The Crisis of American Democracy
America prides itself in being the world’s oldest democracy and in the past, has been unafraid to export these values to the rest of the world. There is no threat to American democracy but there are clear fissures in the system that are personified in the 2016 presidential election.
The more conventional Republicans are belatedly trying to derail the train of the Trumpistas. In recent decades, the Republican donor class has kept the rand and file on the reservation. The rank and file of predominantly white voters bought into the formula of the Club of Growth philosophy of small government, tax cuts, free enterprise and a deregulated bureaucracy. The presumption was that the conservative prescription enhanced financial security and preserved social mobility. The presumption is that government is the enemy and at this juncture in American society what is needed is to reduce the size of government and privatize the safety net.
What the conventional politicians and the superficial media failed to pick up was the deep-seated crisis facing the white working class. As is the case in American society, the assumption is that black and Latino people are the only one’s hurting and everything was fine with the white working class.
America does not have a planned economy and the laissez-faire approach in an age of globalization has had a massive destructive impact on workers. When the de-industrialization removed labor intensive jobs out of the inner cities and the Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, wrote about the disappearance of jobs that shattered black lives, no one paid any attention to the crisis as it was limited to the black community. That crisis that began in the 1970s weakened the resilience of inner city neighborhoods and gave rise to an escalation of violent crime and underground drug markets.
The growing income inequality and the stagnation of wages eventually impacted on white communities. The Great Recession of 2007-2008 hastened that process of disillusionment as the proliferation of foreclosures and homes under water overnight erased the equity that was build up with homeownership.
The crisis in the white community was more acute among those with just a high school education and those who had failed to complete high school. These folks saw their wages plummet and lost confidence in the American dream. The white working class crisis was not acted out through increased crime rates but by increasing levels of alcoholism, heroin overdosing, suicides and falling longevity rates particularly among those 45 to 54 years.
The donor class never saw the revolt in the making. The political elite in Congress focused on legislation that was oblivious to the plight of the white working class. Fanatics like Senator Ted Cruz embarked on crusades to rescind Obamacare and to shut down the federal government. While Rome burned, the segment of the white electorate that was already confused regarding their class interests, turned to a “messiah” who was part of the donor class but was outside of the elected political system.
The Trumpistas are flocking to Trump’s rally as he feeds them raw meat. What ails America, according to the gospel of Donald Trump, are things external. The solution is to build walls around America, deport illegal immigrants and pursue policies of economic isolation. Like Sanders, Trump blames America’s ills on NAFTA, the pending TPP, trade with China and Japan.
There is no question that economic globalization has had a profound impact on American workers. Neither Trump nor Sanders has developed detailed proposals for America to compete in a globalized economic environment. As was evident in 2008, reckless investment policies led to a nigh collapse of the world’s financial system and plunged the world economy into a recession from which it has not fully recovered. A resort to economic isolationism will inevitably plunge the world economy into a depression.
One should not equate Sanders with Trump. The Trumpista ideology is what I would call demi-fascism. It is functioning in a democratic political system but there are raw appeals to racism and to xenophobia. The foreign policy crudely annunciated would take America beyond the Geneva Convention and rationalize torture. The Trumpista ideology seeks to intimidate the free press. On a daily basis, Trump excoriates folks who work in the media.
Things in the Republican Party have come to that state of reckoning. Historically, we have associated brown shirts with Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and Peron in Argentina. These earlier authoritarian/fascist movements gave credence as an outgrowth of an economic crisis. The racists in the South and elsewhere are now coming to the fore in support of the Trump candidacy.
It would be a mistake for Democrats not to identify and address this crisis in the white community and to articulate policies that alleviate their immiseration. Those folks have suffered from benign neglect. Domestic policies that address these economic dislocations caused by globalization must be developed not just by Hillary Clinton but by those running under the banner of the Democratic Party.
