped so
badly House Speaker Paul Ryan didn’t dare bring it to a vote, included
eliminating the requirements that health insurance plans cover such basics as
preventive health screening and maternity care.
It contained a
plan for so-called “Health Savings Accounts” that would have given individuals
a tax break if they funded their own health care — something that, as opponents
of the bill pointed out, would be far easier for rich than non-rich people to
do. And it would have allowed insurance companies to sell policies across state
lines, which critics pointed out would lead to low-ball so-called “health
insurance” policies that had lower price tags than current ones but would have
so many exclusions and such high deductibles they would be virtually useless if
you got sick.
One other aspect
of Libertarianism that is strongly influencing the policies of President Trump
and the Republicans in Congress is its visceral hatred for any laws that
attempt to protect the environment. Not only do Libertarians reject the idea
that government has a legitimate role in protecting workers from abusive
employers — if your job threatens your health or safety, they say, you should
just quit — they regard laws to protect the environment as yet more attempts by
“moochers” and “takers” to get in the way of the genius of capitalist
entrepreneurs. Ayn Rand believed that capitalists were so powerful they could literally change the laws of physics; John Galt, the mystery
hero of Atlas Shrugged whose
disappearance powers the book’s plot, turns out to have invented a motor that
runs on air.
Perhaps the
strongest statement of the Libertarian credo from a Presidential candidate came
from the last Republican nominee before Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, on May 17,
2012. Speaking at a private fundraiser in Florida among some of his fellow
0.01-percenters, Romney said, “In every stump speech I give, I speak about the
fact that people who dream and achieve enormous success do not make us poorer —
they make us better off. And the Republican audience that I typically speak to
applauds.” Then, in the part that was quoted most when the secret recording of
it was made public in September 2012, he showed his Libertarian contempt for
the less fortunate people who were supporting his opponent, then-President
Obama.
“There are 47
percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney
said. “[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. That — that’s an entitlement. And
the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no
matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of
Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. …
[M]y job is not to worry about those people — I’ll never convince them that
they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
A Philosophy for Bullies
The influence of
Libertarian ideas on the current Republican Party is a well-documented fact.
When House Speaker Paul Ryan ran for Vice-President on Mitt Romney’s ticket in
2012, it was widely reported that when he hired anyone for his Congressional
staff, he gave them a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and told them to read it so they would know what he
expected of them. David Koch, who along with his brother Charles funds groups
like the Americans for Prosperity that enforce Libertarian discipline on the
Republican Party by choosing which candidates to fund, actually bought his way
onto the Libertarian Party ticket for Vice-President in 1972. He offered the
party a large contribution if they put him on the ticket — and the party
accepted because they realized he was just following Libertarian principles by
treating political office as a commodity to be purchased like any other.
Donald Trump
wasn’t especially known as a Libertarian before he ran for President in 2016,
but the Libertarian philosophy is congenial to him both politically and
personally. Trump is neither a self-made man nor a trust-fund baby; he
inherited a substantial fortune from his father but built it through his own
efforts into a much larger one. At the same time he and his family were looked
down on by the business establishment of New York City because they had started
in the city’s outer boroughs and, until Trump took over, had never cracked the
sacred precincts of Manhattan. Much of Trump’s fabled truculence, his
insistence that if anyone hits you, you should hit them back 10 times as hard,
comes from the status anxiety he felt growing up, the sense that other people
with money didn’t accept him as being a legitimate part of their club.
Libertarianism
fits Donald Trump personally because it allows him to regard himself as a
superior being, entitled to make all the money he wants no matter how many
lesser individuals he has to screw over in the process. And it fits him
politically because it reinforces his instinctive bias that the purpose of
government is to protect rich and super-rich people like himself against the
demands of everyone else. Trump is and always has been a bully, and
Libertarianism is a philosophy that exalts bullying and tells the already
powerful that they have a right to their power, and that includes the right to
lash out at, and if necessary utterly destroy, anyone who stands in their way.
Donald Trump
didn’t run for President as a Libertarian, but he’s certainly governing as one.
His endorsement of Paul Ryan’s Libertarian health care plan — which Ryan and
his fellow Libertarians in Congress saw as just step one in dismantling the
entire social welfare state, starting with the Affordable Care Act and working
through Medicaid, then Medicare and finally the last and biggest target, Social
Security — showed that. So did his Cabinet appointments, which have come almost
exclusively from ideologically Libertarian Republican Congressmembers,
corporate officials and military leaders. And so did the draft budget he
presented in mid-March, which increased spending for the Departments of Defense
and Homeland Security, left alone Social Security and Medicare (for now) and
took a meat ax to just about everything else the federal government does.
It slashed
funding for the National Institutes of Health — because Libertarians believe
that private capital, not tax money, should fund scientific research. It zeroed
out the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Institute of Museum
and Library Services. Those were easy targets not only because the religious
Right, who have been junior partners to the Libertarian Right in the Republican
Party since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, hates them because they provide
alternatives to their narrow “moral” view of the world, but because the
Libertarian philosophy holds that it’s no damned business of government to
improve access to arts, culture and knowledge for people who can’t afford to
pay the full market cost of them.
Trump’s budget
also specifically attacked any program by which the federal government might
document the existence of human-caused climate change or develop and implement
renewable energy. Trump’s visceral denial of humans’ role in climate change
seems to have a lot of roots in his personality, specifically in his exaggerated
sense of machismo. Part of the American
Right’s opposition to environmental protection and renewable energy seems to
come from a perception that “real men” get their energy from inside the ground,
either drilling for oil or digging for coal. It’s only useless, feminized wimps
who get their energy from ground level or above — from solar, wind, geothermal
or hydropower.
But it also is
supported by the radical religious Right, who regard it literally as
blasphemous that humans could do anything that could threaten the survival of
their species on earth — only God can do that, they claim. And it’s also part
of the Libertarian creed that environmental regulations, like regulations in
general, just get in the way of the heroic capitalists who create all value and
without whom we’d still be living in the Dark Ages. (This aggressive
anti-environmentalism seems unique to American Right-wingers; elsewhere in the
world the Right seems to be aware that the words “conservative” and
“conservation” come from the same root and capitalists aren’t going to be able
to make any money if humans destroy the earth environment that sustains them.)
Trump’s budget
not only slashes funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science,
which funds research in clean-energy alternatives to fossil fuels, he also cut
the budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). What’s
more, he cut NASA in a specific way, leaving its space flight programs in place
but cutting way back on its research into climate. One fear climate scientists
have toward the Trump administration is it may simply have NASA stop launching
weather satellites, which have produced much of the information that has
documented that human activity is indeed changing the earth’s climate.
Also, despite
Trump’s phony “populist” rhetoric during the campaign, much of his budget
directly targets programs helping the people who voted for him and gave him his
unlikely victory. As John Cassidy noted in a New Yorker post on March 16 (http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/donald-trumps-voldemort-budget?intcid=mod-latest),
“While Trump would leave in place the subsidies
that the Department of Agriculture provides to ‘Big Agra,’ he would scale back
programs aimed at small farmers and workers, such as the Rural
Business-Cooperative Service, which
promotes rural development and the spread of co-operatives. The budget would
also eliminate a number of federal agencies charged with spurring development
in specific deprived areas of the country, many of which voted for Trump. The
Appalachian Regional Commission would be killed; so would the Mississippi River
region’s Delta Regional Authority.”
Trump’s budget also implements his Libertarian agenda by
directly targeting social services lower-income people rely on. “At the
Department of Housing, for example, Trump would eliminate the
three-billion-dollar Community Development Block Grant program, which helps big
cities pay for affordable housing, slum clearance, and many other things,
including the delivery of hot meals to home-bound seniors,” Cassidy
wrote. “At the Department of Education, cuts would be made to two programs
designed to prepare low-income students for college, and to a work-study
program that helps those students pay their way through school once they’re
there.”
Throughout Trump’s budget, his personal definition of power
as the ability to throw his weight around and boss the rest of the world
interacts with the Libertarian concept of government as a force to protect the
powerful and screw over everyone else. On foreign policy, Cassidy wrote,
“Someone in the Trump Administration appears to have gone through the entire
budget looking to eliminate funding for small entities that try to do some
good.
“These include the Africa Development Foundation, an
independent organization that provides grants to small businesses and community
groups in some of the world’s poorest countries, and the Institute of
Peace, a nonpartisan organization, founded in 1984, that supports efforts to
resolve violent conflict, promote gender equality, and strengthen the rule of
law around the world. The budget would even eliminate a program co-founded
by Bob Dole, who backed Trump in the Republican primary: the McGovern-Dole Food
for International Education Program, which helps provide school meals and
nutritional programs in impoverished nations.”
In George Orwell’s novel 1984, O’Brien, the representative of the all-powerful Inner
Party that rules the dystopian dictatorship, tells the book’s hero, Winston
Smith, that his vision of the future is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
For all its pretensions of celebrating individual freedom, a Libertarian
society in practice would be a handful of wealthy, privileged people stamping
on the faces of everyone else forever. Whatever their differences, Donald
Trump, Paul Ryan and the handful of Republican Congressmembers in the so-called
“Freedom Caucus” who sandbagged the American Health Care Act because it wasn’t
tough enough and didn’t throw as many
people off of access to health care as they wanted share that cruel vision, and
they mean to use the full power of the U.S. government to bring it about.