So Trump got elected. In
the aftermath, people are saying that urban liberal elites didn’t pay
sufficient attention to the complaints of middle- and working-class America,
especially rural middle-America. I more or less agree with that, but I’m also not
sure much more could be done given the US’ history and institutions and the basis of the
differences between urban ‘elites’ and rural Americans.
Numerous commentators have underlined
that this result is not a function of economic deterioration in Republican
voting districts. That it is instead about racism (a ‘whitelash’) and sexism.
The main point against the economic argument is that the median wealth of Trump
voters in exit polls was about $70K p.a. These people aren’t on struggle
street.
I am hesitant to dismiss
the economic dimensions of this result. Countries that undertook structural
adjustment in the late 20th century in line with the inexorable technological
drivers of globalisation under left-wing governments, like Australia, New
Zealand, Germany, Canada and Scandinavia, do not have Brexit levels of
reactionary sentiment, at least not yet. Crypto-fascist, isolationist parties
are rising in all these countries, but they aren’t getting near power (Holland
is a curious case that I need to think more about). That said, I also don’t
think that Sanders had a reasonable economic plan to help struggling America.
He had sympathy, but no plan. Free college tuition is not a plan. Hillary had a
plan, one that recognised the realities of America’s system of checks and
balances and the necessity of incremental reform. Sanders would have been just
as disastrous for policy as Trump. Sure, I’d sleep easier because at least
Sanders won’t drop a Nuke on a whim, but he still wouldn’t be a great outcome,
especially for ‘ordinary’ Americans.
Having said all that about
the economic aspects of this result, racial sentiment seems right now to have been
the actual decisive factor in both Trump’s win and Brexit. I think this is a
symptom of a deeper aversion to the pace of change that is accompanying
globalisation and the present pace of technological change. The psychological
sciences have demonstrated comprehensively in the last few decades that humans
do not like ambiguity and uncertainty, and they hate the feeling that they don’t
have control (see Terror Management Theory for a primer). I refer to you to
Paul Keating’s prescient critique of Hanson for how this manifests in the
political sphere (Keating, P. ‘For the New Australia’ address at UNSW 1996):
The
great tragedy of the shamelessly regressive politics of Pauline Hanson is not
so much that it is rooted in ignorance, prejudice and fear, though it is; not
so much that it projects the ugly face of racism, though it does; not so much
that it is dangerously divisive and deeply hurtful to many of her fellow
Australians, though it is; not even that it will cripple our efforts to enmesh
ourselves in a region wherein lie the jobs and prosperity of future generations
of young Australians, though it will—the great tragedy is that it perpetrates a
myth, a fantasy, a lie.
The
myth of the monoculture. The lie that we can retreat to it.
The younger generation has
grown up in uncertain, fast-changing conditions, so they can adapt, but the
boomers and the rest have lived through a lifetime of steady jobs, relatively steady
growth, a consistent ideological narrative from the Cold War and a long peace
founded on US hegemony. They can’t handle the pace of change (China has gone
from Nothing to contesting the US in 30 years!) and their response is to
retreat into the familiar. When faced with uncertainty, people retreat into
their basic cultural values—tribal values. Liberal elites hold onto the hope
that the staggering economic costs of a retreat from globalisation will be
enough to prevent people voting for dynamite, but Brexit and Trump demonstrate
that no matter how large the opportunity cost, people will vote to hold on to
the illusion of control.
It’s not clear what ‘liberal
elites’ can do about this. The contemporary urban liberal accepts globalisation
and benefits from it. What’s more, they think that the best hope for disaffected
rural communities is to embrace globalisation, with good reason. It is critical
to underline that the most successful rural communities in America are those
that have accepted immigrants, notably Hispanics, because those Hispanics have
brought investment, new business and cheap farm labour. The same is true of
Britain and Australia. So the economic solution is actually more openness, not
less. If you believe the data you can’t in good conscience recommend anything
else. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, urban liberal elites see
racial biases and sexism as completely morally unacceptable. They can’t pander
to such prejudices no matter how much it might get them into power. This is especially the case given that most urban liberals see themselves as global citizens. If a job leaving the US creates 10 in Mexico then that is a net increase in the welfare of humanity and you're morally obliged to back it. Why should being born in America give you some special right to a good job when someone else would work harder for it and get more out of it? This is something the Sander side, with its calls for economically catastrophic trade abolition, never appreciated. The liberal
line to middle-America is thus to say ‘this is the reality of the situation; you can
come with us and things will get better gradually, or you can go along with
Trumps hallucinations and end up dead’. And now we’re dead.
In terms of positive steps
that might be taken, I think actual liberal elites need to become more
politically active, and need to devote a lot of time to learning better
communication. I think it is worth distinguishing here between smug liberal ‘elites’
who aren’t actually elite and don’t have power, actual elites who do have
power, actual liberals who stress constantly about how to help disaffected
voters, and those few actual liberals who also happen to be elites. There are
heaps of people who are progressive voters who work in well-paid urban, professional
jobs whose only reaction to this election has been ‘I can’t believe those despicable
racist, sexists voted for Trump’. That is a smug reaction. Very few of those
people have any real power to speak of. Then you’ve got elites, especially the
business community, who are currently shitting a brick about the damage to
wealth things like Trump will cause, but won’t take long to find a way to keep
making money (e.g. stocks in private prisons). Then you’ve got liberals like
the people I work with who care deeply about democracy, have faith in the
median voter, and have been busting a nut for decades to try to figure out how
to ensure compensation for the losers from globalisation and arrest the decline
of the not-so-cerebral classes, by which I mean people who don’t work in
creative jobs (such jobs are the future, are hard, require a certain cognitive
disposition and are rare). Problematically for left-wing values, such liberals
are not common, and very few of them have power. Many of those who do have
power, like Paul Krugman, are infected with an intellectual arrogance that
buttresses a moral arrogance and results in smugness and ineffectual talk. There’s
also the problem that humble liberalism lends itself to an aversion to naked
politics—the kind of stuff Get Up does. Yet that kind of stuff is necessary to
win elections. Intellectual liberals always try to convince people with
reasoning, even when it is abundantly clear that instinct, emotion and
tribalism have taken over and reasons won’t get through. Reasons are also
becoming increasingly complex and hard to communicate to people who don’t want
to listen.
And then there are the
politicians. While the intellectual elites can maybe just about wrap their
heads around what’s going on and the best among them (like Varoufakis for
example) can even come up with some workable policies, very few politicians can
follow through on any of that. Politicians are tribal, instinctive and
emotional. They also rarely have the cognitive equipment necessary for modern
policy, especially when they mostly care about power. Such politicians cannot provide the kind of powerful narrative that soothes a disaffected public and calms their fears. Hawke could do that, but he was a very unusual leader. As such, I think one of the most important things going forward is for
liberal elites to become more politically active and to start learning how to
communicate with disaffected voters. That said, you can’t talk to someone who
thinks Obama was born in Kenya—the conspiracy theory aspects of this election
are terrifying to say the least, and Malcolm Roberts suggests Australia isn't far off.
I think we’re in for a
rough couple of decades. The last time this kind of tribal hysteria gripped the
West we got WW2 and the curtain seemed to be falling on the enlightenment.
Reason and humanism rebounded and flourished through the second half of
the 20th century, but we had to kill a few million people first. I
really hope it doesn’t go that way again; we might not survive this time.
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