by Lance Selfa
23.John Nichols, “Hillary Clinton’s Popular-Vote Victory Is Unprecedented—and Still Growing,” Nation, November 17, 2016, www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clintons-popular-vote-victory-is-unprecedented-and-still-growing/; “Election 2016: New York Results,” New York Times, August 1, 2017, www.nytimes.com/elections/results/new-york.
24.United States Elections Project, “2016 November General Election Turnout Rates,” 2016, www.electproject.org/2016g; Thom File, Who Votes? Congressional Elections and the American Electorate: 1978–2014 (Washington DC: US Department of Commerce, 2015), 3.
25.Sean McElwee, “Why The Voting Gap Matters” Demos, October 23, 2014, www.demos.org/publication/why-voting-gap-matters; Sean McElwee, “Why Non-Voters Matter”; Pew Research Center, “The Party of Nonvoters,” October 31, 2014, www.people-press.org/2014/10/31/the-party-of-nonvoters-2/.
26.US House of Representatives, “Party Divisions of the House of Representatives,” http://history.house.gov/Institution/Party-Divisions/Party-Divisions/; Thom File, “Who Votes?”; NCSL, “2009 State and Legislative Partisan Composition,” National Conference of State Legislatures, www.ncsl.org/documents/statevote/legiscontrol_2009.pdf.
27.NCSL, “2009 State and Legislative Partisan Composition”; NCSL, “2015 State and Legislative Partisan Composition,” National Conference of State Legislatures, www.ncsl.org/documents/statevote/legiscontrol_2015.pdf.
28.Rick Perlstein, “It Goes Way, Way Back,” New Republic, June 14, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/133776/split; Aaron Bycoffe, “The Endorsement Primary,” FiveThirtyEight, 2016, http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-endorsement-primary/; Radiowalla, “Many Progressive Caucus Members Have Endorsed Hillary and Here’s the Corrected List,” Daily Kos, October 1, 2015, www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/11/1430646/-Many-Progressive-Caucus-members-have-endorsed-Hillary-and-here-s-the-corrected-list; Tote, “New York City Council Member Jumaane Williams Endorses Bernie Sanders at Prospect Park Rally,” Daily Kos, April 18, 2106, www.dailykos.com/story/2016/4/17/1516643/-BREAKING-NY-City-Council-Member-Jumaane-Williams-Endorses-Bernie-Sanders-at-Prospect-Park-Rally. See the following pages on the Congressional Progressive Caucus website: “About Us,” “Caucus Members,” “Seeking Global Security: Rethinking National Security and Defence Policy,” “The People’s Budget,” https://cpc-grijalva.house.gov/.
29.Thom File, “Who Votes?,” 1–4.
The Great God Trump and the White Working Class
1.According to the Pew Research Center, there were 10.7 million more eligible voters in 2016 than in 2012. “More than two-thirds of net growth in the US electorate during this time has come from racial and ethnic minorities.” Jens Manuel Krogstad, “2016 Electorate Will Be the Most Diverse in U.S. History,” Fact Tank (blog), Pew Research Center, February 3, 2016, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/03/2016-electorate-will-be-the-most-diverse-in-u-s-history/.
2.Jeremy Carl, “The Red Wall,” National Review, December 5, 2016. “By the presidential election of 2020, Census Bureau projections indicate that non-Hispanic whites will be down to around 61 percent of the population. By 2050 that share will have dropped to almost exactly half.” Depending on which criterion is used (education or occupation) the white working class will be 41 or 37 percent of the adult population in 2020. Alternatively, using an income-based definition, “yields an estimate of 20 percent of families qualifying as white working class.” Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira, “The Rise of a Mass Upper-Middle Class,” in Ruy Teixeira, ed., Red, Blue, and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC: 2008), 133–34.
3.Craig Gilbert, “Great Lakes Battlegrounds Turned Tide to Trump,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 9, 2016.
4.Vanessa Williamson and Carly Knight, “Choose Your Own Election Postmortem: Part Two,” Brookings, November 16, 2016.
5.All statistics are derived from Ballotpedia; the New York Times (county data 100 percent count); the Cook Political Report (raw votes); and the Atlas of U.S. Elections website, http://uselectionatlas.org. Caveat emptor: all 2016 figures are subject to final count figures (not yet available at time of writing) and in some of the tables have been rounded off to the nearest thousandth or tenth of a percent.
6.“The Most Extreme Republican Platform in Memory,” editorial, New York Times, July 18, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/opinion/the-most-extreme-republican-platform-in-memory.html.
7.Kenneth Vogel, “The Heiress Quietly Shaping Trump’s Operation,” Politico, November 21, 2016.
8.In Pew exit polls, a majority of self-identified white, evangelical voters said they were voting against Clinton, not for Trump. See Kate Shellnutt, “Trump Elected President, Thanks to 4 in 5 White Evangelicals,” Christianity Today, November 17, 2016, www.christianitytoday.com/news/2016/november/trump-elected-president-thanks-to-4-in-5-white-evangelicals.html.
9.The flip side is that 147 million voters in thirty-five nonswing states, plus the District of Columbia, were “sidelined and largely bypassed by the national campaigns.” Nonprofit Vote and US Elections Project, America Goes to the Polls: A Report on Voter Turnout in the 2016 Election, March 2017, p. 12, www.nonprofitvote.org/documents/2017/03/america-goes-polls-2016.pdf.
10.Where Clinton did win previously red suburbs, most notably in metropolitan Atlanta (Cobb and Gwinnett counties) and Houston (Fort Bend County), the key factor may have been recent increases in the minority population more than disaffected Republican women.
11.Quoted in Eleanor Clift, “How Macomb County Created and Killed the Clinton Machine,” Daily Beast, 28 November 2016.
12.Roger Stone, The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution (Skyhorse Publishing: New York, 2017), 312.
13.She also outperformed Obama in some strategic suburban counties around DC, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee, but in the latter two cases it was not enough to overcome Trump’s margins in small cities and rural areas. See Amy Walter, “The Story of the Suburbs,” Cook Political Report, November 14, 2016.
14.According to the Miami Herald, while total voter turnout was up 3 percent in Florida, the share of voters identifying as Democrats fell from 35 to 32 percent. Patricia Mazzei, “Gobsmacked by Election, Florida Democrats Try to Refocus,” Miami Herald, November 12, 2016, www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article114255783.html..
15.John Russo, “Why Democrats Lose in Ohio,” American Prospect, February 2, 2017, http://prospect.org/article/why-democrats-lose-ohio.
16.Mark Muro and Sifan Liu, “Another Clinton-Trump Divide: High-Output America versus Low-Output America,” Brookings Brief, November 29, 2016.
17.Brennan Center for Justice, “New Voting Restrictions in Place for 2016 Presidential Election,” www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/New_Restrictions_2016.pdf.
18.Paul Krugman, “The Populism Perplex,” New York Times, November 25, 2016.
19.Carl, “The Red Wall.” Carl quotes from a memo he wrote in 2015: “According to the modelling done here, if [Candidate X] could win white voters at Reagan 1984 percentages (66 percent) and at Bush 2004 turnout levels (67 percent) and we assume African American turnout was to return to historical levels and percentages for Democrats, we could win the presidency without winning a single Hispanic, Asian, Native American, or Arab vote. Think about that, because it is a staggering statement and it’s a true one.”
20.Clift, “How Macomb County Created.”
21.It’s important to recall that Ohio, the key to Bush’s 2004 victory, swung dramatically to the Democrats in 2006, in part because of plant closures and job losses. The rest of the Midwest, except Missouri, followed in 2008. The Democrats had a clear mandate to address the region’s distress and, as with Appalachia, failed to produce major policy initiatives—apart from Obamacare—to support local Democrats. The 2009 auto bailout’s political impact faded with the flight of the auto parts industry to Mexico.
22.Karl Rove, “The GOP Targets State Legislatures,” Wall S
treet Journal, March 4, 2010, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703862704575099670689398044.
23.Quoted in David Daley, Rat F**ked: The True Story behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy (New York: Liveright, 2016), 86–87.
24.Andy Kroll, “Behind Michigan’s ‘Financial Martial Law’: Corporations and Right-Wing Billionaires,” Mother Jones, March 23, 2011.
25.See Chris MacKenzie, Outside Influence: Out of State Money in the 2016 Senate Elections, US PIRG Education Fund, October 2016; Ian Vandewalker, Election Spending 2016, Brennan Center for Justice, New York University.
26.Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster, “The Rise of Negative Partisanship and the Nationalization of US Elections in the 21st Century,” Electoral Studies 41 (2016): 21.
27.Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia, 2nd ed. (New York: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957; New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 136, 153. Citations refer to the Schocken edition.
28.Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound, 153. Worsley, a Communist anthropologist, collaborated with the famed CP Historians Group, especially with Hobsbawm with whom he shared similar interests in millenarian movements, and was one of the founders of the New Left Review. His important contributions have been overlooked in most accounts of these two germinal milieus of contemporary left thought.
29.In addition to the Rust Belt and its outliers (Pueblo, Colorado, for instance), we might also include a few other regions dominated by formerly unionized extractive industries, such as the eight coastal timber counties in the Pacific Northwest that were flipped by Trump—an approximately 20,000-vote shift. In Oregon, Clinton won eight counties including metro Portland, but popular Democratic senator Ron Wyden won these and ten more.
30.“White Voters: What’s Going On,” Economist, November 5, 2016, 24.
31.Trip Gabriel, “How Erie Went Red: The Economy Sank, and Trump Rose,” New York Times, November 12, 2016; Devin Henry, “Company Announces Closure of Ohio Coal Plants,” The Hill, July 22, 2016; and Shelley Hanson, “Local Plant Closings Shock Ohio Valley,” The Intelligencer: Wheeling News-Register, December 5, 2016.
32.“White Voters,” 24.
33.Jack Jenkins, “Appalachia Used to be a Democratic Stronghold,” ThinkProgress, https://thinkprogress.org/appalachia.
34.Cited in “16 for ’16,” Sabato’s Crystal Ball (blog), University of Virginia Center for Politics, November 19, 2016, www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/16-for-16.
35.John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 811.
36.At stake are birthright citizenship and congressional apportionment by population—both of which are opposed by many Trump supporters.
37.Gunther, Inside U.S.A., 809–12. This almost 1,000-page portrait of immediate postwar America is a time capsule that everyone should find time to open, if only to discover how much the present only recapitulates the past.
38.“Populist-Nationalist Tide Rolls On,” Patrick Buchanan – Official Website, November 29, 2016, http://buchanan.org/blog/populist-nationalist-tide-rolls-126086..
Choosing or Refusing to Take Sides in an Era of Right-Wing Populism
1.Some of what follows draws on chapters 7 and 8 of my Nation-States: Consciousness and Competition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
2.See Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November 18, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html.
3.Hal Draper [1967], “Who’s Going to Be the Lesser Evil in 1968?” Reprinted in International Socialist Review 34, April–May, 2004, and also available at the Marxist Internet Archive, at www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1967/01/lesser.htm.
4.Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Separation of the Economic and Political under Capitalism,” New Left Review 127 (1981): 81–82.
5.Adam Smith [1776], An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), book 1, chap. 11, 278.
6.Smith, An Inquiry, book 4, chaps. 7, 8.
7.Karl Marx [1867], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Harmonds-worth, UK: Penguin Books/New Left Review, 1976), 606–7.
8.Marx, Capital, 610.
9.Carl Schmitt [1932], “The Concept of the Political,” in The Concept of the Political, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 63.
10.Joseph Schumpeter [1944], Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 1994), 138–39.
11.Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 1, State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 321–24.
12.Bernard Porter, Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 49.
13.Fred Block [1977], “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,” in Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Postindustrialization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), chap. 3.
14.Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Revolution,” in Revolution in History, edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 27.
15.Antonio Gramsci [1929–1934], Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 211, Q13§23.
16.Gramsci, Selections, 408, Q7§24.
17.Robert Skidelsky, “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Osborne,” New Statesman, March 14–20, 2014, 29. The reasons for this are too complex to be discussed here, but see my “Neoliberalism as the Agent of Capitalist Self-Destruction,” Salvage 1 (2015): 81–96.
18.Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User’s Guide (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 2014), 190–91; Will Hutton, “Power Is Fragmenting. But What Is the True Cost to Democracy?,” Guardian, August 25, 2013, 36.
19.Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, 93.
20.Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 367–68.
21.Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013), 45.
22.Leon Trotsky, “What Next?,” Marxist Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1932-ger/next01.htm.
23.Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 490–97.
24.Roger Griffin, “Revolution from the Right: Fascism,” in Revolutions and Revolutionary Traditions in the West, 1560–1991, edited by David Parker (London: Routledge, 2000), 198.
25.Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, “Introduction: The Scepter and the Specter,” in Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy, edited by Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 5.
26.Alexandra Cole, “Old Right or New Right? The Ideological Positioning of Parties of the Far Right,” European Journal of Political Research 44, no. 2 (2005): 222–23.
27.Ulrich Herbert, “Labor and Extermination: Economic Interest and the Primacy of Weltanschauung in National Socialism,” Past and Present 138 (1993): 195.
28.Alex Callinicos, “Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 2 (2001): 403, 406.
29.Peter Sedgwick, “The Problem of Fascism,” International Socialism 42 (1970): 34. Callinicos actually ascribes this thought to Joel Geier, who expressed it from the floor during a discussion at Marxism 1993. See Callinicos, “Plumbing the Depths,” 413, note 95.
30.Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 22–76; Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940–1941 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 438–44; Sabby Sagall, Final Solutions: Human Nature, Capitalism, and Genocide (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 196–210.
31.Detlev Peukert [1982], Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1989), 44.
32.Götz Aly, Hitler�
�s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
33.Donny Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism, and the Working Class (London: Bookmarks, 1999), chap. 9; Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 118–25.
34.Tim Mason [1975], “The Primacy of Politics: Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany,” in Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, edited by Jane Caplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 74.
35.Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 176–78; Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking, 2006), 358–59, 513–15.
36.Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 563, 567–68, 713.
37.Theodor Adorno [1951], Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1978), 105–6.
38.Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 347–48.
39.Nigel Harris [1968], Beliefs in Society: The Problem of Ideology (Harmond-sworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1971), 115–16.
40.Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 6.
41.Gramsci, Selections, 333–34, Q11§12.
42.Georg Lukács [1923], “Class Consciousness,” in History and Class Consciousness: Essays on Marxist Dialectics (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 51.
43.Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, 348.
44.Chip Berlet, “The Violence of Right-Wing Populism,” Peace Review 7, nos. 3/4 (1995): 285.
45.Alexandra Cole, “Old Right or New Right?”
46.Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (New York: Nation Books, 2013), 281.
47.Kimmel, Angry White Men.
48.Müller, What is Populism?, 13.
49.Ed Pilkington, “Immigrants Go into Hiding as Alabama Rules That Looking Illegal Is Enough,” Guardian, October 15, 2011.
50.American Immigration Council, “Bad for Business: How Alabama’s Anti-Immigrant Law Stifles State Economy,” November 3, 2011, www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/bad-business-how-alabama’s-anti-immigrant-law-stifles-state-economy.