by Lance Selfa
US POLITICS IN AN
AGEOF
UNCERTAINTY
US POLITICS IN AN
AGEOF
UNCERTAINTY
ESSAYS ON A NEW REALITY
Edited by Lance Selfa
© 2017 Lance Selfa
Published in 2017 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
[email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-60846-874-4
Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca
In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com
All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International, [email protected]
This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.
Cover design by Rachel Cohen.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Lance Selfa
Chickens Coming Home to Roost for the Democratic Party? How Neoliberalism Quietly Devastated the US Working Class
Sharon Smith
We Got Trumped!
Charlie Post
Who Put Donald Trump in the White House?
Kim Moody
The Great God Trump and the White Working Class
Mike Davis
Choosing or Refusing to Take Sides in an Era of Right-Wing Populism
Neil Davidson
From Hope to Despair: How the Obama Years Gave Us Trump
Lance Selfa
Black Politics in the Trump Era
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The Misogynist-in-Chief: The Stakes for Women’s Rights in the Trump Era
Elizabeth Schulte
Trump, Islamophobia, and US Politics
An Interview with Deepa Kumar
From “Deporter-in-Chief” to Xenophobia Unleashed: Immigration Policy under Trump
An Interview with Justin Akers Chacón
The End of Progressive Neoliberalism
Nancy Fraser
Acknowledgments
Contributor Biographies
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
Months after the event, the Electoral College’s selection of Donald Trump as 45th president of the United States still has the power to shock on many levels. A transition from the first African American president to someone who made racism a cornerstone of his campaign is one element. Another is the fact that Trump triumphed against what appeared to be a solid “popular front” of most of American business, the media, the political establishment, and liberal activists lined up behind Democrat Hillary Clinton. Despite all of these factors—or perhaps, more accurately, because of them—the United States’s dysfunctional political system delivered the world’s most powerful office to the loser of the national popular vote for the second time in sixteen years.
Trump’s election blindsided the political and media establishment. Even most of us on the left—who are much more attuned to the economic wreckage and despair on which Trump built his appeal—considered Trump’s election a distant prospect. The International Socialist Review’s first postelection editorial noted:
Very few of us on the left expected that the next president of the United States would be a corrupt, narcissistic billionaire swindler, an open sexist and self-confessed serial abuser, and a man the Far Right hails for his open racism and nationalist xenophobia. Donald Trump successfully positioned himself as a right-wing populist, anti-establishment candidate who would tear up free trade, deport immigrant “job-stealers,” and restore good jobs for “real” Americans. And it worked.1
With this in mind, Haymarket Books decided to publish this reader. We’ve brought together contributions, written by socialists, on different aspects of US politics in this era of transition from Obama to Trump. Many of these texts appeared originally in publications such as International Socialist Review, Jacobin, Dissent, or Catalyst. Others are original to this volume. Although some of them were written or published after Trump’s election, they generally do not speculate about the future course of a Trump administration. Instead, they attempt, as Trotsky once wrote, to “look reality in the face,” in order to develop an understanding of what happened in 2016.
To be sure, each writer has a particular perspective on the election. And each emphasizes different points. And while the authors may not agree on each point, the collection develops general themes. One of these is the corrosive impact that forty years of free market policy and ideology, known as neoliberalism, has had on living standards and political imagination. Neoliberalism has devastated working-class lives and organizations, and narrowed mainstream political choices to liberal and right-wing populist versions of the same basic economic program.
Sharon Smith and Lance Selfa show how the Democratic Party’s commitment to the neoliberal status quo, along with its own failure in government to address the real issues facing working-class Americans of all races and ethnicities, opened the door to Trump’s right-wing populism. With the election seemingly offering a choice between a candidate who proclaimed that “America is already great” (Clinton) and one who—however disingenuously—promised to “make America great again,” millions of voters opted for change. As Neil Davidson points out, this pattern, pitting what Nancy Fraser dubs “progressive neoliberalism” against right-wing populism, is a worldwide phenomenon, not just one observed in the United States.
Much postelection analysis and commentary focused on defining Trump’s “base” as emanating from what the media and political professionals describe as the “white working class,” a shorthand for “whites without four-year college degrees.”2 The contributions from Charlie Post, Mike Davis, Kim Moody, and Smith take up the question of the “white working class” from various angles. While it can’t be denied that some layer of white workers—including people who had voted for Obama twice—voted for Trump, locating Trump’s key support among white workers is sloppy and inaccurate. For one thing, as Davis shows, Trump’s percentage of the white vote hardly differed from what Mitt Romney received in losing to Obama in 2012. Moreover, as Moody and Post point out, the population segment of “whites without a college degree” includes significant percentages of lower-level supervisors and small business owners who are normally thought of as the Republican rank-and-file. Plenty of analyses of the Trump vote suggest it represented more of a middle-class backlash than a working-class revolt, especially when one considers, as Smith does, the always-high level of working-class abstention in US elections.3
Another tendentious reading of the election—especially on the liberal side of the political spectrum—is the notion that the Democrats lost because they championed “identity politics,” aimed at attracting groups of Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, women, and LGBTQ people, while eschewing a more inclusive “class” politics.4 Most authors in this collection would disagree with this assessment. Other than projecting a kind of patina of “lean-in feminism” and the rhetoric of “diversity” common in Corporate America, Clinton and the Democrats have actually advanced—or acceded to—policies that have encouraged mass incarceration, the erosion of abortion rights, Islamophobia, and mass deportations.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s essay shows how “Obama’s presidency was not a gift to African Americans; instead, it represented the painful continuity of racism, discrimination, and inequality that has always been at the center of Black life in Amer
ica.” Elizabeth Schulte contends that, while Trump and many of his Republican cohorts exude contempt for women, the Democrats’ feeble attempt to pose themselves as the “lesser evil” on women’s rights failed. The interviews with Deepa Kumar and Justin Akers Chacón remind us of how much the Obama and Bill Clinton administrations set in motion, or deepened, many of the policies that promote Islamophobia and “border security” and have now been placed in the xenophobic Trump administration’s hands.
This brief introduction can’t do full justice to the detailed and insightful analyses that each of the contributions collected here brings to an understanding of the 2016 election. These essays are offered with the knowledge that the social forces that drove the 2016 election remain with us still. For the left to build organizations and to project politics that can offer a real alternative to the working-class majority, we need to understand what these forces are.
Lance Selfa
October 2017
CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?
How Neoliberalism Quietly Devastated the US Working Class
Sharon Smith
Amid the shock and horror following Donald Trump’s election, mainstream news outlets all sounded the same alarm: white workers were getting their “revenge.” Indeed, the headlines were stunningly similar. “How Trump Won: The Revenge of Working-Class Whites” (Washington Post);1 “The Revenge of the White Man” (Time);2 “Revenge of the Forgotten Class,” (ProPublica);3 “Revenge of the Rural Voter” (Politico);4 “Why Trump Won: Working-Class Whites” (New York Times).5
In this way, the mainstream media created the postelection narrative, parroting Democratic Party leaders frantically seeking to blame someone (other than themselves) for Hillary Clinton’s loss. They settled on the slice of white voters in key Midwestern swing states (Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio) who voted for Trump. They labeled these voters “working class” based on the large number of Trump voters without a college degree—disregarding the fact that his supporters in the 2016 primaries earned an average of $72,000 per year, well above the median household income, indicating a solid middle-class component among Trump’s core backers.6
Just weeks after the election, researchers Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr convincingly challenged the media’s “blame the white working class” narrative. After studying the exit poll data in the Rust Belt swing states, they concluded, “Relative to the 2012 election, Democratic support in the Rust Belt collapsed as a huge number of Democrats stayed home or (to a lesser extent) voted for a third party. Trump did not really flip white, working-class voters in the Rust Belt. Mostly, Democrats lost them.”7 Voting analyst Nate Cohn reported that voter turnout fell significantly among people of color nationwide—and among Black residents in swing-state cities including Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. In Detroit alone, turnout fell by 14 percent.8
Yet the blame game continued. Many Clinton supporters were openly contemptuous of the so-called white working class, also disparagingly labeled “low-information voters.”9 The Daily Kos, for example, reveled in its disdain: “Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance. They’re Getting Exactly What They Voted For,” its headline taunted.10 On the other hand, some commentators criticized the Clinton campaign for purportedly front-loading “identity politics” (i.e., championing the rights of the oppressed)—speculating that this alienated white voters with “economic anxiety” who then had no choice but to reject Clinton and turn to Trump. Columbia University professor Mark Lilla put it perhaps the most crudely in the New York Times, claiming to “paraphrase” Bernie Sanders: “America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms,” Lilla wrote.11 (Fact check: Sanders declared his support for transgender bathroom rights in May 2016.)12
The mainstream debate thus counterposed “class” politics to so-called “identity” politics—as if combating class inequality and fighting racism, sexism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression are necessarily mutually exclusive. It also left hanging the issue of whether Clinton was a genuine fighter against oppression, or just cynically chasing the votes that her campaign mistakenly calculated could win her a majority in the Electoral College.
The working class is no longer (if it ever was) predominantly white and male, even though this remains the caricature. People of color will very soon become the majority in the US population, and are already close to 50 percent among younger generations.13 Moreover, people of color have always been disproportionately represented within the working class and the poor, due to the economic consequences of racism. This demonstrates why combating oppression is (and always has been) a working-class issue, and will be vital to rebuilding a fighting class-based movement. Today’s working class is multiracial, made up of multiple genders and nationalities, and many people with a variety of disabilities. While white male workers have suffered enormously in recent decades, Black people and other oppressed sectors of the working class have suffered yet more. There is no reason to counterpose their interests, when solidarity among all workers will advance the entire working class and all its oppressed members—if the movement champions the rights of all those who suffer oppression.
“Democrats for the Leisure Class”
Most in the media failed to ask the most important questions about the 2016 election before concluding that the white working class, especially in the “flyover country” of the Midwest, has become a bastion of reaction. How many of these same people voted for Obama four years earlier? Millions of them did, a fact the Clinton campaign discovered months before the November election. As Cohn described, “The [Clinton] campaign looked back to respondents who were contacted in 2012, and found large numbers of white working-class voters who had backed Mr. Obama were now supporting Mr. Trump.”14 It is also the case that self-described socialist Bernie Sanders experienced a groundswell of support in the Midwest during the 2016 primaries—winning the Michigan, West Virginia, Indiana, and Wisconsin primaries—which all went to Trump in the general election.
The real story of the 2016 election is the sharp political polarization that allowed both Sanders and Trump to attract mass popular support during the primary season. The mainstream media, with its fleeting attention span, failed to appreciate this fact in its election postmortem. Although Sanders spoke from the left and Trump from the right, both candidates acknowledged the failures of the political status quo, which no other politicians had done for many decades. The centerpiece of Sanders’s campaign message was that the Democratic Party establishment had sacrificed the interests of the working-class majority at the altar of its corporate donors. Trump succeeded in winning the nomination, but Sanders did not. Unfortunately, Sanders ran as a Democrat, but the party’s powerbrokers had anointed Clinton as their neoliberal candidate from the beginning. There is no way to know what a Sanders vs. Trump contest would have produced, but it is very possible that Sanders would have energized Democratic voters in ways that Clinton could not in the general election.
The 2016 election elevated voting for “the lesser of two evils” to a new level, as Clinton and Trump were the two most unpopular candidates in recent decades—and undoubtedly many voters and nonvoters alike considered the election as a choice of which road to take to hell. The Clinton campaign’s high-tech computer models couldn’t motivate people to get to the polls on Election Day in what were once Democratic Party strongholds. The 2016 election merely highlighted how the Democrats had frittered away their traditional voting base over a period of decades—taking their votes for granted yet offering less than nothing in return, even as working-class living standards plummeted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
As it happens, Bill and Hillary Clinton were among the key architects of the Democratic Party’s open embrace of neoliberalism, beginning in 1985 with the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), shifting the party and its loyalists steadily right-ward in the process. The Rev. Jesse Jackson once called the DLC �
�Democrats for the Leisure Class,” and with good reason: its board of trustees, made up of major donors, included Koch Industries, Aetna, and Coca-Cola, while its executive board included Enron, AIG, Texaco, Chevron, and AT&T, among other corporate giants. The DLC spawned a generation of “New Democrats,” to carry out its mission—reshaping the Democratic Party as (more openly) probusiness and much less liberal. As Robert Dreyfuss described in The American Prospect, “The DLC thundered against the ‘liberal fundamentalism’ of the party’s base—unionists, blacks, feminists, Greens, and cause groups generally.”15 The DLC closed its doors in 2011, on the verge of bankruptcy, but it had already succeeded in its mission. The Clinton Foundation acquired its records, in a fitting conclusion.
The New Democrats had assumed that they could maintain the party’s voting base by offering a “Republican-lite” alternative as the “lesser evil” at the voting booth. But, as the decades passed, the Democrats’ voting base gradually hollowed out among those whose suffering steadily worsened, especially among young people with bleak futures—who also had no reason to be loyal to the Democrats. Many “low information voters” were very much aware that mainstream Democrats had turned their backs on them in search of a well-educated and higher-income constituency.
Together, the Clintons personify neoliberalism and its path of destruction for workers. In his 1996 State of the Union Address, Bill Clinton stole the Republican Party’s thunder, declaring, “The era of big government is over.” Reagan had invented the racist myth of the “welfare queen,” but it was Bill Clinton who ended “welfare as we know it.” He also oversaw the mass incarceration of Black and Latino nonviolent drug offenders in the name of the racist “War on Drugs”—while Hillary Clinton demonized young Black men with the racially charged term super-predator to bolster her husband’s efforts. Trump called for building a one-thousand-mile wall at the Mexican border, but Bill Clinton had already built a three-hundred-mile security “smart fence” in the 1990s, and both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted for a seven-hundred-mile fence in 2006 when they were in the Senate.