US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty

by Lance Selfa

  Trump’s nationalist-populist proposals will face much more resistance both from congressional Republicans and the unelected, permanent professional bureaucracy in the executive branch of the federal government.47 His infrastructure program, which relies primarily on tax credits to encourage private companies to rebuild and repair roads, bridges, and the like, rather than massive federal spending, may well pass Congress. However, it is unlikely to provide the sort of Keynesian stimulus that would create the “good paying jobs” that many of his middle- and working-class supporters hoped for.48 However, on the key populist elements of his program—repealing neoliberal trade pacts, wholesale deportations of undocumented immigrants, and a realignment of US foreign policy toward Putin’s Russia—Trump will either continue to backpedal or face concerted opposition.

  Trump has already backpedaled on some of his more populist and nationalist proposals. Not only is Trump no longer threatening to indict Bill and Hillary Clinton, but he has also waffled on calls for withdrawing from the Paris climate accord (which would require congressional approval) and reinstituting waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation” (torture).49 Other key elements, like the renegotiation or withdrawal from NAFTA or the imposition of tariffs on companies moving production abroad, will likely require the cooperation of Congress to implement. The repeal or restructuring of Obamacare and the building of a wall on the US-Mexico border also require congressional approval. Other policies, like the suspension of immigration from “terror-prone areas” (having abandoned a blanket ban on Muslim immigrants), ending foreign trade “abuses,” and leaving the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, could be done through executive order.50 However, it is clear that key congressional Republicans and key groups of capitalists organized in the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce will oppose any and all attempts to undermine the neoliberal order.51 Any attempt to realign US imperialist alliances away from traditional allies in Western Europe and the Middle East, in favor of Putin’s Russia, will face resistance from the permanent officialdom of the State, Defense, Commerce, and Treasury Departments.52 Put another way, Trump will face the same structural-institutional obstacles social democrats face when attempting to implement anticapitalist reforms through the capitalist state.53

  The clearest indications of capitalist pushback on the Trump administration can be seen in his speech to Congress on February 28, 2017, and his enthusiastic support for Speaker Ryan’s proposal to replace Obamacare. Trump’s first speech to both houses of Congress was filled with Bannonite rhetoric—complete with attacks on “globalism” and NAFTA. Trump actually quoted Lincoln, who argued that protective tariffs are necessary to defend the living standard of American workers.54 However, its substance affirmed Trump’s willingness to accept the limits capital has placed on his actions. Despite calling on NATO partners to “meet their financial obligations,” Trump reaffirmed US support for “NATO, an alliance forged through the bonds of two World Wars that dethroned fascism, and a Cold War that defeated communism.” His calls for “fair trade,” were not followed by calls for renegotiating NAFTA or ruling out future multilateral trade deals.

  Most importantly, Trump embraced “a merit-based immigration system.” This is the foundation of the McCain-Schumer bill that has been languishing in Congress since 2007, blocked by Tea Party populists who rejected any bill that includes provisions allowing undocumented immigrants to achieve legal status. The McCain-Schumer proposal does include a long and tortuous road to citizenship, which would involve millions returning to their countries of origin for indefinite periods before being allowed to come to the United States as legal immigrants who only then become eligible for US citizenship. The most important element of the plan, “merit-based immigration,” would move the United States away from a system of nationality-based quotas that allow legal immigrants to become permanent residents and citizens. In its place would be a system where people with certain “skills”—not just those with computer science and engineering degrees, but workers in agriculture, construction, garment, and other low wage industries—to come to the United States to work for defined periods of time. Put another way, the United States would move toward a guest-worker program, where immigrants would be allowed to come to the United States to work, have no legal rights (in particular the right to unionize), and be forced to return to their country of origin when their employers no longer need them. The main supporter of this proposal is the National Immigration Forum—a coalition that includes the US Chamber of Commerce, executives from agribusiness and the healthcare industry, religious leaders, heads of police departments, and the leaders of two of the largest US trade unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).55

  Trump’s enthusiastic support for Ryan’s plan to replace the Affordable Care Act also demonstrates his support for a neoliberal solution to healthcare. While dropping the individual mandate and replacing income with age-based tax breaks to purchase individual plans, Ryan’s proposal would preserve Obamacare’s large public subsidies for private insurance companies.56 However, key aspects of the plan are still opposed, from different directions, by the remnants of the Tea Party in Congress and the healthcare industry. For the Tea Party Republicans, the Ryan-Trump proposal is “Obamacare lite,” and the tax subsidies to pay for individual health insurance create another monstrous “entitlement program.”57 On the other side, the healthcare industry—major insurers, hospital associations, and the American Medical Association—are joining Democrats in denouncing the end of individual mandates and the restructuring of Medicaid, with the federal government substituting fixed-block grants (along the lines of Bill Clinton’s 1996 “Welfare Reform Act”) for federal funding of state expenditures on healthcare for the poor.58 Ryan and Trump may well find themselves caught between the Democrats and the healthcare industry, which fears the loss of 24 million potential customers; and the Tea Party right, which welcomes a potential $337 billion reduction in the deficit over the next ten years but opposes any public funding of healthcare.59 The end result will likely be a plan that will have much more in common with Obamacare than Trump and his nationalist-populist supporters promised.

  Trump’s vacillations and the opposition to his nationalist populist proposals portend a continued civil war within the Republican Party. In this battle, the Republican establishment, with its historic ties to old-line WASP capitalists, has all the advantages in a confrontation with the populist nationalists. The Republican leadership controls the party’s purse strings and they are well situated to change the rules for the next presidential nominating race. They already have the Democrats’ road map to prevent any future insurgency: the creation of unelected “super-delegates.”60 Trump’s failure to “Make America Great Again”—the rollback of neoliberal trade deals, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and the revival of industrial employment—will disillusion many of his white middle- and working-class supporters. Without their support, the populist nationalists may find themselves marginalized in the Republican Party well before the 2020 election.61

  The biggest danger issuing from Trump’s victory comes not from the corridors of power, but from the streets. Small groups of organized fascists and individual right-wingers believe they have the “wind at their back,” freeing them to assault people of color, immigrants, Muslims, queer folks, and leftists. Through November 16—just one full week after Trump’s election—the Southern Poverty Law Center counted approximately seven hundred violent hate crimes in the United States.62 The greatest number occurred in the three days following the election, but incidents continue to be reported from across the United States. Approximately 29 percent of the attacks targeted immigrants, 22 percent African Americans, 11 percent LGBTQ folks, 7 percent Muslims, and 5 percent women. Another 11 percent involved swastika vandalism, while less than 4 percent involved verbal or physical attacks on Trump supporters.

  The fightback against Trumpism will have to
take various forms—organized, collective anti-fascist defense against attacks; mass protest demonstrations; and, ultimately, in a struggle in the workplace. Strategically, new organizers need to understand that we cannot rely on either the Democrats or the forces of official reformism (labor officials, middle-class leaders of people of color, women, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, etc.) in these battles. With most leading Democrats, from Clinton to Sanders, arguing that we “need to give Trump a chance,” any notion that the Democrats will tack to the left after their 2016 defeat is illusory. The “insurgent” bid of African American representative Keith Ellison (MN) for chair of the Democratic National Committee went down to defeat, following the routing of Representative Tim Ryan’s (OH) challenge to Nancy Pelosi for House Democratic leader. 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 election. Given the commitment of most of what passes for a left in the United States—social democrats and former Stalinists who share a commitment to a “strategic alliance” with the forces of official reformism—it will be an uphill battle to build movements capable of acting independently of the Democrats and their reformist supporters.

  The spontaneous protests in many cities, the disruptions at the airports protesting Trump’s de facto ban on Muslims entering the United States, and the March 8th Women’s Strike are all 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, if not explicitly to revolution—in workplaces and social movements. Without such a layer rooted among broader layers of working people, the labor officials, Democratic Party politicos, and the middle-class leaders of the social movements will be able to continually derail and demobilize promising struggles—as they have for most of the last forty years.

  This essay first appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of the International Socialist Review. It was updated on March 14, 2017, and does not reflect developments since that date.

  WHO PUT DONALD TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE?

  Kim Moody

  The media story in the days following the 2016 election was that a huge defection of angry white blue-collar workers from Rust Belt communities from their traditional Democratic voting patterns put Donald J. Trump in the White House in a grand slap at the nation’s “liberal” elite. But is that the real story? While he didn’t actually win the popular vote, Trump did carry the majority (58 percent) of white voters. Furthermore, he won the key “battleground” states in the Rust Belt that are the basis of the media story, which raises serious questions. The first question is, who were these white voters? Second, was this the major shift that sent Trump to victory or was there something else?

  Exit polls taken during the primaries, when the Trump revolt began, showed the whole election process was skewed toward the better-off sections of US society and that Trump did better among them than Clinton. Looking at those voters in the general election from the 26 percent of US households earning more than $100,000, who are unlikely to be working class these days, we see that Clinton got 34 percent of her vote and Trump a slightly larger 35 percent of his from these well-to-do voters.1 In other words, upper-income groups were overrepresented in the voting electorate as a whole, and both candidates drew a disproportionate part of their vote from the well-to-do, with Trump a bit more reliant on high-income voters. This, in itself, doesn’t rule out a working-class shift to Trump, but the media’s version of this is based on a problematic definition.

  Aside from the narrower measure of the union household vote, which we will examine below, in most exit polls and media accounts of this blue-collar rebellion, white “working class” was defined as those white voters without a college degree. There are a number of problems with this definition. One problem is that a large majority of those without a college degree don’t vote at all, so that any measure of patterns among those who do vote is a measure of a minority who, as we will see, are likely to be among the higher-income voters. Furthermore, as we will see below, people who don’t vote are generally to the left of those who do on economic issues and the role of government. Hence the minority of little more than a fifth of the 135.5 million white Americans without degrees who voted for Trump do not represent this degreeless demographic very well. Another problem is that there are only about 18.5 million white, “blue-collar” production workers—the prototype of the defecting white industrial worker.2 If we double this to account for adult spouses to make it just under 40 million, and assume that none of them have degrees, it still only accounts for a little more than a third of those white adults lacking the allegedly class-defining degree. Of course, there are another 14 million or so white, “service” workers who are working class, but, even if we bring them and their spouses in, we still account for only about half of the huge 70 percent of white adults in the United States who lack a college degree.

  The other side of this definitional problem is that there are also millions of Americans who don’t have a college degree, who are not working class, and who are actually more likely to vote than the “left behind” industrial workers. There are some 17 million small business owners without that degree. As a 2016 survey by the National Small Business Association tells us, 86 percent of small business owners are white, they are twice as likely to be Republicans as Democrats, almost two-thirds consider themselves conservative (78 percent on economic issues), and 92 percent say they regularly vote in national elections. Plus, they drew an average salary of $112,000 in 2016 compared to $48,320 for the average annual wage.3 It is doubtful that any significant group of blue-collar workers can match that salary or level of voter turnout, even assuming these small entrepreneurs exaggerated their civic virtue. Add in the spouses and this classically petty-bourgeois group alone could more than account for all the 29 million of those lacking a college degree who voted for Trump.4

  There are also 1.8 million managers, 8.8 million supervisors, and 1.6 million cops whose jobs don’t require a college degree. To this we could add insurance and real estate brokers and agents, and so on.5 Some may have a degree, but it is clear that there are tens of millions of nonworking-class people in the United States who lack such a degree, and who are more likely to be traditional and frequent Republican voters than a majority of white, blue-collar workers. Thus, the proportion of those without a college degree who are petty bourgeois or genuinely middle class, who are more likely to vote and to vote Republican, is clearly very large, and the equation of the missing degree with working-class status misleading. The relatively high income levels of much of Trump’s vote point toward a majority petty-bourgeois and middle-class base for Trump, something The Economist concluded in its earlier survey of Trump primary voters when they wrote, “but the idea that it is the mostly poor, less-educated voters who are drawn to Mr. Trump is a bit of a myth.”6 The first point, then, is that Trump’s victory was disproportionately a middle-class, upper-income phenomenon.

  To test the extent to which white, blue-collar or related workers handed Trump victory, we will look at the swings in union household voting in national elections. This is far from perfect, of course, since only a minority of workers belong to unions these days, about half are public employees, and nonwhite workers make up a third of the total. Nevertheless, we can safely assume that any swings toward the Republicans came mostly from white union members and their families. It is important to bear in mind as well that the union household vote has declined as a percentage of the total vote in presidential elections from about 27 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2016. The impact of the union household vote has diminished, though not disappeared.7

  Table I

  Union Household Vote in Presidential Elections, 1976–2016

/>   Sources: Roper Center, “How Groups Voted,” 1976–2012, http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how-groups-voted/; “Election 2016: Exit Polls; President,” CNN Politics, November 23, 2016, www.cnn.com/election/results/president.

  Two things are clear from table I. First, an average of about 40 percent of union members and their families have been voting Republican in presidential elections for a long time, with the Democrats winning a little under 60 percent of the union household vote for the last four decades. Only in 1948 and 1964 did over 80 percent of union household members vote for the Democratic candidate, Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson respectively.8 Nevertheless, in 2016, a relatively small number shifted to Trump from 40 percent for the Republican in 2012 to 43 percent in 2016. These 3 percentage points represent a shift of just under 800,000 union household voters across the entire country, which is 3.5 percent of the more than 23 million of them who voted in 2016. Even more interesting is that the Democratic vote fell by seven points from 2012 to 2016 as union household members defected to a third party, refused to answer the question when surveyed, or didn’t vote and weren’t surveyed. While the unspecified “no answer” group of those surveyed lends some credibility to the theory of the “silent Trump voter,” this drop nonetheless points to the fact that the Democrats have lost votes since 2012.