I’m still trying to process how the United States could elect a convicted felon, deranged right-wing demagogue as president. It’s going to take a while. There are so many factors that played a role.
For starters, we have to talk about racism and sexism; once again, the voters refused to elect a qualified woman to the Oval Office, and Donald Trump made repeated racist statements about Vice President Kamala Harris. This is reality.
We also have to talk about Gaza; I don’t have data yet, but it’s likely that in some swing states like Michigan, the Biden Harris role in unconditionally supporting Israel’s war cost what could have been critical votes.
But I want to go a little bit deeper, because the rise in right-wing populism, driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, is not unique to the United States—and I am going argue that there’s a very clear reason this is happening.
It should impact the direction of the Democratic Party nationally—but also here in San Francisco and in California.
Let’s listen to Sen. Bernie Sanders. (If the power structure of Democratic Party hadn’t gone all out to prevent him from winning the primaries in 2016, Trump might never have been president). Because he has a powerful point.
It’s hard to underestimate the class anger in this country today—anger that is racist and sexist and homophobic, but is also rooted in economic insecurity.
The working class was once a Democratic stronghold, and would have given Harris a victory. Trump is not the ally of these folks, but he got their votes.
When David Brooks, the conservative NY Times columnists, not only agrees with Sanders but says that the Democratic Party might need a Bernie-style candidate to win the presidency, it’s worth paying attention.
In 2014, the French economist Thomas Piketty warned about exactly what’s happening today, not just in the US but in Europe, where anti-immigrant sentiment is empowering the far right. In his landmark book, Capital in the 21st Century, he argued that economic and wealth inequality was going to destroy the fabric of society, that the percentage of wealth going to a tiny number of elites was fundamentally unsustainable.
Piketty said there’s only one solution—that “training people for the jobs of the future,” and “encouraging economic growth” and even more unionization, simply won’t and can’t work. The only answer is to tax the very rich, at high enough rates to bring down the level of inequality.
No credible economist was able to refute his data or conclusion.
No major nation did anything to act on it.
Now, millions of people, displaced by economic inequality and (the directly related) climate change are refugees, seeking a place that’s safe for their families, and where they can find adequate food and shelter. right-wing politicians are blaming those immigrants for the economic despair that has settled in all over the world. With nobody on the side of, say, the US Democratic Party leadership challenging that narrative, the right wing is winning.
There are many reasons Trump won this election, but deep class-based resentment and anger is absolutely one of them. The working class used to be a reliably Democratic base, but the party has lost those voters. It started, I think, with Bill Clinton.
After Ronald Reagan shocked the Democrats with his victory in 1980 (running on an openly racist and deeply conservative platform emphasizing tax cuts for corporations and rich people), Clinton and some other Democratic governors created the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to move the party to the right—and to appeal to the growing finance sector in the economy.
In the process, they threw the working class under the bus, assuming that no matter how much the party ignored its base, those voters would still not support Republicans.
The culmination of that strategy was the North American Free Trade Agreement. Nafta, backed by and pushed by Clinton and the DLC folks, allowed capital and money—but not people–to move freely between the US, Canada, and Mexico.
It cost the US millions of unionized blue-collar jobs, ad big manufacturers sough cheaper labor (and more lax regualtions) in Mexico. It wrecked the farm economy in Mexico, as us corporations dumped cheap, subsidized corn into that county. That caused a huge uptick in immigration—and since Nafta (unlike the European Union) allowed only money and capital to cross borders, much of that immigration was illegal.
Add in the brutal wars and dictatorships the US was sponsoring in Central and South America, and you start to get the picture.
Union workers lost their jobs. Once-prosperous working-class cities like Detroit were utterly devastated.
Then as the Reagan tax cuts on the rich started to take effect, and the Democrats did nothing to reverse them, and the tech boom started creating unprecedented wealth for a very, very small number of people (most of them white and college educated), life for the working class, for people without college degrees, got more and more perilous.
Along the way, the Democratic Party became the part of the elites.
Today, for people without a college degree, there is very little economic stability. Millions of people can’t afford a house, or even the rent. (The rise in the number of very rich people has had a huge impact on housing prices).
Some of those voters are racist, homophobic, sexist. But some of them, probably enough to have changed the outcome of the election, are just terrified by the state of the economy. The Democrats ignored those voters or took them for granted, and as in Europe, that opened the door for a nativist right-wing populist demagogue.
This has happened before in the world. It should frighten us all.
So now, the Chron says, Gov. Gavin Newsom can be the next leader of the Democratic Party. I think it’s safe to say the Newsom for President campaign started Wednesday morning. But columnist Emily Hoeven says Newsom needs to move more to the right—the same DNC-style approach that laid the groundwork for the Trump presidency.
This is not going to work.
Newsom’s entire political career comes from his connections to the elites, starting with billionaire Gordon Getty. He is a rich person married to a richer person.
More important, he has never, in his entire political career, talked about economic inequality or raising taxes on the rich and big corporations. He’s done the opposite.
The Bernie Sanders voters among the working class are not going to go for the current version of Gavin Newsom.
In San Francisco, the new mayor, Daniel Lurie, is also a rich guy. He won the election by spending millions of dollars and saying he’s an outsider—but now he has to govern. I asked him during a campaign event what he thought about Thomas Piketty; he said he’d never heard of him.
