Jacobin-24.pdf

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Nixon’s real crimes are not the petty ones of bribery and corruption which his fellow capitalists so hypocritically accuse him of. Our movement to dump Nixon must expose his real crimes against the people of Indochina, the Arab peoples and the people of Chile as well as the working and oppressed people here in the U.S. While these are not on Time Magazine’s or Senator Kennedy’s list of Nixon’s crimes, they must be added to our indictment of the Nixon government and the imperialist interests which he represents. — “Dump Nixon! Stop the Fascist Tide!” The Call, Vol. 2, No. 3, December 1973

Features

ISSUE 24

WINTER 2017

pg. 23

pg. 41

FROM MARGINS TO MAINSTREAM

HOW THE DONALD CAME TO RULE

DOUG HENWOOD

CHARLIE POST

pg. 67

pg. 85

LOSING WEST VIRGINIA

BEING ANTI-TRUMP ISN’T ENOUGH

CATHY KUNKEL

DAVID BRODER

pg. 107

THE GLORY DAYS ARE OVER NICOLE ASCHOFF

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

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Departments FRONT MATTERS

READING MATERIEL

THE TUMBREL

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51

97

the soapbox

canon fodder

girondins

Letters + The Internet Speaks

Coulterland

False Answers

8

54

101

party lines

field notes

thermidor

Now What?

Big Plans

Paleocons for Porn

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62

103

friends & foes

dossier

versailles

Steve Bannon’s Autobahn

Discover the Networks

Kiss the Ring

15 struggle session

The Trump Way

LEFTOVERS

77

117

bass & superstructure

popular front

Stand Down Margaret

Results & Prospects: Q4 2016

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80

119

the vulgar empiricist

ways of seeing

means & ends

How Pepe Turned Brown

No Money, Mo’ Problems

MEANS OF DEDUCTION

What Nate Missed

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82

misery index

beyond a boundary

The New Populists

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CULTURAL CAPITAL

Adam Silver Isn’t Protesting

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Contributors cover art by Edward Carvalho-Monaghan Nicole Aschoff is the managing editor at Jacobin and the author of The New Prophets of Capital.

Brendan James is a writer in New York City and the producer of Chapo

Matthew Miranda writes about sports for SB Nation and FanSided,

Trap House.

Billy Bragg is an English rock musician and activist.

Susan L. Kang is an associate professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She is the author of Human Rights and Labor Solidarity.

and teaches English and writing at Stony Brook University.

David Broder is a translator and a member of the Historical Materialism editorial board. He lives in Rome, where he is researching a phd on dissident communists in the Italian Resistance. Arun Gupta was an editor of the Guardian Newsweekly and founder of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer and is the host of Behind the News. His new book is My Turn. Tanner Howard is an editorial assistant at Jacobin.

Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin. Cathy Kunkel is an independent consultant on energy and electric utility issues based in Charleston, WV, and is also active with the community organization Advocates for a Safe Water System. Ella Mahony is an assistant editor at Jacobin.

Angela Nagle is a cultural critic for the Baffler, Current Affairs, and Dublin Review of Books. Leo Panitch is a professor of political science at York University and the co-editor of the Socialist Register. His latest book, with Sam Gindin, is The Making of Global Capitalism. Charlie Post is a longtime socialist activist who teaches at City University of New York. Alex Press is a writer and phd student in sociology at Northeastern University. She lives in Boston.

Branko Marcetic is an editorial assistant at Jacobin. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.


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Citoyens E D I TO R & P U B L I S H E R

O U T R E AC H & D E V E LO P M E N T

Bhaskar Sunkara

Jason Farbman

C R E AT I V E D I R E C TO R

R E A D I N G G RO U P S

Remeike Forbes

Neal Meyer

M A N AG I N G E D I TO R

C I RC U L AT I O N

Nicole Aschoff

Katrina Forman

AS S O C I AT E E D I TO R

C O N T R I B U T I N G E D I TO R S

Shawn Gude Micah Uetricht

Bashir Abu-Manneh Jonah Birch Sebastian Budgen Ronan Burtenshaw Liza Featherstone Sabrina Fernandes Belén Fernández Eileen Jones Matt Karp Cyrus Lewis Chris Maisano Scott McLemee Gavin Mueller Karen Narefsky Catarina Príncipe Kate Redburn Corey Robin Miya Tokumitsu

E D I TO R I A L B OA R D

Seth Ackerman Alyssa Battistoni Mike Beggs Megan Erickson Peter Frase Connor Kilpatrick A RT E D I TO R

Erin Schell AS S I STA N T E D I TO R S

Elizabeth Mahony Jen Hedler Phillis R E S E A RC H E R

Jonah Walters E D I TO R I A L AS S I STA N T S

Tanner Howard Branko Marcetic Rajeev Ravisankar Miles Pulsford

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Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly. SUBSCRIPTION PRICE

$29 US (print) $39 Canada (print) $59 international (print) $19 (digital) High-income $59 Institutions $69 Lifetime $295 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217 jacobinmag.com/subscribe/ [email protected] © 2017 Jacobin Foundation ISSN: 2470-6930 B O O K STO R E D I ST R I B U T I O N

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Circulation: 30,920 Web Visitors: 1,766,097

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FRONT MATTERS

A HEALTHY START TO A NUTRITIOUS MAGAZINE.

FRONT MATTERS THE SOAPBOX

Small Is Not Beautiful

Letters Storm the Libraries! As Chris Maisano wrote in The ABCs of Socialism, public libraries “would be one of the most important institutions in any socialist society worthy of the name.” Where is the mention of libraries, museums, and other institutions that exist for the common good in The Party We Need? Most public libraries are funded by property taxes, which create well-funded libraries in wealthy areas and underfunded ones in communities where a library would benefit people most. Educational institutions would not have to grovel to corporate interests if they were divorced from property-taxbased funding. We need equitably distributed funds for all public education. — Mike Monahan, Chicago, IL

In the last issue, Megan Erickson laid out an excellent vision for the education policy we need. One policy she did not mention, but that we desperately need, is decoupling public schools from municipal property taxes. The way schools are funded in this country results in further segregation (and hurts housing affordability), as well as constrains budgets in communities that need funding the most. Education research has consistently shown that school integration is one of the best ways to close the “achievement gap,” so eliminating systems that prevent integration will create better schools for all. The Supreme Court failed to protect students in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez when they held that property tax funding of schools is not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, the work falls to us, at the level of state organizing. In 2013, Colorado attempted to pass a constitutional amendment that would have shifted school funding away from local property taxes and towards a guaranteed state level of funding per pupil. Although Amendment 66 failed (and included some bad provisions on charter schools), the push to shift school funding away from local property taxes provides a model for how the Left can pursue policies that make schools more equal for all. — Ryan Dykhouse, Boston, MA No is this where we send in letters that get printed in the personals section of jacobin? —Moya Márquez, Los Angeles, CA

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The Internet Speaks Because communication is at the heart of any good relationship.

Someone’s Figured out the Formula Such social democratic bs from this page, acts like it is marxists. —Martin Burk, Berkeley, CA Against Mike Barnicle I’ve had to listen to Mike Barnicle yammer my whole life — I grew up in Massachusetts and he was on the local news, moralizing about sports and ripping off George Carlin. If that asshole knew where Aleppo was nine months ago, I’ll shit out an official Patriots gameday ball signed by the devil himself and give it to Barnicle for a belated Christmas gift. —Peter Berard, Watertown, MA

You’ll Need to Give Us State Power First I wonder if Jacobin is ever going to give us regular updates on Socialist and Communist massacres.

Not a Bad Idea ... Memo to self: Stop reading the Comments on Jacobin’s fb page. —Jeff White, Toronto, Canada

—Melissa Borman, Atlanta, GA Don’t Do This! Jacobin drinking game: Take a shot every time you read “neoliberalism” or “elite.” Die before finishing the first paragraph. —Brian Biekman, Houston, TX


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FRONT MATTERS PARTY LINES

1. Trump’s victory signals a deep political crisis, not simply a failure of strategy. Trump didn’t win because he’s a Twitter Jedi or a masterful orator. He won because he acknowledged working people’s fear, anger, and anxiety. This doesn’t mean he cares about them — nothing in his long history as a money-grubbing businessman indicates that he does. It simply means that for enough Americans, “more of the same” was enemy number one, and Trump took that sentiment to the bank.

Now What? Back at the beginning of the 2016 campaign, pundits predicted a boring slog between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. The heir that raised the most cash would take the crown, simple as that. Instead, Bush collapsed almost immediately, vying with Lincoln Chafee for “candidate we felt most sorry for,” and Clinton found herself in the fight of her career, battling “political outsiders” on both wings. Election night was a nightmare for progressives. Instead of a candidate we all knew — and loved or hated accordingly — we got Trump: a mendacious wild card whose recipe for making America great again seems to be equal parts xenophobia, misogyny, and nationalism. Now what?

Put differently, Trump’s victory is the result of a deep crisis of legitimacy, present in the United States and a growing number of countries around the world. The institutions and alliances that constitute the bipartisan consensus underpinning neoliberal capitalism are in serious crisis; voters increasingly see the political center as bankrupt and hopeless. The Left can’t ignore this fact. Sure, in hindsight it’s clear the Clinton team made grievous errors, honing in on piecemeal, identity-based pockets of voters to create a winning coalition, ignoring the broader economic concerns of voters in states like Wisconsin. But there’s a real danger that the political takeaway of Trump’s victory for progressives will be “watch out for those Russians,” or that next time around we should “do the same, but better” — better polling, better analytics, better messaging — instead of recognizing that different, not better, is what’s needed.

This question has been on our minds. In our last print issue we talked about how the Left could build on the surge of support for Bernie Sanders and craft a socialist platform to challenge the common sense of our for-profit system. Trump hasn’t extinguished this possibility — he’s made it more urgent than ever. “Journey to the Dark Side” takes this urgency as its guide. It shines a light on Trump’s victory and examines what his win says about our political landscape. Three lessons can be distilled from the arguments within:

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We can’t count on the Democrats to put up a fight; the fight must come from the Left.

2. Americans are divided, but they have the potential to be united. A wide expanse of Americans found Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric an appealing narrative to explain their troubles. But the “two Americas” narrative, in which a foward-thinking, tolerant, educated people is pitted against a hateful, ignorant, nostalgic people, is simplistic and unsubstantiated. A look at the numbers shows that the liberal elite’s story that Trump rode to victory on a wave of euphoric white working-class support doesn’t hold water. Voter turnout in this year’s election was abysmal as usual — hitting a twenty-year low in some states — and the majority of working-class whites stayed home. Trump didn’t rally the hordes; he won by a nose on a promise to give people jobs. Chances are he won’t keep that promise. It’s up to the Left to make good on it instead — bringing people together in a class-based movement of “us against the rich,” instead of emphasizing all the things that keep ordinary people apart. Americans are divided by identity and culture, but they also have the potential to be united by their shared desire for a good life, rooted in security, respect, and justice.

3. Fight the movement, not the man. Trump’s myriad flaws, shameful history, and opportunistic antics are like a magnet, constantly monopolizing our attention and criticism. But difficult as it is, we must resist his centripetal powers because focusing our shared energies and resources on attacking Trump will only result in an even weaker left and a strengthened populist right. Trump’s presence in the White House will empower the most disgraceful elements of American society. This includes not only neo-fascists and racists, but also voracious capitalists who are ready to run through the doors Trump will open. We can’t count on the Democrats to put up a fight; the fight must come from the Left. But how we fight matters. We need to take the lessons from last year to heart. The most important of these is that the Left needs a vision, not a defensive posture. We must organize around a positive, forward-looking program for real change — a program that gives people something to fight for, not just something to fight against. ■


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FRONT MATTERS FRIENDS & FOES

BY CONNOR KILPATRICK

ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES CLAPHAM

Steve Bannon’s Autobahn There is no doubt that Steve Bannon is a bulging sack of shit. With his chin fuzz and sloppy gray mane, he looks like an alcoholic stepdad grimly watching a History Channel special on Rommel in the desperate hope of an erection. In Bannon, President Trump has found his very own jack-booted Wormtongue. He will whisper darkly about “race realism” and the evils of birth control. His ascent to the White House should indeed send chills down all of our spines. But what’s dangerous about Bannon isn’t that his loony, farright politics have reached such high places. After all, that’s practically an American tradition. Have we already forgotten about Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, who reenacted Bill Clinton’s supposed assassination of Vince Foster with a pistol and a cantaloupe? What about Reagan’s secretary of the interior James G. Watt, the man who banned the Beach Boys from playing on the National Mall because they attracted “the wrong element”? Ultra-right

You can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism.

John Birch Society president and conspiracy theorist Larry McDonald came to Congress in 1975 — during that supposed era of reasonable bipartisan consensus. A few years later, he urged the nomination of Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess for the Nobel Peace Prize on anticommunist grounds. Before he made his way to the Senate, Ted Cruz declared a war on dildos, stating in a legal brief: “There is no substantive due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes.” And in 1980, Ronald Reagan stood just seven miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi — where three civil rights activists were murdered in a conspiracy involving


the county sheriff’s office, the local police, and the Ku Klux Klan — and promised to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.” If terrifying right-wing loonies at the levers of state power could bring about the Fourth Reich, it would’ve happened decades ago, during a truly raging wildfire of American class conflict, at the behest of powerful oilmen like Clint Murchison Sr, who rumor has it funded the American Nazi Party, and Texaco chairman Torkild Rieber, who helped cinch Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War with shipments of much-needed oil and a telegram that read, “Don’t worry 11

FRIENDS & FOES

Just like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bannon once wrote his very own rap musical.

about payments.” Despite fascist sympathies in high places, none of these uber-powerful slimeballs tilted our constitutional oligarchy into fascism. So “far-right racist” doesn’t make Bannon particularly unique or worrying. It’s how devastatingly well he understands liberalism’s failures and how willing he is to craft a fraudulent and reactionary program for those who’ve only experienced decline during the Clinton and Obama years. Like a mutant weed growing out of a shit-covered pile of compost, Bannon has cultivated his particular brand of reaction entirely within the decomposing corpse of American liberalism. In no other soil could it ever have blossomed. Summing up the Democratic Party’s embrace of Silicon Valley and finance, he gloats: “[The Democrats] were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.” For the most part, he’s right: the Democrats abandoned — even went to war with — labor, embracing the professional classes instead. Bannon’s rise on the back of a candidate who received fewer votes than even Mitt Romney was only possible with the collapse of turn-of-the-century liberalism and its agents in the Democratic Party. Bannon (and Trump) would be 12

nothing and nowhere without that implosion. In a Hollywood Reporter interview that appeared shortly after Trump’s surprise victory, Bannon outlined his agenda for America — something he calls “economic nationalism.” We’re going to build an entirely new political movement.... It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up.... It will be as exciting as the 1930s. Except it won’t look anything like that. Trump and the Republican legislature are no more likely to enact Bannon’s program than Obama was going to launch a Green New Deal. Trump’s actual infrastructure plan consists of nothing but tax credits. Private investors might jump on pipeline expansions, but they won’t be interested in overhauling municipal water systems. This is hardly the Tennessee Valley Authority, which modernized and developed the most backward regions of the United States, despite being an “unprofitable venture” for the private sector. The New Deal, which Bannon cites as inspiration,

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wasn’t a mere giveaway to construction and building-trades hustlers like Trump’s proposal or even like much of Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (arra). Instead, it employed Americans with public oversight. Between 1935 and 1943, the Works Progress Administration hired 8.5 million men and women, not to mention the 3 million who worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps. As the Hurricane Katrina fiasco demonstrated, without effective federal regulation and oversight, infrastructure cash alone creates a race to the bottom in terms of wages and workplace protections. In December, a worker died at one of the new affordable-housing units going up in New York City. Unions had demanded that all workers be covered, but de Blasio’s City Hall wanted to “maximize production” rather than pay union wages. And now someone is dead because that worker was not adequately protected. Whatever projects Trump launches, workers’ pay, safety, and well-being won’t matter. They’ll be just as disposable as the tens of thousands of employees the president has already scammed throughout his miserable career. Nevertheless, what Bannon said about negative interest rates creating the perfect opportunity for a massive infrastructure upgrade is true. (Even the increasingly worthless Paul Krugman agrees on this point.) And yet President Obama — who ushered in arra when interest rates were even lower — refused to fully fund a plan to rebuild the country when he had the perfect chance. Obama’s economic adviser Christina Romer estimated at least $1.2 trillion was needed to pull the country out of the Great Recession.

Steve Bannon’s Autobahn

His political team, fearing the t-word (which apparently does not frighten Bannon), whittled it down to less than $800 billion, much of it tax cuts. But even Romer’s initial estimate was far too conservative — she later said the country needed at least $2 trillion in stimulus money. Obama shunned a New Deal, and now a reactionary is riding into office promising the Herrenvolk version. What made the New Deal effective — and nothing like arra or Trump’s proposals — was that millions went from unemployed to employed within a matter of weeks. It prioritized well-paying jobs for workers, not handouts to construction tycoons. Labor union militancy, much of it shaped by the Communist Party, made this possible. As much as we might loathe Obama for having no plan to revive the American working class, we should never have believed he or the Democratic Party would. Liberalism failed in the twenty-first century not because of any new developments but because it always had wild deficiencies, even at the peak of its powers. It was only worth a damn when there was a radical labor movement for it to co-opt and, reluctantly, invite into a political coalition. Without working-class militancy, there was never going to be a new New Deal under Obama. And there certainly won’t be one under Trump. Does the Donald have a plan to spur a new wave of unionization with his very own Wagner Act? Or a proposal to go after the “donor class” Bannon claims to despise? Of course not. Trump’s already targeting union leaders from his Twitter account and inviting corporate America into his administration

with unparalleled vulgarity. He wants to make a working-class paradise by bringing back manufacturing jobs that can compete with developing-world wages. It makes Obama’s food stamps and Uber economy look like 1970s Sweden. A true right-wing “economic nationalism,” on the model of early twentieth-century fascism, is a dead letter in twenty-first-century America. The Republican Party may be the hard right of our ruling class, but it’s still a thoroughly capitalist ruling class — no Prussian dueling scars or epaulets these days. And these dull, business-minded captains of industry have no interest whatsoever in a new New Deal, reactionary or otherwise. Neither tva nor autobahn. They’re far too bourgeois for anything like that. As is both Trump and, for all his rustic bluster, Bannon. Despite his common-man shtick, Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs before turning Hollywood financier and growing rich off Seinfeld. His screenwriting partner claims Bannon once proposed limiting the vote to property owners. He’s more Federalist snot in the mold of Alexander Hamilton than reactionary Jacksonian. Behind his supposed working-class economic program lies the same shitty elitist views he pillories in liberals. Just like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bannon once wrote his very own rap musical. Like every rich, right-wing asshole, he plays gi Joe in public — or Julius Streicher, if the mood is right — before settling in with a nice bottle of Amarone in a climate-controlled beachfront property. Bannon’s ambitions make gruesomely clear that liberalism and the Democratic Party in no way


represents the left-wing obverse of conservatism and the gop. And liberals, deep down in their hearts, understand this. They have no true ideological counterpoint — no real program and certainly no vision for changing society for the better. Michael Wolff correctly diagnosed Bannon as “embodying more than anyone the liberals’ awful existential pain and fury.” This doesn’t just refer to his disgusting comments — it includes his fiery ambition, something the Democratic Party has altogether lost. And even at its absolute best, liberalism’s aspirations were only a watered-down, cheap knockoff of the utopian dreams of communist and socialist activists. Trump winks and smirks at Nazis while the Democratic Party can barely disguise its contempt for Scandinavian social democracy — “whatever that means,” as Clinton said. Finland’s government-provided baby boxes are as likely to elicit howls of contempt from Democratic Party officials as a golden hammer and sickle. Leading left-of-center pundits now seem to regard liberalism’s most popular quasi-social-democratic achievements — Social Security, Medicare, the Wagner Act — as little more than the tainted products of a racist, sexist past. Meanwhile, the party’s leadership spent the better part of last year slandering its most popular politician — only very recently and reluctantly a member of that party — as a wild-eyed demagogue. Despite the outcry over the Breitbart News connections, Trump stood by Bannon and didn’t so much as flinch when his white nationalist associations were splashed across front pages around the world. Bannon’s position as senior counselor 13

FRIENDS & FOES

and White House chief strategist remained secure. And yet the most ambitious, leftmost member of Obama’s inner circle, Van Jones — a one-time card-carrying Maoist who was supposed to lead the green jobs initiative — was forced out within nine months. Why? A video surfaced in which Jones called Republicans “assholes” as did a signature on a silly 9/11 truth petition. Bannon, in contrast, was once charged with beating his wife, with a police officer as witness. With Trump’s rise alongside liberalism’s popular decline we have the clearest manifestation of what Perry Anderson calls the United States’s “all-capitalist ideological universe”: A mental firmament in which the sanctity of private property and superiority of private enterprise are truths taken for granted by all forces in the political arena.... There will tend to be more elasticity to the right of its center of gravity than to the left, since the basic belief system lends itself to stronger articulation, and readier appeal, in unalloyed rather than dilute form. Just as buttoned-down conservative Robert Taft (the Paul Ryan of his day) privately pushed Joe McCarthy to go as far as he needed to, the Republican Party made their peace with Trumpism in a matter of weeks. We’ve yet to see that rightwards elasticity snap back. The gop establishment may initially fear what lies farther down their end of the spectrum — and a few politicians like Charlie Crist or the Bushes might cry “uncle” — but eventually, like The Thing, they will consume the threat and shape it just as it shapes their party in turn. 14

No such relationship exists between the Democratic Party and the socialist left. Liberalism without labor is far worse than worthless and a Left without Marxism even more so. Affirmed right-wingers like Bannon have always understood this. He calls himself “a Leninist,” and much like Grover Norquist, keeps a bust of V. I. on his desk. It’s not ironic in either case, and it never has been. For them, Lenin represents both the trophy of a conquered ideology —

He calls himself “a Leninist,” and much like Grover Norquist, keeps a bust of V. I. on his desk.

something like a safari pelt — and an admission of revolutionary inspiration and discipline. They aren’t mocking Lenin — they’re mocking the Left for abandoning Marxism. Even David Brooks has chided the twenty-first-century left for discarding anticapitalist critique: The Left no longer has Marxism or any other coherent intellectual structure ... no rigorous foundation to rely on, no ideology to give it organization and shape.... It undermines the power and effectiveness of modern politics more generally.

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They can’t even hide their glee. The Right — not the Democratic Party — wants to remake this country from top to bottom. And socialism and Marxism are its true opponents. If we’re going to fight Trump and Bannon, that’s how we do it. The racism Trump both conjured and campaigned on goes beyond very real bigotries — its promise has a material lure: jobs, loans, and property values. But you can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism. A paltry means-tested welfare state just flips white-supremacist programs and policies “for the deserving us not the undeserving them.” Both fit comfortably in the ruling-class politics of divide and conquer as opposed to the broad solidarity they fear. How can we expect the public to rally around something like Medicaid when huge portions of the working and lower-middle classes don’t qualify for it? Universal social democracy — a more transformative program than the one Sanders campaigned on — is called for. We’re in the midst of a reckoning with the neoliberal consensus. The Right has made their play, and now we have to make ours. So let’s return liberalism to its rightful place — as dinner-table etiquette for the elite who are gobbling up the country and making peace with Trump and Bannon as we speak. Because that’s all liberalism is today and all the Left will be if we continue to borrow so much from it, consciously or unconsciously. While etiquette can get people to wipe their mouths and use polite words for impolite concepts, it can never transform society. It can never defeat creeps like Bannon. ■

FRONT MATTERS

AN INTERVIEW WITH

STRUGGLE SESSION

LEO PANITCH

The Trump Way What kind of economic agenda does Trump have in store for workers?

In the run-up to November, commentators from across the political spectrum predicted a round defeat for Donald Trump, not least because of the palpable disgust he elicited from elites. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was the recipient of a number of moneyed defections from the Republican Party and soaring capitalist confidence. Trump’s hostility to free trade, the threat his xenophobia posed to the maintenance of a cheap and precarious labor force for capital, and his general instability all seemed inimical to the interests of a globalized ruling class. Yet since the election, he’s seamlessly assembled a coterie of corporate bosses into his transition team, and markets, after wobbling initially, have stabilized and even risen. Meanwhile, the Left is trying to make sense of his infrastructure proposals and promises to workers. Arun Gupta and other Jacobin contributors spoke to Leo Panitch about Trump’s economic agenda, his relationship to transnational elites, and how neoliberalism’s crisis could mean revitalization for the Left.

JACOBIN

Are there positive outcomes from this election? Can we say corporate free-trade deals are no longer a sure thing?

LEO PANITCH


Certainly the Trans-Pacific Partnership is over, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is probably too. That said, I don’t think this spells the end of neoliberal international trade arrangements that allow for the free flow of capital and the protection of that capital when it lands in another state, which is the main point of the free-trade and investment treaties now. And I don’t think we are going to see the introduction of massive import

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STRUGGLE SESSION

controls that would interrupt the integrated global production network we have. The Trump administration has an enormous interest in keeping the flow of capital and trade going. I expect we will see a diminution of the labor and environmental side agreements that go with these international arrangements, not that they were worth very much, including those that are a part of nafta. At least this seems to be the end of Clintonism, of which Obama was the last gasp. Yes. I do think this is the nail in the coffin of the Third Way, that is, the social-democratic line of progressive competitiveness, globalization, and the free movement of capital inaugurated by the Clinton administration in the 1990s and followed by the Blairites in the United Kingdom and Europe in general. The Third Way is attached to the promise that through retraining, workers in the United States could compete with Vietnamese workers earning a dollar a day. I think that’s over. We see the utter hollowing out of the Third Way project. So far Trump’s economic agenda appears to be warmed-over supply-side economics, such as massive tax cuts. But it seems to be neoliberalism with a white nationalist face. What this moment represents, and it’s been coming for some time since the 2008 global financial crisis, is the delegitimization of the institutions — from mainstream 16

parties to the European Union — that attached themselves to neoliberalism. The claim from these institutions that “the nation” can benefit from neoliberal globalization is now all but dead, even as they continue to impose neoliberal austerity measures to keep the old arrangements going. In this context, there has been a notable shift from protest to politics on the Left in recent years. The focus of protest itself visibly shifted to emphasizing class inequality in the wake of the financial crisis — from Occupy Wall Street to the Indignados in Spain. But since then it’s taken a turn to recognizing that you can’t change the world without taking power. The radical left has reentered electoral politics. This could be through new parties, as in Greece and Spain, or through old parties, as in the United Kingdom and the United States, where this shift surprised and roiled the old discredited political establishment of those parties. But the delegitimization of mainstream institutions also involved a much more powerful rise of the xenophobic right, which claims to represent the national interest in cultural and ethnic terms. The big question is whether this nationalist political right represents a turn away from transnational capital accumulation. These forces sometimes express themselves as protectors of domestic manufacturing jobs. But I don’t think that’s their main thrust. Their main thrust is to define the nation again in xenophobic terms, which also combines with protection of

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old cultural values that would restore hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Peter Gowan used to say of Sam Gindin’s and my analysis of the American state’s leading role in facilitating and coordinating global capitalism that this might come undone by a nationalist right taking power in Germany. Astonishingly, this happened first in the United States. We need to see if this xenophobic right, which is coming to prominence not only in the Western capitalist world — look at India, Turkey, and the Philippines — will oppose being involved in capital accumulation on a global scale. Or we could see it start constructing a continuation of global capital accumulation that is deliberately asymmetric in terms of closing the mobility of labor. That’s another important question: Is closing off international labor mobility feasible amid economic globalization and capital mobility? I think that it could be feasible, tragically. It won’t just be trickledown economics, though that will be a large part of it. It may entail “brownshirt” infrastructure capitalism. It seems you’re referring here to a kind of right populist approach to the state and deficit spending — using things in the toolkit that the Paul Ryans of the world wouldn’t use. But a lot of people do mean this literally. They look at people like Bannon and say that Trump is supporting, or at the very least

The Trump Way

The Trump administration has an enormous interest in keeping the flow of capital and trade going.

fostering, neo-facist political elements. Do you think it’s useful to think about Trump that way? I don’t mean that Trump himself represents a fascist movement with ground troop militias, or anything like that. But it’s worth remembering that fascist regimes were capitalist. There is a tendency among analysts to think of capitalist regimes as tending to be free-market, but the type of stateled capitalism that Hitler introduced was very much capitalist. This is where I was going with the “brown” notion, trying to get at the fact that we might see authoritarian stateled, but blatantly capitalist, infrastructure programs and policies. The authoritarian populist dimension of this will be something that we will need to pay very careful attention to. Again we do not necessarily have to take this in the sense of Trump explicitly using the equivalent of the brownshirt militias (some of which are already around on the far American right today), or deliberately planning something like the Reichstag fire as a staged event to trigger the closure of democratic political space. But as at other dark moments in American history — such as the repression

and was sustained in the years immediately following it, let alone the anticommunist repression through the decade after World War ii — we should definitely be on the lookout for new practices of unethical authoritarian political opportunism, which would especially involve deliberate attempts to target progressives and the Left. Trump is talking about a trilliondollar infrastructure program. But it’s not a traditional program that the government funds directly. He wants to use tax breaks to incentivize the building. I think it could be a really big infrastructure program. Yes, it will probably involve public-private partnerships (ppss), and massive taxes, subsidies, and pork-barrel spending for the construction companies involved. After all, Trump is a developer, and that industry often forms the base of the Republican Party across the country. Their modus operandi is to accumulate at public expense while ideologically biting the hand that feeds them. The state currently funds infrastructure through private construction companies rather than direct public employment.

of domestic dissent that followed the US entry into World War i JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

ppss will likely entail the floating of corporate debt on an even more massive scale than we are already seeing, on the premise that the state will underwrite it. It will cost more money by virtue of corporations borrowing at a higher rate of interest than what Treasury bills can be floated at to cover a federal budget deficit. That’s also part of the inegalitarian nature of this, and capital is especially happy to build and manage public infrastructure so long as the government will subsidize corporate borrowing to that end in various ways, such as tax forgiveness and even covering private interest payments, while these corporations will for decades reap the profits that come with the charges they are able levy on either individuals or local governments for the use of this infrastructure. Trump’s infrastructure ideas focus on the material moving economy — building roads, ports, rails, bridges, airports. Do you think they could actually work? Well, what does that mean, work? It could involve mass employment on a big scale. We need to remember Trump is a construction capitalist, a developer. He hires construction companies, and I think we are going to see that applied in a significant way. It could involve putting workers dispossessed of their old jobs in manufacturing, or those who used to be employed by the state itself, to work building bridges and paving highways. And that involves a hell of a lot of movement of people around and disruption of communities.

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STRUGGLE SESSION

If Trump expels three million more Mexican immigrants, lots of whom work in construction, will his white working-class supporters take these jobs? Heck, they may be needed to work on golf courses, mowing the grass in Palm Beach or Palm Springs. The logic in this infrastructure promise combined with a xenophobic threat to foreign labor is this: where the only option before for laid-off workers in Ohio was McDonald’s or Walmart, maybe now they’ll take a job doing construction, as laborers, and that would involve a lot more internal labor mobility within the United States for these workers. This may end up involving more than old trickle-down economics, where the state offers the wealthy tax breaks in the hope they will invest without any state guidance to what they invest in, or whether to invest at all. It’s rational to have massive state-led investment. Without our side coming to power, it will never be anything other than a means of facilitating capital

accumulation, of course. Can this type of investment be done without direct state employment and the direct state movement of labor? I don’t know. As for the international context for the rise of this new right, will we see states, led by the American state, reintroduce import controls, capital controls, and so on? I am not so sure. We don’t see capitalists who want to accumulate only within their own territory. Can you keep globalization going via the cooperation of right-wing governments that are anti-immigration? Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, articulates this — as do many of those on the new right in Europe — as something like: “We are not against any culture, we just believe in cultural apartheid. They belong over there and we belong here.” Can we have an asymmetric globalization that keeps capital accumulation going but which closes off labor mobility, certainly that closes off economic and political

Is closing of international labor mobility feasible amid economic globalization and capital mobility?

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refugees, which a lot of Latinos in the United States are? There’s been a lot of connections made between the rise of Trump and a rising right populism elsewhere around the world. Does Trump fit neatly into this narrative? What’s similar, and what’s different in your mind? I’ve been thinking lately about the irony of Trump or Nigel Farage’s nationalism. These are people who, especially in the case of Trump and the capitalists who he’s appointing, have very extensive international investments and ties with international investors. Trump has a broad range of links with investors around the world, whether it’s major players like Deutsche Bank or gangster capitalists in the Russian regime. Farage himself was a broker in the City of London. You don’t get a more internationalized sphere of capitalism than the financial sphere of British capitalism. Yet both of them played the nationalist card, and it shows the extent to which the nation-state has remained integral to the global accumulation projects of so many capitalists. These guys understand that for accumulation to continue on a global scale, you need to legitimate it by attaching it to a xenophobic nationalism of some kind. They’re trying to ride this tiger of nationalistic ideology that allows global accumulation to continue. That may be at the expense of the Ukrainian or the Estonian nationalists, and for sure at the expense of Mexican immigrants, let alone refugees of every sort.


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Now, where does this fit with the nationalist, very far-right forces we see elsewhere? They sometimes have a more explicit antiglobalization focus. This is most clearly seen in Europe, with the National Front in France and the Le Pen movement, Golden Dawn in Greece, etc., which are not only anti-immigrant, racist, and so on, but explicitly hostile to the transnational project of the European Union. That said, we see in Poland and in Hungary farright nationalist regimes that want to remain within the European Union. So we’ll have to see how this plays out, whether this is one part of a break with globalization. It’s still my view that unlike in the 1930s, there aren’t significant enough elements of the capitalist class who have an interest in exclusively accumulating on their own terrain. Insofar as that’s the case, I don’t think we’ll see a return to a kind of territorially-based capitalism, operating behind closed borders. But this all remains to be seen, of course. Moving back to the US political landscape, is it possible to move the Democratic Party more toward the Sanders and Warren wing in your view? Well if we look at what has happened in the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, the Corbyn example is an extremely positive phenomenon that indicates possibilities for similar developments in the Democratic

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Party. That said, it’s clear the insurgency behind Corbyn won’t succeed without a recalibration of what the Labour Party is organizationally. That would involve a split from the party of those members of Parliament whose first loyalty is to nato, the monarchy, the current institutions of the British state, and the practice of class harmony with the financial capitalists in the City of London. More fundamentally, the insurgency has to remake Labour’s apparatus outside Parliament into a vehicle for transforming the party branches into centers of working-class life once again. They would need to engage in organization, education, and class formation on a scale not seen in a long time, indeed perhaps never seen in that party in much of the country. In the case of the US Democrats, the possibility of organizational and ideological recalibration runs up against the loyalty of party leaders to the existing state and their deep links to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the military-industrial complex. But there is an additional obstacle. The Democratic Party’s organizational structure is so diffuse and its links to the working class, or at least the active elements of it, are much less organic than is the case with Labour. For Labour, the connections to the working class have always gone beyond the links of the political leadership to the union bureaucracy. It’s a harder thing to change the Democratic Party from a donkey into a gazelle, and it’s bloody hard already in the British Labour

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Party. In my view that could only occur with a split and a fundamental reorganization of what that party is. There will be an attempt to recalibrate the Democratic Party. There is no stopping this, so let’s see what happens. How should the US left move beyond the election and build on support for Sanders’s vision? What Andrew Murray wrote in Jacobin about the new politics that produced Corbyn and Sanders being “generally more class-focused than classbased” rings true. Especially as we get further and further from the Sanders campaign, it seems like there’s a real danger that anything tangible from it will dissipate. And what role do you think organized labor should play in all this? Do you think it should have a central role as we’ve historically conceptualized it, or is there a plausible alternative base for a left opposition? In a sense your two questions are related to one another. I’m not convinced that without really fundamental organizational change in the Democratic Party, and more fundamentally in the trade unions, this will be all that different from MoveOn.org, or the least mobilized aspects of the Bernie fundraising campaign. It’s hard to imagine that the intent to build the Left within the Democratic Party will go very far if it isn’t connected to an attempt to transform the very nature of labor’s long-standing alliance with the Democratic Party.

The Trump Way

It’s a harder thing to change the Democratic Party from a donkey into a gazelle, and it’s bloody hard already in the British Labour Party.

Changing the labor base of the party is probably going to have to involve challenging the structure of trade unionism in the United States, and a crucial part of this has been the definition of politics that accompanied the alliance with the Democratic Party — the very limited mobilizing role the unions have played while staffing the |phone banks historically for Democratic candidates, and the role the unions play merely in channeling a portion of union dues to the Democrats — without any politicization of a class kind. At this moment when American politics are clearly being reconstructed, I think there are two crucial things to focus on. First, how to transform protest politics, which to some extent was class-focused since Occupy, in such a way that it is organizationally focused and classrooted. The negative reaction of so many activists — in Black Lives Matter and other movements — to the insistence on the left since the election

that we were not class-focused enough, and especially not classbased enough, has sometimes amounted to saying this is just “whitesupremacist male chauvinism in another guise.” I’m afraid the Left is going to be intimidated by this. But it shouldn’t be. We must insist on the importance of organizing among men and women in workingclass communities of color, and doing so in practical, pragmatic ways, that link up the needs of those communities with the needs of the broader mass of the working people, so that they’re not seeing what they’re demanding as a special benefit to black people alone. This is the way that racists, and opportunists like Trump, have always portrayed the welfare benefits that have been won in the United States, especially those won in the 1960s, which is of course absurd. The other thing that needs to be avoided is concentrating entirely on the effort to reform the Democratic Party. This should not take away from the efforts that need to go into


transforming the unions’ structures and their strategy. Socialists especially need to organize alongside people trying to do both those things, but they also need to organize on their own, to engage in socialist education, socialist vote mobilization, and socialist cadrebuilding. That way, when and if the difficulties, the barriers, or the limitations of operating inside the unions to change them, and operating inside the Democratic Party to change it, are confronted you have some ballast — you have some core left, rather than just a disheartening defeat. More than that, given the ecological crisis as well as the capitalist crisis, the recalibration of the parties and the unions I was speaking of needs to actively involve workingclass people in imagining and developing capacities for alternative forms of production and consumption in their own communities as well as nationally and eventually internationally, and showing that this can be done only through democratic economic planning. I really think this has to involve the construction of new socialist parties with this central to their agenda, but they won’t come out of nowhere. They will come out of the reconstitution of forces inside and outside of old parties. The actual organizational form it will take right now is hard to predict, but I do think there is a real opening which we have already seen with the shift from protest to politics. ■

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHAEL DEFORGE

From Margins to Mainstream DOUG HENWOOD

The making of the modern Republican Party.


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he original version of this essay was written in June 2015, almost at the moment Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign. No one took him seriously, and everyone — including me, the author of a very critical book about her — thought Hillary Clinton had a lock on the presidency. Democrats have yet to process this loss, blaming Vladimir Putin and the incurable bigotry of the white heartland rather than their own ideological and organizational deficiencies and the fatal weakness of their candidate and her already-forgotten running mate. It’s striking, re-reading this after Trump’s election, to reflect on his formation of a very right-wing government despite the lack of any elite or popular mandate for one. He was endorsed by almost no capitalist of significance, and he lost the popular vote by nearly three million. Though there’s little doubt that while quite a few of his voters — we have no good idea of just how many yet — were hardcore xenophobes and misogynists, he won mainly because of the exhaustion of the mainstream of the Democratic Party, an exhaustion perfectly embodied by Hillary Clinton. It’s a party vulnerable to the sort of takeover from the left that the gop experienced from the right from the 1960s into the 1980s. While there are certainly obstacles to that sort of renovation — for one, our ossified labor movement could never provide the kind of institutional support to the Left that the corporate lobby provided for the Right, and for two, the Dems’ moneybags would fund a formidable resistance to any insurgency — there’s a lot to learn from the discipline and far-sightedness of the revolutionists of the Right.

Who Wants to Save Capitalism? The American right, never on the ropes for very long, is on the march again. In some sense, this resurgence is hard to understand. If you buy the thesis that the Right is driven by a defense of hierarchy and privilege and draws its energy from opposition to a strong left, its strength is almost incomprehensible. It’s hard to think of a time when American capital and capitalists were so politically secure. During the first Gilded Age, the sleep of the moneyed was often troubled by populist and socialist agitation. Armories were built in major American cities to house National Guard units meant to suppress strikers and demonstrators, something that seems unimaginable today. 24

Here’s an anecdote that captures elite anxieties. In February 1897, ruling-class lawyer Bradley Martin and his wife Cornelia threw a costume ball at the Waldorf Astoria. J. P. Morgan dressed as Molière; John Jacob Astor dressed as Henry of Navarre and brandished a sword covered in jewels. No less than fifty women dressed as Marie Antoinette — and Mrs Martin wore a necklace that had once belonged to the royals. But the hosts were so nervous about “men of socialistic tendencies” interrupting the festivities that they surrounded the hotel with Pinkertons and had the first-floor windows nailed shut. The public outcry over the egregious too-muchness of their costume ball drove the Martins to resettle in England soon afterwards. Contrast that with a sixtieth birthday party that private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman — the man with the biggest living room in Manhattan — threw himself in 2007 at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, with 1,500 of his closest friends and Rod Stewart as the headline entertainment. The major security concern was paparazzi, not “men of socialistic tendencies.” And the site was one of those armories built to house the troops whose mission was suppressing a restive working class. It was no ordinary armory. Its interiors were by Louis Tiffany because it was the regiment of the city’s upper class. That regiment didn’t do much fighting (and lasted a couple of weeks in the Civil War before returning home), though they may have put down a strike or two. But now we don’t need a national guard to put down strikes, and we can repurpose their armories as venues for fancy parties. And yet the reactionary community is agitated and paranoid. For much of the Right, and not just the obvious lunatics, Barack Obama is a man of socialistic tendencies. They’ve been energized by opposition to the so-called Affordable Care Act, affectionately known as Obamacare, a contraption that has its roots in 1980s and early 1990s scheming by a British Tory, Stuart Butler, who was then working at the Heritage Foundation. It got a trial run in Massachusetts under Gov. Mitt Romney, a minor private equity titan who was also the 2012 Republican presidential candidate. While the better part of it — the expansion of Medicaid, a joint federal-state program for providing health insurance to the poor — does expand the public sector, the bulk of it is very friendly to the private insurance industry, which isn’t surprising considering that a former lobbyist for the industry wrote a good bit of the original draft legislation. So we have the Democrats embracing a

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capital-friendly plan with a right-wing pedigree that the Right now opposes because it’s too statist. This is a neat illustration of two aspects of modern American political life: the ever-rightward drift of the Right, and the way in which the Democrats tail them and thereby enable that drift. While today the Right’s ascendancy in American politics looks inseparable from its takeover of the Republican Party, for most of the twentieth century, while the gop was usually more conservative, especially on economic issues, than the Democrats, there was a great deal of ideological diversity within the two major parties. The Republican Party also had a liberal wing, just as the Democrats had a conservative wing. Of course, there had long been far-right tendencies in the Republican Party, most notoriously Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who ended up disgraced after a wild run in the 1950s, but whose obsessions, like hatred of upper-class Harvard-educated liberals, prefigured his modern descendants. But the gop of the 1950s was dominated by northeastern wasps (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the ruling elite for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Though it’s hard to believe today, when the Republican Party routinely race-baits to win the votes of white bigots, the gop of the 1950s and 1960s often had a stronger civil rights record than the Democrats, because the Dems still had a large Southern component. Into the 1960s, the Republicans often were stronger on civil liberties than Democrats as well. Robert Kennedy, his brother John’s attorney general, wanted to expand the Sedition Act of 1918 to prohibit Americans from writing or speaking anything deemed disloyal to or abusive of the United States. (Sidney Zion, who served as an assistant US attorney under Robert Kennedy, said that he had the worst record on civil liberties of any attorney general, and “used his office as if he were the Godfather getting even with the enemies of the Family.” Zion was probably exaggerating, but his point survives a prudent toning-down.) Congressional opposition to the bill was led by John Lindsay, the liberal Republican congressman from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, then known as the silk-stocking district for all its upper-class residents, but the bill passed. Lindsay would later become mayor of New York, much to the annoyance of William Buckley, who ran against him as part of his effort to destroy liberal Republicanism. When big business found political expression through organizations like the Committee on Economic Development (ced), founded in 1942 by Paul Hoffman, an automobile executive who would later become an Eisenhower intimate, this was a significant departure from the traditionally reactionary policies endorsed by the National Association of Manufacturers.

The ced, while distressed by some of the antibusiness attitudes of the New Deal, accepted that unions were here to stay, as with some version of the welfare state — and cutting wages to subsistence levels did no one any good in the long run. This point of view animated the policies of the Eisenhower administration. As Ike himself famously said, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things.... [B]ut their number is negligible and they are stupid.” Eisenhower rejected sending troops to Indochina to bail out the failing French, and warned against allowing the United States to become “an occupying power” in a seething Arab world, and left office with a famous warning about the military-industrial complex that is impossible to imagine any politician uttering today. Liberals generally disdained him as simple and boring — “the Great Golfer,” Gore Vidal called him, who presided over a regime of “dull terror.” But Eisenhower now seems, if such a transhistorical comparison is possible, a more peaceful and egalitarian figure than Obama. But that petit bourgeois provincial branch of that “splinter group” had a material problem with the Eisenhower-era settlement: General Motors may have preferred life without the United Auto Workers, but it could afford to pay union rates, especially in exchange for labor peace. Smaller fry couldn’t. They were caught in the

The American right, never on the ropes for very long, is on the march again.


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petite bourgeoisie’s classic difficult competitive position, squeezed by Big Labor and Big Capital. Their freedom was under siege and they reacted by funding a right-wing insurgency. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by the retired ceo of a Massachusetts-based candy company, Robert Welch, who’d made a fortune off lollipops (which his brother invented) and Junior Mints. Welch made a fortune, but still, he was no Rockefeller or Mellon. That was three years after William F. Buckley, a few years out of Yale, founded National Review, with the mission of “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it,” as he wrote in the magazine’s first issue. Though the United States might have seemed to many a conservative country, making the founding of the magazine an act of “supererogation,” as the Catholic reactionary put it, in fact it was anything but: it was a bold counterstroke against liberal hegemony. As risible as that might sound now, Buckley had a great deal of trouble raising money for the magazine, and needed help from his father, a small-time oil baron. As Buckley later put it, the capitalists didn’t seem all that interested in the project of saving capitalism. Eisenhower’s tepidity and compromises energized the Right, whose insurgency was almost Bolshevik in its ideological and organizational discipline. The Bolshie tendencies were no accident. There were not only intellectuals like James Burnham, ex-Trot turned co-founder of National Review, but important organizers like Clif White and the ex-Communist Marvin Liebman who consciously emulated Red tactics in organizing their insurgency. Tom Hayden, observing a Young Americans for Freedom delegation attending a national conference on the Peace Corps in 1961, noted their use of multiple communist tactics. Both the organizational and ideological rigor of this right in the Republican Party at the time dismayed and disoriented the moderates, who preferred politeness and compromise above all things. Though it would take decades, the Right eventually drove the moderates out of the party. Even today, what liberals are left (all of them Democrats) are still confused by the Right’s fervor, and lack both the passion and vision to fight it.

The Serfs in the Estate The Birchite and Buckleyite tendencies would eventually split, sort of, but before they did, they united in their 28

affection for Barry Goldwater as their political avatar. Continuing the provincial petit bourgeois theme, Goldwater was the grandson of the founder of a five-outlet department store chain based in Phoenix, Arizona — a flyspeck next to the likes of Macy’s. Goldwater, or more accurately Goldwater’s supporters, launched a bid for the 1960 Republican nomination, which failed badly and had victor Richard Nixon betray the Right in several ways but most visibly with his choice of the Massachusetts aristocrat Henry Cabot Lodge Jr as his vice presidential candidate. Goldwater tried again in 1964, and though he would eventually be crushed in the general election by Johnson by a 23-point margin, the convention that nominated the Arizonan was an important rite of passage for the conservatives. As the journalist Murray Kempton put it, “This convention is historic because it is the emancipation of the serfs.... The serfs have seized the estate of their masters.” Nelson Rockefeller, a leader of the moderate Republican faction whose surname symbolized the old elite’s domination of the party, was rudely heckled, shocking old-schoolers. The old northeastern wasp aristocracy was in decline, their fortunes reduced by inflation, successive generations of inheritance, and the competitive weakening of the industrial basis of their fortunes in old-line industry. And the party’s transition on race was made crudely clear by insults directed against black delegates — one of whom saw his jacket deliberately burned with a cigarette. Delegate Jackie Robinson, the man who integrated professional baseball, said that the performance made him feel like “a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” Movement conservatives were undeterred by Goldwater’s massive loss and continued with their plot to take over the Republican Party. A year later, Buckley ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket, with the conscious aim of drawing enough votes away from the liberal Republican John Lindsay to elect the Democratic candidate, Abe Beame, and thereby weaken the gop’s left flank. (The contrast with liberals, who shy away from any third-party challenge that might lead their party to a loss, is a vivid symptom of their lack of conviction.) Buckley initially thought he’d harvest votes from the city’s wasp elite, but they were put off by his social conservatism. Instead, he tapped into the growing backlash of white ethnics — “the people at the end of the subway lines,” as they were described by future Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips, lead architect of his Southern Strategy — against civil

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rights and “permissiveness.” He ended up with 13 percent of the vote — not huge, but a non-trivial amount for a third-party candidate. Though much of that backlash was driven by race, there was also a class angle that most center-left analysts overlook. Lindsay was a social liberal, and very attentive to the concerns of black New Yorkers, but on economic policy he worked largely on behalf of the city’s powerful real-estate industry, reflecting his patrician base. At the time, city policy was several years into accelerating the eviction of manufacturing and working-class housing from Manhattan and replacing it with offices and upscale residences. This was good for financiers, developers, and lawyers, but not for working-class whites — who expressed their resentment by lashing out at blacks and elite liberals. Nixon, elected in 1968, would work similar resentments on a national scale, developing a mass base for conservative politics. But in many ways he governed to the left of his rhetoric (which is why Garry Wills called him the last liberal). Despite his various corruptions (including spying which looks mild by today’s standards), Nixon governed mostly as a moderate Republican. His time in office brought us food stamps, the Environmental Protection Administration, and a proposal for a guaranteed annual income. Those compromises with liberalism energized the Right the same way that Eisenhower’s had two decades earlier. But Nixon did longer-term help to the cause of the Republican right with his Southern Strategy — appealing to the resentments of white southerners (and their fellow-thinkers in the urban North) over the social gains of black Americans. Within the GOP, the liberal wing remained lively into the 1970s. Among its leaders was George Gilder, who later would move sharply to the right. Gilder illuminates how what later came to be called cultural issues fit neatly with the economic agenda — from the first, they were never in tension. For the likes of Gilder, the roles of the entrepreneur and the patriarch were inseparable, and the attack on the privileges of both, along with the attack on the racial hierarchy, fueled a rightward move on both macro and micro levels, both large-scale social conflict and changes in gender relations within the household. The centrality of sex and gender roles to the rise of the Right in the 1970s could be seen from how conservatives were galvanized by the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which said little more than “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Passed by Congress in 1972, it was promptly ratified by thirty states, but momentum stalled with the Right’s mobilization against it, and it failed to reach the required thirty-eight states. At the 1980 Republican convention,

the one that nominated Ronald Reagan, the party dropped support for the era from its platform for the first time since it was adopted in 1940. The nomination of Reagan marked the victory of the Right in the Republican Party. There were many developments outside the Republican Party that would prove fertile soil for a right-wing mobilization. Nixon’s resignation in 1974 could be read as a major symptom of a broad set of crises: oil shortages, chronic inflation, miserable financial markets, a Third World in rebellion, US defeat in Vietnam, the spread of 1960s rebelliousness into the domestic working class, and a general sense that the system was rotten and lacking all legitimacy. That political and affective constellation was custom-made for the Right’s appeal — but, as Sidney Blumenthal shows in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, the conservative counterrevolution was led not by ceos, but by policy entrepreneurs operating in think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Going into the 1980 election, most ceos supported John Connally or George Bush — and not yet Reagan, who during the 1970s had become the new public avatar of movement conservatism. Former Citibank chair Walter Wriston told Blumenthal that most Eastern executives “underestimated his skills and his great political strength.” That, of course, would change. Blumenthal’s account is of the movement right, and he’s correct that the corporate establishment was not involved in that mobilization. But that doesn’t mean the corporate class wasn’t mobilizing. It was developing new institutions, and reviving older ones, to fight the inflation, the Keynesian order, and impose what we would later call the neoliberal agenda.

The Managers’ Revolt As Benjamin Waterhouse emphasizes in Lobbying America, many of the businesspeople who pushed the neoliberal agenda in the 1970s were neither movement conservatives nor self-made entrepreneurs but career managers.They were often socially liberal. But they objected to the host of new claims along what we’d later call identitarian lines (gender, race, etc.) as well as an explosive growth in social regulations (environment, workplace safety, and the like, as opposed to more narrowly drawn economic regulation of prices and product lines), which they felt were annoying restrictions on the free play of capital. This strained the accommodation with the New Deal and the Keynesian state starting in earnest in the late 1960s, a discontent that intensified in the 1970s as inflation and fiscal recklessness seemed not like transient problems but the foundations of the new order (or disorder). Deepening the hurt feelings


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of capitalists was what was perceived as a hostility to business in public opinion, popular culture, and increasingly among their employees. It took some time for capital to mount its counterrevolution. Modern business political action committees (pacs) got their start with the American Medical Association’s efforts against “socialized medicine” in 1961. Their ranks expanded with nam’s foundation of the first corporate pac in 1963. But the legal standing of corporate pacs remained murky, diluting their power, until the Federal Election Commission legalized them in 1975. The number of corporate pacs increased almost tenfold in the following four years, and would more than double by the end of the 1980s. While the influence of the Powell memo is sometimes exaggerated, it did embody the business wisdom of the time and helped inspire a quadrupling of the Chamber of Commerce’s membership during the 1970s. Shedding its musty reputation but not its conservative politics, it reinvented itself as a slick, modern organization — but one railing against occupational safety inspectors and environmental regulations. It argued that business had no social responsibility, a position once associated with marginal figures like Milton Friedman, who of course was on the verge of becoming not marginal. The renascent chamber became an important part of the Right’s institutional structure. But capital was organizing on other fronts as well. The Business Roundtable, made up of the ceos of 150 large corporations, was founded at a private club in Manhattan in 1973, to fight the antibusiness drift of American politics. It had its roots in a late-1960s business mobilization against inflation, which they saw as fundamentally caused by unions, and the growth of the welfare state during the Johnson years. The Roundtable took up that fight, though they felt outclassed in the political realm by labor, a problem compounded by what the politically conscious ceos saw as fragmentation among the ranks of business lobbyists. The Roundtable came into being just as the Right was founding its flagship think tanks. The Heritage Foundation was born in the same year as the Roundtable, 1973, and the Cato Institute appeared a year later. For that relatively brief moment — the late 1970s into the early 1980s — there would be productive parallel agitation by the mainstream business lobby and the newly mobilized right whose moments of political triumph were the appointment of Paul Volcker to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve and the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Together, 30

Reagan and Volcker would end the “inflationary spiral” of the 1960s and 1970s and break the economic and political power of organized labor. That triumph, however, would lead to a dissolution of capital’s broad political unity. In contrast with the days of the ced’s corporate liberalism, we now have a different sort of ceo class — now it’s all about shareholder value, short-term profits, and “getting rich now,” as Drutman put it. Compounding business’s fragmentation is the radicalization of the Republican right, which is more interested in blowing things up than in the preference for stability usually attributed to the ceo class. If you poke about the party’s elite base, you see some commonalities with the old days. Look, for example, at the board of the Cato Institute, which published essays by Patri Friedman (Milton’s grandson) and Peter Thiel (venture capitalist and Donald Trump enthusiast) explaining how libertarianism was incompatible with democracy. Cato is libertarian, and so they take some half-decent positions — notably against the carceral state and against many imperial wars. But on economic issues, they’re firmly reactionary: against any sort of stimulative fiscal or monetary policy, regulation, or anything that might interfere with the process of accumulation, even for a second. So the Right, despite its power, seems not to be the dominant ideology of the US ruling class. But it is very useful, apparently. The last few years have been fascinating for students of the US ruling class. The Republican Party is now dominated by evolution-deniers, climate-change deniers, xenophobes, religious nuts. This seems not to alarm corporate America, which remains publicly devoted to diversity and the powers of instrumental reason. Closer to home, we’ve seen congressional Republicans shut down the federal government and even threaten default on Treasury bonds. Some of this is performance art, designed to rile up the base. But it’s also risky stuff, threatening both the credibility and creditworthiness of the US state on a global scale. So of what use is the Right today? According to former Republicans like economist Bruce Bartlett and long-time congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, all that the American corporate class cares about these days is lower taxes and lighter regulations, and the battering ram that is today’s gop is a great way to get that, despite the risks. With no left opposition to speak of, the big bourgeoisie wants it all, and is happy to let the ravers do some dirty work for them. ■

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MEANS OF DEDUCTION

WE GOT MORE GRAPHS THAN ROSS PEROT.

MEANS OF DEDUCTION THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST

BY SUSAN KANG

What Nate Missed The pundits and pollsters have been criticized ad nauseam for failing to correctly predict the 2016 presidential election. Granted, they didn’t get everything wrong. The popular vote tallies matched the predictive models more closely than the Electoral College projections, which saw Hillary Clinton winning a decisive victory. Nonetheless, it is has been a time of many apologies. Both political science as an academic discipline and professional pollsters have a bull’s-eye on their back for their failures. Social scientists should recognize and acknowledge their mistakes. But we should first be clear about what these mistakes were. More pressing than flawed models and a failure to predict outcomes is the political science discipline’s complicity in limiting our political imagination. Mainstream political science views its mission in a highly depoliticized, technocratic manner that results in a blinkered understanding of the range of political possibilities. Taking on that vision is more important than ever in the age of Trump.

It wasn’t just bad math that led us to believe Trump would be defeated. It was a lack of political vision.

Polling has become gospel in American politics. Without polling and reliance on datasets, it is nearly impossible to make a respected political argument. This is unfortunate, because polling by its nature is flawed. It does not provide a neutral snapshot of voters’ understandings of politics. Instead, polls reflect the dominant narratives at a moment in a way that naturalizes key controversies. In contrast to the assumptions of most poll- and survey-based studies, political psychologists demonstrate that exposure to campaigns (both directly and through the media) influences voters in sophisticated ways, and does not merely “reinforce voters’


preexisting partisan loyalties.” People don’t exist in a vacuum; polling itself shapes the narratives they adopt to understand and make decisions about policy. This past year polling numbers were used to reinforce conventional political strategies precisely along these lines. For over a year, experts assured us that Sanders was unelectable and urged the nomination of the “safe” candidate. While acknowledging that Democrats had gone “more liberal” in recent years, pollsters argued that voters were not yet liberal enough to elect Sanders. Such polling-driven arguments foreclosed the real possibility that surging 33

THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST

support for Sanders might not require voter self-identification as “more liberal.” Polling data couldn’t adequately capture a comprehensive picture of voters’ thoughts and orientations, which are after all nothing more than preferences at a single moment and depend almost entirely on how various questions are framed. Polls (and media reliance on polls) also naturalize and delineate the potential range of political outcomes. People are seen as consumers, with preexisting, ordered preferences that drive their political behavior; they are presented with a limited range of choices and issues and must respond in a circumscribed, preordained way. Pollsters, experts, and political scientists then use this data as a definitive representation of the electorate rather than for what it is — imperfect timebound data points 34

that require triangulation with other forms of information. Political scientists and pollsters, relying on their existing models and methods, could only dismiss the Sanders campaign as a longshot distraction. Sanders lacked the name recognition, party connections, resources, and other standard markers of a winning candidate. The fact that Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, filled stadiums and had supporters waiting for hours in cold weather to hear him speak may not have been quantifiable — but in retrospect it was more meaningful than anything represented by polling at the time. Even in the election postmortem, there is strong pushback against claims that Sanders, or a more socialist, left-populist candidate in general, could have beat Trump. To squelch this idea pundits point to

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exit polls that demonstrate that the number one issue reported by Trump supporters was immigration, followed by terrorism. Sanders did not run a xenophobic campaign, so by extension we’re told his message would not have gained traction among Trump supporters. As socialists, we must reject this limited poll- and data-driven thinking. Just because many Trump supporters checked off the box for immigration on exit poll questionnaires does not that mean that they could not join a broad, multiracial, working-class coalition to fight for progressive change in the future. Most Trump supporters also felt the economy was doing poorly, in contrast to the Democratic narrative praising Obama’s recovery. This presents a clear opportunity to introduce a progressive, redistributionist narrative that moves beyond poll-centered politics. ■

THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST

Can’t Buy Me Love

Clinton was great at raising money — not so great at inspiring voters.

Presidential Campaign Spending: 1960–2016 737.1 million

Donald Trump was the first modern presidential candidate to still win after being massively outspent. Democrat

Republican

8.8 million ’60

’64

’68

’72

’76

’80

’84

’88

’92

’96

’00

’04

’08

’12

’16

Donations to Presidential Campaigns by Industry Lawyers / Law Firms Trump

6.1 million 0.3 million

Clinton 1.8 million

Real Estate 0.7 million

1.9 million

Doctors 0.5 million

1.6 million

Wall Street 0.3 million

1.4 million

Entertainment 0.05 million

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Why They Didn’t Vote 26% 25%

Didn’t like any candidates My vote would not matter Not registered/eligible Something came up Ran out of time Pretty sure who would win Not interested in politics Tried but was unable Physically could not go

22% 18% 17% 15% 14% 10% 8%

Change in Support for Democratic Candidate in Presidential Elections: 2012–2016 Households Earning Less than 50K / year Barack Obama (2012) Hillary Clinton (2016)

Union Households 60%

59%

52%

51%

African Americans

Latinos 93% 88%

71% 65%

Change in Households Earning Less than 50K / year Republicans

-1,700,000 Democrats

Obama Counties Swinging to Trump

+350,000

Over 200 counties that voted for Obama swung to Trump represents 10 counties


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MEANS OF DEDUCTION MISERY INDEX

The New Populists

Most of Donald Trump’s dream team walk and talk like run-of-the-mill Republicans.

Stephen Bannon Former investment banker turned Hollywood financier turned Breitbart News chief, Bannon has called for both draconian immigration restrictions and massive federal infrastructure programs. Kellyanne Conway Long supported immigration reform efforts that the president rejects, while holding hardline views against abortion and gay marriage. On economic issues she identifies with the libertarian wing of the party. Betsy DeVos Businesswoman and would-be education secretary who’s a strong proponent of charter schools. Heavily involved in right-wing Christian foundations. Nikki Haley The former South Carolina governor attacked Trump during the campaign for failing to renounce white supremacist groups. She even implicated Trump in far right violence. Opposed her state’s bathroom bill, but otherwise espouses standard conservative positions. Rick Perry

Jeff Sessions

Former Texas governor and energy secretary, known for wanting to eliminate the Energy Department. Supported a $145 billion cross-Texas highway system that would be partially controlled by private interests.

The National Review called the Alabama senator “amnesty’s worst enemy” for his anti-immigrant stances. Former colleagues testified that he used the n-word and joked about the kkk, saying he thought they were okay until he found out they smoked pot.

Wilbur Ross

Rex Tillerson

A ruthless investor and banker, Ross breaks with his peers by calling for steep tariffs on China. Previously a Democrat, he advocates against free-trade agreements, and helped start New York Blade, a now-defunct lgbt newspaper.

The former ceo of ExxonMobil and next Secretary of State. Supports conservative Christian church groups but otherwise standard business conservative. Breaks with Trump on tpp, which he supports.

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Donald Trump Jr.

Ivanka Trump

Donald Trump’s oldest son and Trump Organization trustee. He’s a staunch supporter of daddy, but has been consistently pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage to atone for some of his sins.

Ivanka plays a leading role in her father’s empire. She’s at least spoken out in favor of equal pay and other protections for women in the workforce. Claims to be neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Why pick one when you can have it all?

Pat Robertson

Huey Long

Milton Friedman

Betty Ford


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ILLUSTRATIONS BY RAÚL SORIA

How the Donald Came to Rule CHARLIE POST

A radical middle-class insurgency has stormed the Republican Party. JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

41


I

n 2016, a radical, right-wing, middle-class insurgency displaced the dominant capitalists in the Republican Party, at least temporarily. Donald Trump’s nomination and election is the most recent chapter in an ongoing struggle that began in the aftermath of the economic crisis and the 2008 Democratic electoral victory. Capital successfully beat back the first wave of middle-class radicalism in the Republican Party — the Tea Party — during the 2014 congressional elections, but these rebels were not vanquished. They were radicalized. Since the 1960s, the voter base of the Republican Party has been made up primarily of older, suburban, white, middle-class, small businesspeople, professionals, and managers, and a minority of older white workers. Until recently, the particular passions of that base — especially its hostility to the democratic gains of people of color, women, and lgbt people — could be contained. Minor concessions to social conservatives on abortion, affirmative action, voter restrictions, and same-sex marriage/legal equality maintained their loyalty, while capitalists set the substantive neoliberal agenda for the Republicans. As with the Democrats, the non-capitalist elements of the Republican coalition were clearly junior partners to capital.

A Failed Marriage The Bush and Obama administrations’ bailouts of banks, the auto industry, and some homeowners changed this dynamic, catalyzing a radicalization of the Republican electorate. The Tea Party began as an alliance between a grassroots rebellion of older, white, suburban small businesspeople, professionals, and managers, and elements of the capitalist class. While the middle-class ranks of the Tea Party railed against “corporate welfare” and “bailouts for undeserving homeowners,” in particular people of color who held subprime mortgages, capitalists like the Koch brothers saw an opportunity to advance their libertarian agenda of defeating Obamacare and privatizing Medicare and Social Security. Broader layers of the capitalist class encouraged the Tea Party’s mobilizations as long as they targeted unions and social services, and supported the continued deregulation of capital. This alliance continued through the 2010 congressional elections, when the Republicans won a majority in the House and deprived the Democrats of their filibuster-proof “supermajority” in the Senate. While particularly 42

right-wing capitalists like the Koch brothers helped finance the Tea Party, most capitalists continued to hedge their bets electorally, with capitalist donors slightly preferring Democrats in 2010. Capital was more than willing to use this nativist, racist, and anti-union movement when their interests coincided. However, the new right has an agenda independent of and, at times, opposed to that of capital. Unlike the political establishment, the Tea Party right supported stricter immigration controls and wasn’t fazed by the possibility of a federal credit default. The minority of older white workers who voted Republican viewed undocumented immigrants as competitors on the labor market, while the older small businesspeople and professionals who made up the majority of the Tea Party cadre and voters viewed those immigrants as a threat to their “quality of life” and competitors for scarce social services. Capitalists, however, have a different perspective on immigration. Not only do high-tech industries want access to skilled foreign professionals, but labor-intensive sectors like agriculture, construction, landscaping, domestic service, child care, health care, and hospitality rely on lowwage, vulnerable immigrant labor. The two most important “business lobbying” organizations — the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable — oppose wholesale deportations and other policies that reduce the size of the immigrant workforce. Instead, they are leading the fight for an immigration reform that would create massive “guest worker” programs and a difficult “path to citizenship” for those in the United States without papers. There is more common ground on the federal budget deficit, which capital would like to make inroads on through massive social spending cuts. However, the Tea Party’s political brinkmanship — its willingness to let the United States default on its public debt by refusing to raise the debt ceiling in 2011 — estranged capital from it. Both the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable opposed attempts to “shut down the government” as a threat to the US economy and global financial system. The uneasy alliance between the Tea Party and the capitalist class ended in autumn 2013. The 2012 campaign to “Fix the Debt” brought together dozens of former senators and congressmen and over 150 ceos of US transnational corporations in support of a “grand bargain” to close corporate tax loopholes and lower the overall tax rate in exchange for “restructuring” federal pensions, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The campaign won the support of

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Trump’s populist nationalism appeals to elements of the older, white middle class who fear sliding downward into the working class.

President Obama, the Democratic leadership, and mainstream Republicans, but the Tea Party refused to accept the compromise, sparking the late 2013 government shutdown. Capital wasn’t pleased. In 2014 it waged primary campaigns against the Tea Party (organized primarily through the Chamber of Commerce). Scott Reed, the chamber’s chief political strategist, launched “Vote for Jobs,” targeting key Senate and House races to defend incumbents like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and defeat Tea Party candidates. “Vote for Jobs” was effective in shaping the Republican congressional primaries and the November 2014 election. Only one Republican was elected to the Senate without a Chamber of Commerce endorsement. Initially, the capitalist attempt to discipline the Republican Party appeared successful. Despite the greatly reduced Tea Party congressional contingent’s success in blocking serious discussion of a pro-corporate immigration reform and forcing John Boehner out of Congress, calls by the Tea Party to shut down government to block Obama’s executive order on immigration failed. Bipartisan coalitions in both the House and Senate pushed through the nearly $1.1 trillion spending plan in late December 2014.

Enter Trump But the radical revolt symbolized by the Tea Party hadn’t disappeared. Donald Trump’s “outsider” campaign for president marked a deepening of the right-wing radicalization of sections of the middle classes. When Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, few political commentators took his campaign seriously. With a field dominated by mainstream Republicans like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, most believed that Trump’s campaign would be short-lived. However, within a month of announcing, Trump was outpolling his competitors. In a year’s time he would be the only one left standing. What made Trump unacceptable to the Republican establishment and their corporate backers was not merely his unabashed racism and misogyny, or his casual references to his penis size. Trump champions an economic nationalism that rejects central tenets of the bipartisan neoliberal agenda that has impoverished segments of the middle and working classes. Capital was uneasy with Trump’s stance on immigration and the federal debt — he floated the idea of trying to persuade creditors to accept less than full payment on loans to the US government. The corporate elite is even more disturbed by his ideas about foreign policy and global “free trade.” Trump claims to reject the established US alliance system, in particular nato, that has maintained US dominance since World War ii. An advocate of “America First” politics that have been rejected by the US corporate elite since the 1940s, Trump is perceived as an unreliable agent of US capital.


43

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Even more disturbing for the corporate elite are Trump’s positions on trade. The removal of political obstacles to the free movement of capital and goods — but not labor — has been a fundamental element of neoliberal orthodoxy for over thirty years. From Bill Clinton’s signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) to Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (tpp), the entire US capitalist class and its political representatives in both major parties have promoted the liberalization of trade and investment. However, Trump blames nafta and other trade deals for the loss of US manufacturing jobs, and calls for tariffs as high as 40 percent on imports to protect American jobs against “unfair” competition — despite warnings that this could spark a global trade war that could damage the role of US corporations in the world economy. Trump’s nomination sent the majority of the capitalist class, including traditionally Republican capitalists, running to support the reliable neoliberal imperialist, Hillary Clinton. According to OpenSecrets.org, Clinton received over 92 percent of corporate contributions in the 2016 election cycle, including over 80 percent of the contributions from finance, insurance, and real estate; communications/electronics; health care, defense, and “miscellaneous business.” Trump’s support was limited to 60–70 percent of contributions from construction, energy and natural resources, transportation, and agribusiness — which together accounted for less than 10 percent of total capitalist donations. So how did Trump win? Despite losing the popular vote by almost three million votes, he swept the Electoral College. Voter participation among traditionally Democratic segments of the electorate fell. African Americans dipped from 13 percent of all voters in 2008 and 2012 to 12 percent in 2016. In some communities of color, the drop was even more precipitous. In Milwaukee’s Council District 15, which is 84 percent black, voter turnout was nearly 20 percent lower than in 2012. Households earning less than $50,000 a year, who made up 51 percent of the US population in 2014, dropped from 41 percent of voters in 2012 to 36 percent in 2016. The percentage of households earning over $100,000, a mere 17 percent of the population, rose from 28 percent to 33 percent of voters between 2012 and 2016. Put simply, the electorate in 2016 was even more disproportionately well-off than in the last three elections. Within these key categories, there were also small, but significant shifts in voter preference. While 60 percent of voters in households earning less than $50,000 a year voted 46

for Obama in 2008 and 2012, Clinton’s share of these voters dropped to 52 percent. Clinton only won 88 percent of the black vote, down from 95 percent and 93 percent for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Especially alarming for the Democrats was their falling share of the Latino vote. Democratic pollsters were confident that Trump’s racist diatribes would allow Clinton to sweep this key sector. However, among Latinos, the Democrat share declined from 71 percent in 2012 to 65 percent in 2016. Finally, the percentage of union households voting Democratic fell from 58 percent in 2008 and 59 percent in 2012 to a mere 51 percent in 2016. Trump’s ability to retain the core sectors of the Republicans’ post-1980 voter base — primarily the traditional (self-employed and small businesses with less than ten employees) and new (professionals, managers, supervisors) middle classes, including evangelical Christians, and a minority of older white workers — was clear in all of the exit polling. Trump’s margin of victory came from a small minority of voters who had supported Obama in 2008 and 2012. Of 700 counties that had voted for Obama twice, nearly one-third (209) swung to Trump; and of 207 counties that Obama won once, almost 94 percent (194) went to Trump. The shift to Trump was concentrated in traditionally Democratic states of the Great Lakes and Midwest that had suffered the loss of manufacturing jobs and were experiencing a rise in the Latino population. However, Trump’s victory was primarily a result of a sharp drop in the participation of traditionally Democratic voters, rather than a sharp swing to Trump. Trump did gain around 335,000 more votes than Romney among households earning less than $50,000 a year in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. However, Clinton received 1.7 million fewer votes than Obama among the same group. It was these small shifts in voter preference that gave Trump his razor-thin margins in a number of key states: less than 0.25 percent in Michigan, less than 1 percent in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and less than 1.5 percent in Florida. According to one analysis, had about 100,000 Trump voters in these areas voted for Clinton instead, she would have swept the Electoral College.

Why They Voted Trump Trump’s populist nationalism appeals to elements of the older, white middle class who fear sliding downward into

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the working class. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, a study of Southern Tea Party and Trump supporters, reveals people who believe they are “hard workers” who “play by the rules” and never ask for “handouts” but are constantly falling behind socially and economically. They are threatened both by powerful economic and social elites and “line jumpers” — blacks, Latinos, and women who benefit from affirmative action, as well as undocumented immigrants and refugees. In certain respects the attraction of the middle classes to right-wing populist demagogues is clear — these political strongmen promise to defend the “little man” against the forces that squeeze them from above and below. Yet the Left often falters in explaining why a minority of workers support right-wing politics. Why have around 40 percent of union households supported Republicans or other rightwing candidates (Ross Perot in 1992) in most elections since 1980? Why did another small, but significant group of white working-class voters embrace the nationalist populism of Trump, giving him his margin of victory? Historically, many on the Left have treated working-class support for the Right as a form of false consciousness. Capital’s control of the means of ideological production (the media) allow them to distort workers’ thinking. For others, working-class racism and sexism is the defense of white and male privilege against threats from women, queer people, and racialized minorities. Both of these explanations are inadequate. “False consciousness” presents capital and their ideologists as all-powerful, and portrays workers as passive consumers of capitalist ideologies. Meanwhile, simplistic notions of “defense of privilege” ignore the increasing precarity all working people face today. Grasping the contradictory character of capitalist social relations of production allows us to transcend these explanations. The objective, structural position of workers under capitalism provides the basis for both collective, solidaristic radicalism; and individualist, sectoralist, and reactionary politics. As Bob Brenner and Johanna Brenner pointed out in their 1981 analysis of Reagan’s election: ... workers are not only collective producers with a common interest in taking collective control over social production. They are also individual sellers of labor power in conflict with each other over jobs, promotions, etc. This individualistic point of view has a critical advantage in the current period: in the absence of class against class organization. It seems to provide an alternative strategy for effective action — a sectionalist strategy which pits one layer of workers against another. As competing sellers of labor power, workers are open to the appeal of politics that pit them against other

workers — especially more vulnerable ones. Without the experience of mass, collective, and successful class organization and struggle, it should not surprise socialists that segments of the working class are open to right-wing politics. Workers in the United States have seen forty years of attacks on their living and working conditions. The labor movement has responded with one surrender after another, as concession bargaining and futile attempts to forge “labor-management cooperation” have destroyed almost every gain workers made through mass struggle in the 1930s and 1970s. Faced with an impotent labor movement that tails after an ever-rightward-moving Democratic Party, it is not surprising that a minority of older, white workers are attracted to politics that place responsibility for their deteriorating social situation on both the corporate “globalists” and more vulnerable workers — blacks, Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, women, and lgbt people. Kirk Noden, writing in the Nation, grasps why the Republican right wins many working-class votes: Two narratives emerged about the collapse of the industrial heartland in America. The one from the right has three parts: First, that industry left this country because unions destroyed productivity and made labor costs too high, thereby making us uncompetitive. Second, corporations were the victims of over-regulation and a bloated government that overtaxed them to pay for socialist welfare systems. Third, illegal immigration has resulted in the stealing of American jobs, increased competition for white workers, and depressed wages ... The second narrative, promoted by corporate Democrats, is that the global economy shifted and the country is now in transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy. This story tacitly accepts the economic restructuring of the heartland as inevitable once China and other markets opened up. Trump and his nationalist populist ideologues from Breitbart and the “alt-right” added a fourth element to the Right’s narrative — the role of globalizing corporations and free trade. Given a choice between an elitist neoliberal who refused to speak to the realities of their lives (and rejected Bernie Sanders’s social-democratic program as “unrealistic”); and a populist demagogue who offered an illusory solution to their problems, it is not surprising that some white workers embraced Trump. Trumpism is the fruit of decades of lesser-evilism, where the Left trails after the labor officials, who continually surrender to capital, while chasing a rightward-moving Democratic Party in the name of “fighting the Right.” Without a clear and potent independent working-class


47


The uneasy alliance between the Tea Party and the capitalist class ended in 2013. political alternative, one rooted in mass struggles in workplaces and communities, more and more workers will see no alternative to the neoliberal capitalist offensive other than white populist nationalism.

The Task Ahead What can we expect from a Trump presidency? We can expect a continuation and intensification of the attacks on working people that every administration — including Obama’s — carried out since the late 1970s. We should expect even more deportations of “criminal” undocumented immigrants (Obama set the record for deportations), more cuts to social services (Obama made the deepest cuts to food stamps of any president), and the removal of even more regulations on capital, especially in terms of energy production. Despite the presence of Steve Bannon and other nationalist populists in the administration, it is unlikely that Trump’s promises to roll back neoliberal free-trade agreements or to renege on US commitments to imperialist diplomatic and military alliances will come to fruition. Trump himself has already backpedaled on his threats to deport all undocumented workers, reinstitute waterboarding, withdraw from the Paris Climate accords, indict Bill and Hillary Clinton, or ban all Muslims from entering the United States. His proposals to renegotiate nafta and impose tariffs on China, withdraw from Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, build a wall on the Mexican border, or shift US military and diplomatic alliances from nato 48

to Putin’s Russia will face concerted opposition from both the establishment-dominated Republican Congress and the permanent officialdom of the federal government. Put another way, Trump will likely face the sort of structural-institutional obstacles social democrats face when attempting to implement anticapitalist reforms through the capitalist state. This will, of course, demoralize many of his middle- and working-class supporters and make it easier for the mainstream Republicans to regain control of the party, possibly through the creation of a system of unelected “superdelegates” like those the Democrats created in the 1970s. Of course, there is another threat brewing. While the Trump regime is not fascist, his election has encouraged small groups of organized fascists and individual right-wingers. They believe they have the “wind at their back,” freeing them to assault people of color, immigrants, Muslims, queer folks, and leftists. Just one full week after Trump’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center counted around seven hundred violent hate crimes in the United States. The fight-back against Trumpism will have to take various forms: organized, collective antifascist defense against attacks; mass protest; and ultimately struggles within the workplace. Strategically, new organizers need to understand that we cannot rely on either the Democrats or the forces of official reformism. While the labor officials and their allies may be more willing to mobilize against Trump than they were against Obama, we can expect them to “double down” on their support of the Democrats in the 2018 congressional elections. The spontaneous protests in many cities and the growing campaign to wear safety pins as a sign of solidarity against racist and homophobic violence are promising beginnings. However, the danger is that these struggles, like the Wisconsin Uprising, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter, will be short-lived and leave little independent organization in their wake. The way forward for the Left is rebuilding the militant minority — the layer of activists with a strategy and tactics that go beyond reformism — in workplaces and social movements. Without such a core rooted among broader layers of working people, the labor officials, Democratic Party politicos, and the middle-class leaders of social movements will be able to continually derail and demobilize promising struggles — as they have for most of the last forty years. ■

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READING MATERIEL

WE READ THINGS YOU SHOULDN’T READ, SO WE CAN TELL YOU WHAT TO READ.

READING MATERIEL CANON FODDER

Coulterland The Conservative Heart Arthur C. Brooks Arthur C. Brooks, who heads the influential conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, is consumed by the fact that conservatives appear to have lost touch with ordinary working people, lecturing them about fiscal responsibility and hard work while failing to acknowledge the poverty and lack of opportunity that afflict many. As a solution, he provides a blueprint for the Right to adopt the rhetoric of compassion while changing nothing about its policies, many of which disadvantage the working poor he hopes to win over.

Buying these books really messed up our Amazon recommendation algorithm.

assistance goes out to people who aren’t “really” poor. He spends a whole chapter extolling the uplifting nature of work, while also deriding the Obama stimulus package. He complains conservatives criticize the welfare state without providing an alternative, yet believes social justice can be reached through promoting the right “values.” Still, there is much to be gleaned here about the rhetorical shifts the Right hopes to make in a more populist era.

The Conservative Heart is consequently a study in cognitive dissonance. Brooks acknowledges that “most people who are falling behind are not doing so on purpose,” yet spends much of the book endorsing work requirements for welfare and arguing government


51

COULTERLAND

The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech

ists to Answer Questions”) to the obvious (“Spot Inconsistencies in the Left’s Argument”). Whether or not Shapiro’s advice will actually work on an opponent who isn’t the hapless Morgan — whose show cancellation Shapiro appears to give himself credit for — will remain to be seen by intrepid conservatives who try these techniques out in the field. Happy hunting.

Kimberley Strassel History has seen a number of instances of speech repression coming from the liberal-left — from the “Brown Scare” of the late 1930s to today’s student activists keeping their campuses free of right-wing speakers. Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel chooses to focus on none of those, reserving her ire for financial disclosure and transparency laws that have helped expose the corporate and big money donors behind political groups of all stripes. The Kochs, Exxon Mobil and groups like alec are now experiencing what civil rights campaigners of the 1950s went through, Strassel argues, except instead of being shot at, firebombed and murdered, these conservative campaigners face “harassment.” While Strassel notes some instances of death threats, the “harassment” she outlines seems suspiciously like the tools of regular democratic action, such as protests, boycotts and, in one particularly sinister case, an ad campaign that would publicly announce corporations’ support for alec.

How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument Ben Shapiro At its heart, former Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro’s short ebook is a feel-good pamphlet for conservatives. It rests on the dubious proposition that the 52

¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole Ann Coulter For forty years, Ann Coulter writes, voters have been warning politicians that America’s suicidal immigration policies are “the single biggest threat facing the nation,” destined to turn our homeland into a “Third World hellhole.”

Right — which spent eight years attacking Obama as an anti-American, Kenyan Marxist motivated by antiwhite rage, eager to plan concentration camps and death panels — is simply too intellectually honest and policy-focused for twenty-first century politics. The Left, meanwhile, are bullies who label their ideological opponents bigots and misogynists solely to feel better about themselves. Shapiro therefore presents his readers with an eleven-point plan for how to humiliate leftists (represented in the book by well-known Maoist Piers Morgan). Tips range from the sensible (“If You Don’t Know Something, Admit It”; “Force Left№ 24 / WINTER 2017

It’s a leftist plot to drown out the native-born vote, but we have strange allies in our mission. Elite interests — from the media to Wall Street to “ethnic activists” — hide the evidence and tar concerned citizens as xenophobes and racists. Coulter strikes a populist cord, even lambasting Republicans who push for amnesty to “please well-heeled donors” and business interests. She buttresses her case with bad math, inflating the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States and their impact on the economy. At one point Coulter even claims that a quarter of the entire population of Mexico has fled to the United States. But that doesn’t make her a xenophobe: Mexico? “Love the food!” ■

READING MATERIEL FIELD NOTES

Text from Trump’s official economic policy package. September 16, 2016

The Trump Economy: 25 Million New Jobs Created In The Next Decade

Big Plans Behind Trump’s big economic promises is a lot of bullshit.

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The greatest percentage reduction in tax bill goes to working and middle class taxpayers:

Every income group receives a tax cut under the Trump plan, with million more being removed from the income tax rolls and low-income Americans paying no income tax at all.

A Pro-Growth Tax Plan

Growth averaged at least three and a half percent per year in the 55 years between World War II and the year 2000. With the faster growth from the Trump Plan, the economy will create 25 million new jobs over the next decade. For each 1 percent in added GDP growth, the economy adds 1.2 million jobs. Increasing growth by 1.5 percent would result in 18 million jobs (1.5 times 1.2 million times 10 years) above the projected current law job figures of 7 million, producing a total of 25 million new jobs for the American economy.

Donald Trump has proposed sweeping reforms in tax, trade, energy and regulatory policies. The Trump campaign’s economist estimates that the plan would conservatively boost growth to 3.5 percent per year on average, well above the 2 percent currently projected by government forecasters, with the potential to reach a 4% growth rate.

You get a tax cut, you get a tax cut, everyone gets a tax cut! Oh, but the rich get a lot more — about $215,000 per household. And actually, anyone making less than $9,275 will get a 2% spike.

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Tax plans should be simple enough to fit on the back of a business card, so I’m going to follow the lead of the House GOP and have only three tax brackets — and raise the rates we originally proposed in the process. I’m banking that you won’t realize they’ll cost about $7 trillion over ten years, more than double the price tag of Bush’s cuts. Tremendous.

The plan will close special interest tax breaks and cap deductions at $100,000 for single filers and $200,000 for married filers, eliminating

Tax brackets in the individual income tax will be reduced from 7 to 3. Tax rates will be 12%, 25% or 33%, with thresholds very similar to the House GOP plan.

The plan also allows U.S.-based manufacturers to elect full expensing of plant and equipment, an invitation to massive investment. If they elect this approach, they will give up the ability to deduct interest expense.

The plan lowers the business tax rate to 15%. The current business rate 35% rate is one of the highest in the world, making domestic investment unattractive. It includes a 10% tax on repatriation, instantly bringing trillions of dollars back into the U.S. economy now parked overseas.

Married couple earning $5 million per year with two children and $12,000 in child care expenses will get only a 3% reduction in their tax bill.

A married couple earning $75,000 per year with two children and $10,000 in child care expenses will receive a 30% reduction in their tax bill.

A married couple earning $50,000 per year with two children and $8,000 in child care expenses will save 35% from their current tax bill.

FIELD NOTES

The United States has the third-highest corporate tax rate in the world (behind those businesshating communists in the United Arab Emirates and Puerto Rico), so I’m going to slash the rate to be the developed world’s third lowest. Then, we can start competing with Ireland over which of us will be large multinationals’ tax haven of choice.


In 2015 alone, federal agencies issued over 3,300 final rules and regulations, up from 2,400 the prior year. Every year, overregulation costs our economy $2 trillion dollars a year and reduces household wealth by almost $15,000 dollars.

One of the keys to unlocking growth is scaling-back years of disastrous regulations unilaterally imposed by our out-of-control bureaucracy.

A Modern Regulatory Framework

Finally, the plan eliminates the carried interest loophole for Wall Street and the death tax, which falls especially hard on small businesses and farmers.

The plan provides a child care deduction for children up to 13 years of age for average child care expense. There’s an income cap, so the new deductions don’t apply to the rich.

The standard deduction will be $30,000 dollars for married couples and $15,000 dollars for single individuals. Most taxpayers will have no need to itemize, simplifying their tax returns and making it easier to file.

many costly tax loopholes while stimulating growth.

Big Plans

The plan provides a child care tax deduction that in theory should alleviate working families’ concerns, but in practice will fail to help most families, who find child-care unaffordable. But don’t worry, we’ll tack on an unspecified income cap so this still sounds vaguely populist.

Finally, we’re going to pair a populist pitch that targets Wall Street with the elimination of the estate tax, which only falls on estates worth more than $10.9 million. It’s about time the ultra-wealthy — or as I prefer to call them, small businesses and farmers — had the freedom to pass their riches on to their children without limit.

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A lot people (mainly those who own the affected businesses) are saying they don’t like laws that help to ensure we’re not drinking pesticides out of the tap, or that prevent a catastrophic amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, so those will have to go.

There will be no Trans-Pacific Partnership, even

Trade will be an important driver of economic growth along with other key structural reforms. Donald Trump will ensure that every single one of our trade agreements increases our GDP growth rate, reduces our trade deficit, and strengthens our manufacturing base.

Unless there’s a new deadly virus outbreak, I’m not going to implement any new regulations, no matter how great the public need. And to figure out which existing regulations I should gut, I’ll ask the various plutocrats I’ve appointed as heads of federal agencies.

An America-First Trade Policy

A complete regulatory overhaul will level the playing field for American workers and add trillions in new wealth to our economy – keeping companies here, expanding hiring and investment, and bringing thousands of new companies to our shores.

This includes eliminating some of our most intrusive regulations, like the Waters of The U.S. Rule. It also means scrapping the EPA’s so-called Clean Power Plan which the government itself estimates will cost $7.2 billion a year. This Obama-Clinton directive will shut down most, if not all, coal-powered electricity plans in America.

Mr. Trump has proposed a moratorium on new federal regulations that are not compelled by Congress or public safety, and will ask agency and department heads to identify all needless job-killing regulations and they will be removed.

FIELD NOTES

If we just eliminate workplace safety standards, give companies free reign to pollute and to sell unsafe products, and generally cut back regulations to the level of a failed state, companies that have moved jobs offshore might be tempted to bring them back. Everybody wins!


The U.S. Trade Representative will bring trade cases against China. China’s unfair subsidy behavior is prohibited by the terms of its entrance to the WTO. If China does not stop its illegal activities, including its theft of American trade secrets, Donald Trump will use every lawful presidential power to remedy trade disputes, including the application of tariffs.

China will be labeled a currency manipulator. Any country that devalues their currency in order to take unfair advantage of the United States will be met with sharply, and that includes tariffs and taxes.

NAFTA will be renegotiated to get a better deal for American workers. If our partners do not agree to a renegotiation, America will withdraw from the deal.

Donald Trump will appoint the toughest and smartest trade negotiators to fight on behalf of American workers and direct the Secretary of Commerce to identify every violation of trade agreements a foreign country is currently using to harm our workers.

if the President and Congress are reckless enough to pass it in a lame duck session against the will of the American people.

Big Plans

We want bilateral trade deals with even less thorny regulations.

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Lifting unnecessary restrictions on all sources of American energy (such as coal and onshore and offshore oil and gas) will (a) increase GDP by

The Trump Administration will unleash an energy revolution that will bring vast new wealth to our country. We will support coal production. We will support safe hydraulic fracturing. We will allow energy production on federal lands in appropriate areas. We will also open up vast areas of our offshore energy resources for safe production.

The United States will become the world’s dominant leader in energy production. The first step will to undo the damage of the last 8 years. By 2030, the Obama-Clinton energy restrictions will eliminate another half a million manufacturing jobs, reduce economic output by $2.5 trillion, and reduce incomes by $7,000 per person.

The Trump energy policy that will make us energy independent, create millions of new jobs, and protect clean air and clean water. We have one of the world’s most diverse resource bases – from abundant coal, oil, and natural gas to geothermal, solar, and wind. We are also the world’s leader in energy technologies like nuclear power.

Unleash American Energy FIELD NOTES

Hopefully this will be enough to offset the fact that you and your children will end up wandering a deserted hellscape bereft of life.


The “Penny Plan” would reduce non-defense, non-safety net spending by one percent of the previous year’s total each year. Over ten years, the plan will reduce spending (outlays) by almost $1 trillion without touching defense or entitlement spending.

The Penny Plan

Finally, a Trump Administration will support continued research into advanced energy technologies, but we will not be in the business of government picking winners and losers. We need to allow the free market and the innovative spirit of the American people to product [sic] the new energy technologies of tomorrow, without undue government interference.

The Trump Administration will ensure a reliable, streamlined regulatory and permitting process for energy infrastructure projects, and will work with their sponsors to find workable solutions so that worthy energy infrastructure projects can be completed on time and on budget.

more than $100 billion annually, add over 500,000 new jobs annually, and increase annual wages by more than $30 billion over the next 7 years; (b) increase federal, state, and local tax revenues by almost $6 trillion over 4 decades; and (c) increase total economic activity by more than $20 trillion over the next 40 years.

Big Plans

Nevermind my other promises and that virtually the only way the coal industry can be brought back from the brink is through government intervention.

The good news is, once the government is crippled and fails to adequately carry out its basic functions, the Republicans in Congress can justify further cutbacks since government can’t do anything right. What a deal.

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READING MATERIEL DOSSIER

Discover the Networks The new GOP is fueled by some old think tanks.

pick for secretary of state — has provided it $1.9 million since 2007. The aei quickly declared Tillerson “the right choice” for the position. It has laid out a range of policy recommendations for 2017, including boosting charter schools, rolling back fuel efficiency regulations and “reforming” entitlements.

Marginalized in academia for much of the twentieth century, conservatives built their own apparatuses to develop ideas. Here’s a guide through the alphabet soup of conservative think tanks, and what role they’ll play in Trump’s administration.

counter liberal influence in the “marketplace of ideas.” The think tank soon began receiving millions of dollars from conservative foundations and business interests. Paul Ryan has called the think tank “one of the beachheads of the modern conservative movement.”

American Enterprise Institute (AEI)

While the aei has been far from complimentary towards him, Trump has admitted that he seeks out aei Senior Fellow John Bolton for foreign policy advice. Besty DeVos, Trump’s choice for education secretary, is on the think tank’s Board of Trustees, and ExxonMobil — whose ceo Rex Tillerson is Trump’s

Founded in 1938, for decades the aei viewed its role as an objective “research adjunct” to policymakers. By the time Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” had come and gone, it sought instead to

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Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) The cis, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called “the anti-immigrant movement’s think tank,” was founded in 1985 by John Tanton, a retired ophthalmologist bent on maintaining “a Europe-andAmerican majority” in the US. Since 1995, the cis has been headed by Mark Krikorian, who believes the government is undertaking “social engineering” through a policy of “mass immigration.”

The Trump campaign consulted with the cis on immigration policy during the election, and Krikorian was one of sixteen people who met with Trump at his home in August for a foreign policy briefing.

Center for Security Policy (CSP) The csp was founded in 1988 by former Reagan administration Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, a far-right Islamophobic neocon who was behind the rumors that President Obama is a Muslim and that Hillary Clinton confidante Huma Abedin is a covert operative for the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaffney was reported by multiple outlets to be serving on Trump’s transition team, but he quickly denied it. Nonetheless, Gaffney’s relentless anti-Muslim conspiracizing fit neatly with Trump’s campaign, and Gaffney has publicly praised Trump. Trump’s call for a Muslim ban closely mirrored a tweet by Gaffney made around the same time, and Trump even cited a bogus csp poll to justify the policy. Trump’s cia director, Mike Pompeo, also has ties to the organization.

Family Research Council (FRC) The frc is a Christian right think tank founded in 1983 by James Dobson and other conservatives, focusing on issues like homosexuality, abortion, sexual behavior, stem cells and, increasingly, the dangers of Islam. The frc is virulently anti-gay, advancing

false claims that gay men are more likely to be pedophiles. Its president also praised a Ugandan bill that would have sentenced gays to death. Dobson, who continues to have ties to the frc, joined Trump’s executive evangelical advisory comittee in June and endorsed him a month later. Trump, in turn, was the first gop nominee to ever address the frc’s Values Voter Summit. The domestic policy chair for Trump’s transition team is an FRC senior fellow, and several more team members have ties to the organization.

Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies The Federalist Society started in 1982 to counter what three conservative law students viewed as liberal dominance in the legal world. By 2010, there were more than 45,000 lawyers, judges, academics, and others involved in the Society’s various activities. It has produced four Supreme Court justices over its lifetime. With Trump eager to assure the gop establishment of his conservative bona fides, the Society looks to retain its influence under his administration. Trump promised that his judges would be “all picked by the Federalist Society” and met with its executive vice president to discuss filling the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia. Nine of the names on Trump’s shortlist later appeared at the Federalist Society’s annual national convention.


Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) The fee was started by Jeb Bush in 2008, largely to advance the education reforms he had implemented as Florida governor. This includes promoting charter schools and digital education, issuing taxpayer vouchers for private schools, and grading school performance on an A to F scale. While a think tank founded by Trump’s mortal enemy might seem a strange fit with the new administration, its policy proposals are ones that conservatives have long championed. On top of that, Betsy DeVos has served on its board, and various DeVos family foundations have donated to the fee and continue to do so. ExxonMobil has also been a consistent donor.

Heartland Institute The Heartland Institute is a freemarket think tank founded in 1984, advocating for rolling back taxes on tobacco (a product whose health concerns it has downplayed), spreading climate denial, pushing for private schools, and more. It has a full-time staff of 38, and works with a network of more than 200 elected officials. Steel manufacturer Nucor donated $502,000 to Heartland in 2011 and 2012, the think tank’s largest single donor for the period. Until 2014, Nucor was run by Dan DiMicco, who was one of Trump’s fourteen economic advisors during the campaign. Rebekah Mercer, a hedge fund heiress who has been a major donor to Heartland and other

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DOSSIER

conservative groups, has used her connections to influence Trump’s transition effort. Heartland also received $736,500 from ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2006, though it has ceased to make its donors public since then. The think tank’s Action Plan for Trump includes policies like withdrawing from the Paris climate deal, approving Keystone and other pipelines, rolling back various epa regulations, repealing and replacing Obamacare, and block granting Medicaid.

Heritage Foundation Founded in 1973, Heritage became the leading fountainhead of conservative ideas and policies by the 1980s, with its Mandate for Leadership serving as the policy blueprint for the Reagan administration. The think tank has continued to serve as the premier conservative intellectual voice ever since. In the words of one defense consultant, it has now similarly “positioned itself as the intellectual foundation for a Trump administration,” while the Wall Street Journal has called it “an administration-in-waiting for Mr. Trump,” with dozens of current and ex-staffers either floated for posts or working on the transition. This follows a shift by Heritage to an increasingly more antagonistic relationship with the gop, epitomized by the think tank’s push for Republicans to defund Obamacare at the risk of government shutdown.

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Heritage has received tens of millions of dollars from conservative foundations and corporate donors over the years, including Dow, General Motors and the Scaife Foundations. Some of these donors have a direct line to the incoming Trump administration: the DeVos family has deep ties to Heritage, supporting the think tank for the last ten years. Trump’s transportation secretary Elaine Chao also served a fellowship there, while Tillerson’s ExxonMobil has given nearly $800,000 to the think tank since 1998.

Hoover Institution Founded by former president Herbert Hoover in 1919, the Hoover Institution was focused chiefly on anticommunism in its first few decades, as well as pushing the public and lawmakers towards “individual liberty.” The think tank came into its own when Glenn Campbell took the reins in 1960, pushing Hoover to focus more on advocacy for the latter. By the time he died in 2001, Hoover was called “one of the world’s most influential conservative research groups” by the New York Times, producing conservativeleaning research and housing various right-wing intellectuals. Like other think tanks on this list, Hoover has been the recipient of large donations from conservative foundations and corporations, as well as maintaining connections to the gop. ExxonMobil has given it nearly $300,000 over the last nineteen years. Numerous Hoover staffers joined aei personnel to work on the 1964 Goldwater campaign,

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while others later joined the Reagan and Bush administrations. Trump’s secretary of defense, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, has been a visiting fellow with the institution for the last two years. Three of the members of Trump’s transition team — Peter Thiel, Williamson M. Evans, and Edwin Meese iii — also have close ties to Hoover.

New Century Foundation The New Century Foundation is a white nationalist think tank founded in 1994 by Jared Taylor, a Yale graduate and former West Coast editor of PC Magazine. Its chief function is putting out the magazine American Renaissance, which argues in favor of eugenics and for the existence of a link between race and intelligence. The New Century Foundation has also published The Color of Crime, a book arguing that racial bias by police is negligible, that race is connected to criminality and that black on white crime is a serious problem. The New Century Foundation has no direct links to the Trump administration. However, its fortunes and the movement it represents have seen an uptick since Trump’s victory. Having been granted the status of a non-profit, the group has, along with three others (including the npi) raised $7.8 million to spread their beliefs.

Discover the Networks

Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) The tppf was founded in 1989 by James Leininger, a conservative Christian activist who made his name through campaigns against same-sex marriage in Texas, promoting school vouchers and through his giving to various conservative politicians. The tppf counts itself today as “America’s largest free

market state think tank,” and describes its mission as a “fight for freedom” for which it is developing “workable ideas for elected officials.” These ideas range from tax cuts and tightening government spending to “school choice” and scaling back federal regulations. Like Trump, one of its chief targets is the epa’s Clean Power Plan. Trump’s Department of the Interior transition team is being led by Doug Domenech, head of the tppf’s


Fueling Freedom Project, which aims to explain “the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels” and push back against epa regulations. Trump’s energy secretary pick Rick Perry also has ties to the organization, which receives thousands of dollars from billionaires like the Koch brothers, conservative foundations and various businesses. One of these, unsurprisingly, happens to be ExxonMobil. ■

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY AXEL PFAENDER

Losing West Virginia CATHY KUNKEL

Few states better illustrate the contradictions and failures of the Democratic Party than West Virginia. JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

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est virginia got a lot of attention in this year’s presidential election cycle. It was spotlighted regularly by the media to explain the phenomenon of the “Trump voter.” Unlike states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump’s victory in West Virginia was predicted far in advance. On Election Day he took the state in a landslide, with 68 percent of the vote. The story of West Virginia’s drift to the right in presidential elections is well known. George W. Bush’s first campaign marked a significant shift in the state’s voting patterns as it switched from reliably voting Democrat to Republican in presidential elections. This move is typically explained by pointing to West Virginia’s declining unions, opposition to climate-change regulations that would impact the state’s coal industry, and the rising appeal of social conservatism. Less discussed is the decline of the West Virginia Democratic Party, particularly its collapse in the last two years. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of the West Virginia legislature for eighty-two years from 1932 to 2014. But in the space of two years the party has become a shadow of its former self: the Democrats went from holding 71 percent of the seats in the House of Delegates in 2008 to 54 percent in 2012 to 36 percent in 2014 (and maintained 37 percent in 2016). Democratic representation in the state senate fell from 71 percent in 2012 to 47 percent in 2014 to 35 percent in 2016. So while the focus on West Virginia over the past year was largely superficial, the attention wasn’t entirely unwarranted. Few states illustrate the contradictions and failures of the Democratic Party’s economic policy — and the challenges ahead in rebuilding the Left — better than West Virginia.

workers were in a union, compared to less than 30 percent nationally. But after peaking in the early 1980s, West Virginia union membership fell dramatically as manufacturing (notably in the steel industry) and mining jobs disappeared. In 2015, only 12.4 percent of West Virginia workers were unionized. With the decline of its union base, the state’s Democratic Party became increasingly vulnerable. The recent collapse of West Virginia’s coal industry was the final straw. After a 2008 boom in global coal markets, West Virginia coal production and coal-mining employment began a rapid decline from which it is not expected to recover. Coal production fell 39 percent from 2008 to 2015, with the state’s southern coalfields (long the base of the state’s Democratic Party machine) seeing a drop of 59 percent. Since 2008, more than seven thousand miners in West Virginia’s southern coalfields lost their jobs; in Boone County, formerly the state’s largest coal-producing county, mining employment fell 58 percent from 2011–15. The main reasons for the collapse are structural: geology (the state’s southern coalfields are increasingly uncompetitive as the easiest-to-mine coal is gone), the increasing use of natural gas for power generation nationally, and a weak market for coal exports. But the drop in coal production and employment coincided with Obama’s presidency, creating an opportunity for the West Virginia Republican Party. Despite the fact that federal environmental regulations have had minimal impact on the decline

The Unmaking of a Party The West Virginia Democratic Party — brought to power in the early 1930s on the heels of a coal market crash and the Great Depression — has historically drawn its strongest base of support from the state’s union movement. The United Mine Workers of America, bolstered by the prolabor policies of the Roosevelt administration, emerged as a powerful force in West Virginia politics in the thirties, and in the decades that followed West Virginia’s industrial and coal-mining unions continued to exert political power. In the mid-1960s, about 35 percent of West Virginia 68

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Sanders won all 55 counties in the state’s Democratic primary.

of the state’s coal industry, the sector’s rapid decline provided the perfect opportunity for Republicans to attack the Obama administration’s “war on coal.” West Virginia’s state elections came to be seen by Republicans as up for grabs, and out-of-state money and politicians flooded in to make the “war on coal” the dominant issue. In early 2013, Republican Alex Mooney moved from Maryland to West Virginia to make a successful run for House of Representatives the next year. Patrick Morrisey moved to eastern West Virginia in 2006 (he still maintains a home in Alexandria, VA) and won the 2012 state attorney general race, the first time a Republican held the office in nearly a hundred years. The national Republican Attorneys General Association plunked down $3.4 million to ensure Morrisey’s reelection in 2016. Seemingly overnight the Democratic Party’s control over the West Virginia political system collapsed.

A Party of Coal Yet the failure of the West Virginia Democratic Party can’t simply be placed at the feet of global coal prices or opportunistic Republicans. The Democrats’ failure to develop an economic vision that would benefit West Virginia workers is central to the story. The West Virginia Democratic Party has long been beholden to dominant economic interests in the state, particularly coal mining. Even back in the 1950s, a proposal by Democratic governor William Marland to impose what would have been the first severance tax on the coal industry was soundly defeated by his Democratic legislature after an industry outcry. Today, West Virginia’s Democratic politicians don’t just represent the industry — some are the industry. Senator Joe Manchin has made millions from his family’s coal brokerage business and Governor-elect Jim Justice is a coal-mining ceo. The party’s capture by industry has intensified in recent decades as union influence has waned in the face of mechanization. Coal mining has gone through a series of booms and busts in West Virginia, but each successive boom has employed far fewer people. At its peak in 1948, coal mining employed nearly 132,000 miners; in the mid1970s, mining employment peaked again at 64,000 miners, and in 2008, mining employment reached a high of 22,034. And of these only one in three miners worked on the highly mechanized mountaintop removal mines, which accounted for nearly half of the state’s coal production. While mechanization has systematically destroyed coal-mining jobs, the state Democratic Party has postured as an advocate for workers, opposing environmental regulations on the industry as a way to “save jobs.” But their pro-worker position is a façade. The party has attacked restrictions on mountaintop-removal mining

(by systematically under-enforcing federal surface-mining regulations), despite the fact that mountaintop mining employs far fewer miners than underground mining. West Virginia Democrats have also catered to the coal industry on worker safety issues, failing to meaningfully increase mine safety regulations even after the 2010 Upper Big Branch explosion killed twenty-nine miners. The state Democratic Party acknowledges no contradiction in its cozy relationship with coal, arguing that what’s good for the industry is good for jobs. As governor, Joe Manchin even tried to change the state’s official motto from “wild and wonderful” to “open for business” until public outcry forced him to backtrack. Under Manchin, the state eliminated the business franchise tax and cut other corporate taxes by $425 million a year. The fragile position of West Virginia workers has been exacerbated by the West Virginia Democrats’ long-term failure to pursue meaningful economic diversification in the state, itself a product of industry capture. Rather than pursuing other opportunities for economic diversification, the party has doubled down on extractive industries. For example, the state Democratic Party embraced the Marcellus shale gas drilling boom that swept into the state in the late 2000s, catering to another out-of-state extractive industry rather than building and retaining wealth and jobs within the state. The Democratic Party’s attempts at true economic diversification have been meager at best. In 2009, the Democratic legislature passed an “alternative and renewable energy portfolio standard” that was ostensibly designed to diversify the state’s electricity system. In reality, it did literally nothing because it allowed utilities to count their existing coal-fired power plants as “alternative energy resources.” And unlike some other extraction-intensive states (Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota), for decades West Virginia’s legislature failed to establish a permanent mineral trust fund to keep natural resource wealth in the state during times of bust. When it finally did so in 2014, the legislature severely underfunded it.

The Last Straws The WV Democratic Party’s accelerating representation of coal industry interests in the wake of weakening union power left it ill-prepared to deal with the recent structural decline of the state’s coal industry. The party had no real answer to offer thousands of laid-off coal miners or the towns and counties whose budgets were slashed by the decline in coal severance tax revenues. When confronted by the Republican Party’s decision to opportunistically blame the decline of the coal industry on Obama’s “war on coal” and the “job-killing epa,” the West Virginia Democratic Party could not articulate any


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alternative vision. Instead, many Democratic politicians chose to run even further to the right, joining in with the bashing of the Environmental Protection Agency and distancing themselves from Obama. This strategy worked for a few Democrats. Governor Joe Manchin successfully ran for US Senate in 2010; one of his campaign ads featured him picking up a gun and shooting a cap-and-trade bill. In 2016, the party also managed to get Jim Justice elected as governor — Justice escaped being tarred with the “war on coal” brush by virtue of being a coal-mining ceo and the wealthiest man in the state. He was also a registered Republican until three months before deciding to run. But on the whole, the party was annihilated. At first glance, this is somewhat puzzling. After all, shouldn’t the West Virginia Democrats’ steadfast support for the industry have insulated them from the Republicans’ “war on coal” rhetoric? The Republican strategy was successful for two reasons: the constant message tying the Democrats to Obama and his “war on coal” — a message that also played to dogwhistle racism in an overwhelmingly white state — made it all but impossible for state Democrats to fully distance themselves from the national party of the same name. As Charleston Gazette-Mail journalist Ken Ward Jr wrote in 2015, “every 2016 race in West Virginia will again be about President Obama, who won’t be on the ballot.” What’s more, the decision of most Democratic candidates to run further to the right, emulating Republicans, underscored the fact that the Democrats have no new ideas to offer. After more than eighty years of Democratic rule at the state house, the Republican Party successfully positioned itself as the party of change and channeled real anger at the economic desperation in West Virginia. Boone County — which voted for Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016 — is perhaps the starkest example of this economic desperation. In 2008, the county was the largest coal producer in the state. From 2008 to 2015, coal production there fell 72 percent, and in just the last four years mining employment fell 58 percent. West Virginia’s overall economic outlook has been declining, as well. In 2015, the state experienced the third largest employment decline in the country. The job gains that have occurred have been in low-wage sectors, exacerbating poverty in a state that historically ranks at or near the bottom of most economic indicators, including per capita income and life expectancy. Ultimately, the West Virginia Democratic Party found itself caught in its own version of the internal contradictions plaguing the national Democratic Party. For the last three decades, the national Democratic and Republican Party establishments have maintained a consensus on core economic issues. These have revolved around support

for the financial industry (including bank bailouts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis) and big corporations, and trade deals that prioritize the free flow of capital and fail to incorporate labor or environmental standards. These policies have resulted in widening inequality and pervasive economic insecurity, making it harder for the Democrats to credibly position themselves as representatives of the working class. The West Virginia Democratic Party created an analogous situation by championing dominant extractive industries in the state while also claiming to be the party of labor. The decline of the coal industry laid bare the fact that the state Democratic Party has no real vision for supporting workers, particularly as the tensions between creating jobs and protecting the environment become increasingly fraught. At the national level, environmental policy has never been coupled with social and economic policy to aid communities transitioning away from fossil fuels, leaving the national Democratic Party open to attack for pitting workers against the environment. The same “jobs vs. environment” argument was used effectively by Republicans in West Virginia to crush the state Democratic Party. Yet the WV Democratic Party itself has failed to articulate any critique of the ways in which neoliberalism and mechanization have destroyed the working class in West Virginia — or how a different economy could provide both dignified work and a “just transition.” Such an analysis would not have been foreign to prominent West Virginia politicians of the early twentieth century, some of whom who clearly saw how the extraction of wealth from the state and its people went hand in hand with environmental degradation. Republican governor Henry Hatfield (1913–17) once asked: Why will not those who have large holdings in our commonwealth assist in the up-building of the state? When will relief come to us? Will it be when these hills and valleys have been exhausted of their bounties of nature and when these great mountains have shed their last stately oak, and when the hills will resound with emptiness because the mineral beds that once reposed within have been exhausted in a market beyond the state borders? It is difficult to imagine an elected official of either party posing such a question today.

The Republican Vision The future for West Virginia seems bleak. At the state level, since the Republicans took power in 2014, they have rolled back protections for workers, repealing the state’s prevailing wage law (which had set a minimum wage for


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In the mid-1960s, 35 percent of West Virginia workers were in a union, compared to less than 30 percent nationally. state-funded construction projects) and making West Virginia a “right-to-work” state. At the federal level, it is unlikely a Trump presidency will do much to benefit the state, despite his campaign promise to bring back coal. Trump will be unable to deliver on his pledges to make both natural gas and coal “great” because the fuels are in direct competition with each other for electricity generation; given that natural gas is cheaper, it will presumably win out. Even notorious coal baron Bob Murray, an early backer of Trump’s campaign, urged Trump to moderate his campaign promises to coal miners because of the impossibility of delivering on them. Quoted in the industry publication SNL Financial in May 2016 Murray said, “[Trump] wants to bring the mines back and I told him that was not possible.” And considering that Trump’s pick for treasury secretary is a former Goldman Sachs banker (as was Timothy Geithner, Obama’s first treasury secretary), there is no reason to expect that Trump will improve overall economic conditions in the rest of the country either. The Steven Mnuchin pick all but assures that campaign promises to enact protective tariffs to bring back jobs will not materialize. Instead, a continued prioritization of the interests of finance will exacerbate the trend of widening income inequality and growing economic discontent that contributed to Trump’s rise in the first place.

In Search of Alternatives The recent history of the West Virginia Democratic Party underscores the desperate need for an economic vision in West Virginia, and in the rest of the country, that actually works for working people. Bernie Sanders began to provide an outline of what this vision could look like in West Virginia. Campaigning in the state he challenged the Democratic establishment’s ties 74

to Wall Street — and also to the pharmaceutical industry that has flooded the state with prescription painkillers over the last decade. He spoke directly about climate change, a problem that West Virginia Democrats prefer to pretend does not exist. And he addressed the reality that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class in West Virginia. Sanders won all fifty-five counties in the state’s Democratic primary. His victory suggests that the challenge of winning back a state that voted 68 percent Trump may be less impossible than it appears. But winning will require the articulation of a real analysis of the state’s problems rather than a continuation of the myth that what’s good for the state’s extractive industries is necessarily good for workers. Nationally, an economic vision for the working class must seriously address the twin crises of economic insecurity and climate crisis. Addressing climate change solely through technological innovation and regulating polluters — the Democratic Party’s approach so far — will leave behind states like West Virginia whose economies have depended on fossil-fuel extraction for decades. A path to a future that protects both workers and the environment will require transitioning towards an economic system that does not produce sacrifice zones in pursuit of fossil-fuel extraction and in which communities have the resources to weather the serious climate change impacts that are already on the way. It will involve breaking up large monopolies and large concentrations of wealth in order to return greater political power and control over resources to local communities. The economic transformation needed to build an economic system in the interest of workers while remaining within natural limits is a long-term transformation. But we must begin it. The alternative, a continued failure to address underlying economic realities, will continue to drive voters to the Right. ■

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CULTURAL CAPITAL

OUT-OF-CONTEXT GRAMSCI QUOTES GO HERE.

CULTURAL FRONT BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE

BY BILLY BRAGG

Stand Down Margaret Today, it’s hard to imagine an artist crooning “I don’t want to change the world” and becoming a left-wing icon. But when Billy Bragg released “New England” in 1983, Margaret Thatcher was pursuing a radical program to destroy the postwar Keynesian consensus and usher in a brave new world of capitalist hegemony. What the Conservative Party termed “progress” in that year’s elections meant the ruination of British working-class political power. “I don’t want a new England,” Bragg opined, and who could blame him? When miners initiated their national strike a year later, Bragg threw himself into solidarity efforts, performing in miners’ towns across the country. Later, inspired by the 1970s Rock Against Racism tours that pit antiracist performers against neo-Nazis, he set up the musicians’ collective Red Wedge to organize opposition to the Tories. It’s possible that being embedded in such struggles is what preserved the clear, folksy, even upbeat sound

Songs from round one to inspire us to win round two.

in his music, even as fellow musical rebels like the Ramones and the Clash were popularizing the harder, faster, and louder. The impossible faith of striking miners against the Conservative government must have served as an antidote to the pessimism, sliding into nihilism, that gave punk its sexy, transgressive edge in the same era. Now, the neoliberal order Thatcher pioneered has succeeded in its major goals. As the Left was defeated and labor beaten back, the musical battle cries of the seventies and eighties turned to whimpers, and punk seemed more and more a relic of a countercultural past. Yet winning has its downside.


Now that neoliberalism has conquered its old enemies and won its world wars, its adherents have transformed from radical pioneers into conservative defenders of the status quo. “There is no alternative” sounds less like the battle cry of uncompromising reformers and more like the plea of an embattled caste. In this context, the Left and its musicians can once again say that yes, we do want to change the world — while remembering why Billy Bragg didn’t in 1983. Here, Bragg takes us through eight songs that best captured the resistance and rebellion of the Thatcher era. 77

BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE

THE STYLE COUNCIL

“Walls Come Tumbling Down” Paul Weller had already established himself as a sharp observer of working-class angst during his years fronting The Jam. When he broke up the band in 1982 and formed a jazz/soul outfit The Style Council, his social commentary came wrapped in a cooler sound. The 1984 miners’ strike brought the fire back to his songwriting and this punchy single got to number six in the UK charts. Opening with the words “You don’t have to take this crap,” “Walls Come Tumbling Down” sounded a rallying call to those dismayed by Thatcher’s Britain. Its message: unity is powerful. HEAVEN 17

“(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” Heaven 17 recorded this dance floor favorite in 1981, shortly after splitting from the Human League. While their erstwhile colleagues topped the charts, they took their synthpop in a more political and, it has to be said, funky direction. With Thatcher and Reagan in power, there was a sense that the forces of reaction, which had been held in check by youth culture since the 1960s, were gaining the upper hand, pushing back against civil, social, and sexual rights. Heaven 17 spoke out, alerting us to “Racist men with evil views spreading all across the land.”

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“Are you gonna try to make this work Or spend your days down in the dirt You see things can change YES an’ walls can come tumbling down!” — THE STYLE COUNCIL, “WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN”

THE BEAT

THE REDSKINS

“Stand Down Margaret” The Two Tone movement was a key aspect of antiracist activism in late ‘70s Britain, bringing black and white youth together to fight against discrimination, while dancing to ska-influenced pop. It was only natural that the bands involved in the scene should take a stand against Thatcher. The Beat were among the first, transforming Prince Buster’s “Whine and Grine” into an anthem of opposition. The “white law” mentioned in the lyrics is an oblique reference to William Whitelaw, Thatcher’s hardline minister for law and order, but we all knew what they really meant.

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“Keep On Keepin’ On” A trio of hard-left skinheads — hence the name — the Redskins were inspired by a heady mixture of sixties soul and Trotskyism and promised to “walk like the Clash and talk like the Supremes.” Their one album, “Neither Washington nor Moscow,” took its title from the slogan on the front of the Socialist Workers Party newspaper and the band’s politics were uncompromising and workerist. However, they avoided the miserablism that sometimes afflicts the Trotskyist left by writing great pop tunes like this.

Stand Down Margaret

ELVIS COSTELLO

“ Tramp the Dirt Down” Costello was probably the nearest to a traditional protest singer thrown up by the punk rock scene, with a back catalogue of powerfully topical songs that seek to make sense of a hostile world. However, none of the others have the personal invective contained in this song, made all the more powerful by being a lament rather than a ranting thrash. The image of Costello stamping on Thatcher’s grave to ensure she doesn’t rise again might seem faintly ridiculous now, but her ghost still haunts British politics.

TELEVISION PERSONALITIES

“A Sense of Belonging” The real enemy of all of us who want to make a better world is not capitalism or conservatism, but cynicism — our own feeling that no one cares about this shit, that nothing will ever change, so what’s the point? Woody Guthrie knew this, as did Dan Treacy, the driving force behind Television Personalities. Cynicism takes hold when empathy becomes a chore — the only real antidote is activism. This song makes that point in a wonderfully world-weary way.

ROBERT WYATT

“Shipbuilding” Shipbuilding is about what happens when a leader uses war to whip up patriotic fervor and distract from their domestic unpopularity. Thatcher was floundering mid-term when the Argentine junta invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982. Pushing aside all reasonable attempts at brokering peace, she sent the Royal Navy down to the South Atlantic in search of a glorious reenactment of British imperial might. Britain was victorious and Thatcher was returned to office a year later in a landslide. Nine hundred and four combatants lost their lives. THE ENEMY WITHIN

“Strike!” “Can’t remember such a bitter time The Boss says jump! The workers fall in line I’m not down, but I’m feeling low They whip us into line With the threat of the dole” —THE REDSKINS, “KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON”

The 1984 miners’ strike was a catalyst for opposition to Thatcher. Over the course of the twelve month struggle, artists identified themselves by doing benefit gigs and recording supportive singles. This piece of spartan agitprop was released by Keith Le Blanc, whose previous hit featured the voice of Malcolm X. His nom de guerre comes from a quote by Thatcher, who in a speech to the Conservative Party during the strike juxtaposed the defeated Argentine junta — “the enemy without” — with the miners — “the enemy within.” The voice you can hear is that of Arthur Scargill, thenleader of the National Union of Mineworkers. ■


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CULTURAL FRONT WAYS OF SEEING

BY TANNER HOWARD

How Pepe Turned Brown Inside every cartoon frog is a totalitarian screaming to get out.

In simpler times (aka 2005, the height of the Bush years), Pepe the Frog was a ne’er-do-well stoner, whose frequent munchies often resulted in acid reflux attacks. Created by artist Matt Furie for a comic book called Boy’s Club, the affable frog and his friends reveled in scatological humor and other juvenilia. It wasn’t pathbreaking or insightful by any stretch, but it was hardly creeping fascism. Pepe’s popularity jumped in 2008. That year, a page from Boy’s Club showing Pepe peeing with his pants pulled down made the rounds on 4Chan, and his accompanying catchphrase, “feels good man,” 80

quickly became ubiquitous on the website’s infamous /b/ board. In time, Pepe’s sunny optimism would grow more complex, as anonymous web users developed a range of emotions for him, including Sad Frog, Smug Frog, and Angry Pepe. Stripped of his pre-recession innocence, Pepe would never be the same. Before he became an alt-right icon, Pepe unwittingly became a sought-after commodity. In 2014, 4chan users began trading customized Pepe macros, calling their creations “rare” Pepes. The inevitable backlash saw collectors flood the web with huge batches of “rare” Pepes to depreciate

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the market, but not before someone almost sold 1,200 Pepe images on eBay for $99,166, or more than $80 a Pepe. Pepe’s sad descent reached its nadir this election cycle, as white supremacists decided to “reclaim” Pepe from the “normies” misusing his image. Pepe’s transformation into fascist icon began last July on 4chan’s /pol/, or “Politically Incorrect” board, with a macro of a Smug Pepe with Trump hair grinning in front of a US border fence. A s Tr u m p e m b r a c e d t h e amphibian, retweeting a cartoon of Pepe with Trumpian hair behind


a potus lectern, we witnessed the spectacle of the Clinton campaign publishing an article denouncing a cartoon frog. The response to white supremacy suggested by the campaign was typically uninspiring: “Vote.” Their strategy couldn’t keep Trump out of the White House. Neither could a valiant campaign to #SavePepe prevent Pepe’s tragic downfall into racism, making him the first frog to be labeled a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. With the Right on the move, we can expect more of even the dankest memes to fall prey to the forces of reaction. ■


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CULTURAL FRONT BEYOND A BOUNDARY

BY MATTHEW MIRANDA

Adam Silver Isn’t Protesting As long as no one risks the league’s power or profits, the NBA can sell politics all the way to the bank.

Last August — a month after police shot and killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two years after police shot and killed Michael Brown and choked Eric Garner to death, and three years after wannabe cop George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing Trayvon Martin — San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he said afterward. “There are bodies in the street, and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” 82

His actions seemed to align with comments made by nba stars LeBron James, Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade, and Carmelo Anthony at the espy awards that July, just a week after Sterling’s and Castile’s murders. They called on athletes to resurrect the activist tradition of Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, and others. “It’s not about being a role model, it’s not about our responsibility to the tradition of activism,” James said. “I know tonight we’re honoring Muhammad Ali, the goat, but to do his legacy any justice, let’s use this moment as call to action for all professional athletes to educate ourselves, explore these issues, speak

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up, use our influence and renounce all violence ...” After generations of basketball players reserving their voice for commercial endorsements — Michael Jordan’s “Republicans buy sneakers, too” and Charles Barkley’s “I am not a role model” — today’s stars’ willingness to take meaningful stances seemed like a welcome development. nba commissioner Adam Silver, the more progressive successor to David Stern’s serrated antagonisms, praised the athletes for “put[ting] themselves in a leadership position.” He went on, “When they see sort of symbolic gestures by athletes in other sports, and not to devalue them in any way, I think their view is ‘We’ve moved past that stage already ... we will be judged by the substantive actions we’re taking in our communities.’ ” A closer look reveals that these “substantive actions” carry far less weight than the “symbolic gestures” the nba has purportedly “moved past.” These include Wade’s bike ride through Miami that included

police officers, Los Angeles Lakers– sponsored pickup games between law enforcement and children, and Memphis Grizzlies head coach David Fizdale’s initiative to register his players to vote. Meanwhile, several teams chose to lock arms during the national anthem. “We’re not protesting,” Milwaukee Bucks head coach Jason Kidd declared. “We’re showing unity. There’s not a protest.” When players do go beyond the nba’s vague rhetoric about “leadership,” they’re punished. Last July, players from three w n ba teams faced fines after wearing t-shirts during warm-ups that decried the Sterling and Castile shootings as well as the murder of three Dallas police officers during a peaceful protest. Even after being fined $5,000 — almost a tenth of the average wnba salary — New York Liberty players Swin Cash, Tina Charles, Kiah Stokes, Carolyn Swords, and Tanisha Wright focused the post-game press conference on police brutality and criminal justice reform, refusing to discuss that day’s game. Although wnba commissioner Lisa Borders, who reports to Silver, eventually rescinded the fines, Silver’s response to the protest exposed the nba’s true face. “I would greatly prefer that the players use the platforms they’re given,” he said. “Social media, press conferences, media in lockers rooms, however they want to do it, to make their political points of view be known.” To put it more clearly, players can say and wear whatever they like off the court, but they cannot desecrate the sanctum sanctorum — the stadium and the uniforms. No matter that these same courts and uniforms are acceptable spaces for

commercial advertising. While the league can afford for half its audience to turn off the press conferences, it can’t let politics interfere with its game time ratings. But when players do threaten the league’s massive revenues, they win huge gains. In 1964, the nba All-Star game was scheduled for live television, an enormous opportunity for the league to establish itself. Shortly beforehand, the players, who earned so little they often worked two jobs, told the owners they wouldn’t play unless they received certain benefits, including a pension. The owners huffed and puffed outside the locked locker room, but the


players eventually won. They risked their careers to benefit themselves and future players. The average nba salary now rests just under $6 million a year. Today’s owners are no less driven by profit and power than owners fifty years ago. The nba is a $5 billion-ayear industry whose financial partners include many of the people and media this activism means to disrupt and discomfort. LeBron and Carmelo can keep talking. Philando and Trayvon can keep dying. Neither affects the bottom line. As long as no one risks the league’s power or profits, the nba can sell politics all the way to the bank. ■ 83

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUCA BATTAGLIA

Being AntiTrump Isn’t Enough DAVID BRODER

Silvio Berlusconi’s tenure reminds us that the Left needs to attack the neoliberal center, not just the populist right. JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

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J

ust months after the left seemed poised for a historic breakthrough, a shock national vote brought a dangerous reactionary to power. Smashing open the old party of the Right, the billionaire tycoon’s populism surfed a wave of anger against the corrupt elite that had long controlled the political center. Making government the stage for a permanent public performance, this curiously wealthy popular champion radically reshaped the country’s political life. Such was the scene in Italy in 1994 as Silvio Berlusconi took power amid the ruins of Christian Democracy, the Catholic conservative party which had long dominated national government. In power since World War ii, the Christian Democrats collapsed together with their Communist rivals at the end of the Cold War, and it was Berlusconi’s Forza Italia that filled the void. But Italy’s new right was no mere rebranding of the traditional conservative party — it was a novel coalition stretching from the tycoon’s business associates to populists and ex-fascists. Since November many have suggested that the nine years of Berlusconi rule scattered between 1994 and 2011 were Rome’s own “Trump moment.” Italians often rue their record in “exporting” such lamentable phenomena as 1920s fascism and 1990s Berlusconism, and indeed there is much to learn from what this new right achieved in its homeland before spreading abroad. This is all the more important when we consider that Berlusconi was not, as his opponents expected in 1994, simply exposed as a charlatan upon reaching high office. Rather, he succeeded in making lasting changes to Italian political life, including the near destruction of the Left.

The Berlusconi comparison should be understood within its specific limits. The United States in 2017 is not the same as 1990s Italy. Today there is turmoil and political realignment across the globe, but we can hardly assume that the weakest links in the chain are holding up to the more powerful and stable states a mirror of their own future. Berlusconi’s Italy and, on the other end of the political spectrum, Syriza in Greece are test beds for broader dynamics, not models which later parties or leaders are doomed to copy. Still, in the face of a potentially much more dangerous Trump the US left would do well to learn some lessons from Berlusconism.

A Time of Monsters Berlusconism’s origins lay in a systemic crisis, with the early 1990s collapse of a political order based on the Cold War binary pitting Christian Democrats against Italy’s second party, the Communists. While Italy had nearly fifty governments between 1947 and 1992, each one of them was a coalition based on the dominance of the center to center-right and pro-nato Christian Democrats, designed to keep the Communist Party from ever reaching power. Forming a continual series of cabinets that balanced its internal factional interests and those of its episodic coalition partners, the Catholic and anticommunist Christian Democracy built up a vast network of corruption, patronage, and links with organized crime, sure of its permanent ownership of the state. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 destroyed this system, breaking up the Cold War dynamic on which it was

Prominent figures in Berlusconi’s coalition had links to the most explicit historical fascism. 86

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based. As the 1991 collapse of the Communist Party in turn dissolved the Christian Democrats’ own internal solidarity, a far-reaching judicial inquiry was launched, the so-called “Clean Hands” investigation into the “Bribesville” practices long sustained by Italy’s “blocked democracy.” Swamped with accusations of fraud and bribery, the Christian Democrats dissolved just two years after their historic Communist rival. Unscathed by this scandal due to their Cold War–era exclusion from high office, the majority of the Communists now reformed as the Democrats of the Left, and from 1992 to ’94 this new social-democratic formation looked to be on the brink of power. Fearing the Left reaching office for the first time since the coalition governments of 1944–47, the Right sought a new standard-bearer. A candidate soon emerged to save the ruling class from the discredit into which Christian Democracy (and smaller allies like the centrist Italian Socialist Party, psi) had dragged it. Their hero was billionaire media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, in the early 1980s associated with the (only nominally “socialist”) psi but now the frontman of the populist right. He stood independent from the discredited Christian Democrats (rebranded the Italian People’s Party) and was also fiercely hostile to the ex-Communist Democrats of the Left. Entering the field in January 1994, he promised a continuation of free-market and pro-nato policies while replacing the corrupt individuals who populated the Italian government. Berlusconi’s victory at the March 1994 election despite his total lack of political experience succeeded not only in heading off the Democrats of the Left but also in radically reshaping the Right. Organized around a single charismatic leader, his newly created Forza Italia was a media vehicle created from the top down and promoted through Berlusconi’s own tv channels. It was more like an American party than anything seen in the postwar Italian context. Whereas the Christian Democrats had participated in the anti-Nazi Resistance of 1943–45 and for the most part repudiated any fascist presence in government over subsequent decades, Berlusconi had no such scruples. With the historic parties of Italian democracy disappearing in the early 1990s, the barriers to the far right were effectively removed, and they were soon welcomed into his new coalition. In the 1994 election, Forza Italia’s eight million votes were complemented by five million for the “post-fascist” Alleanza Nazionale and over three million for the Lega Nord, a hard-right party seeking to detach the wealthier North of Italy from the “lazy,” “corrupt” South. Together they dominated the new parliament. Prominent figures in Berlusconi’s coalition had links to the most explicit historical fascism. Alleanza Nazionale was a 1994 rebranding of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (msi), the fascist party created in 1945 by surviving lieutenants of Benito Mussolini’s Nazi-puppet Italian Social

Republic. Alleanza Nazionale leaders such as Gianni Alemanno (1970s msi youth organizer and theorist of its most radical, “revolutionary” wing; 2008–13 mayor of Rome), Gianfranco Fini (who in 1991 described himself as a “fascist for the 2000s”), and Alessandra Mussolini (the dictator’s granddaughter, in 1994 msi candidate for mayor of Naples) would over the next decade move from being ministers in Berlusconi’s coalitions to members of his party. While the 1990s creation of Alleanza Nazionale was itself an attempt to mainstream the far right by shedding its fascist baggage, these figures along with Berlusconi continued to relativize the crimes of the Mussolini regime, transgressing the norms of postwar Italian democracy. Above all an opportunist, Berlusconi’s policies in government were, however, characterized not by creeping fascism but a continuity with prior Christian Democrat administrations. Beyond such decisions as abolishing inheritance tax and a botched attempt to create a two-party voting system, Berlusconi’s rule was notable less for economic and institutional reforms as for his use of office to protect his personal business interests. This principally centered around measures designed to remove constraints on media monopolies (the “Gasparri Law”) and protect him from prosecution for crimes like fraud, massive tax evasion, and paying a seventeen-year-old for sex. Romano Prodi, today a leading figure in the Democratic Party, denounced Berlusconi’s obsession with passing “ad personam” legislation aimed at protecting himself from jail time. His rule was thus mostly remarkable for a tedious soap opera of court appearances, appeals, and counter-attacks against what he labeled a politically motivated caste of judges. Hoping that the courts would punish Berlusconi for his dubious business dealings, the center-left merely mirrored his attempt to polarize Italian politics around his own persona rather than questions of general interest or economic recovery. Following the sweeping “Clean Hands” trials and the emergence of judge-politicians like Antonio di Pietro (in 1993–94 a lead prosecutor against Berlusconi’s friend Bettino Craxi, and later founder of the liberal “Italy of Values” party and minister in Prodi’s government), prosecutors and corruption charges increasingly took the place of substantial political issues in left discourse. Consider the example of the country’s antiwar movement. Italy had the world’s largest demonstration against the Iraq War, as three million people took to the streets of Rome on February 15, 2003. Yet the Democrats of the Left consistently abstained on all bills relating to Berlusconi’s decision to send troops. The Italian left more broadly never made the invasion’s disastrous failure a key criticism of the media magnate, as it had become for George W. Bush and Tony Blair.


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Indeed, during the post-2008 European crisis the Democratic Party (formed by the Democrats of the Left and fragments of the old Christian Democracy in 2007) even adopted positions favoring much harsher budget cuts than Berlusconi himself, attacking him for his “unseriousness” in conforming to the European Central Bank’s austerity demands. There was, of course, political substance to even the moral and personal criticism of Berlusconi. Trump’s claim in the second presidential debate that his failure to pay federal income tax was “smart” echoed a key theme of Berlusconism, namely the swaggering billionaire’s attempts to pose as just like the “little guy” (i.e., small businessman/patriarch) who wants to put his foot down in his business and family without state interference. He spoke less the language of the “strongman” à la Putin than of unfiltered individual self-interest, thus detaching neoliberal ideology’s underlying conception of human behavior from its typical association with managerialcentrist government. Faced with critics who were often themselves of dubious financial propriety, Berlusconi took the poison out of their accusations with his own brazen, almost “honest” admission that he was working purely for personal advantage. Already in the 1980s he had notoriously built up a close relationship with psi premier Bettino Craxi, who fled into Tunisian exile in 1994 to escape corruption charges. The case against Craxi included the help his government had given the media tycoon in expanding his tv networks. Yet in his own time in office Berlusconi was unabashed in pursuing this same agenda, merging the role of statesman into his higher calling as an entrepreneur. Berlusconi’s maintenance of a “straight-talking” public persona and throwback machismo went hand in hand with his frequent provocatively sexualized, racist, and misogynistic jokes. His rancid public statements ranged from defending his paying for sex with a teenage girl — “Better fancy beautiful girls than be gay” — to his claim that it would be impossible to combat street rapes “because we would have to deploy as many soldiers as there are pretty girls, and our women are too beautiful.” In a 2003 intervention at the New York Stock Exchange that perhaps summed up his whole worldview Berlusconi declared, “Italy is now a great country to invest in ... Today we have fewer communists, and those who are still there deny having been one. Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries.” 88

As with Trump, some of his more famous “gaffes” merely put the unspoken assumptions of Western policymaking into unduly direct terms. After 9/11 this future participant in the Iraq War made clear the chauvinism that underpinned the war on terror: “We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion. This respect certainly does not exist in the Islamic countries.” Faced with a non-politician turning public life into the stage for his crass performances, the center-left, however, proved unable to propose a political alternative that went beyond decrying Berlusconi and his malign associates. After the system-wide collapse of the early 1990s, to accuse him of “bringing his office into disrepute,” of undermining the “democratic spirit of the Constitution won through the Resistance,” or even of being a “fascist,” made little impression on an Italian public weary of both such pieties and the continual media revelations of scandal, crossing party divides. Moreover, given the Democrats of the Left’s open embrace of the Blairite-Clintonian Third Way, with the party’s former Communist leaders now abandoning the legacy of Antonio Gramsci in favor of managerial neoliberalism, they had no basis to oppose him with an alternative economic agenda. Stathis Kouvelakis has aptly noted the macabre spectacle of former Communist leader Achille Ochetto visiting Wall Street and the nato headquarters to declare them the homes of civilization and democracy. Subordinate to the antiberlusconismo underpinning the Democrats, even the radical left effectively played into the tycoon’s hands. This was most marked in the actions of Rifondazione Comunista, formed by those activists who opposed the dissolution of the Communist Party in 1991. A promising force in the 1990s, regularly receiving up to 10 percent of the vote and establishing solid social movement links, Rifondazione was ultimately destroyed by its obsession with antiberlusconista ideology. An endlessly repeated analogy with Communist policy in the 1943–45 Resistance — in which the party had allied with socialists, liberals, Christian-Democrats, and monarchists against Nazi German occupation — over time came to justify an infinitely broad, barely political front against Berlusconi. Rifondazione entered into repeated electoral and governmental pacts with the Democrats on this basis, during Prodi’s 2006–8 administration even voting for the

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Berlusconi’s rule was notable less for economic and institutional reforms as for his use of office to protect his personal business interests.

war in Afghanistan in order to prevent the government collapsing and Berlusconi regaining power. Demoralizing its own membership (and even expelling those who refused to vote for the war in parliament), Rifondazione was heavily punished at the 2008 general election, when Berlusconi returned to government and no Communist MPs were elected for the first time since World War ii.

The Worst Product of Berlusconi: Anti-Berlusconism Indeed, while Italy’s historically strong Communist Party and social movements had begun their slow decline already in the early 1980s, anti-Berlusconism was the instrument by which the followers of Blair and Clinton diverted the Italian left from an agenda of social change to an essentially moralistic-judicial conception of political legitimacy. The weakening of Italian trade unions following the defeated 1980 strike at the massive fiat Mirafiori plant in Turin — the country’s largest factory and historic bastion of the labor movement — was compounded at the turn of the 1990s with the final collapse of the Communist Party and the neoliberal triumphalism that soon followed. As elsewhere in Europe, this weakening of social struggle was the context in which a new “classless” left emerged. The rearguard action against Berlusconi would prove to be the decisive pretext for the Democrats of the Left’s efforts to form a corporate-liberal Democratic Party, explicitly imitating the US model. Refashioning the Communists’ historic veneration of Italy’s postwar republican institutions, they came to portray Berlusconi as an “abnormality,” external to the constitutional establishment. Initially formed by the majority of Communists who voted to dissolve the party in 1991, across the following two decades the Democrats of the Left consistently moved to the right in an effort to win conservative voters from the “illegitimate” Berlusconi. Whereas the old Communist Party had always had some elements tending toward social democracy, the 1990s fragmentation of the Christian Democrats allowed this zombie incarnation of the Left to devour a series of Catholic and conservative forces also opposed to the billionaire. In government from 1996 to 2000 and 2006 to 2008, the center-left coalitions led in turn by former left–Christian Democrat Romano Prodi and ex-Communist Massimo d’Alema included not only the Democrats of the Left, Greens, and small Communist groups (and Rifondazione as an external ally) but also the continuity Christian Democrats (the Italian People’s Party) and center-right Republicans. Another party in the Prodi coalition was Italy of Values, a liberal force led by anti-Berlusconi prosecutor Antonio di Pietro.


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Finally reaching office in 1996 after decades of Christian Democratic rule, the center-left however did nothing to challenge the historic right-wing domination of the state. Upon arriving in his new role, Prodi’s ex-Communist interior minister Giorgio Napolitano promised police chiefs he would do nothing to seek out the “skeletons in the cupboard,” as he and his comrades sought to create a new party of order. By the late 2000s the Democrats would invite even ex-fascists like Fini into the anti-Berlusconi camp. Outside of such parties, there were important social struggles during Berlusconi’s rule. The anticapitalist movement at the turn of the millennium — in Italy largely built around social centers — created a growing number of community and activist spaces and reached its peak at the 2001 g8 summit held in Genoa, where over two hundred thousand people demonstrated in defiance of a police lockdown of the harbor city. Hosted by Berlusconi, the summit would become a lasting icon of the antagonism between the social movements and the Italian state. Indeed, the murder of twenty-three-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani by a policeman, as well as aggressive nighttime police raids on buildings where demonstrators slept, made the Genoa events comparable even to the appalling violence orchestrated by the Italian governments of the 1970s. Chanting Mussolini-era anthems and slogans as they brutalized hundreds of arrested protesters, the police certainly showed their sense of what was at stake politically, the ring of steel around the neoliberal leaders’ summit giving them their chance to beat down the activist left. Yet even so far as extremism in Italian police ranks has fascist overtones, a center-left determined to display its “responsible” credentials utterly failed to support the targeted activists. Even an attempt to launch a public inquiry into the fatti di Genova was sunk by Italy of Values’s insistence that it also investigate protester actions. As the powerful but brief surges of anticapitalist and antiwar mobilization dissipated over the 2000s, Italian liberalism increasingly settled into its own moralistic-judicial battle against Berlusconi, devoid of any wider social content. This was true not only of the Democrats but also of separate so-called “citizens” movements’ against Berlusconi such as the girotondi (“human chains”) protests starting in 2002, or, from 2009 Il Popolo Viola. These mass citizens’ demonstrations organized on Facebook claimed not only to be non-partisan (except for their self-described “antifascist” anti-Berlusconism) but 92

Hoping that the courts would punish Berlusconi for his dubious business dealings, the centerleft merely mirrored his attempt to polarize Italian politics around his own persona.

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to stand only for the Constitution itself. Calling a “No Berlusconi Day” in 2009, Il Popolo Viola issued a call to demonstrate that deemed Italy an “anomaly in the democratic West,” intoning that the country had become “what foreign press call a ‘dictatorship’” led by “a man hostile to all forms of free expression.” While not enjoying the Democrats’ support — and claiming to embody a direct form of “citizen expression” not “mediated by parties” — even this more street-based “march for civic values” reflected a basically similar idea of anti-Berlusconism, an ethical crusade standing above social or political interests, beyond the values expressed in the Constitution. Grimly warning of the coming fascism, the spokespersons for Italy’s supposedly class-neutral “citizen initiatives” enjoyed fulsome praise in the English-speaking business press. This owed not least to the Berlusconi government’s bizarre legal row with the Economist (deemed by the Italian premier a “communist” publication) and liberals’ own reference to the negative image of Italy in such organs as the Financial Times to declare that theirs was “not a normal country.” Such liberal handwringing however proved distinctly lacking in democratic probity. Following the most recent general election in February 2013 la Repubblica co-founder Barbara Spinelli launched a petition, signed by anti-establishment luminaries such as the late Dario Fo, calling on the courts to refuse Berlusconi his seat on account of his conflicts of interest. Spinelli’s attempt to fell the leader of the second most popular electoral coalition was unsuccessful, though the following year she renounced her own pledge to refuse her seat in the European Parliament, before abruptly quitting her party and then keeping the salary. In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini had characterized the Communist Party as an honest, uncorrupted “country within a country,” and in that same decade its ascetic general secretary Enrico Berlinguer sought to associate the Left with moral “austerity” as he denounced rising consumerism and political scandal. In a very real sense the postwar Communists did form an Italy apart, not only in winning a third of the vote at national elections, leading mass trade unions, or setting up millions-strong cooperatives, but also in brandishing the platonic progressive sentiments of Italy’s 1948 Constitution even despite their own exclusion from office. However, as this community and workplace organizing withered during the 1990s and Communist politicians became neoliberal Democrats, this in-group mentality morphed into a hollow liberal elitism, redefining opposition to Berlusconi as the new marker of republican virtue, able to embrace even his right-wing and Catholic-conservative critics. This was notably expressed in the slogan that Italy ought to become a “normal country,” the demand that other European states help unseat Berlusconi, or the meme that

he was a “national embarrassment.” Such sentiments went hand in hand with the center-left’s increasing embrace of the European Union as a cure for the country’s ills. The rise of this elitist-institutional instinct across the liberal left reached its most extreme conclusion in the behavior of Giorgio Napolitano, president of the republic between 2006 and 2015, a Democratic grandee who had long sought an external benefactor to resolve Italy’s dysfunctions. Beginning his political life as a fascist student hoping that Nazi Germany could be Italy’s benign protector, a belated Stalinist turn in 1945 saw him turn his allegiances to the Soviets, before he became a staunch supporter of the European Union in more recent decades. Although the Italian presidency is supposed to be a neutral guardian of the Constitution, Napolitano instead used his office to promote an EU-driven coup against Berlusconi’s elected government, punishing the premier for failing to meet European Central Bank budget-cutting targets. As Perry Anderson has explained, Berlusconi was removed from office by basically unconstitutional means, under eu pressure that the Left would find outrageous if applied to almost any other leader. Conspiring with Angela Merkel and incoming European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, over the summer of 2011, Napolitano worked to position former eu commissioner and Goldman Sachs adviser Mario Monti as premier. Appointing Monti a senator for life in November 2011, Napolitano intended to form an unelected government of technocrats to carry out la manovra, slashing the budget deficit without those involved ever being accountable to the electorate. As Anderson recounts, “Under threat of destruction by the bond markets should he resist, Berlusconi capitulated, and within a week Monti was sworn in as the country’s new ruler, at the head of an unelected cabinet of bankers, businessmen and technocrats ...” Those who had long attacked Berlusconi for subverting Italian democracy didn’t seem to mind. The supposed “fascist” Berlusconi thus fell victim to an antidemocratic coup. Beyond the Monti administration’s role in implementing a slew of anti-labor and budget-cutting “reforms,” this maneuvering was a lackluster success even within the narrow terms of keeping Berlusconi out of office. When the country did again go to the polls in February 2013, the Democrats again failed to win a majority. Unable to form a government, they squared the circle by forming a grand coalition including none other than Silvio Berlusconi. Having used the need to fight Berlusconi as the stick with which to discipline the Left, the Blairites now combined with him in government. Today Italy remains ruled by a coalition of the Democrats and center-right splits from Berlusconi’s party; the


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media tycoon himself left the ruling coalition at the end of 2013 when it failed to guarantee him immunity from prosecution. The rising opposition, in the aftermath of a historic victory in December’s constitutional referendum, is dominated by the populist Five Star Movement and hard-right Lega Nord. Despite the 1990s folding of the historic msi into Berlusconi’s coalition, “anticapitalist” fascist movements like CasaPound/Lotta Studentesca today make increasing headway among alienated youth. While the activist left clings onto life, only in isolated areas has it been able to galvanize the mood of social revolt mostly hegemonized by Five Star and the Right. In the wake of its 2000s disasters, Rifondazione Comunista today barely exists.

Building a Political Opposition The lessons for the American left are clear. US Democrats who, having long insisted that only Hillary Clinton was “moderate” enough to break conservatives from the “fascist” Trump, now speak of “national unity” and “owing him the chance to lead.” They are just as rudderless as the Italian Democrats who beat the drums of antiberlusconismo before combining with Berlusconi in 2013. Barely more clarity comes from those liberals who more intransigently deny Trump’s “legitimacy” and see his administration as an unprecedented advance for white supremacy. The justified fear of Trump’s future actions blinds progressives to even the most recent American history, with the actual victims of the Obama or Clinton administrations suddenly rendered nonexistent and the great history of black and working-class struggles made a mere adjunct to calls to rally round corporate liberalism. The point is not that Berlusconi or Trump today are mere paper tigers, “only as bad” as what went before. Rather, it is that pandering to their “honest conservative” opponents or painting them as foreign to mythologized national values has no chance of success. We should know this. Not just because of the harmful effects illustrated by the Italian case, but because we saw it fail in the United States on November 8. Exactly these arguments were the entire basis of Hillary Clinton’s lesser-evil campaign. To persist in the “offended liberal defends institutional values” approach to politics is to disregard everything we see all around us, from Brexit to Duterte to Le Pen 94

to Trump. It is to imagine that the attempt arbitrarily to define the boundaries of “legitimate” political discourse can dam a wave of populist reaction. Of course, American politics are more deeply racialized than Italy’s, and the stakes are also far higher. Governments in Rome have long served as a border sergeant for the European Union, even outsourcing this responsibility to Berlusconi’s long-time ally Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. Casual racism, the exclusion of ethnic minorities from almost any aspect of public life, and the lack of “political correctness” are hallmarks of Italian society, and in their own way more extreme than the US scenario. Yet with its lower levels of immigration, relative lack of established ethnic-minority communities, and weaker traditions of black political organization, organized white backlash is also less present in Italy. While many call Trump a fascist in order to paint him as extreme and illegitimate, the armed racism of the US right — including within the police — is already a far more pervasive physical threat to minorities than Italy’s own fascist-nostalgic subculture. Political forces similarly toxic to Berlusconi’s allies now rise to power in the United States in a situation of much more dramatic social tension. In this regard the Italian case presents a dire warning, even despite Berlusconi’s ultimate ejection from office. Today as the Democratic Party-led coalition continues its program of tearing up postwar labor rights, detaching his party from any vestigial attachment to the Left, the mass opposition to him comes not from social movements or Rifondazione Comunista, but an individualist and often ugly populist reaction, winning huge support even in the historic “red” bastions of Northern Italy. Where the Democrats have moved to occupy the centrist and center-right political space now left by Berlusconi’s ailing party, the leftists who joined their anti-Berlusconi crusade now lie in ruins. Instead of a Podemos or Syriza, 2010s Italy has the Five Star Movement and Lega Nord — an anti-political revolt shaped not by social struggle or a vision of progress, but atomization, reactionary “common sense,” and even xenophobia. It got Trump, not Bernie. The Left’s alignment with neoliberal centrists against Berlusconi did nothing to thwart right-wing populism or keep racism out of politics. It guaranteed these forces’ unchallenged hold over millions of voters, while destroying its own alternative voice. Looking over the wreckage of the 2016 campaign, the US left must avoid making a similar mistake. ■

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THE TUMBREL

RIGHTEOUS HATERADE AGAINST THE GREAT ENEMIES OF PROLETARIAN PROGRESS.

THE TUMBREL GIRONDINS

BY ALEX PRESS

False Answers In a remarkable display of self-assuredness — entirely unjustified after uniformly failing to predict Trump’s victory — our professional commentariat immediately began putting forward theories to explain Trump’s success. Disregarding explanations that tend toward the bogus — fbi director James Comey handed Trump the election — or the conspiratorial — Russian hackers — the more reasonable of this group settled on the narrative that racism, and to a lesser extent sexism, are to blame for Trump’s victory. The “racism elected Trump” take became the preferred explanation almost instantly. The Washington Post’s Jim Tankersly penned a column on November 9 headlined “How Trump Won: The Revenge of Working-Class Whites.” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie ran a piece under the more succinct title “White Won.” Damon Young wrote in the Nation that “Trump voters didn’t vote against their own interests, they voted for the preservation of white privilege — their paramount interest.”

The Clinton establishment has every interest in obscuring why they really lost in November.

Cosmo’s Brittney Cooper rightly noted the ways in which racism overlaps with sexism and class, but decided to blame “whiteness before gender” because a majority of white women — 53 percent — voted for Trump. Vox, hedging its bets, ran both stories, publishing a piece exploring how Trump won because of misogyny and another on how Trump’s win is a reminder of the power of racism. Tankersly’s Post column, which blames the racist white working class for handing key Rust Belt states to Trump, is representative of the field. He argues that “for the past 40 years, the American economy has raked


blue-collar white men over the coals,” and they finally had enough. The story of white racists electing Trump is an easy story to tell; after all, racism is rampant in the United States. But the data belie such simple explanations. Indeed, Tankersly himself notes that “half of these voters said the economy was the most important issue in their vote, compared to 14% for immigration. A majority said international trade takes away American jobs. Three-quarters said the economy is ‘not good’ or ‘poor’ and nearly 8 in 10 said their personal financial situation was the same or worse than it was four years ago.” In other words, many Trump 97

GIRONDINS

The Left must offer all workingclass voters a compelling narrative that blames the rich.

voters are experiencing the economic anxiety that many mainstream pundits have brushed off from their comfortable coastal homes, choosing instead to characterize these voters as hicks, rednecks, deplorables. So while it’s true that many Trump voters do express higher rates of racist or sexist views, this shouldn’t be the end of the conversation. People don’t have pre-packaged ideological beliefs. Their ideas are rooted in an ambiguous set of experiences open to interpretation and change. We need to talk about why some of the white working class broke to the right this election cycle but not the last, and what it would look like to offer an alternative. The punditry’s relentless rundowns of survey and exit polling data takes as a given what must be explained. Why did key Rust Belt demographics switch their support from the Democrats to Republicans? Why did so many voters not vote? Plenty of counties that Obama easily carried flipped to Trump. When liberal elites cast these areas as irrevocably bigoted, we should see this 98

for what it is: a refusal to do politics, one that stems from a fear that what they might discover could lead to a condemnation of Clinton’s campaign strategy, placing the blame for her loss squarely on the bankruptcy of her ideas and the short-sightedness of her campaign rather than voters. This is exactly what critical Clinton campaign analyses show, few as they are in number. Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere’s thorough postmortem on how Clinton lost Michigan details a top-heavy and data-driven campaign that couldn’t see the walls collapsing around it. The alias for Clinton hq was “Brooklyn” — an appropriate moniker for a campaign so disconnected from the Rust Belt that it was blind to the droves of voters flocking to Trump. The refusal of Democratic elites to consider their culpability in the election outcome showed itself in a particularly stark light in a post-election interview with Jess McIntosh, the Clinton campaign’s director of communications. When msnbc’s Chris Hayes pointed out that Clinton

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didn’t get much more of the white women’s vote than Obama, McIntosh responded: “Internalized misogyny is a real thing.” In other words, it was women’s irrevocable sexism, not bad strategy, which cost Clinton the election. We should expect nothing less from the liberal establishment, politicians and pundits alike. It will always shrug off responsibility for its failures. But in this political moment we can’t let it. We cannot leave our understanding of how we got here to the so-called experts. The establishment won’t provide an honest assessment of how it failed or tell us what we must do better. Rather than catering to racists or sexists — precisely what Clinton’s campaign did — the Left must offer all working-class voters a compelling narrative that blames the rich for the immiseration of the majority, one that gives people a reason to vote rather than stay home. The Clinton campaign was never going to articulate that understanding. Socialists must do this ourselves, and we can. ■

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THE TUMBREL THERMIDOR

ANGELA NAGLE


Paleocons for Porn A new right is alive in America — and it’s weird. While some alt-right figures like Richard Spencer aspire pretentiously to a style of European blood-and-soil right-identitarianism, the real creative energy behind the new right-wing sensibility online today springs from anonymous chan culture. Nihilistically reveling in shock, transgression, and trolling, you’re more likely to find these young men posting diaper porn, My Little Pony hate, and swastika-laden Pepe memes than listening to Wagner or reading Alain de Benoist. Feminist analysis has often characterized the movement’s rank misogyny as a throwback to toxic patriarchal traditions. Its stylistic roots, however, could be more accurately traced back through avantgarde movements to the Marquis de Sade, whose scandalous libertinism and extreme pornographic writings led to his imprisonment, than it could to Edmund Burke, who wrote amid the tumult of the French Revolution that “manners are of more importance than laws.”

The new online right draws on transgressive aesthetics to rebrand conservative politics. It’s a contradiction that won’t hold.

Chan culture’s shitposting and crapflooding shares more with the Paris ’68 slogan “It is forbidden to forbid!” than it does with Phyllis Schlafly or William F. Buckley. Its dark obsessions with cruelty, rape, humiliation, suicide, murder, race, and genocide taboos have led chan culture to an avant-garde antimoral sensibility not unlike French dramatist Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty: “There can be no spectacle without an element of cruelty as the basis of every show.” In the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing days of the early Occupy movement, pro-hacker progressives did a great deal to glamorize 4chan because of


its leaderlessness and its nonhierarchical form. But as Evgeny Morozov warned, this network fetish could easily cause us to overlook the real content of any movement’s ideas, which in this case remains the lowest form of a vacuous, faux-ironic, sniggering moral imbecilism. Its empty postmodern style has energized and fused with the openly antisemitic and white-supremacist core of the alt-right who mean what they say literally but snobbishly roll their eyes at the normies and “basic bitches” who “don’t get” their sophisticated non-irony as they Sieg Heil and very clearly lay out their vision for a white ethno-state. 101

THERMIDOR

Infighting over the precise definition of “alt-right” may continue for years to come, but the broadest interpretation encompasses various, often warring, factions from the white supremacists who consider themselves the rightful owners of the term, to followers of Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment, to the “altlight,” which includes social media figures like Milo Yiannopolous, right-transhumanism, traditionalist neo-masculinism, and right-wing chan-influenced culture broadly. What these factions have in common is that they constitute a total break from the preexisting American conservative movement and, in different ways, they all seek to reassert the power of some combination of the last remaining identity group yet to be admitted to the identity politics tent — white heterosexual men. The real numbers of the hard, ideologically driven alt-right remain small. Even with the emboldening Trump win, the National Policy Institute conference from which the famous “Hail Trump!” footage came had only around two hundred adherents in attendance. Site traffic to the more serious alt-right sites like Counter Currents and RadixJournal are all under three hundred thousand visits monthly, with an average visit duration of one to two minutes. This small alt-right is influenced by the French new right, sometimes called the “Gramscians of the Right,” and Richard Spencer stresses the importance of profoundly changing the culture, not “just cutting taxes.” But people like Milo and others in the sjw-mocking “alt-light” have most successfully used media and culture in this Gramscian sense. Milo even regularly says he 102

“doesn’t care about politics,” instead quoting Andrew Breitbart’s line that “politics is downstream from culture.” In a relatively short period, Breitbart News has far outgrown other mainstream, establishment conservative outlets with ninety-three million visits in the last month. The hard altright regards Milo as a “kike faggot,” but his and Allum Bokhari’s widely cited and highly flattering article about them boosted their profile enormously.

The altright mourns European culture’s decline but has itself created the most degraded and degenerate forms of culture the West has ever seen.

Other “alt-light” figures include Mike Cernovich, author of Gorilla Mindset and MAGA Mindset, who has 182,000 Twitter followers, and Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of Vice Media who has 140,000 followers and two different YouTube shows. Tomi Lahren’s — “white power Barbie” — video condemning Colin Kaepernick for not standing for the national anthem garnered 66 million views.

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The Alex Jones channel has posted over 29,000 videos on YouTube, each with views in the five and six figures. While liberals enjoyed cultural hegemony and became complacent and intellectually lazy, the young transgressives of the alt-right produced an undeniable level of creative energy. The war for the soul of America Pat Buchanan waged in the 1990s has long since been won by the cultural left, and the tyrannical overreach of liberal intellectual conformity undoubtedly helped create the youthful rebellion against it. But this temporary alliance of very different factions — the most stark being between the traditionalist right and the libertinism of chan culture — has produced a schizophrenic incoherence. The alt-right mourns European culture’s decline but has itself created the most degraded and degenerate forms of culture the West has ever seen in its own fetid forums. It romanticizes the West but hates its Christian “slave morality” and the best of its intellectual traditions. The alt-right uses the now completely bankrupt language of counterculture and transgression when they talk about being “the new punk,” which should serve as a reminder of how empty those ideas have now become. But how will that framing continue to make sense during the Trump era? When liberals are no longer in power, the philosophical irreconcilability between its paleo-conservatism, which aims for a return to traditional marriage while disapproving of porn and promiscuity, and the amoral libertine Internet culture from which all the real energy has emerged, will soon begin to show. ■

THE TUMBREL VERSAILLES

BY BRENDAN JAMES

Kiss the Ring 1. The Ricketts Family Before “I hear the Rickets [sic] family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!”

After months of denouncing Trump, the rich and powerful realize they could use some Donald in their life after all.

— Trump, March 2016.

2. Linda McMahon

The Ricketts, led by patriarch Joe, founder of online trading hub td Ameritrade, has long put their money to work in belt-tightening initiatives like “Ending Spending, Inc.” and massive donations to the Republican Party — the old version. In the primaries, Joe and his wife Marlene gave $5.5 million to the antiTrump pac Our Principles and earned themselves an angry Trump tweet.

Before “I think [his] rhetoric has really gone over the top. Some of the comments that have been made, I think, are quite deplorable.” — Linda McMahon, March 2016. After Despite using the D-word on Trump months before Hillary Clinton slammed Trump’s supporters as a nasty little basket, the wwe’s Linda McMahon kept her options open and eventually donated $6 million to a pro-Trump pac. She’s now his pick for Small Business Administration head.

After Joe’s son Todd, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs and Gary Johnson donor, is now Trump’s deputy commerce secretary.


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VERSAILLES

3. Steve Case

6. Robert Mercer

Before

Before

Co-founder and ex-ceo of aol, Case positioned himself as a Clinton supporter despite his distaste for “hyper-partisanship” and politics in general. “I agree with Clinton on the need to control the deficit,” he said, as well as her goal to keep America “the most innovative and entrepreneurial nation in the world.”

ceo of Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer started as a hardcore Ted Cruz guy, founding and donating $13.5 million to a flush Cruz super pac in the primaries. He flirted briefly with Marco Rubio as well in a desperate attempt to keep money flowing to a more traditional Republican candidate.

After Hours after Trump’s victory, Case tweeted an open letter to the presidentelect inviting him to embrace his ideas for a new economy based around “startup culture” and Silicon Valley values. “I’m looking forward to working with you on these important issues.”

4. Marc Benioff Before Proudly declaring that he donated to both Barack Obama and Paul Ryan in 2012, the ceo of Salesforce nevertheless vocally backed Clinton last year. Benioff cited her commitment to education. “I’m deeply worried about the kids,” he told cnn.

5. Sheldon Adelson Before The biggest and wrinkliest gorilla in the room, casino mogul and proIsrael fanatic Sheldon Adelson snubbed Trump through the entire primary and continued to hold out even after the convention, reportedly disturbed by Trump’s wild temper and lack of discipline. After When the payoff finally came, it came in a big way: Adelson dumped $25 million into Trump’s campaign last minute, handily becoming the biggest donor to either party in the entire 2016 race. He’s now a key liaison between Trump and the Netanyahu regime. “I felt strongly that someone with that level of ceo experience would be welltrained for the job of president,” he said. “It turns out that is exactly what we are getting in Trump.”

After As soon as Trump won, Benioff tweeted his congratulations, said he looked forward to slashing the national debt, and speculated that Trump’s racism and xenophobia were probably exaggerated anyway.

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After Quicker than some of his fellow heavyweights, Mercer kissed Trump’s ring in June and converted to a pro-Trump super pac, giving another $1.5 million. Now, along with notorious Trump advisor Steve Bannon, he’s a main backer of Cambridge Analytica, the data firm behind Trump’s operation and the Brexit Leave campaign.

7. Paul Singer Before Hedge fund daddy Paul Singer funnelled $2.5 million to an anti-Trump pac and $5 million to a pro-Rubio super pac, and made headlines for declaring Trump would cause a depression. “The most impactful of the economic policies that I recall him coming out for are these anti-trade policies,” Singer whined. After Now that Trump is in charge, Singer is making nice, joining him at a fundraising breakfast and reportedly preparing a fat donation to the inauguration committee.

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Kiss the Ring

8. The National Review Before Always the mouthpiece of the business wing of the Republican Party, National Review devoted an entire January 2016 issue to making the case “against trump,” featuring right-wing luminaries from Glenn Beck to Jonah Goldberg to John Podhoretz. “Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him,” the editors wrote. “Count us out.”

“If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives? The movement that ground down the Soviet Union and took the shine, at least temporarily, off socialism would have fallen in behind a huckster.” After By the end of summer the magazine had begun looking on the bright side, running pieces like, “Trump Can Fix It.” (Written by onetime media titan and convicted fraudster Conrad Black, no less.)


9. Richard Uihlein Before The founder of industrial distributor Uline, Uihlein gave $1 million to the anti-Trump pac Our Principles, joining Paul Singer and the Ricketts. After And, like those fat cats before him, Uihlein soon flipped and gave $5,400 to the Trump campaign and $325,000 to Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee with the rnc. His wife Liz ended up on Trump’s economic advisory committee. ■

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARCO MICCICHÈ

The Glory Days Are Over NICOLE ASCHOFF

Trump’s victory signals a deep crisis of neoliberalism. JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

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THE GLORY DAYS ARE OVER

P

bs NewsHour is generally pretty staid stuff — like Ambien but less habitforming. Election night, however, was something else. As the evening wore on, and the pundits succumbed to quiet bafflement, or barely concealed panic, the conversation became punctuated by awkward pauses and murmurs. Searching for a toehold, co-host Judy Woodruff asked Amy Walters whether Trump’s victory wasn’t similar to Brexit — both because despite close last-minute polls, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union was a shock, and because Trump himself had promised “more Brexit” for the United States. The Brexit analogy was Woodruff trying to make sense of an event we were assured wouldn’t happen, akin for many liberals to the rogue gas planet colliding with Earth in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. She wasn’t alone. Many saw Brexit as a bellwether of the growing global discontent with elites, “globalism,” and the political status quo — a feeling confirmed by Trump’s victory. In a NewsHour conversation over the summer, David Brooks and Mark Shields discussed this very topic. Brooks observed that “in country after country, we’re seeing a conflict between what you might call urban cosmopolitans and less well-educated ethnic nationalism, and ethnic nationalism is on the rise.” Shields agreed. “I think the forces and the advocates of globalization have been primarily obsessed with the well-being of the investor class and the stockholders and the shareholders, and been indifferent, oftentimes callous, to the dislocation and the suffering that people in countries affected by this trade, the expanded trade, the larger economy, who have been victimized by it.” According to Shields, this “elitist condescension” facilitated the rise of right-wing figures like Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and Trump. Robert Reich summed up the sentiment in a nutshell two days after the election: “Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods.” Yet Brexit and Trump’s election signify something more than popular anger, xenophobia, and cultural anxiety. They mark the end of neoliberalism’s heyday and the emergence of a competing capitalist vision. This vision, at least rhetorically, rejects two of the founding tenants undergirding contemporary global capitalism: the global trade architecture operating through institutions like nafta and 108

the inter-state alliances buttressing America’s decades-old geopolitical vision and goals.

The End of “the End of History” The decline of neoliberalism is emphatically not the decline of capitalism, so what does it mean to say neoliberalism is past its sell-by date? Neoliberalism is not, after all, just a set of policies that can be discontinued and replaced with something else — neoliberal capitalism has birthed a complex global economy that isn’t going to change overnight. Moreover, neoliberalism is also an encompassing set of orienting ideas that pervades all spheres of life; its core ethos of faith in private enterprise, ever-expanding commodification, and bootstrap individualism remains robust. Yet Trump, at least rhetorically, has thumbed his nose at the two keystones of American hegemony: existing “free trade” agreements and the institutions and alliances that underpin US-led capitalism. This has created a deep crisis of legitimacy for the dominant ideas guiding global capitalism. Now whether Trump actually “takes an ax” to these principles remains to be seen. His cabinet looks pretty “swampy” at the moment: the Heritage Foundation is quarterbacking his transition team, and his cabinet picks, for the most part, would sit comfortably in any Republican administration. Moreover, Trump’s roadmap — like his plan to generate public-private partnerships to carry out a trillion-dollar infrastructure overhaul, or rewrite nafta by tacking a 35 percent tariff onto goods exported to the United States by American companies operating in Mexico — lacks a certain plausibility given the makeup of Congress and the deep, functional integration of global and regional value chains. Nevertheless, this competing vision has the Third Way wonks committed to the thirty-year bipartisan consensus worried. Francis Fukuyama, in a post-election op-ed, put it bluntly: “Donald Trump’s stunning electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton marks a watershed not just for American politics, but for the entire world order.” Fukuyama famously dubbed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union “the end of history” — a cute turn of phrase indicating the triumph of US-style global capitalism. Today, that era is over. According to Fukuyama, “we appear to be entering a new age of populist nationalism.”

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Comparing Trump’s victory to the toppling of the Berlin Wall was a common trope in the days after the election. Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist at the Financial Times, thinks it is symbolic and poignant that the election of Donald Trump was confirmed on the morning of November 9, 27 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was a moment of triumph for US leadership — and ushered in a period of optimism and expansion for liberal and democratic ideas around the world. That era has been definitively ended by Mr. Trump’s victory. Political columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote something similar in the Washington Post: Twenty-five years ago — December 1991 — communism died, the Cold War ended ... That dawn marked the ultimate triumph of the liberal democratic idea. It promised an era of Western dominance led by a preeminent America, the world’s last remaining superpower … That era is over. For these opinion makers, the death of the post-Communist liberal world is a terrible thing. For them it represents something great that has been thrown away in a fit of stupidity. The funeral dirge for the liberal world order goes something like this: After World War ii, some forward-thinking Americans began setting up a system of rules and institutions that allowed global trade, investment, and democracy to flourish. This system evolved and improved over the decades, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, giving us container ships full of Poäng chairs and PlayStations, all while boosting wealth and democracy for the global poor. According to liberals, the linchpin of this awesomeness was the United States unselfishly superintending the global economy and providing a model of democracy that world masses aspired to and authoritarian governments feared. In his op-ed Richman shares a misty-eyed memory of John F. Kennedy back in 1961 saying, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Alas, no longer. Financial Times editor Lionel Barber declares that “in 2016, we witnessed the birth of the ‘Fourth Way’ — a new brand of politics that is nativist, protectionist and bathed in a cultural nostalgia.” Instead of liberty first, liberals lament that now it’s America first, that instead of idealism we have the “pinched nationalism” of Trump, enabled by a generation “fattened by fast food and infantilised by reality television.”

Brexit and Trump mark the end of neoliberalism’s heyday and the emergence of a competing capitalist vision.


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But just as Trump has spun a fantasy of renewed greatness, in mourning the status quo of the past three decades liberals are engaging in some wishful thinking of their own. The bipartisan elements of hegemony — globalization and international alliances — that have underpinned the American Century have themselves generated the deep contradictions that explain Trump’s victory.

Globalization and Its Discontents Consider the global trade architecture. The elite consensus of the past thirty years was that lowered barriers to trade, production, and capital were essential to liberty and prosperity. Today, globalization is increasingly being denounced by respectable folks, and not just the Pope. Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, recently insisted that “what we’re facing right now — in terms of the rise of populism and divisive and fearful narratives around the world — it’s based around the fact that globalization doesn’t seem to be working for the middle class, for ordinary people.” Granted, many on the global left criticized globalization. But the bloated center was gung-ho and criticism was slow to catch on. By the nineties, neoliberal policies and ideas had become common sense. For people like Tom Friedman, proof positive of globalization’s benefits was the rebirth of the US economy beginning in the 1980s. Following a decade when stagflation and political unrest were wreaking havoc, neoliberal ideas brought about a belle epoch, at least for the privileged. The US government resolved its crisis on the backs of working people: it helped free up corporations to restructure operations, fire workers, and demand union givebacks; it deregulated finance, exploding its avenues for profitability; and it greased the wheels through militarism and debt spending. Three decades of de- and re-regulation — signposted by Reagan-Thatcher, the wto, the single European market and currency, the integration of China — closed the book on Keynesianism and the core ideas of Bretton Woods and essentially removed restrictions on the flow of capital, goods, and services. For global elites these were heady days. These resolutions were successful for a time — profit rates soared, unemployment was kept in check, and America seemed back on top. And others seemed to benefit too. Sure, not those “failed states” in Africa or Latin American workers and farmers, but the global bourgeoisie, 112

Behind Hillary Clinton’s “Everything is fine, chill” campaign slogan and Obama’s calm were aggressive, ongoing moves to fortify the neoliberal model.

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transnational corporations, and the Asian tigers did amazingly in the eighties and nineties, and China and India soared in the 2000s. But if the bipartisan elite saw neoliberal globalization as a way of ordering the global economy that brought huge rewards, it also brought major crises. The global financial and trade architecture that emerged in the eighties and nineties ensured that you can get your new iPhone in time for Christmas, but it was also a wrecking ball that devastated economies and working-class communities. Currency mayhem and spiraling debt, deindustrialization, environmental destruction, exploitation, and dispossession became the norm in the liberal world order now mourned. These contradictions manifested themselves in dozens of financial crises in the 1990s and 2000s in countries like Argentina, Mexico, Russia, and South Korea. 2008 brought a crisis that dwarfed previous crises in its scale and scope as it rippled across the globe, dragging Europe into its undertow in 2010, and triggering a worldwide spike in food prices. All the while the United States, the European Union, and the institutions they created kept trucking along, putting out fires, insisting that the kinks had been worked out. The facts speak for themselves. In the United States workforce participation is down, and “globalism” has become enemy number one. The past few decades have seen real wages stall and then drop for most workers. Families have had to work harder and longer to stay in place, and many can’t even manage that. Good jobs — those with humane hours, decent pay, and benefits — are scarce, and anxiety about the economy is persistent. The rich are riding high — bolstered by tax cuts, corporate subsidies, bank bailouts — while poor and working people stand on the sidelines. As Reich says: Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Advocates of the status quo are loath to acknowledge these plain truths. But their actions demonstrate a definite awareness of cracks in the system. Behind Hillary Clinton’s “Everything is fine, chill” campaign slogan and Obama’s calm were aggressive, ongoing moves to fortify the neoliberal model. Consider the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal — which Barber neatly characterizes as “a geopolitical building block as well as a trade pact.” tpp advocates saw the agreement as a way to protect the system they’ve built since the 1980s — a global trade system for capital, but also heavily weighted in favor of protecting wealthy states and transnational corporations.

Protecting the system meant keeping China out of the deal, thereby limiting its disruptive competitive potential. But a growing chorus of voices didn’t want to protect the system any longer. In the end, Trump didn’t destroy the tpp; his opposition to the agreement reflected an already overwhelming sentiment rooted in popular anger over the costs and benefits of globalization. Now that the pact looks dead in the water, China is pushing forward its own regional deal — the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — and countries like Japan and Russia are interested. This, to put it mildly, is a horrifying prospect for champions of the liberal world order.

The Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove The question of China brings up the other half of the US hegemony sandwich that elites recall so fondly: the alliances that underpin the global trade and financial system. They represent the iron fist in the velvet glove — the institutions and arrangements that align states with America’s vision and goals, whether willingly or by force. Like all hegemonic projects, America’s has always relied on both coercion and consent. The US government skillfully blended these elements in the decades following World War ii with tactics that spanned the spectrum from full-scale war and slaughter, secret invasions, torture, and covert ops, to sanctions, diplomacy, and mutual agreements like the wto, nafta, and nato. Coercion and consent were the yin and yang of US power — a model of power that for the past three decades hid its nasty bits behind the apparent efficiency and neutrality of neoliberalism and liberal democracy. Trump says this model of power isn’t making America great anymore. Angered by the snubs and slights of our ungrateful global inferiors, he is promising to go lone wolf. He’s talking to Taiwan on the phone instead of Theresa May, hiring pals of Putin, threatening to defund nato, and stepping up denunciations of China. This rhetorical realignment, much more than Trump’s racist slurs and misogynist quips, gives status-quo scholars the goosebumps. With Trump in charge, who will challenge China’s influence in Asia? Who will keep Russia’s aggression in check? Who will preserve the liberal world order? Instead of solemnly pledging allegiance to the Third Way, Trump is pushing an inward political-economic vision. Granted, Trump is a masterful opportunist and a habitual liar, so it is impossible to get a bead on what he’ll actually do in office. As Leo Panitch argues, he may settle on a compromise, facilitating a “continuation of American-led global capitalism on xenophobic nationalist grounds” — a right-wing revival that blends most of the features of neoliberal globalization with “brown infrastructure capitalism” at home.


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Nonetheless, Trump’s victory signals a deep crisis of legitimacy for the reigning ideology, in large part because he’s not alone. He’s the lead blowhard in a growing gallery of right-wingers whistling the same nativist tune. As Barber says, Trump gives “succor to the demagogues-in-waiting” like Le Pen. Increasingly, states are rejecting the Third Way model of open borders and inclusion. This is a significant shift. In the decades after World War ii, America’s signature blend of coercion and consent was viewed as a viable, valuable model — countries around the world signed on to the vision because it provided growth and prosperity and was seen as legitimate in the eyes of their populaces. Those countries that didn’t benefit or protested the rules of the game — poor countries, colonies, those in the Soviet bloc — were either repressed or excluded. After a rocky patch in the seventies, new trade agreements rejuvenated geopolitical alliances, while the solidification of the European Union and the dynamism of India and China revived the hegemony of the United States. But the contradictions of this revival generated a crisis of legitimacy that can’t be papered over with more bank bailouts and quantitative easing. Today the global geopolitical landscape is increasingly fraught. Indeed, Barber thinks that a Le Pen victory in 2017 “would surely spell the end of the European Union.” The political and social costs of neoliberal globalization and financialization have proven impossible to repress in the long run.

Breaking the Impasse This legitimacy crisis is what has birthed Trump. And the muddled nature of his vision speaks to the impasse that countries find themselves in. The reigning centrist elites and their party alliances are seen as hopelessly bankrupt, and the Left has no power to enact its demands. This leaves the Right to speak to working people’s fears and anger, but that right is itself divided between capitalist elites and social conservatives. Trump simply stepped into a vacancy, an opportunist capitalist speaking the confused language of an angry right-populist vision. This is why the Brexit analogy resonated with observers. It provided the connective tissue to talk about a deep, multi-dimensional crisis. Unfortunately Brexit also showed the winning strategy so far for dealing with this crisis, and that strategy — laced with hate and fear — sucks. 114

But the wailing neoliberals are equally deluded if they think it’s possible to turn back time. Trump did not create the crisis of neoliberalism. He simply tugged on the thread of a model of power that has been rapidly unraveling for a decade or more. Capitalism is a masterful crisis generator of course; contradictions are built into the dna of our for-profit system, and crises have helped the system survive and adapt for centuries. But at the same time, the arrangements ordering the global geopolitical system seem to be generating more crises than they are resolving these days. Put differently, while the serious problems we are facing — like global warming and labor exclusion — are the result of longue durée processes like industrialization, imperialism, and technological advance, they are now reaching acute proportions, exacerbated by financialization and neoliberal globalization. And as Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver have argued, the US hegemonic model is increasingly unable to deal with these problems. The rise of demagogues like Trump show the withering away of consent, leaving only coercion. Heedless of its failures — after sowing nothing but chaos and suffering in Iraq, Afghanistan, and countless other war zones — the US state is rapidly extending its tentacles into Africa and ramping up its drone program. At home, Obama has deported nearly two million people, the nsa spies on our daydreams, and the police continue to kill with abandon. Trump will not change this. He’ll make it worse. He’s a xenophobic, misogynist crook and his presence in the White House will empower the most reprehensible elements in US society. But contrary to the misconceptions of Third Wayers, Clinton would have made things worse too. The global order is in crisis. Nostalgia for the mythical days when America would bear any burden for the success of liberty is a waste of time. We need something different — something more than a defensive “progressivism.” We need to challenge the common sense of our for-profit system by offering an alternative vision of change rooted in worker power, social rights, and democratic control over the institutions central to our lives. And more than ever we need this movement in the United States. Trumpism is not going away, nor will the US government quietly relinquish the keys to some imagined global successor. The politics that prevail in America will determine whether the transition from neoliberal capitalism to something else is a step forward or a descent into hell. ■

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LEFTOVERS

OUR WORK HERE IS NOT YET DONE.

LEFTOVERS POPULAR FRONT

BY ELLA MAHONY

Results & Prospects: Q4 2016 Back in November, the standoff in North Dakota between “water protectors” and Energy Transfer Partners (etp), the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, set a tense backdrop to the national election. Law enforcement was growing more aggressive towards the protesters, and it looked like things might reach a bloody conclusion — until the Army Corps of Engineers abruptly denied etp the permits needed to drill below the Missouri River. Many were overjoyed at the announcement. But with Donald Trump headed for the White House, activists dug in for the winter. Signs on camp lavatories listed the symptoms of hypothermia — the day of the Army Corps announcement, water protectors faced 37 mph winds and snow heavy enough to collapse all but the soundest structures. Still, they persisted. “We should all stay until it’s over,” said Standing Still of the Ojibwe tribe. “It starts here and it should stop here. If it goes past this river, it’s going to affect 18 million people down the Missouri river.”

With Trump in office, we need resistance, but also a credible alternative.


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POPULAR FRONT

The harrowing conditions at Standing Rock can be seen as a metaphor for the Left’s arduous task over the next four years. Fortunately, social movements seem to be responding with similar determination. The week after the election, tens of thousands took to the streets, many of them middle- and high-schoolers. The largest student walkout occurred in Seattle, where five thousand students from twenty middle and high schools took the streets; they were joined by students in Portland, San Francisco, Maryland, and Los Angeles (where they chanted “Undocumented and unafraid” and “No papers, no fear”). In Boston, students briefly occupied City Hall in an attempt to deliver their demands, which included making Massachusetts a “sanctuary state.” The walkouts showed that young people are acutely aware of the threat Trump’s education agenda — led by wealthy homeschooler Betsy DeVos — and his immigration agenda pose to their future. Their willingness to sacrifice to build an organized resistance — risking suspension or expulsion — stands as a model to us all. Still, despite these impressive mobilizations, social movements have so far failed to cohere a strategy to respond to an empowered right. Republicans’ January offensive against Planned Parenthood, for example, elicited the usual social media rage and obtuse paeans to the organization’s cancer-screening services, but little else. “Abortion is health care” is a far cry from the assertive declarations of the feminists who first won us abortion rights in the first place. But it’s not just about picking a new slogan. Hillary Clinton’s 118

If socialists are too timid to contest elections and stand in front of voters, they will never build a mass movement.

campaign sought to make the election a referendum on sexism. Instead she cemented modern feminism’s image as a self-help philosophy for female corporate climbers. Feminists must rebuild a fighting movement that can reach working-class women and lgbt people where they are most threatened — the red states and rural areas that Trump dominated. Luckily, there are contemporary models to emulate: Poland’s “Black Monday” strike, which mobilized thousands against a draconian anti-abortion bill, and the #NiUnaMenos protests against an epidemic of femicides in South America. Yet the coming assaults on women, lgbt people, labor, and people of color can’t be stemmed on the streets alone. The contradictory success of Sanders-style ballot measures in November demonstrated that there is a broad base for potential left-wing candidates to draw on and a hunger for more ambitious, redistributionist policies. Electoral politics do present serious dangers for the Left. For one, the electoral cycle imposes its own timeline on movements, often causing activists to sacrifice long-term visions for the short-time imperatives of petition deadlines, fundraising, and legislative politicking. For another,

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the dearth of experienced, authentic left candidates often encourages movements to take the shortcut and endorse politicians who have no organic connection to the Left and do nothing to build its independent power. But a set of dangerous fanatics holds the levers of state power, and the official opposition in the Democratic Party is incapable of seriously challenging them. We need a left alternative — even if it falters at times in the short term. As the Sanders campaign showed, even lost elections are opportunities to promote a vision and build a living, breathing base. Many working class and poor people, who work too much and are excluded from higher education, come to politics through unions or through elections. If socialists are too timid to contest elections and stand in front of voters, they will never build a mass movement. By all accounts, social movements have ballooned in size since the national election. But the danger is that they will amount to little more than an incoherent network, unified only by vague opposition to the personality of Trump and the specter of the “deplorables” that back him. A rabble of “antis” with no broader vision or plan to address the deep suffering that fueled Trump’s rise will only play into the president-elect’s playbook. The Left must see the abject failure of the Clinton campaign for what it is: an opportunity to assert itself as a freestanding alternative both to a bankrupt center and a nihilistic right. That requires not trailing the center or piously obsessing over “alt-right” transgressions, but standing on the strength of its own ideas. ■

LEFTOVERS MEANS & ENDS

BY BHASKAR SUNKARA

No Money, Mo’ Problems We didn’t predict Trump, but we’re bound to get things right soon.

Since my last note things have not gone as expected. Hell, a couple weeks before the election we published an article called “In the Bag.” I’ve been poking fun at Micah Uetricht for that piece ever since, but I certainly agreed at the time. The next decade seemed clear: Hillary Clinton’s centrism may not have been enough to defeat Trumpism in the long haul, but it should have at least beat Trump in November. In the meantime, the Left could challenge her and offer new alternatives to liberalism. We thought we had plenty of time to build on the momentum of the Sanders campaign and the hollowness of Clinton’s. Instead, we got the Donald. In a way, we shouldn’t be surprised. Jacobin spent months talking about the Democrats’ bankrupt policies, how millions felt left behind, and why the Clinton establishment’s mix of socially inclusive rhetoric and neoliberal economics was a weak

response to Trump’s xenophobic populism. Still, he seemed just too buffoonish and too unpopular to win. We were wrong and things are moving fast — in sometimes surprising directions. In the weeks after Trump’s election, Jacobin gained almost ten thousand new subscribers. Just days before this issue went to press, millions marched against Trump in the largest demonstration in American history. It was inspiring. Yet what this broad movement is for is less clear than what it is against. That’s why, now more than ever, we need socialist perspectives and leadership. Jacobin doesn’t have all the answers by a long shot. But we can play an important role — reaching people with clear, compelling arguments that see the existing left as the core of a majority in the making, not a subculture to be preserved.


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In 2017, under a Trump presidency and an uncertain political climate, we have big plans to that end: • A constantly improving quarterly print magazine. • A new website with better and more diverse online features.

What this broad movement is for is less clear than what it is against. That’s why, now more than ever, we need socialist perspectives and leadership.

• More reading groups and events around the world. • A Jacobin-sponsored relaunch of Africa Is a Country, an online magazine focusing on politics and culture in sub-Saharan Africa. • The release of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a companion project edited by Robert Brenner and Vivek Chibber. • A handsomely produced podcast series and more video content. • New books, including a title on the rise and fall of the Brazilian Workers’ Party and another on the relationship between race and class.

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We’re excited about what the future holds, but none of this will be possible without your help. Jacobin is not a “publishing project.” We’re a political one, with a mission that has never been clearer. Few magazines have ever done more with less. But while we pride ourselves on our frugality, the truth is that we need help from you, our readers, to reach our goals. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation today to Jacobin Foundation, 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217 or online at jacobinmag.com/donate/. ■

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Don’t study collective action alone. Join an existing Jacobin reading group or let us help you get one started. Visit www.jacobinmag.com/reading-groups/

“What I’m doing is about as close as you’re going to get to the quality of Versailles.” —Donald Trump

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