Two recent articles in The Nation have revived my concern
about how we should analyze the election of Donald Trump.
The first is a data driven analysis “Economic Anxiety Didn’t
Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did”. After attempting to mystify us with charts
and graphs, the authors’ basic conclusion is that Trump voters scored higher
than Democratic voters “across several different measures of racial animus” (duh)
while not showing any more economic anxiety than Democratic voters, proving
that racism, not economic peril, was the basis of Trump’s win.
So, let’s begin by noting what anyone schooled in the social
sciences should know – correlation does not demonstrate causation. Yes, large
numbers of Trump supporters are racist and with the current political
alignment, the Democrats generally don’t appeal to voters motivated primarily
by racism.
But if I’m right and the real issue is not how people voted,
but who voted, then this correlation proves little. And, most
importantly, it fails to explain the demographics of the election. Why did
Trump win in areas that have seen little in the way of economic recovery in the
last 8 years and lose in areas which have done significantly better under the
neoliberal policies of the last 40+ years? How did Trump carry many areas that
voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012? And why was the voter turnout significantly
lower than in the past two presidential elections?
Many working class whites did vote for Trump based on their
animus towards blacks and immigrants. But what motivated their animus and also
gave them a reason to “vent” by voting for the man who gave the establishment
the finger? Was it their precarious relationship to the American economy and
political structure? Was it the same sort of alienation that has led to the
opioid epidemic and the rising death rate among working class whites in the US?
And were there large numbers of working class whites (and w-c minorities) who
simply didn’t come out to vote because they didn’t see a candidate who was addressing
their needs? None of these questions are addressed by this limited statistical
analysis. Nor does this give us any understanding of how the resistance should
move forward.
In “Trumpism: It’s Coming from the Suburbs”, Jesse Myerson
argues that the basis of support for Trump is the petit bourgeois, which he
says constitutes the core of fascism “always and everywhere” and populates the
suburbs. While his goal, critiquing the establishment liberal dismissal of
white workers who supported Trump as racist trailer trash, is commendable, his
op/ed does little to promote a deeper understanding of what really happened.
There are many problems with this analysis. To begin with,
Myerson’s utilizes Marxist terminology, but then offers a decidedly non-Marxist
and very vague definition of petit bourgeois, which allows him to classify the police
and Border Patrol agents as petit bourgeois and imply that anyone who has a
pension plan and lives in the suburbs is also petit bourgeois. Then he reasons
that because the petit bourgeois is always the core of fascism, this must be
where Trump’s support came from. As suburbanites, who fled the cities to escape
living next door to minorities, Trump’s racist appeals spoke to them and they
flocked to his banner. They were not motivated by economic anxiety, but more by
status anxiety.
Myerson then states that the working class is limited to
those “in and adjacent to poverty” and goes on to claim that, since poor people
don’t vote (why should they, I might ask), this group could not have possibly
been a major basis of Trump support. The problem here is that it just doesn’t
fit the actual demographics of the election. Trump won large majorities in
rural areas of the South, Mid-West and West, but not necessarily in the suburban
areas of the Northeast and West Coast.
A much more credible theory might look at who came out and
who did not. Did Trump bring out the “missing white voters” (poor, working
class and petit bourgeois),who saw in his candidacy a chance to fight back
against the establishment which has offered them nothing to improve their
situation over the past 40 years? Was this a protest vote for many Trump
supporters? And did a sizable portion of the working-class electorate (both the
white and minority), who were not motivated by Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant
appeals, stay home because they saw no reason to come out and vote for the
people who have done little or nothing for them over this same period?
I think we would be much better off adopting the
classification proposed by the British economist, Guy Standing, a professor at
the University of London. (See my earlier posting “The ‘Precariat’ and the
Danger of Fascism” – 1/2/16.) Standing has suggested an updated system of
economic classification in which he posits a large class (1/3rd to1/2 of the
population in developed capitalist countries) called the “precariat”. This
class is defined by its precarious economic existence.
According to Standing, the diverse individuals in the precariat
share several characteristics:
- They
suffer from elevated levels of stress
- They
lack meaningful work and have no occupational identity
- They
have no access to benefits and no financial security
- Their
level of education is frequently above the work they do
- They are both young and old (think of the WalMart greeters and the McDonald’s workers)
- THEY ARE ALIENATED, ISOLATED AND VERY ANGRY
Their ranks have been swelled by 30 years of economic recessions,
followed by recoveries that have bypassed them. They have formed the
basis of both the left and right populist explosions in Europe and the US, and they
offer a fertile ground for the development of fascism, particularly when,
absent a strong labor movement, there is a weak countervailing force on the
left. Donald Trump appealed to their anxieties (both economic and social) and offered them "hope", while the Democrats offered???
We must therefore ask, can the Democratic Party
fill that void on the left? The answer will depend on how we analyze the election of 2016
and the long-term decline of the Democrats and whether the Democrats can shed
the neoliberalism of the past 40+ years and regain their former status as the “party
of the people”.
A luta continua.
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