Happily,
many on the US left are beginning to see the intense, ongoing battle
between Trump and his defenders and the self-described “Resistance”
as reflective of a “split in the ruling class.”
This
is a welcome development because it removes some of the confusions
fostered by the Democratic Party leadership and the childish
sensationalism and witless simplicity of the capitalist media. With
little more than Russians-under-every-bed to rouse the electorate,
the Democrats sell a narrative of Trump-as-Traitor,
Trump-as-Defiler-in-Chief, and Trump-as-Fascist. Nancy Pelosi, the
billionaire face of the Democratic Party parliamentary contingent,
declared three priorities, should the Democrats win the interim
election, three pieces of battered, rusty liberal boilerplate:
lowering health costs and med prices (always promised, never
delivered nor deliverable under a private system), higher wages and
improved infrastructure (unrealized for nearly half a century and a
teaser to the labor movement), and “cleaning up corruption”
(which means continuing the bizarre Mueller witch hunt). No mention
of overturning the Trump administration’s tax cuts for the rich.
It
is a step out of the weeds of political posturing and shallow cable
news analysis to now see a real, fierce battle between different
groups of the wealthiest and most powerful, a conflict that gives
some deeper meaning to the bizarre antics of the Trump era. Behind
the lurid and illusory imagery of a corrupted vulgarian (Trump)
resisted by the “heroic” protectors of freedom and security (the
FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc.) lies an actual contest over ideas,
interests, and destiny. So it is a good thing that not everyone has
been seduced by the cartoon-like political circus constructed by the
capitalist media. It is a good thing that more are seeing a contest
between the rich and powerful, contesting different visions of the
future of capitalism: “a split in the ruling class.”
“My
administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks”
For
much of the last two years, I have written often of the emergence of
a ruling class alternative to the conventional wisdom of market
fundamentalism-- so-called “neo-liberalism” and “globalization.”
I have written of the growth of economic nationalism in the
“advanced” economies as the expression of that alternative. I
have postulated its increasing ruling class popularity as grounded in
the damage to globalism-- deceleration of trade, slow growth,
financial imbalances, popular discontent, etc.-- in the wake of the
global crisis that began in 2007. The intensifying competition in the
politics of energy are offered as materially
symptomatic of economic nationalism, as is the disinterest in
maintaining a relatively peaceful backdrop to securing and promoting
trade. The US, for example is more interested in selling arms than in
resolving its many wars (Secretary of State Pompeo is said to have
convinced those in the Trump administration publicly shamed by the
slaughter in Yemen not to cut off support for Saudi Arabia because of
the possible loss of $2 billion in weapons sales).
Therefore,
a recent commentary (The Dividends of
Wrath, 9-3-18) by the influential
senior national correspondent for Bloomberg
Businessweek, Joshua Green, counts
as recognition of the shifting political terrain triggered by the
crisis and its direct consequence in “Making America Great Again,”
the slogan of Trump’s economic nationalism. The subtitle of Green’s
think-piece clearly identifies that theme: How
anger over the financial bailout gives us the Trump presidency.
Through
reminiscences of an interview with former Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner, Green takes us back to the aftermath of the financial
collapse, where a resigned Geithner expressed a profound fear of the
populace seeking “Old Testament justice” for Obama’s bailout of
the banks and the coddling of the banksters.
Green
reminds us of Obama’s infamous White House meeting with the CEOs of
the major banks where he candidly told them, “My administration is
the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
Reflecting
on Obama’s words, Green comments:
Ten
years after the crisis, it’s clear Obama was foolish to think
public sentiment could be negated or held at bay… Millions of
people lost their job, their home, their retirement account-- or all
three-- and fell out of the middle class. Many more live with a
gnawing anxiety that they still could. Wages were stagnant when the
crisis hit and have remained so throughout the recovery. Recently the
Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US workers’ share of
nonfarm income has fallen close to a post-World War II low.
This
unusually harsh mainstream indictment of post-apocalyptic capitalism
well captures the conditions that have stoked fear of dusted-off
pitchforks. And make no mistake, those who rule the major capitalist
centers pay attention to the anger, not to answer it, but to deflect
it.
Green
continues: “...the pitchfork-wielding masses will eventually make
themselves heard. The story of American politics over the last decade
is the story of how the forces Obama and Geithner failed to contain
reshaped the world… unleashing partisan energies on the Left
(Occupy Wall Street) and the right (the Tea Party)... The
critical massing of conditions that led to Donald Trump had their
genesis in the backlash...” [my
emphasis]
While
it may be emotionally satisfying to blame Obama and Geithner and go
no further, it is more revealing to locate the cause of Trump in the
failure of market fundamentalism and the unsettling consequences for
capitalism if no alternative were found. Trump and “Make America
Great Again” may be a crude response to dangers unleashed by market
fundamentalism run amok, but response it is.
“We
worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off these proposals”
Insightfully,
Green locates
the first
stirring of an alternative to the reigning politico-economic paradigm
in Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to
dissociate the Republicans from the Obama bailouts-- in his words to
“...keep our fingerprints off these proposals [the TARP funding of
the banks].”
But
it wasn’t until Trump that anyone crafted a strategy that
successfully harnessed the mass anger into political success. “By
the time Trump declares his candidacy in 2015, Americans of every
persuasion had soured on the ‘elites’ running both parties,
something his Republican opponents didn’t understand until far too
late,” Green notes.
Trump
was able to cobble together a campaign based on responding to the
anger with a measure of economic nationalism, patriotism, and,
paradoxically, partisanship for the working class.
Green
explains:
Today,
his campaign is remembered as having been driven mostly by
anti-immigrant animosity. But… Trump spent loads of time attacking
Wall Street on behalf of the forgotten little guy and fanning the
suspicion that a cabal of political and financial eminences was
screwing ordinary people.
When
I interviewed Trump just after he’d locked up the Republican
nomination, he told me that he intended to transform the GOP into “a
workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage
increase in 18 years, that are angry.”
His
closing message in the campaign consciously evoked the disgust so
many people had come to feel toward Wall Street and Washington. His
final ad on the eve of the election flashed images of Federal Reserve
Chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and sought
to implicate them, and Hillary Clinton, in what Trump called “a
global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions
that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its
wealth, and put that money into the pockets of large corporations and
political entities”... It’s no surprise that this message struck
a chord: What is Trump if not the embodiment of a balled fist and a
vow to deliver Old Testament justice?
Of
course the idea that Trump is building a workers’ party is
ridiculous, and Green knows it. But that is not the point.
The
point is that Trump is not merely the anomaly, the Elmer Gantry
figure, bent on capitalizing solely on his cynicism, his vulgarity,
his hypocrisy to cheat his way to the pinnacle of power. He is not
simply the cartoon-like character of orange hue, small hands, and a
Mussolini-like pout. Instead, he represents a section of the ruling
class’s alternative to the now nearly thirty-year unopposed reign
of market fundamentalism.
But
it is most important to stress that he is a ruling
class answer to the failings of a
ruling class-dictated
era of the universal worship of private property exclusively, of US
policed globalism, and of lubricated trade. The latter ideology has
not surrendered and the ideology of economic nationalism has yet to
dominate. In no way does the struggle between the two roads promise
to advance the interests of the working class-- both are dead ends
for working people. And Green confidently reminds us that the damage
wrought by the economic crash “...makes it all but certain that the
next presidential election, and Trump’s possible successor, will be
shaped by it, too.”
Green,
with his earnest, liberal hopes, believes that there is a chance that
the otherwise disinterested Democrats will take up the cause of those
wielding the pitchforks. He sees that opportunity in Elizabeth
Warren. Others see it in Bernie Sanders or the ripples of DSA
progressivism on the surface of the Democratic Party.
With
the Democrats delivering no qualitatively meaningful reforms for the
US working class since the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, that
likelihood has moved from hope to groundless faith.
Taking
sides in this struggle over how best to serve capitalism will only
further set back the cause of working people. And looking for a road
away from serving capitalism within the Democratic Party is a futile
repeat of old illusions.
Only
a concerted effort to create or nurture a truly independent,
anti-capitalist movement addressing the real and urgent needs of
working people makes sense today, when the bourgeois parties
willingly sacrifice the interests of workers to the Moloch of
capitalism. Only a movement with revolutionary purpose can divert the
working class from the false prophets of inward-looking demagogy,
tribalism, and Spencerian Survival of the Fittest.
Greg
Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
