The chaotic screaming and pushing surrounding Kevin McCarthy’s election as Speaker of the US House of Representatives hides the real politics behind the school-yard antics. Today’s far-right is a toxic alliance of two forces joined by anger and anti-democratic fervor. The first has grown out of the network of Koch funded groups from the Libertarian Party to the Tea Party to the Club For Growth, now represented in Congress by the Freedom Caucus. By “freedom” they mean freedom from any constraints on the use of private property and for-profit business (regardless of the impact on anyone else or the world we live in), and from any “taking” of personal wealth by taxes or other means imposed by non-wealthy majorities’ influence on government (especially for social insurance programs that reduce workers need to accept what employers give them). While some libertarians actually have some “libertarian” tendences — a belief that people should be free to conduct their personal life in any way they want — many of them share conservative social values, in part because they all think of themselves as one of the “fitter” who will survive, making everyone difference from themselves one of those who will be run over.
Libertarians saw most of the traditional upper-class Republican Party leadership as sellouts to the free-market cause. For all of Nixon, Reagan, and the Bush’s reactionary social policies, they were still tied to the business establishment – the big banks and major corporations. Libertarians were pro-business, but also anti-government. However, by stressing their anti-regulation and anti-tax themes, and following the general outline of Lewis Powell’s strategy for free-market victory over New Deal and Great Society coalitions, libertarian themes were able to slowly dominate GOP rhetoric and policy proposals. Today, the entire Republican Party is deeply committed to radical free-market policies. There are no “Rockefeller Republicans” left in Congress or in State government. However, for the sake of the free-market radical’s commitment to lower taxes and “liberate” business from government regulation, and because the business elite have traditionally been Republican, many high-level corporate leaders were (and still are) happy to support the upstarts.
Anarchist capitalism heroizes the individual. It agrees with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that there is no such thing as society. There’s just individuals and families looking out for themselves. It seeks to dismantle the Big Government that grew out of early 1900s Progressivism, expanded when the mid-century New Deal cleaned up the Republican Great Depression, and opened the door to the poor, African-Americans, Latinos, and immigrants in the Great Society’s response to the Civil Rights, anti-poverty, anti-war, and women’s movements of the 1960s. But it was exactly this expansion of the public sector that created the mid-century expansion of the American middle class – including a large proportion of the blue-collar workforce. And cutting back on these programs will destabilize what’s left of the middle class. Understandably, dismantling all these social programs is not an election-winning platform. (A good description of this wing of the GOP coalition is in another blog post:
So the Libertarian forces have allied with – often funded and encouraged – a second right wing force, which is itself composed of numerous interwoven strands: religious fundamentalists, white supremacists, patriarchal masculinists, “betrayed” veterans. At the edge of each strand are exmilitary vigilantes: fascist-style terrorists fighting what they believe to be a moral war against a society whose established leaders are so evil and so entrenched that its violent destruction is both necessary and legitimate. At the same time, surrounding their hate-fueled core, each of these strands has a “soft” outer fringe of “reasonable sounding” issues that echo “traditional” American themes and that enabled them to reach into more mainstream culture and politics – pro-life and motherhood, local control and state’s rights, traditional family and gender roles,, parental authority and child protection, crime reduction and social stability, anti-elitism and “respect for work”, patriotism and the American Dream.
These issues are visceral. They speak directly to peoples’ anxieties, frustrations, and endangered hopes as well as their sense of community, cultural traditions, and past progress. The irony is that, reaching back into the long history of radical movements for segregationist white democracy, these movements combine the demand for more grassroots power by “ordinary” Americans with the authoritarian imposition of their vision on the rest of society. And as history has repeatedly shown, these are issues that can mobilize enough people to swing elections, allowing the far-right to claim to be fighting for democracy while acting to destroy it..
What unites the two forces– the libertarians and the rightist populists – is their shared fury at the status quo and the elites, both visible and hidden, who run and benefit from it. And what makes them electorally dangerous – what makes so many in the “silent majority” open to their message – is the larger context of industrial decline, stagnating living standards, and the flagrant disregard of those elites for the wellbeing of anyone except themselves.
PARTING OF THE WAYS
The 1989 collapse of the Soviet bloc opened the globe to Western influence, military pressure, and business investment. The wobbly political economy of many newly independent nations made them desperate for investment and trade, which the larger Western businesses were happy to provide in exchange for cheap labor, lax regulation, and authoritarian stability. The creation of increasingly speculative financial tools and markets –from off-shore banks to derivatives to lightly regulated hedge funds – along with the growing concentration of increasingly deregulated US and European banking, made finance a dominant force in economic dynamics – and therefore of policy decisions. And the explosion of digital technologies made it all go faster.
Corporations have always used machines and automation to undercut workers’ power and wages. Digital technology exponentially increases their power over both labor and governments. Computers and the Internet now allow centralized, remote control of factories no matter where in the world they are located, down to the level of individual machines. In addition to facilitating the de-industrialization of First World countries, the runaway shops being set up in the developing world were highly automated, drastically reducing the skills needed while increasing individual employee’s replaceability. To a degree unprecedented in world history, multinational corporations can quickly transfer production, supply sources, and distribution methods to wherever labor is cheapest, operations least regulated, externalities least noticed, and profits least taxed. Top executives don’t manage manufacturing; they manage money flows. Global corporations may have divisions that produce or transport or sell, but their core function is financial; they’ve essentially become commercial banks – in many cases literally through partnerships, interlocking directorates, and acquisitions.
The biggest corporations have gone from being national to multinational to non-national and global, and the tiny number of the ultra rich have become not only astronomically richer but more influential. Consolidation is economy-wide: there are few industries in which the top three firms don’t control 70 to 90 percent of the market. In the US,while small businesses create over 45% of the nation's jobs, and “working for myself” is the aspirational step upward for many workers, they are all subject to the financial giants' influence over credit, investment, access to supplies, and markets. As the protest movements of the 1960s moved into the workplace, raising both the cost of labor and the difficulty of shop-floor control, the business world became more conservative. Both Democratic and Republican Administrations reflected the conservative drift, climaxing in Ronald Reagan’s wholesale firing of air traffic controllers after they were pushed to a strike over unsafe working conditions.
It shouldn’t be surprising that unions have shrunk and blue-collar real wages stagnated for nearly a generation. Outsourcing, layoffs, and speedups are the norm. The wages of non-college educated workers have stagnated for several decades, with the manufacturing sector nearly disappearing. The rich keep getting even more disproportionately richer and out of touch. The old feeling that one’s employers cared about anything except profits has been shredded. What’s left are feelings of betrayal, frustration, and fury.
BLUE COLLAR REBELLION
Over the past several decades, the feeling among working class families of being part of a national community dissolved into the cesspool of declining blue-collar jobs and the catastrophic collapse of viable economic futures for the mass of non-college educated (white) men who used to work there. The replacements – insecure low-level white collar service sector jobs in restaurants, hospitals, and retail – paid significantly less, and required taking on what was previously considered women’s work: serving other people’s personal needs rather than flexing one’s muscles on objects. These were not jobs that inspired hope for a better future for oneself or one’s children. In a society whose cultural message, banged incessantly into our heads by every form of media and advertising, is that “you deserve it all” and that social worth is shown by one’s wealth, whose celebration of rich and famous life-styles makes “keeping up with the Jones” simply impossible for most people – no wonder so many people became resentful, angry, rebellious.
One result of collapsing opportunities was the rise of parasitic businesses, the kind that preyed on its own. Waves of methamphetamine, opioids, and other drugs (many pushed by the pharmaceutical industry) swept through “middle America” – meaning that white communities began to experience the “deaths of despair” that had decimated African-American neighborhoods for years. Drugs, suicide, alcohol, and violence became part of many family’s lives, with the biggest increases in left-behind small-town and rural areas. (Paul Krugman, NYT, 10/21/22)
Adding further insult to the injury, the increasing focus of mass entertainment media and advertising on the lifestyles of the upwardly mobile, urban, college-educated youth – living in an affluence that most blue-collar families both wished for and began to resent. Similarly unsettling in the midst of disappearing opportunity for the white working class – after centuries of invisibility and exclusion, people of color and gays were becoming increasingly visible in sports, music, movies, and commercials – with celebrities making increasing amounts of money. There were some Archie Bunkers and RoseAnne Barrs on TV; but they were mostly there for comic relief.
People living in “fly over'' areas – both rural and rust-belt – felt increasingly abandoned, disposable, and disrespected. There was no national community anymore. They were on their own. “For much of the 19th and 20th centuries….almost every generation of Americans was more productive, wealthier, and long-lived than the one before it. In the past few decades, however, progress has faltered – and faith in it has curdled. Technological progress has stagnated, especially in the non-virtual world. So have real incomes. [As in the post-Soviet Russia of oligarchic capitalism] life expectancy has been falling…” (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2023)
Ironically, African-Americans had shown an alternative.. Black Power, Black Pride, and Black Identity all posited an ethnic group separate and often in opposition to the national community. And, for a while, Irish and Italian Pride, along with a raft of others, were visible themes. But soon, conservative Republicans found ways to gather the resentment into more traditional racial cagtegories. Nixon’s Southern Strategy showed the way with its anti-affirmative action overtures to segregationist Dixicrats. Ronald Reagon completed the deal by combining nostalgia for the past with aggressive nationalism, traditional anti-government cynicism with business deregulation and tax cuts, and praise of hard work with attacks on social service recipients. Even further to the right, Pat Buchannan began promoting anti-establishment radicalism. The Evangelical, Fundamentalist, and Pentecostal movements discovered that the more political and militant they became the faster they grew. The NRA shifted from gun safety to guns as citizen’s most important protection from an unsafe society and unleashed government. The Kock-funded Libertarian Party provided a national structure allowing anti-tax Tea Party insurgents to escalate from scattered protests to a national presence that quickly joined other rightist insurgents moving into a welcoming Republican Party.
NEO-LIBERALISM’S “THIRD WAY”
While manufacturing declined, the vast post-WWII expansion of higher education churned out an annually increasing number of 4-year college graduates, by the 2020s growing to almost 40% of the workforce. The top tiers, the 14% with advanced degrees, have done very well over the years. Earning much more than their parents and their non-graduating peers, they’ve become the professionals and managers needed to staff the high-level white collar jobs that keep the economy and society functioning. Even their growing demands for more personal life-style autonomy from traditional constraints was socially constructive – creating new consumer markets, bringing new people into the workforce, and bringing energizing innovation to business.
Neoliberalism emerged after the splintering of the Democratic base over race and Vietnam, in the context of the increasing conservatism of economic elites, shifts in the domestic and global economy, and the rise of right-wing libertarianism. The New Democrats and Third Way advocates saw the decline of the labor movement, the growing pressure from business, and the escalating sense of unease among the general population. They concluded that it was no longer possible to build a political majority around manufacturing-based labor unions, nor politically feasible to focus on ending poverty as a way to “lift all boats.”
However, they opposed Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and Regan’s “government is the problem” conservatism. Instead, they believed the winning strategy for national prosperity and liberal political success was to go along with the entrepreneurial energy (and money!) spewing from the digitalized and media-saturated economy quickly becoming dominant in Northern bi-coastal cities. At the same time, Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy co-opted conservative issues while distancing himself from the Democrat’s past – in particular from unions, anti-poverty, and Black radicalism. His “three strikes” criminalization and mass incarceration in privatized prisons. He turned welfare into workfare and deregulated business. He championed high tech and finance while ignoring labor. In the midst of a world economic collapse caused by irresponsible financial-sector speculation, Barack Obama bailed out the banks. For the New Democrats, the “innovation sector” of the economy was the future, and the people who were creating and working in it were their constituents – the base for a new coalition.
This left out a lot of people.
REALIGNMENT
It’s not surprising that the people caught in the sewage of the era began to see the world as a brutal place in which the rich and powerful are able to flaunt their wealth, break all the rules, and let the rest of us struggle. At the same time, despite their cynicism, most people yearn to be part of something larger than themselves – or at least to be able to ride the coat-tails of a growing movement that speaks to their feelings and situation.
Donald Trump was born for the job. He was a tabloid celebrity with a sleazy love life who became a TV star flaunting his personal business brilliance and his vicious contempt for anyone who displeased him. He was the “bad boy” who did it “his way” while extolling himself on social media.. Once Obama was elected he began touring the country as the most prominent “birther” questioning the mixed-race President’s citizenship, letting him get in sync with the growing anger motivating people who felt the country was getting away from them. Here was a man who made million-dollar deals while thumbing his nose at propriety, who denounced the government that regulated and taxed him, who dated movie stars while keeping his wives in check, who openly mocked the nation’s most visible black person, and who happily and visibly loved himself. He intuitively knew how to feed the new media’s need for 24/7 headlines and the public’s love for nasty put downs – an appetite fed by earlier media stars from Rush Limbaugh to Bill Maher.
As the field of 14 mainstream candidates split the vote, Trump slipped through to the GOP nomination. And then, just as the German business class supported Hitler against their common enemies on the Left, the American business world jumped in behind Trump's promise to get the government off their backs. With almost no ideological commitments other than narcissism, Trump was happy to welcome any source of anger willing to join his parade – and nearly the entire spectrum of far-right groups jumped in, learning to work together and that they were much stronger as a united movement than as separate protests. His campaign, and his Administration, was an endless carnival of football rallies and comedy shows. He was the outsider who would bring down the corrupt kingdom, drain the swamp, lock ‘em up. Even as Trump's personal incompetence and money-grubbing obsessions became embarrassingly obvious,, his hard-core supporters stayed true, simply shifting his role from savior to door-opener.
Eventually, as Trump proved incapable of either domestic or international governance, his business support slipped away – some moving towards the mainstream corporate Democrats who welcomed reinforcements against the Party’s growing progressive wing, some towards less openly bizarre far-right politicians such as Ron DeSantis.
It’s important to remember that the rise of authoritarian, far-right populism is a world phenomenon. Religious conservatism in some places; secular pro-business in others; openly fascist in still others. In many places these groups had gained power. In others they’re still fighting, sometimes (as in Brasil) against the results of a losing election.
AROUND THE CORNER
Now that the Republicans have gained control, however narrowly, of the US House of Representatives, the most strident militants – those who have best learned how to generate headlines and support by combining the three themes of anti-elitist libertarianism, authoritarian prejudices, and violent aggressiveness – have enormous leverage. Their next move will be to shut down the government by refusing to increase the debt ceiling, with the strategic intention of forcing major cuts to, or even the privatization of, social security and medicare – our nation’s two biggest mutual aid programs that tie people together, and to big government by using taxes from the wealthy to subsidize benefits to the majority. Stay tuned….this is going to be ugly.