Just at the moment, many of my readers—and of course a great
many others as well—are paying close attention to which of the two most
detested people in American public life will put a hand on a Bible in January,
and preside thereafter over the next four years of this nation’s accelerating
decline and fall. That focus is understandable, and not just because both
parties have trotted out the shopworn claim that this election, like every
other one in living memory, is the most important in our lifetimes. For a
change, there are actual issues involved.
Barring any of the incidents that could throw the election
into the House of Representatives, we’ll know by this time next week whether
the bipartisan consensus that’s been welded firmly in place in American
politics since the election of George W. Bush will stay intact for the next
four years. That consensus, for those of my readers who haven’t been paying
attention, supports massive giveaways to big corporations and the already
affluent, punitive austerity for the poor, malign neglect for the nation’s
infrastructure, the destruction of the American working class through federal
subsidies for automation and offshoring and tacit acceptance of mass illegal
immigration as a means of driving down wages, and a monomaniacally
confrontational foreign policy obsessed with the domination of the Middle East
by raw military force. Those are the policies that George W. Bush and Barack
Obama pursued through four presidential terms, and they’re the policies that
Hillary Clinton has supported throughout her political career.
Donald Trump, by contrast, has been arguing against several
core elements of that consensus since the beginning of his run for office.
Specifically, he’s calling for a reversal of federal policies that support
offshoring of jobs, the enforcement of US immigration law, and a less rigidly
confrontational stance toward Russia over the war in Syria. It’s been popular
all through the current campaign for Clinton’s supporters to insist that nobody
actually cares about these issues, and that Trump’s supporters must by
definition be motivated by hateful values instead, but that rhetorical gimmick
has been a standard thoughstopper on the left for many years now, and it simply
won’t wash. The reason why Trump was able to sweep aside the other GOP
candidates, and has a shot at winning next week’s election despite the
unanimous opposition of this nation’s political class, is that he’s the first
presidential candidate in a generation to admit that the issues just mentioned
actually matter.
That was a ticket to the nomination, in turn, because
outside the bicoastal echo chamber of the affluent, the US economy has been in
freefall for years. I suspect that a
great many financially comfortable people in today’s America have no idea just
how bad things have gotten here in the flyover states. The recovery of the last
eight years has only benefited the upper 20% or so by income of the population;
the rest have been left to get by on declining real wages, while simultaneously
having to face skyrocketing rents driven by federal policies that prop up the
real estate market, and stunning increases in medical costs driven by Obama’s
embarrassingly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” It’s no accident that death
rates from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning are
soaring just now among working class white people. These are my
neighbors, the people I talk with in laundromats and lodge meetings, and
they’re being driven to the wall.
Most of the time, affluent liberals who are quick to emote
about the sufferings of poor children in conveniently distant corners of the Third
World like to brush aside the issues I’ve just raised as irrelevancies. I’ve
long since lost track of the number of times I’ve heard people insist that the
American working class hasn’t been destroyed, that its destruction doesn’t matter,
or that it was the fault of the working classes themselves. (I’ve occasionally
heard people attempt to claim all three of these things at once.) On those
occasions when the mainstream left deigns to recognize the situation I’ve
sketched out, it’s usually in the terms Hillary Clinton used in her infamous
“basket of deplorables” speech, in which she admitted that there were people
who hadn’t benefited from the recovery and “we need to do something for them.”
That the people in question might deserve to have a voice in what’s done for
them, or to them, is not part of the vocabulary of the affluent American left.
That’s why, if you pay a visit to the town where I live,
you’ll find Trump signs all over the place—and you’ll find the highest
concentration of them in the poor neighborhood just south of my home, a bleak
rundown zone where there’s a church every few blocks and an abandoned house
every few doors, and where the people tipping back beers on a porch of a summer
evening rarely all have the same skin color. They know exactly what they need,
and what tens of thousands of other economically devastated American
communities need: enough full-time jobs at decent wages to give them the chance
to lift their families out of poverty. They understand that need, and discuss
it in detail among themselves, with a clarity you’ll rarely find in the media.
(It’s a source of wry amusement to me that the best coverage of the situation
on the ground here in the flyover states appeared, not in any of America’s
newspapers of record, nor in any of its allegedly serious magazines, but in
a
raucous NSFW online humor magazine.)
What’s more, the working class people who point to a lack of
jobs as the cause of middle America’s economic collapse are dead right. The reason why those tens of thousands of
American communities are economically devastated is that too few people have
enough income to support the small businesses and local economies that used to
thrive there. The money that used to keep main streets bustling across the
United States, the wages that used to be handed out on Friday afternoons to
millions of Americans who’d spent the previous week putting in an honest day’s
work for an honest day’s pay, have been siphoned off to inflate the profits of
a handful of huge corporations to absurd levels and cater to the kleptocratic
feeding frenzy that’s made multimillion-dollar bonuses a matter of course at
the top of the corporate food chain. It really is as simple as that. The Trump
voters in the neighborhood south of my home may not have a handle on all the
details, but they know that their survival depends on getting some of that
money flowing back into paychecks to be spent in their community.
It’s an open question whether they’re going to get that if
Donald Trump wins the election, and a great many of his supporters know this
perfectly well. It’s as certain as
anything can be, though, that they’re not going to get it from Hillary Clinton.
The economic policy she’s touted in her speeches, to the extent that this isn’t
just the sort of campaign rhetoric that will pass its pull date the moment the
last vote is counted, focuses on improving opportunities for the middle
class—the people, in other words, who have already reaped the lion’s share of
those economic benefits that didn’t go straight into the pockets of the rich.
To the working classes, she offers nothing but a repetition of the same empty
slogans and disposable promises. What’s more, they know this, and another round
of empty slogans and disposable promises isn’t going to change that.
Nor, it probably needs to be said, is it going to be changed
by another round of media handwaving designed to make Donald Trump look bad in
the eyes of affluent liberals. I’ve noted with some amusement the various news
stories on the highbrow end of the media noting, in tones variously baffled and
horrified, that when you show Trump supporters videos designed to make them
less enthusiastic about their candidate, they double down. Any number of canned
theories have been floated to explain why that happens, but none that I’ve
heard have dealt with the obvious explanations.
To begin with, it’s not as though that habit is only found
on Trump’s side of the fence. In recent weeks, as one Wikileaks email dump
after another has forced an assortment of stories about Clinton’s arrogant and
corrupt behavior into the news, her followers have doubled down just as
enthusiastically as Trump’s; those of my readers who are familiar with the
psychology of previous investment will likely notice that emotional investment
is just as subject to this law as the financial kind. For that matter,
supporters of both candidates are quite sensibly aware that this election is
meant to choose a public official rather than a plaster saint, and recognize
that a genuine scoundrel who will take the right stands on the issues that
matter to them is a better choice than a squeaky-clean innocent who won’t, even
if such an animal could actually be found in the grubby ecosystem of
contemporary American politics.
That said, there’s another factor that probably plays an
even larger role, which is that when working class Americans get told by
slickly groomed talking heads in suits that something they believe is wrong,
their default assumption is that the talking heads are lying.
Working class Americans, after all, have very good reason
for making this their default assumption. Over and over again, that’s the way
things have turned out. The talking heads insisted that handing over tax
dollars to various corporate welfare queens would bring jobs back to American
communities; the corporations in question pocketed the tax dollars and walked
away. The talking heads insisted that if working class people went to college
at their own expense and got retrained in new skills, that would bring jobs
back to American communities; the academic industry profited mightily but the
jobs never showed up, leaving tens of millions of people buried so deeply under
student loan debt that most of them will never recover financially. The talking
heads insisted that this or that or the other political candidate would bring
jobs back to American communities by pursuing exactly the same policies that
got rid of the jobs in the first place—essentially the same claim that the
Clinton campaign is making now—and we know how that turned out.
For that matter, trust in talking heads generally is at an
all-time low out here in flyover country. Consider the way that herbal
medicine—“God’s medicine” is the usual phrase these days—has become the go-to
option for a huge and growing number of devout rural Christians. There are
plenty of reasons why that should be happening, but surely one of the most
crucial is the cascading loss of faith in the slickly groomed talking heads
that sell modern medicine to consumers. Herbs may not be as effective as modern
pharmaceuticals in treating major illnesses, to be sure, but they generally
don’t have the ghastly side effects that so many pharmaceuticals will give
you. Furthermore, and just as crucially,
nobody ever bankrupted their family and ended up on the street because of the
high price of herbs.
It used to be, not all that long ago, that the sort of
people we’re discussing trusted implicitly in American society and its
institutions. They were just as prone as any urban sophisticate to distrust
this or that politician or businessperson or cultural figure, to be sure; back
in the days when local caucuses and county conventions of the two main political
parties still counted for something, you could be sure of hearing raucous
debates about a galaxy of personalities and issues. Next to nobody, though,
doubted that the basic structures of American society were not merely sound,
but superior to all others.
You won’t find that certainty in flyover country these days.
Where you hear such claims made at all, they’re phrased in the kind of angry
and defensive terms that lets everyone know that the speaker is trying to
convince himself of something he doesn’t entirely believe any more, or in the
kind of elegaic tones that hearken back to an earlier time when things still
seemed to work—when the phrase “the American Dream” still stood for a reality
that many people had experienced and many more could expect to achieve for
themselves and their children. Very few people out here think of the federal
government as anything more than a vast mechanism operated by rich crooks for
their own benefit, at the expense of everyone else. What’s more, the same
cynical attitude is spreading to embrace the other institutions of American
society, and—lethally—the ideals from which those institutions get whatever
legitimacy they still hold in the eyes of the people.
Those of my readers who were around in the late 1980s and
early 1990s have seen this movie before, though it came with Cyrillic subtitles
that time around. By 1985 or so, it had become painfully obvious to most
citizens of the Soviet Union that the grand promises of Marxism would not be
kept and the glorious future for which their grandparents and
great-grandparents had fought and labored was never going to arrive. Glowing
articles in Pravda and Izvestia insisted that everything was just
fine in the Worker’s Paradise; annual five-year plans presupposed that economic
conditions would get steadily better while, for most people, economic
conditions got steadily worse; vast May Day parades showed off the Soviet
Union’s military might, Soyuz spacecraft circled the globe to show off its
technological prowess, and tame intellectuals comfortably situated in the more
affluent districts of Moscow and Leningrad, looking forward to their next
vacation at their favorite Black Sea resort, chattered in print about the good
life under socialism, while millions of ordinary Soviet citizens trudged
through a bleak round of long lines, product shortages, and system-wide
dysfunction. Then crisis hit, and the great-great-grandchildren of the people
who surged to the barricades during the Russian Revolution shrugged, and let
the Soviet Union unravel in a matter of days.
I suspect we’re much closer to a similar cascade of events
here in the United States than most people realize. My fellow peak oil blogger
Dmitry Orlov pointed out a decade or so back, in a series of much-reprinted
blog posts and his book Reinventing Collapse, that the differences
between the Soviet Union and the United States were far less important than
their similarities, and that a Soviet-style collapse was a real possibility
here—a possibility for which most Americans are far less well prepared than
their Russian equivalents in the early 1990s. His arguments have become even
more compelling as the years have passed, and the United States has become
mired ever more deeply in a mire of institutional dysfunction and politico-economic
kleptocracy all but indistinguishable from the one that eventually swallowed
its erstwhile rival.
Point by point, the parallels stand out. We’ve got the news
articles insisting, in tones by turns glowing and shrill, that things have
never been better in the United States and anyone who says otherwise is just
plain wrong; we’ve got the economic pronouncements predicated on continuing
growth at a time when the only things growing in the US economy are its total
debt load and the number of people who are permanently unemployed; we’ve got
the overblown displays of military might and technological prowess, reminiscent
of nothing so much as the macho posturing of balding middle-aged former
athletes who are trying to pretend that they haven’t lost it; we’ve got the
tame intellectuals comfortably situated in the more affluent suburban districts
around Boston, New York, Washington, and San Francisco, looking forward to
their next vacation in whatever the currently fashionable spot might happen to
be, babbling on the internet about the good life under predatory
cybercapitalism.
Meanwhile millions of Americans trudge through a bleak round
of layoffs, wage cuts, part-time jobs at minimal pay, and system-wide
dysfunction. The crisis hasn’t hit yet, but those members of the political
class who think that the people who used to be rock-solid American patriots
will turn out en masse to keep today’s apparatchiks secure in their comfortable
lifestyles have, as the saying goes, another think coming. Nor is it irrelevant that most of the
enlisted personnel in the armed forces, who are the US government’s ultimate
bulwark against popular unrest, come from the very classes that have lost faith
most drastically in the American system. The one significant difference between
the Soviet case and the American one at this stage of the game is that Soviet
citizens had no choice but to accept the leaders the Communist Party of the
USSR foisted off on them, from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev,
until the system collapsed of its own weight.
American citizens, on the other hand, do at least
potentially have a choice. Elections in the United States have been riddled
with fraud for most of two centuries, but since both parties are generally up
to their eyeballs in voter fraud to a roughly equal degree, fraud mostly swings
close elections. It’s still possible for
a sufficiently popular candidate to overwhelm the graveyard vote, the crooked
voting machines, and the other crass realities of American elections by sheer
force of numbers. That way, an outsider unburdened with the echo-chamber
thinking of a dysfunctional elite might just be able to elbow his way into the
White House. Will that happen this time? No one knows.
If George W. Bush was our Leonid Brezhnev, as I’d suggest,
and Barack Obama is our Yuri Andropov, Hillary Clinton is running for the
position of Konstantin Chernenko; her running mate Tim Kaine, in turn, is
waiting in the wings as a suitably idealistic and clueless Mikhail Gorbachev,
under whom the whole shebang can promptly go to bits. While I don’t seriously
expect the trajectory of the United States to parallel that of the Soviet Union
anything like as precisely as this satiric metaphor would suggest, the basic
pattern of cascading dysfunction ending in political collapse is quite a common
thing in history, and a galaxy of parallels suggests that the same thing could
very easily happen here within the next decade or so. The serene conviction
among the political class and their affluent hangers-on that nothing of the
sort could possibly take place is just another factor making it more likely.
It’s by no means certain that a Trump presidency will stop
that from happening, and jolt the United States far enough out of its current
death spiral to make it possible to salvage something from the American
experiment. Even among Trump’s most diehard supporters, it’s common to find
people who cheerfully admit that Trump might not change things enough to
matter; it’s just that when times are desperate enough—and out here in the
flyover states, they are—a leap in the dark is preferable to the guaranteed
continuation of the unendurable.
