Donald Trump as Avatar and Scapegoat
We now know that of the half of the American electorate that actually voted, about half of those pulled the lever for Donald Trump, about half for Hillary Clinton, and a few percent for the smattering of other candidates. And those of us who live in the traditionally blue states are feeling indeed quite blue. This is a now time for all to heal a bit after a bitter campaign, for all to perhaps huddle with likeminded friends and family. There, one camp can celebrate their triumph uninhibited; the other can lick their wounds without further upset.
Here I offer a meta-analysis of the Trump phenomenon in composite form, as the complexity of it precludes an airtight linear narrative. I will eschew commenting on political and media strategies, personal shortcomings, the undemocratic electoral process, and demographic evaluations, important as these may be. Instead, I offer a historical, environmental, and economic perspective.
Thread One: The Human Predicament
Let us keep in mind a most important planetary backdrop to the American elections and to every human endeavor, really: the human population is still growing at the astounding rate of 80 million people a year; we have long passed peak water, land, forests, fish, ocean health, climate benignancy, and food security—that is, we have far fewer resources for far more people; inequality is at an all time high, both at home and internationally; over two billion people suffer from malnourishment; 800 million actually feel the daily pangs of hunger; trillions of dollars of wealth disappeared from the world’s bottom 99% in the Great Recession of 2008; and sixty-five million people have recently become refuges of war, persecution, and climate. Whether one is conscious of these or not, they are powerful problems of planetary scale and are far more significant than even the American elections. Clearly, however, the political decisions made by the world’s most powerful military and economy (yes, the U.S. is still number one) have significant ramifications for all these problems, and for the biosphere, itself. Donald Trump has shown mostly ignorance or outright antipathy to all these concerns. With all three branches of government soon to be in Republican hands, humanity's upward climb has just gotten steeper.
Thread Two: America’s Golden Moment
After World War II, international conditions favored America’s economic supremacy. Every other industrial economy had been devastated in the war. And so for the next thirty years American industry was without competition. As Robert Reich suggests in his book Supercapitalism, during this special period the vast profits were shared relatively amicably between corporations, labor, and government. High corporate taxes and a large middle class paid for America’s great military build up, infrastructure projects, and new safety net programs. This was the time of Eisenhower’s National Highway System; the space missions that culminated in moon landings; important environmental and social justice legislation, such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Civil Rights Act, and Title ix; almost every Entitlement Program outside of Social Security, itself; and wars in Korea and Vietnam that were expensive for the governments, profitable for business, and devastating for the host countries. This very short historical period was America’s golden moment.
Then, one by one, a number of countries, first in Europe and Japan and then the Four Asian Tigers came on line, taking in Western finance to build export economies to sell products to Westerners. By the 1990s, China and a host of Asian and Latin American countries were joining the gravy train. American products became decreasingly competitive. American wages, taxes, and environmental laws pushed American businesses to other countries they could more easily exploit. Automation too had its inexorable effect, replacing the monotonous, repetitive, unskilled work of America’s uneducated, principally white, middle class. In the following decades America became hollowed out of its traditional industries (steel, automobile, kitchen appliances, electronics, etc.), and the barely skilled Americans without college degrees found themselves working for a minimum wage in service jobs and as salesclerks in huge box stores that sold cheap products made by people overseas who had taken their previous middle class jobs.
But Americans were hooked on those consumer products, on electronics and cars and furniture and bath towels and all the rest. To maintain any semblance of a consumer lifestyle, Americans had to buy on credit. And the credit came easily, too easily. By the first decade of this new century, Americans were trillions of dollars in debt, individually and collectively. American financiers meanwhile had become rich beyond historical compare, by lending to their fellow Americans, mostly in the form of mortgages, credit cards, and government spending, and by creating all sorts of clever abstract financial “products” that had nothing to do with the brick-and-mortar economy that serves humanity. In 2011 Robert Reich, economist and former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton observed, “The ratio of corporate profits to wages is now higher than at any time since just before the Great Depression.” We were in a new gilded age, according to the Nobel prize- winning economist Paul Krugman. Not since the 1920s, had wealth in the U.S. been so mal-distributed. And then in 2014, the economist Thomas Pikkety confirmed this with a flood of data in his tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. And, he argued, this trend would continue into the century.
With an accelerating pace, transportation and particularly communication innovations have made the 99% more aware of their unequal position, of just how wealthy and powerful and famous the one percent is. How beautiful they are, how smart, educated, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan. With television, the 99% became like kids with their faces pressed against the candy store window, looking in at all the goodies that they could not have.
Then in 2008 the financial bubble burst. Ben Bernanke, Chair of the Federal Reserve at the time called it, “… the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.” Of the 13 “most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two.”[i] Economists feared a complete global economic meltdown. By 2011, 1.2 million Americans had lost their homes to foreclosure, over eight million had lost jobs, and collectively eight trillion dollars of wealth (albeit mostly bubble real estate wealth) had disappeared from their lives.[ii] On the other hand, the elite financial institutions, whose casino-like shenanigans created the meltdown of the economic system, fared quite well. In one of the largest upward redistributions of wealth, at least eleven trillion dollars of American tax-payer money has been committed to bail out the financial institutions and over three trillion has been actually invested.[iii] Trillions of dollars from the 99% had gone to prop up the one percent.
Thread Three: Wealth, Status, and Race
An Oxfam 2014 report entitled Working For The Few: Political Capture And Economic Inequality, asks the very sensible question, “How do the rules governing national economies become subservient to elite interests?” It answers the question through several case studies in societies as different from each other as those of the United States, Europe, India, Pakistan, Mexico, and the Horn of Africa. The authors note that, “This is a problem inherent to the nature of politics. … The influence of wealthy groups leads to imbalanced political rights and representation. The outcomes include the capture of legislative and regulatory decision-making functions by those powerful groups. … Concentration of wealth in the hands of the few leads to undue political influence, which ultimately robs citizens of natural resource revenues, produces unfair tax policies and encourages corrupt practices, and challenges the regulatory powers of governments. Taken together, all of these consequences serve to worsen accountability and social inclusion.” This explains why in the past decades wealth has been concentrating ever upward. And it also explains why government often comes off as incompetent. When seen through the lens of oligarchy and elite self-interest, government decisions and actions are actually quite rational and effective.
The oligarchy (the 0.01%) cannot maintain such inequality by themselves. There are simply too few of them. So, they buy off the elite and the affluent (the top twenty percent or so) to do their bidding.[iv] In Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, regional oligarchs have given away their country’s natural resources to nourish First World affluence, leaving their own citizens scrounging for essentials.[v] In the United States, Europe, and the wealthy Asian-Pacific countries, a huge middle class has wed their interests to those of the wealthiest. As long as they have jobs, plenty of meat and entertainment, a car and at least the illusion of upward mobility, these hundreds of millions have quietly accepted the outrages of the ruling classes.
The middle class complicity in planetary-wide suffering is not wholly unlike the role of poor non-slaveholding farmers (who were a majority) in the Southern slavery states. Too poor to own slaves, they were nevertheless willing to be complicit with the practice and to fight in a brutal war and even sacrifice their lives for the rich plantation owners’ right to own slaves.[vi] Through a reading of thousands of letters of American Civil War soldiers, the historian Chandra Manning suggests that a partial explanation for such seemingly irrational convictions and behaviors goes beyond simple economics: it can be found in the socio-psychological depths of slavery and racism, wherein one’s sense of self-esteem and status was—no matter how poor the white person—supported by being regarded, at the very least, theoretically equal to all other whites, and superior to the black slave.[vii] There was the hope instilled by the aristocracy and the Confederate government that non-slaveholders could one day become fortunate enough to become a slaveholder, made more likely through one’s merit as a soldier. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the dominant paradigm engendered a fear in all whites that ending slavery would result in the destruction of Southern society—a highly advanced civilization of great sophistication, in their minds—followed by terrible chaos.[viii] The historian Jeffrey Winters found nearly identical psycho-social explanations—sans the racism—for the bond between the lower classes and the oligarchs against the slaves in democratic BCE Athens.[ix]
So now back to this century: Things looked so bad in 2008 that Americans actually voted a black man into the presidency. 43% of white voters opted for Barak Obama. Then in 2012, 39% did so again when the Republicans put up against the incumbent one of richest, best looking, white men ever to run for the office. Mitt Romney barely lost, but lose he did. But that a white man of such pedigree was defeated by a black man (however brilliant, witty, graceful, dignified, even wise) should have given us pause. How could that happen in historically racist America? Most of us on the winning side were too jubilant to analyze it. Clearly, we surmised, America’s collective consciousness was evolving and, well, we had just sailed through some currents of good fortune.
Meanwhile, the white people with high school diplomas were seething. Wealth and privilege were no longer theirs, and now neither was even their superiority. The world, as Thomas Friedman put it, was “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” The flat referred to the fact that dark skinned people overseas could do the same work as Americans, even more because they’d work 35-hour days if they could, and for far less pay. Not only could they load a conveyer belt and answer a telephone as well as an American, but they could also write code and design software. Americans meanwhile had become overweight and obese, unemployed and underemployed. Many were deeper in debt and without healthcare. And they would not be sending their children to the colleges that had become such an ostentatious part of the high school discourse. They could neither afford these schools nor provide the kind of home culture that encouraged higher education.
Thread Four: The Rise of the Strongmen
Those political party pundits who are still blaming the media and the FBI and trying to parse out the electoral map, dissecting the swing counties within swing states, are missing the point. It’s not about fine-tuning the details. It’s about the big-picture. It’s about the values and beliefs through which we will individually and together create the world we live in. And although there are, of course, many in the Democrat Party who have helped blaze the path towards a more sustainable and equitable future, the party as a whole has clearly not inspired in their electorate much wisdom and hope. With our backs now against the wall, how do we impress upon all that climate change is no hoax; that neither is the rage that our white brothers and sisters feel as history’s sunshine seems to be setting on their scrubby lawns; that neither is the American history of abuse of our fellow Native Americans and people of color; that neither is the profligacy and violence of big business, the financial system, and the American military machine. And neither is the notion that the United States could jettison its moral compass and follow other powerful nation-states into the dangerous waters haunted by demagogues and autocrats.
Britain had their Brexit, and all over the world, authoritarian and nationalist demagogues and strongmen have risen to power. Some of these powerful states were among the world’s most inclusive, open, and progressive at century’s start. Presently all those strongmen listed below enjoy extraordinary approval ratings in their country. Here’s a short list:
President Xi Jinping China
President Vladimir Putin Russia
P.M. Narendra Modi India
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Turkey
P.M. Viktor Orbán Hungary
P.M. Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu Israel
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi Egypt
President Rodrigo Duterte Philippines
To this list we can now add President Elect Donald Trump, USA.
Thread Five: Trump as Apotheosis
Given the outrageous complexity of the society in which we find ourselves, it is almost impossible to get a true bead on causes and consequences. Even the most educated and intelligent argue endlessly over every last detail. So how are the less educated to fare? Well, usually, they resort to hyper-simplifying the natural complexity into a few confused bits—immigration, trade, Wall Street, and mostly government. And this last one they get right. Not because government has been more exploitive than Wall Street, but because the principle purpose of government is to provide a safe environment for its citizens, safe from Nature’s ravishes, safe from outside enemies, and safe from the exploitation of unequal wealth and power. To this last responsibility, government has failed miserably. The U.S. government has allowed wealth and power to run roughshod over the needs of its people, over the environment, over the weak all over the world, and over the government itself.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were arguably the two most popular American candidates of the 2016 election cycle. They both were the representations of our disgust and outrage about present conditions and of our hopes for a committed response. Bernie spoke for the millennials, to the educated, and to the more progressive groups of society. Donald took on the values and beliefs of the less educated, more conservative members of the electorate. Not having any real ideology of his own, he fed the needs of his narcissism and megalomania with the admiration of a group who had no representation. He filled their psychological needs, and they filled his.
A big problem for his followers, of course, is that he has no solutions. He can’t have any. There are no easy solutions to the complex challenges that vex Civilization. And, furthermore, the values that are informing his promises smack of resentment, calculated self-interest, and a rational detachment from nature and from the full spectrum of our human family. These come from the same toolkit of values, beliefs, and worldviews that have proved incongruous with reality: the ecologic and economic crises demonstrate this to us with unrelenting consistency. When we apply insufficiently simplistic solutions to complex problems, the unintended consequences will pop out elsewhere. Al-Queda after the proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan; ISIS after the Iraq invasion; the population explosion after the Green Revolution; and gang wars and a runaway prison population from the "War on Drugs;" to name a few.
The whole global system is trembling. Volatility in markets, in emotions, in elections, and in relations between the big global powers is becoming ever more obvious. As in the 20th century world wars and in the “sixties” we seem to once again be on the cusp of convulsive planetary forces. In the face of these, the poor and once middle class sense their impotence. Donald Trump has become the incarnation of their frustrations and rage, their avatar. Soon enough, when they realize that he cannot deliver on his mix of vagaries, contradictions, and lies, they will turn on him, and he will become their scapegoat, perhaps the human sacrifice for us all.
[i] Worstall, T. (2014, Aug 27) Ben Bernanke: The 2008 Financial Crisis Was Worse Than The Great Depression. Forbes. Accessed November 13, 2016 at http://www.forbes.com/sites/timwors.
[ii] Schoen (2010), Dorfman, D. (2011), Isidore (2010, 2011). According to Ivry, Keoun and Kuntz (2011) 3.6 million homes had been foreclosed between August 2007 and November 2011.
[iii] Goldman (2009), Pittman and Ivry (2009). Nomi Prins (2011:5) argues that total bailout comes closer to thirteeen trillion dollars.
Goldman, D. (2009) CNNMoney.com’s Bailout Tracker, CNNMoney. Available at http://money.cnn.com/news/storysupplement/economy/bailouttracker/#STIMULUS. Accessed October 29, 2011.
Pittman, M., and Ivry, B. (2009) U.S. Bailout, Stimulus Pledges Total $11.6 Trillion, Bloomberg. Available at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aZchK__XUF84. Accessed November 13, 2011.
Prins, N. (2011) It Takes a Pillage: An Epic Tale of Power, Deceit, and the Untold Trillions, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
[iv] For historical examples, see Winters, J.A. (2011) Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press, New York.
[v] See for example, Galeano (1973/1997), Chomsky (1989), Perkins (2004, 2007), Palast (2007:152-153), Maathai (2009), Skidmore, Smith, and Green (2010), Acemoglu and Robinson (2012).
Galeano, E. (1973/1997) Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press, New York.
Perkins, J. (2004) Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA.
Perkins, J. (2007) The Secret History of the American Empire. Dutton, New York.
Chomsky, N. (1989) Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Second End Press, Boston, MA.
Palast, G. (2007) Armed Madhouse. Plume Books, New York.
Maathai, W. (2009) The Challenge for Africa. Anchor Books, New York.
Skidmore, T.E., Smith, P.H., and Green, J.N. (2010) Modern Latin America, Seventh Edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
Acemoglu, D., and Robinson, J.A. (2012a) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown Business New York.
[vi] Gutman, H.G., director (1989) Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture and Society, American Social History Project, Pantheon Books, New York. My understanding of this psycho-social phenomenon comes originally from my dear friend and historian Bruce Baskind.
[vii] Manning, C.E (2007). What This Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and The Civil War. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
[viii] Manning (2007).
[ix] Winters (2011).
