Politics, Populism & Plainspokenness
Though some of its conceivable outcomes have me shuddering in dread, I have to acknowlege that the current presidential race is shaping up as the most fascinating one in my lifetime, and the most consequential. What’s fascinating in part is the populist tinge it has taken on, the notes of resentment being struck by voters (and caucusers). Populism in American history has swung both right and left, but this time it’s oscillating both ways simultaneously, and to some extent overlapping. Comparing the county maps in Iowa after the caucuses, I was surprised to note that Bernie won in pretty much exactly the same places Trump did. This suggests that Bernie’s appeal may be broader than I’d thought – not just a kind of super-campus-rally-plus-limousine-libs thing (Gene McCarthy redux), but an effort capable of drawing on disaffected blue-collar workers and the barely-hanging-on lower middle class: the same elements, or at least overlapping with them, that are also behind Trump.
This shouldn’t be surprising, I guess. It shouldn’t be all that hard to imagine lower-middle-class white people having their animus as powerfully stoked by, and aimed at, the Masters of the Universe who engineered the vast Ponzi scheme that plunged their homes underwater and trashed their retirement plans, as by the prospect of hordes of Mexicans crossing the border to work as fruit pickers and janitors.
Populism is a political form of tribalism. The “us” and “them” dynamic is strong, reinforcing group retrenchment and solidarity, focused by a powerful sense of which other groups are keeping yours down. For right-leaning populists, this opposition arrays along ethnic, racial and national lines. For the left, the dominant tribe is the rich. Does the terminology sound strange? Over the past thirty years, the upper 20% has become blatantly tribal. Their earnings outpace the middleclass far more heftily than before. They are ever more securely immured in lives that don't touch the lives of the middleclass people voting for Trump and Bernie. They don't go to public schools (or they live in towns where the public schools are essentially private schools); they travel globally; they secure professional futures for their children through elite connections; they inherit money; and so on.
“My father told me we don't hate the rich; we want to be the rich.” Where did I hear that recently, in what novel or movie? My middleaged mind can’t quite place it – but the sentiment represents the traditional American escape hatch, the individual hope for making it big that has so often put the kibosh on radical/progressive approaches to politics. But most of you probably saw the studies that came out a year or so ago showing that upward mobility is now easier in many European countries than in the US. Part of the anger currently percolating through the system surely arises from that key point. We have far more overall wealth than we did in the 1970s -- as my conservative economist friends lecture me -- yet we are hugely more unequal than we were in the 1970s. And the escape hatches are being closed.
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