As November 2016 slides into December, I’m ready to move on to other things. But first, here’s a few more thoughts on what just might be the most distressing and damaging election in U.S. history. Or not.
Questions of all kinds relating to Trump’s win will be around for a long time. With enough good questions getting asked, the whole fiasco may yet turn into a blessing in disguise. (Hope springs eternal….) Here’s a couple of conundrums to ponder as the fallout from November 8, 2016, settles over the land.
What Happened?
What just happened? How did Trump confound most polls and expectations, and become President Elect?
Why did so many of the people most damaged by big “business as usual,” vote for the party that stands for big business? Where did America’s distinctive spirit of optimism, fairness, and “can do” go?
There is no end of pundits and professors puzzling over such questions, and writing lots of different explanations. Among the blizzard of blaming and hand-wringing (both reasonable and appropriate under the circumstances), here’s a few facts and two or three conclusions that I’ve come to.
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Galloping Inequality & Populist Anger
First The gap between rich and poor in America has reached towering proportions. That’s one fact. I won’t repeat the stats here. Check it out. Google it for yourself. Get Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s book, The Price of Inequality (2012) from your nearest public library or book store. (It’s an easy read, but still manages to look deeply and realistically at the startling growth of inequality over the last three decades and its causes and consequences. And it backs it all up with hundreds of end-notes that you can use to dig deeper or update trends if you want to.) Here’s a few more highlights that I found from Stiglitz and other sources.
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Second. Inequality goes up and down, and it doesn’t just get worse or better by itself. Since Reagan, income inequality has galloped upward to the highest level ever in U.S. history. And that’s income; the wealth gap—a more significant measure—is even greater. The top 1 percent now owns more than one third, and growing, of our nation’s wealth. We have a bad case of what my friend, economist Ken Peres, calls “runaway inequality.” We’re galloping along the cliff edge and tilting seriously out of balance. More and more wealth funnels into ever fewer private pockets. How can any democracy survive that?
Third. What’s that got to do with Trump? Well, Trump’s win is a warning we need to take seriously. Many people are angry and don’t see a way out with business as usual. And they’re right. That’s the thing: They’re right to be mad (though mad to be Right). They are realistic to give up on the system as it now is.
Our political system and economy have failed more and more people over the last few decades, and it’s getting worse. It doesn’t work for a lot of people now—at least not the way it did. That’s what the figures on income and wealth inequality mean. Many voted for Trump to protest real losses and real wrongs.
(The strange thing is that who and what Trump is—his outsized wealth and extravagance, his predatory business practices, his avoidance of paying his fair or even legal share of taxes, his flagrant narcissism, the way he stiffs employees and contractors working for him—perfectly illustrate how the rich get richer at the expense of the rest of us. The paradox of it all illustrates how the forces that sent inequality galloping to begin with are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing—and will continue to be until we get scared or mad enough, and smart enough, to forcefully reign them in.)
That so many working people voted for this guy also tells us something else. Trump supporters voted for change, for shaking things up. But who they voted for is something else indeed. Look, for a moment, at Trump as a politician. One writer describes him—that something else people voted for—as “a buffoonish dilettante, a man with no ideas, no political experience, and no understanding of the world he wants to lead. Worse still,” he continues, Trump “put fascism on the ballot, and half of America’s voters said ‘Yes.'” Such characterizations sound extreme, but they echo what many otherwise sober, intelligent, and distinguished observers also say. Others point to the racism, misogyny, and nativism in his in own words and in the actions of some of those he has stirred up. You can find a couple of really grim scenarios of Trump’s America here, and here. It may not get that bad. Hopefully not! But we’re right to be worried.
What Happened to the Other Team?
The Dems Fumble The Ball
Fourth. Where (are) the Democrats in all this? Galloping inequality comes into the picture here too. Somehow, back before my time, the Republican party, the party of Abe Lincoln, fell into the pocket of big business while the Democratic Party stood up for working people. It stood up for unions, for regulating big business to protect ordinary people, for graduated and more equitable taxation, for policies that supported public education and other public goods including the environment. It stood for reigning in runaway inequality. But in recent decades Democratic politicians embraced the same neoliberal economic policies and cozied up to the same moneyed interests as the Republicans.
I really don’t know how or why that happened. Perhaps, given the general rightward lurch after Reagan that seemed to sweep the political center of gravity along with it, the Democrats felt like they had to lean with the lurch—to “go with the flow.” Perhaps the growing inequality of wealth raises its ugly head here too, along with growing costs to run political campaigns. Together these trends clearly give wealthy interests greater control over politics. Then there’s the power of lobbyists…. And so it goes.
However it happened, why it happened, I don’t know. But what happened is that the Democratic Party got sucked into same whirlpool of wealth and politics as the Republicans.
No wonder people feel cynical, angry, and that there’s no where to turn. There isn’t. No wonder they feel that the whole damned system is corrupt and rigged against them. It is.
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Take-Home Lessons.
So, are there any take-home lessons here? I think so. For one, the policies and politics, the ideological agendas and political/economic mechanisms, that create such extreme concentrated wealth as we now have threaten democracy itself. They threaten the core values that have helped make America great. You can’t have a functioning democracy with a cavernous divide between the wealthy and the rest—because, in the end, economic power becomes political power. Stiglitz puts it this way:
“Growing economic inequality leads to a growing imbalance of political power, a vicious nexus between politics and economics.”
In other words, the more our nation’s wealth goes to the one percent—or to the 0.1 percent—the more they can rig the system to rake in even more wealth. (And they will. “The rich are different – and not in a good way.” Studies show that wealth selects for and breeds people who steer by outsized greed and little social conscience. When they’re allowed too much political power these values infect the whole culture).
It’s a classic vicious circle. In that light, Trump’s “win” (he did lose the popular vote, after all) is not a curious anomaly but part of the process, a big scary bump down to another level in the erosion of democracy in America. We’re unbalanced, tilting on the edge of where we don’t want to go.
So, what’ can we take home from all this? Basically, we face a choice. Do we continuing to gallop down the path on which this election and the figure of Trump himself is a major signpost? Or will we reign in runaway inequality, turn around, canter back and find the road we missed—the high road to a better democracy.
Sadly, I’m not sure that Hillary would put us on the high road either. But maybe. I give her credit for being smart, experienced, and at heart a good person. At least, she’d have Bernie and all his energized supporters pushing and pulling her back toward what the Dems Left behind when they started sipping the neoliberal Kool-Aid a few decades back.
Finally, as I said above, inequality is always with us, but sometimes more so and sometimes less so. High inequality is not inevitable. It is important to understand the interests that spurred our current runaway inequality into motion, and how they did it. I’ve got a few things about this that are coming together for my next post. Soon.