Archdruids may take vacations but politics never sleeps, and
during the month that’s elapsed since the last post here on The Archdruid
Report, quite a number of things relevant to this blog’s project have gone
spinning past the startled eyes of those who pay attention to the US political
scene. I’ll get to some of the others in upcoming weeks; the one that caught my
attention most forcefully, for reasons I trust my readers will find
understandable, was the reaction to a post of mine from a few months back
titled Donald
Trump and the Politics of Resentment.
It’s not uncommon for a post of mine on a controversial
subject to get picked up by other blogs and attract a fair amount of discussion
and commentary. On the other hand, when something I write takes not much more
than a week to become the most-read post in the history of The Archdruid
Report, goes on to attract more than half again as many page views as the
nearest runner-up, and gets nearly twice as many comments as the most
comment-heavy previous post, it’s fair to say that something remarkable has
happened. When a follow-up post, The
Decline and Fall of Hillary Clinton, promptly became the second
most-read post in this blog’s history and attracted even more comments—well,
here again, it seems tolerably clear that I managed to hit an exquisitely
sensitive nerve.
It may not be an accident, either, that starting about a
week after that first post went up, two things relevant to it have started to
percolate through the mass media. The first, and to my mind the most promising,
is that a few journalists have managed to get past the usual crass stereotypes,
and talk about the actual reasons why so many voters have decided to back
Donald Trump’s aspirations this year. I was startled to see a
thoughtful article by Peggy Noonan along those lines in the Wall
Street Journal, and even more astonished to see pieces making similar points in
other media outlets—here’s
an example,, and
here’s another.
Mind you, none of the articles that I saw quite managed to
grapple with the raw reality of the situation that’s driving so many
wage-earning Americans to place their last remaining hopes for the future on
Donald Trump. Even Noonan’s piece, though it’s better than most and makes an
important point we’ll examine later, falls short. In her analysis, what’s wrong is that a
privileged subset of Americans have been protected from the impacts of the last
few decades of public policy, while the rest of us haven’t had that luxury. This is true, of course, but it considerably
understates things. The class she’s talking about—the more affluent half or so
of the salary class, to use the taxonomy I suggested in my post—hasn’t simply
been protected from the troubles affecting other Americans. They’ve profited, directly and indirectly,
from the policies that have plunged much of the wage class into impoverishment
and misery, and their reliable response to any attempt to discuss that awkward
detail shows tolerably clearly that a good many of them are well aware of it.
I’m thinking here, among many other examples along the same
lines, of a
revealing article earlier this year from a reporter who attended a
feminist conference on sexism in the workplace. All the talk there was about
how women in the salary class could improve their own prospects for promotion
and the like. It so happened that the reporter’s sister works in a wage-class
job, and she quite sensibly inquired whether the conference might spare a
little time to discuss ways to improve prospects for women who don’t happen to
belong to the salary class. Those of my readers who have seen discussions of
this kind know exactly what happened next: a bit of visible discomfort, a few
vaguely approving comments, and then a resumption of the previous subjects as
though no one had made so embarrassing a suggestion.
It’s typical of the taboo that surrounds class prejudice in
today’s industrial nations that not even the reporter mentioned the two most
obvious points about this interchange. The first, of course, is that the line
the feminists at the event drew between those women whose troubles with sexism
were of interest to them, and those whose problems didn’t concern them in the
least, was a class line. The second is that the women at the event had
perfectly valid, if perfectly selfish, reasons for drawing that line. In order
to improve the conditions of workers in those wage class industries that employ
large numbers of women, after all, the women at the conference would themselves
have had to pay more each month for daycare, hairstyling, fashionable clothing,
and the like. Sisterhood may be powerful, as the slogans of an earlier era
liked to claim, but it’s clearly not powerful enough to convince women in the
salary class to inconvenience themselves for the benefit of women who don’t
happen to share their privileged status.
To give the women at the conference credit, though, at least
they didn’t start shouting about some other hot-button issue in the hope of
distracting attention from an awkward question. That was the second thing
relevant to my post that started happening the week after it went up. All at
once, much of the American left responded to the rise of Donald Trump by
insisting at the top of their lungs that the
only reason, the
only possible reason, that anyone at all supports the Trump campaign
is that Trump is a racist and so are all his supporters.
It’s probably necessary to start by unpacking the dubious
logic here, so that we can get past that and see what’s actually being said.
Does Trump have racial prejudices? No doubt; most white Americans do. Do his
followers share these same prejudices? Again, no doubt some of them do—not all
his followers are white, after all, a point that the leftward end of the media
has been desperately trying to obscure in recent weeks. Let’s assume for the
sake of argument, though, that Trump and his followers do indeed share an
assortment of racial bigotries. Does that fact, if it is a fact, prove that
racism must by definition be the only thing that makes Trump appeal to his
followers?
Of course it proves nothing of the kind. You could use the
same flagrant illogic to insist that since Trump enjoys steak, and many of his
followers share that taste, the people who follow him must be entirely
motivated by hatred for vegetarians. Something that white Americans generally
don’t discuss, though I’m told that most people of color are acutely aware of
it, is that racial issues simply aren’t that important to white people in this
country nowadays. The frantic and
passionate defense of racial bigotry that typified the Jim Crow era is rare
these days outside of the white-supremacist fringe. What has replaced it, by and large, are
habits of thought and action that most white people consider to be no big
deal—and you don’t get a mass movement going in the teeth of the political
establishment by appealing to attitudes that the people who hold them consider
to be no big deal.
Behind the shouts of “Racist!” directed at the Trump
campaign by a great many affluent white liberals, rather, lies a rather
different reality. Accusations of racism play a great many roles in
contemporary American discourse—and of course the identification of actual
racism is among these. When affluent white liberals make that accusation, on
the other hand, far more often than not, it’s a dog whistle.
I should probably explain that last phrase for the benefit
of those of my readers who don’t speak fluent Internet. A dog whistle, in
online jargon, is a turn of phrase or a trope that expresses some form of
bigotry while giving the bigot plausible deniability. During the civil rights
movement, for example, the phrase “states’ rights” was a classic dog whistle;
the rights actually under discussion amounted to the right of white Southerners
to impose racial discrimination on their black neighbors, but the White
Citizens Council spokesmen who waxed rhapsodic about states’ rights never had
to say that in so many words. That there were, and are, serious issues about
the balance of power between states and the federal government that have
nothing do with race, and thus got roundly ignored by both sides of the
struggle, is just one more irony in a situation that had no shortage of them
already.
In the same way, the word “racist” in the mouths of the
pundits and politicians who have been applying it so liberally to the Trump
campaign is a dog whistle for something they don’t want to talk about in so
many words. What they mean by it, of course, is “wage class American.”
That’s extremely common. Consider the recent standoff in
Oregon between militia members and federal officials. While that was ongoing,
wags in the blogosphere and the hip end of the media started referring to the
militia members as “Y’all-Qaeda.” Attentive readers may have noted that none of
the militia members came from the South—the only part of the United States
where “y’all” is the usual second person plural pronoun. To the best of my
knowledge, all of them came from the dryland West, where “y’all” is no more
common than it is on the streets of Manhattan or Vancouver. Why, then, did the
label catch on so quickly and get the predictable sneering laughter of the
salary class?
It spread so quickly and got that laugh because most members
of the salary class in the United States love to apply a specific stereotype to
the entire American wage class. You know that stereotype as well as I do, dear
reader. It’s a fat, pink-faced, gap-toothed Southern good ol’ boy in jeans and
a greasy T-shirt, watching a NASCAR race on television from a broken-down sofa,
with one hand stuffed elbow deep into a bag of Cheez Doodles, the other
fondling a shotgun, a Confederate flag patch on his baseball cap and a Klan
outfit in the bedroom closet. As a description of wage-earning Americans in
general, that stereotype is as crass, as bigoted, and as politically motivated
as any of the racial and sexual stereotypes that so many people these days are
ready to denounce—but if you mention this, the kind of affluent white liberals
who would sooner impale themselves on their own designer corkscrews than
mention African-Americans and watermelons in the same paragraph will insist at
the top of their lungs that it’s not a stereotype, it’s the way “those people”
really are.
Those of my readers who don’t happen to know any people from
the salary class, and so haven’t had the opportunity to hear the kind of hate
speech they like to use for the wage class, might want to pick up the latest
edition of the National Review, and read a really remarkable diatribe by Kevin
Williamson—it’s behind a paywall, but here’s
a sample. The motive force
behind this tantrum was the fact that many people in the Republican party’s
grassroots base are voting in their own best interests, and thus for Trump,
rather than falling into line and doing what they’re told by their soi-disant
betters. The very idea! It’s a fine display
of over-the-top classist bigotry, as well as a first-rate example of the way
that so many people in the salary class like to insist that poverty is always
and only the fault of the poor.
May I please be frank? The reason that millions of Americans
have had their standard of living hammered for forty years, while the most
affluent twenty per cent have become even more affluent, is no mystery. What
happened was that corporate interests in this country, aided and abetted by a
bipartisan consensus in government and cheered on by the great majority of the
salary class, stripped the US economy of living wage jobs by offshoring most of
America’s industrial economy, on the one hand, and flooding the domestic job
market with millions of legal and illegal immigrants on the other.
That’s why a family living on one average full-time wage in
1966 could afford a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other
necessities and comforts of an ordinary American lifestyle, while a family with
one average full time wage in most US cities today is living on the street.
None of that happened by accident; no acts of God were responsible; no
inexplicable moral collapse swept over the American wage class and made them
incapable of embracing all those imaginary opportunities that salary class
pundits like to babble about. That change was brought about, rather, by
specific, easily identifiable policies. As a result, all things considered,
blaming the American poor for the poverty that has been imposed on them by
policies promoted by the affluent is the precise economic equivalent of blaming
rape victims for the actions of rapists.
In both cases, please note, blaming the victim makes a
convenient substitute for talking about who’s actually responsible, who
benefits from the current state of affairs, and what the real issues are. When
that conversation is one that people who have a privileged role in shaping
public discourse desperately don’t want to have, blaming the victim is an
effective diversionary tactic, and accordingly it gets much use in the US media
these days. There are, after all, plenty of things that the people who shape
public discourse in today’s America don’t want to talk about. The fact that the
policies pushed by those same shapers of opinion have driven millions of
American families into poverty and misery isn’t the most unmentionable of these
things, as it happens. The most unmentionable of the things that don’t get
discussed is the fact that those policies have failed.
It really is as simple as that. The policies we’re talking
about—lavish handouts for corporations and the rich, punitive austerity schemes
for the poor, endless wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, malign neglect of
domestic infrastructure, and deer-in-the-headlights blank looks or vacuous
sound bites in response to climate change and the other consequences of our
frankly moronic maltreatment of the biosphere that keeps us all alive—were
supposed to bring prosperity to the United States and its allies and stability
to the world. They haven’t done that, they won’t do that, and with whatever
respect is due to the supporters of Hillary Clinton, four more years of those
same policies won’t change that fact. The difficulty here is simply that no one
in the political establishment, and precious few in the salary class in
general, are willing to recognize that failure, much less learn its obvious
lessons or notice the ghastly burdens that those policies have imposed on the
majorities who have been forced to carry the costs.
Here, though, we’re in territory that has been well mapped
out in advance by one of the historians who have helped guide the project of
this blog since its inception. In his magisterial twelve-volume A Study of
History, Arnold Toynbee explored in unforgiving detail the processes by
which societies fail. Some civilizations, he notes, are overwhelmed by forces
outside their control, but this isn’t the usual cause of death marked on
history’s obituaries. Far more often than not, rather, societies that go
skidding down the well-worn route marked “Decline and Fall” still have plenty
of resources available to meet the crises that overwhelm them and plenty of
options that could have saved the day—but those resources aren’t put to
constructive use and those options never get considered.
This happens, in turn, because the political elites of those
failed societies lose the ability to notice that the policies they want to
follow don’t happen to work. The leadership of a rising civilization pays close
attention to the outcomes of its policies and discards those that don’t work. The leadership of a falling civilization
prefers to redefine “success” as “following the approved policies” rather than
“yielding the preferred outcomes,” and concentrates on insulating itself from
the consequences of its mistakes rather than recognizing the mistakes and
dealing with their consequences. The lessons of failure are never learned, and
so the costs of failure mount up until they can no longer be ignored.
This is where Peggy Noonan’s division of the current
population into “protected” and “unprotected” classes has something useful to
offer. Members of the protected class—in today’s America, as already noted,
this is above all the more affluent half or so of the salary class—live within
a bubble that screens them from any contact with the increasingly impoverished
and immiserated majority. As far as they can see, everything’s fine; all their
friends are prospering, and so are they; spin-doctored news stories and
carefully massaged statistics churned out by government offices insist that
nothing could possibly be wrong. They go from gated residential community to
office tower to exclusive restaurant to high-end resort and back again, and the
thought that it might be useful once in a while to step outside the bubble and
go see what conditions are like in the rest of the country would scare the
bejesus out of them if it ever occurred to them at all.
In a rising civilization, as Toynbee points out, the
political elite wins the loyalty and respect of the rest of the population by
recognizing problems and then solving them. In a falling civilization, by
contrast, the political elite forfeits the loyalty and respect of the rest of
the population by creating problems and then ignoring them. That’s what lies
behind the crisis of legitimacy that occurs so often in the twilight years of a
society in decline—and that, in turn, is the deeper phenomenon that lies behind
the meteoric rise of Donald Trump. If a
society’s officially sanctioned leaders can’t lead, won’t follow, and aren’t
willing to get out of the way, sooner or later people are going to start
looking for a way to shove them through history’s exit turnstile, by whatever
means turn out to be necessary.
Thus if Trump loses the election in November, that doesn’t
mean that the threat to the status quo is over—far from it. If Hillary Clinton becomes president, we can
count on four more years of the same failed and feckless policies, which she’s
backed to the hilt throughout her political career, and thus four more years in
which millions of Americans outside the narrow circle of affluence will be
driven deeper into poverty and misery, while being told by the grinning
scarecrows of officialdom that everything is just fine. That’s not a recipe for
social stability; those who make peaceful change impossible, it’s been pointed
out, make violent change inevitable. What’s more, Trump has already shown every
ambitious demagogue in the country exactly how to build a mass following, and
he’s also shown a great many wage-earning Americans that there can be alternatives
to an intolerable status quo.
No matter how loudly today’s establishment insists that the
policies it favors are the only thinkable options, the spiraling failure of
those policies, and the appalling costs they impose on people outside the
bubble of privilege, guarantee that sooner or later the unthinkable will become
the inescapable. That’s the real news of this election season: the end of ordinary politics, and the first
stirrings of an era of convulsive change that will leave little of today’s
conventional wisdom intact.
**********************
On a not unrelated theme, I’m delighted to announce that my next book from New Society Publishers, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead, is now available for preorder. Readers who favor the sort of feel-good pablum for the overprivileged marketed by Yes! Magazine and its equivalents will want to give this one a pass. (It’s been suggested to me more than once that if I ran a magazine, it would have to be titled Probably Not! Magazine: A Journal of Realistic Futures.) On the other hand, those who are looking for a sober assessment of the mess into which we’ve collectively backed ourselves, and the likely consequences of that mess over the next five centuries or so, may find it just their cup of astringent tea.