Of all the predictions I made for the new year in my post
two weeks ago, the one that seems to have stirred up the most distress and
derision is my suggestion that the most likely person to be standing up there with
his hand on a Bible next January, taking the oath of office as the next
president of the United States, is Donald Trump. That prediction wasn’t made to
annoy people, entertaining as that can be from time to time; nor is it merely a
reaction to Trump’s meteoric rise in the polls and the abject failure of any of
his forgettable Republican rivals even to slow him down.
The rise of Donald Trump, rather, marks the arrival of a
turning point I’ve discussed more than once in these essays already. Like the other
turning points whose impending appearance on the stage of the future has been
outlined here, it’s not the end of the world; it’s thus a source of amusement
to me to recall all those Republicans who insisted they were going to flee the
country if Obama won reelection, and are still here, when I hear Democrats
saying they’ll do the same thing if Trump wins. Still, there’s a difference of
some importance between the two, because in terms of the historical trajectory
of the United States, Trump is a far more significant figure than Barack Obama
will ever be.
Despite the empty rhetoric about hope and change that
surrounded his 2008 campaign, after all, Obama continued the policies of his
predecessor George W. Bush so unswervingly that we may as well call those
policies—the conventional wisdom or, rather, the conventional folly of early
21st-century American politics—the Dubyobama consensus. Trump’s candidacy, and
in some ways that of his Democratic rival Bernard Sanders as well, marks the
point at which the blowback from those policies has become a massive political
fact. That this blowback isn’t taking the form desired by many people on the
leftward end of things is hardly surprising; it was never going to do so,
because the things about the Dubyobama consensus that made blowback inevitable
are not the things to which the left objects.
To understand what follows, it’s going to be necessary to
ask my readers—especially, though not only, those who consider themselves
liberals, or see themselves inhabiting some other position left of center in
the convoluted landscape of today’s American politics—to set aside two common
habits. The first is the reflexive resort to sneering mockery that so often
makes up for the absence of meaningful political thought in the US—again,
especially but by no means only on the left. The dreary insults that have been
flung so repetitively at Donald Trump over the course of his campaign are fine
examples of the species: “deranged Cheeto,” “tomato-headed moron,” “delusional
cheese creature,” and so on.
The centerpiece of most of these insults, when they’re not
simply petulant schoolboy taunts aimed at Trump’s physical appearance, is the
claim that he’s stupid. This is hardly surprising, as a lot of people on the
leftward end of American culture love to use the kind of demeaning language
that attributes idiocy to those who disagree with them. Thus it probably needs
to be pointed out here that Trump is anything but stupid. He’s extraordinarily
clever, and one measure of his cleverness is the way that he’s been able to
lure so many of his opponents into behaving in ways that strengthen his appeal
to the voters that matter most to his campaign. In case you’re wondering if you
belong to that latter category, dear reader, if you like to send out tweets
comparing Trump’s hair to Cheese Whiz, no, you’re not.
So that’s the first thing that has to be set aside to make
sense of the Trump phenomenon. The second is going to be rather more
challenging for many of my readers: the notion that the only divisions in
American society that matter are those that have some basis in biology. Skin
color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability—these are the lines of
division in society that Americans like to talk about, whatever their attitudes
to the people who fall on one side or another of those lines. (Please note, by
the way, the four words above: “some basis in biology.” I’m not saying that
these categories are purely biological in nature; every one of them is defined
in practice by a galaxy of cultural constructs and presuppositions, and the
link to biology is an ostensive category marker rather than a definition. I
insert this caveat because I’ve noticed that a great many people go out of
their way to misunderstand the point I’m trying to make here.)
Are the lines of division just named important? Of course
they are. Discriminatory treatment on the basis of those factors is a pervasive
presence in American life today. The facts remain that there are other lines of
division in American society that lack that anchor in biology, that some of
these are at least as pervasive in American life as those listed above—and that
some of the most important of these are taboo topics, subjects that most people
in the US today will not talk about.
Here’s a relevant example. It so happens that you can
determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in
America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of
their income? Broadly speaking—there are exceptions, which I’ll get to in a
moment—it’s from one of four sources: returns on investment, a monthly salary,
an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their
income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much
so that it’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an
investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class.
It’s probably necessary to point out explicitly here that
these classes aren’t identical to the divisions that Americans like to talk
about. That is, there are plenty of people with light-colored skin in the
welfare class, and plenty of people with darker skin in the wage class. Things tend to become a good deal more lily-white
in the two wealthier classes, though even there you do find people of color. In
the same way, women, gay people, disabled people, and so on are found in all
four classes, and how they’re treated depends a great deal on which of these
classes they’re in. If you’re a disabled person, for example, your chances of
getting meaningful accommodations to help you deal with your disability are by
and large considerably higher if you bring home a salary than they are if you
work for a wage.
As noted above, there are people who don’t fall into those
divisions. I’m one of them; as a writer, I get most of my income from royalties
on book sales, which means that a dollar or so from every book of mine that
sells via most channels, and rather less than that if it’s sold by Amazon—those
big discounts come straight out of your favorite authors’ pockets—gets mailed
to me twice a year. There are so few people who make their living this way that
the royalty classlet isn’t a significant factor in American society. The same
is true of most of the other ways of making a living in the US today. Even the
once-mighty profit class, the people who get their income from the profit they
make on their own business activities, is small enough these days that it lacks
a significant collective presence.
There’s a vast amount that could be said about the four
major classes just outlined, but I want to focus on the political dimension,
because that’s where they take on overwhelming relevance as the 2016
presidential campaign lurches on its way. Just as the four classes can be
identified by way of a very simple question, the political dynamite that’s
driving the blowback mentioned earlier can be seen by way of another simple
question: over the last half century or so, how have the four classes fared?
The answer, of course, is that three of the four have
remained roughly where they were. The investment class has actually had a bit
of a rough time, as many of the investment vehicles that used to provide it
with stable incomes—certificates of deposit, government bonds, and so on—have
seen interest rates drop through the floor.
Still, alternative investments and frantic government manipulations of
stock market prices have allowed most people in the investment class to keep up
their accustomed lifestyles.
The salary class, similarly, has maintained its familiar
privileges and perks through a half century of convulsive change. Outside of a
few coastal urban areas currently in the grip of speculative bubbles, people
whose income comes mostly from salaries can generally afford to own their
homes, buy new cars every few years, leave town for annual vacations, and so
on. On the other end of the spectrum, the welfare class has continued to scrape
by pretty much as before, dealing with the same bleak realities of grinding
poverty, intrusive government bureacracy, and a galaxy of direct and indirect
barriers to full participation in the national life, as their equivalents did
back in 1966.
And the wage class? Over the last half century, the wage
class has been destroyed.
In 1966 an American family with one breadwinner working full
time at an hourly wage could count on having a home, a car, three square meals
a day, and the other ordinary necessities of life, with some left over for the
occasional luxury. In 2016, an American family with one breadwinner working
full time at an hourly wage is as likely as not to end up living on the street,
and a vast number of people who would happily work full time even under those
conditions can find only part-time or temporary work when they can find any
jobs at all. The catastrophic impoverishment and immiseration of the American
wage class is one of the most massive political facts of our time—and it’s also
one of the most unmentionable. Next to nobody is willing to talk about it, or
even admit that it happened.
The destruction of the wage class was largely accomplished
by way of two major shifts in American economic life. The first was the
dismantling of the American industrial economy and its replacement by Third World sweatshops; the second was mass
immigration from Third World countries. Both of these measures are ways of
driving down wages—not, please note, salaries, returns on investment, or
welfare payments—by slashing the number of wage-paying jobs, on the one hand,
while boosting the number of people competing for them on the other. Both, in
turn, were actively encouraged by government policies and, despite plenty of
empty rhetoric on one or the other side of the Congressional aisle, both of
them had, for all practical purposes, bipartisan support from the political
establishment.
It’s probably going to be necessary to talk a bit about that
last point. Both parties, despite occasional bursts of crocodile tears for
American workers and their families, have backed the offshoring of jobs to the
hilt. Immigration is a slightly more complex matter; the Democrats claim to be
in favor of it, the Republicans now and then claim to oppose it, but what this
means in practice is that legal immigration is difficult but illegal
immigration is easy. The result was the creation of an immense work force of
noncitizens who have no economic or political rights they have any hope of
enforcing, which could then be used—and has been used, over and over again—to
drive down wages, degrade working conditions, and advance the interests of
employers over those of wage-earning employees.
The next point that needs to be discussed here—and it’s the
one at which a very large number of my readers are going to balk—is who
benefited from the destruction of the American wage class. It’s long been
fashionable in what passes for American conservatism to insist that everyone
benefits from the changes just outlined, or to claim that if anybody doesn’t,
it’s their own fault. It’s been equally popular in what passes for American liberalism
to insist that the only people who benefit from those changes are the
villainous uber-capitalists who belong to the 1%. Both these are evasions,
because the destruction of the wage class has disproportionately benefited one
of the four classes I sketched out above: the salary class.
Here’s how that works. Since the 1970s, the salary class
lifestyle sketched out above—suburban homeownership, a new car every couple of
years, vacations in Mazatlan, and so on—has been an anachronism: in James
Howard Kunstler’s useful phrase, an arrangement without a future. It was wholly
a product of the global economic dominance the United States wielded in the
wake of the Second World War, when every other major industrial nation on the
planet had its factories pounded to rubble by the bomber fleets of the warring
powers, and the oil wells of Pennsylvania, Texas, and California pumped more
oil than the rest of the planet put together.
That dominance went away in a hurry, though, when US conventional
petroleum production peaked in 1970, and the factories of Europe and Asia began
to outcompete America’s industrial heartland.
The only way for the salary class to maintain its lifestyle
in the teeth of those transformations was to force down the cost of goods and
services relative to the average buying power of the salary class. Because the salary class exercised (and still
exercises) a degree of economic and political influence disproportionate to its
size, this became the order of the day in the 1970s, and it remains the
locked-in political consensus in American public life to this day. The
destruction of the wage class was only one consequence of that project—the
spectacular decline in quality of the whole range of manufactured goods for
sale in America, and the wholesale gutting of the national infrastructure, are
other results—but it’s the consequence that matters in terms of today’s
politics.
It’s worth noting, along these same lines, that every remedy
that’s been offered to the wage class by the salary class has benefited the
salary class at the expense of the wage class. Consider the loud claims of the
last couple of decades that people left unemployed by the disappearance of
wage-paying jobs could get back on board the bandwagon of prosperity by going
to college and getting job training. That didn’t work out well for the people
who signed up for the student loans and took the classes—getting job training,
after all, isn’t particularly helpful if the jobs for which you’re being
trained don’t exist, and so a great many former wage earners finished their
college careers with no better job prospects than they had before, and hundreds
of thousands of dollars of student loan debt burdening them into the bargain.
For the banks and colleges that pushed the loans and taught the classes,
though, these programs were a cash cow of impressive scale, and the people who
work for banks and colleges are mostly salary class.
Attempts by people in the wage class to mount any kind of
effective challenge to the changes that have gutted their economic prospects
and consigned them to a third-rate future have done very little so far. To some
extent, that’s a function of the GOP’s sustained effort to lure wage class
voters into backing Republican candidates on religious and moral grounds. It’s
the mirror image of the ruse that’s been used by the Democratic party on a
galaxy of interests on the leftward end of things—granted, the Democrats aren’t
doing a thing about the issues that matter most to you, but neither are the
Republicans, so you vote for the party that offends you least. Right? Sure, if
you want to guarantee that the interests that matter most to you never get
addressed at all.
There’s a further barrier, though, and that’s the response
of the salary class across the board—left, right, middle, you name it—to any
attempt by the wage class to bring up the issues that matter to it. On the rare
occasions when this happens in the public sphere, the spokespeople of the wage
class get shouted down with a double helping of the sneering mockery I
discussed toward the beginning of this post. The same thing happens on a
different scale on those occasions when the same thing happens in private. If
you doubt this—and you probably do, if you belong to the salary class—try this
experiment: get a bunch of your salary class friends together in some casual
context and get them talking about ordinary American working guys. What you’ll
hear will range from crude caricatures and one-dimensional stereotypes right on
up to bona fide hate speech. People in the wage class are aware of this;
they’ve heard it all; they’ve been called stupid, ignorant, etc., ad nauseam
for failing to agree with whatever bit of self-serving dogma some
representative of the salary class tried to push on them.
And that, dear reader, is where Donald Trump comes in.
The man is brilliant. I mean that without the smallest trace
of mockery. He’s figured out that the most effective way to get the wage class
to rally to his banner is to get himself attacked, with the usual sort of shrill
mockery, by the salary class. The man’s worth several billion dollars—do you
really think he can’t afford to get the kind of hairstyle that the salary class
finds acceptable? Of course he can; he’s deliberately chosen otherwise, because
he knows that every time some privileged buffoon in the media or on the
internet trots out another round of insults directed at his failure to conform
to salary class ideas of fashion, another hundred thousand wage class voters
recall the endless sneering putdowns they’ve experienced from the salary class
and think, “Trump’s one of us.”
The identical logic governs his deliberate flouting of the
current rules of acceptable political discourse. Have you noticed that every
time Trump says something that sends the pundits into a swivet, and the media
starts trying to convince itself and its listeners that this time he’s gone too
far and his campaign will surely collapse in humiliation, his poll numbers go
up? What he’s saying is exactly the sort
of thing that you’ll hear people say in working class taverns and bowling
alleys when subjects such as illegal immigration and Muslim jihadi terrorism
come up for discussion. The shrieks of the media simply confirm, in the minds
of the wage class voters to whom his appeal is aimed, that he’s one of them, an
ordinary Joe with sensible ideas who’s being dissed by the suits.
Notice also how many of Trump’s unacceptable-to-the-pundits
comments have focused with laser precision on the issue of immigration. That’s
a well-chosen opening wedge, as cutting off illegal immigration is something
that the GOP has claimed to support for a while now. As Trump broadens his
lead, in turn, he’s started to talk about the other side of the equation—the
offshoring of jobs—as his recent jab at Apple’s overseas sweatshops shows. The
mainstream media’s response to that jab does a fine job of proving the case
argued above: “If smartphones were made in the US, we’d have to pay more for
them!” And of course that’s true: the salary class will have to pay more for
its toys if the wage class is going to have decent jobs that pay enough to
support a family. That this is unthinkable for so many people in the salary
class—that they’re perfectly happy allowing their electronics to be made for
starvation wages in an assortment of overseas hellholes, so long as this keeps
the price down—may help explain the boiling cauldron of resentment into which
Trump is so efficiently tapping.
It’s by no means certain that Trump will ride that
resentment straight to the White House, though at this moment it does seem like
the most likely outcome. Still, I trust none of my readers are naive enough to
think that a Trump defeat will mean the end of the phenomenon that’s lifted him
to front runner status in the teeth of everything the political establishment
can throw at him. I see the Trump candidacy as a major watershed in American
political life, the point at which the wage class—the largest class of American
voters, please note—has begun to wake up to its potential power and begin pushing
back against the ascendancy of the salary class.
Whether he wins or loses, that pushback is going to be a defining force in American politics for decades to come. Nor is a Trump candidacy anything approaching the worst form that could take. If Trump gets defeated, especially if it’s done by obviously dishonest means, the next leader to take up the cause of the wage class could very well be fond of armbands or, for that matter, of roadside bombs. Once the politics of resentment come into the open, anything can happen—and this is particularly true, it probably needs to be said, when the resentment in question is richly justified by the behavior of many of those against whom it’s directed.
