Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders won overwhelming victories in last week’s New Hampshire primaries.
While their base of support is very different, these “outsider” candidates are both attracting voters who are feeling alienated by a political and economic system which they perceive as unfair and rigged against average Americans.
Ultimately, “Feel the Bern” and “Trumpmania” are populist uprisings inspired by protecting the American Dream and its foundational promise that with enough hard work, intelligence, and chutzpah anyone can enjoy upward class mobility in the United States.
A complication: The progressive and forward-thinking dreamers who support Bernie Sanders want to expand those opportunities to all Americans. The nightmare-channeling fearmongers and authoritarians who are Trump’s base want to protect what they have by denying opportunities to others.
There is a second problem for Republicans and those others who are attracted to Donald Trump’s particular brand of right-wing populism: His proposed policies will likely do little to improve the life chances of the working- and middle-class white voters who are attracted to his carnival barker, con man, professional wrestling “heel” routine.
In Trump, they see a savior. He is a man whose (inherited) financial success and wealth is a marker of his greatness and political savvy. In reality, Trump’s rabble is suckered by dime store novel fictions masquerading as substantive politics.
Writing at Fortune, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is spot on with his analysis that:
Trump, like Martha Stewart, delivers to the masses a notion that success can be achieved via understandable, transparent formulas. In fact, the Horatio Alger “rags to riches” myth is a media creation. The real Horatio Alger was a pedophilic minister from Brewster, Massachusetts who fled to New York to write formulaic short stories for newspapers. He died penniless in 1899. However, decades later, a New York author created a fictionalized biography fusing Alger’s name with the image of self-made business success to sell to a nation eager for a hero. In the same period, newspaper cartoonist Harold Gray created the strip “Little Orphan Annie” with protagonist Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks as a beloved politically conservative, anti-politician, free-market capitalist.
Rather than resent success as Marx predicted, Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class predicted in 1899 that Americans seek to emulate the successful. Trump ignites that desire for success and the belief in a fluid American class structure.
For example, Think Progress spoke to a Trump supporter in New Hampshire who said:
But for Davey, it was the vast wealth Trump often brags about that won him over in the end.
“I looked up how much each candidate was worth, Democrat and Republican,” he said. “Trump is worth more than everybody else together. I have friends who say that’s superficial but it’s an ugly world that really is all about money, and we want someone who is going to figure out how to make this country make more money. Just looking at the spreadsheet, Trump can eat these other guys.”
Likewise, a Trump supporter in Iowa told CNN:
"I like him because he's a businessman. He does what he says he's going to do. I've seen him lose a ton of money and bounce back," said Trump supporter Linda Wilkerson at a Raleigh campaign event. "We're in terrible financial debt. I hope he can bail us out."
Another Trump supporter also told CNN:
"With his background, he's going to put the economy back where it belongs," said Jamie Peckham, another Trump fan at the same Raleigh event.
To identify with the success of the rich, and subsequently using it as a decision-rule for one’s own politics (as well as the broader economy and one’s own personal economic circumstances) is the worst type of false consciousness.
The Horatio Alger Myth is a lie. The greatest predicator or intergenerational class mobility is the economic and social standing of a person’s parents. Hard work has little to do with it.
[Upward mobility is deeply tied to a belief in American Exceptionalism. Here too, the facts destroy the illusion. As compared to the United States, if you want to be part of one of the richest and most prosperous middle classes in the world move to Australia. Alternatively, if a person wants to experience more intergenerational upward mobility than the United States they should move to France.]
The myth of individualism is also a deception. People are born into social networks. These communities provide opportunities and resources.
A person has no choice over the family they are born into. Likewise, they have little if any choice about the unearned advantages, opportunities, and liabilities that are granted to them by fortunes of birth, the racialized and gendered bodies they inhabit, and the class milieu they inherit.
Despite these facts, the Horatio Alger Myth and the Myth of Individualism remain cornerstones of American culture. They are so persistent and stalwart that even in an enduring economic downturn that exploded with the Great Recession in 2008 and continues today, has been decades in the making with stagnant wages for at least 40 years, and rife with grotesque wealth inequality that mirrors the Gilded Age, said mythologies still hold sway.
The United States is drunk on absurdist political theater and the politics of disorientation. A society in crisis, where people are unmoored and confused, often turns inward on itself. Unfortunately, in that moment the poor, working classes and struggling middle classes often look at their peers as constituting “the enemy.”
As such, the plutocrats and 1 percent who have gamed the system to their own unfair advantage—and by doing so profit from human immiseration—are left relatively untouched. It is far easier, and perhaps more efficient, to look to one another as the cause of one’s own misery.
Moreover, in a society where the color line and gender have created a filter through which conversations about poverty are processed, the black and brown poor—even when explicitly unnamed as such—are a far more accessible enemy than are the white, older, usually male, and rich.
Unfortunately, white privilege (and how race and class intersect in the United States) has meant that the punches are often thrown down the racial hierarchy, or in some cases laterally at one’s peers, instead of up in the direction they ought to be directed.
Poverty is largely the result of the fortunes of birth. While this may be challenging for many Americans, a person cannot choose their families. The family of one’s birth in turn grants a person resources and opportunities for life success that exist both independent of, and often despite, a given person’s behavior.
There are many poor and working class people who “do the right thing” but whose families and children remain in the same social class—and sometimes even worse off—than those rich and upper class people who act irresponsibly and in some cases, criminally (example number one: President George W. Bush).
In the United States, narratives about life success are gendered and racialized. It is no coincidence that “the welfare queen” caricature is one of the great villains in American politics and culture. She is black and female. Thus, the welfare queen channels both sexism and racism—an object of hostility and hatred for the electoral gain mostly of Republicans in the post-civil rights era with the Southern Strategy, but yes, also for New Democrats such as Bill Clinton and his successors.
People of color continue to experience severe job discrimination in the labor market. To wit: A white man with a felony is just as likely to get an interview as a black man with a college degree.
All things being equal: If you want to be rich in America, you should be born white and male.
Black women in their peak earning years possess $5 in net worth. White women in the same cohort are worth approximately $40,000.
Black and brown American women cannot possibly be that financially inept compared to white women. Rather, black and brown American women are faced with the debits and burdens of racism, sexism, and how those disadvantages play out across generations in ways that white women as a group do not experience.
America of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is typified by how too many of its citizens and elites conflate capitalism and wealth as a sign of “God’s” pleasure and approval, and poverty as an indication of “God’s” disapproval. Right-wing authoritarianism, theocratic yearnings, and Christian Dominionism are not “just” moral or pseudo-ethical systems. No. They are religion as a way of making sense of the world and how resources ought to be allocated in it—and to whom. The “saved” and “elect” receive the money and the power. The “sinful” deserve their station in life.
In reality, the rich are more likely to lie, cheat, and steal than the poor and working classes.
Trump and Romney were/are gangster capitalists who made money in real estate and finance, and by destroying the futures of the American working and middle classes. The right-wing media is a bubble that propagandizes its willing prisoners into hating the poor, working classes, labor unions, immigrants, people of color, and the enemy “Other” of the moment. Conservatives, and those others drunk on the twin myths of Horatio Alger and American Individualism continue to believe a lie where even while their life chances and those of their children and communities are eviscerated by casino capitalism and the 1 percent that somehow they, too, could be rich one day.
These dynamics have a profound impact on the United States’ political culture. In many ways America’s politics are broken because too many citizens have internalized lies as truths—because the basic facts are too horrible to accept.
This is political madness as a substitute for rational political decision-making.
The question now becomes, how will Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—the populist candidates of the left and right, respectively—communicate these facts to their voters and transform painful truths into political action?