John Medaille writes for an online publication called The Distributist Review, which advocates a “middle way” between capitalism and socialism, founded on Catholic social teachings (think Pope Francis.) In a recent article, he wrote:
This is not an election about the head, but about the heart, and at the heart of American politics is a burning rage. Rage that our livelihoods have been sacrificed to abstract economic theories; rage that our communities have been destroyed and scattered; rage that the ordinary citizen has been abandoned by our leaders, Republican or Democrat; rage that the concerns of all have been trumped by concerns of marginal groups, like the transgendered. But mostly, Americans feel rage that their interests have been ignored in favor the interests of the Rich, the powerful, the banker, the foreigner. And all of these concerns are summed up in one word: Globalization.
Hillary cannot address this issue because she herself is a globalist. Her faux repudiation of the Trans-Pacific ‘Partnership’ does not convince anybody, not even her own supporters. She can move as far to the Left as she likes, but no one will take her seriously. Indeed, Trump will pull off that most complex of maneuvers, the double envelopment: he will flank her on both the left and the right, and often on the same issues. And no one will care about the contradictions. He will be Hannibal at Cannae; she will attack in the center, only to find herself engulfed on either side.
The “Cannae” reference is to a battle that took place in 216 B.C. in southeast Italy, between the Carthaginian general Hannibal and a Roman army of as many as 75,000 men. The Roman army concentrated its attack on the center of the Carthaginian line, which fell back in an orderly way until the Romans found themselves in the middle of a “u” shaped formation of Carthaginians. The open end of the “u” was then closed by Carthaginian cavalry, surrounding the Romans, who were then annihilated in one of the most costly and lopsided battles in human history.
I’m not as pessimistic about Hillary’s chances in the general election this November as Medaille, but I think he is mostly spot-on in his description of that rage and about its causes.
That bit about the interests of everyone being “…trumped by concerns of marginal groups,” while it made me wince a bit, reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to mention.
I happened to be working in San Francisco’s Castro District last June when U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Obergefell v. Hodges, legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states. I saw gay couples who’d been together for decades standing on the street, holding each other and crying.
I am old enough to remember the day that San Francisco Supervisor and gay rights activist Harvey Milk was gunned down in City Hall in 1979. I remember that night, too, when thousands of weeping people formed spontaneously in the Castro, lit candles, and processed like a river of defiant human hope a mile or so down Market Street to city hall.
Some part of me felt that the victory last June balanced the scales for that night, in some metaphysical sense. My only sadness was that Harvey Milk was not there to share in the joy, because that victory was, in a very real sense, his.
That said: It has struck me more than once that gay civil marriage is a far more radical change to our society than anything ever proposed or enacted by the Democratic Party in its history (more on that in a bit), and I mean “radical” in its descriptive, etymological sense – from the Latin “rad-“, meaning “root” (that is where the quintessential root vegetable, the radish, gets its name). As far as I can determine, there is no precedent in all of human history for treating gay marriage as legally the same as traditional marriage. And yet, within a few short years it went from a bohemian oddity to mainstream and protected by law.
As I said, I celebrated that victory, but I think it is worth pointing out that according to Gallup, 3.8 percent of Americans – slightly less than 12 million people – identify as gay, lesbian or transgender; an even smaller percentage desire to actually partake in same-sex marriage.
In comparison, there are vastly larger numbers of people with more basic and urgent needs. For example, according to Feeding America, an organization founded to “feed America’s hungry through a nationwide network of member food banks and engage our country in the fight to end hunger,” some 48 million Americans at least occasionally go to bed hungry, including over 15 million children.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 15 million Americans are either a. unemployed and looking for work, b. unemployed but have given up looking for work, or c. are working part-time despite desiring full-time work.
They need help, and while they have been failed by both political parties, I would argue that the more glaring fault rests with the Democratic Party, which was traditionally the party of the little guy – the powerless and vulnerable. We helped LGBTQ people achieve basic civil rights: why can we make so little progress for the hungry?
I’ve been working my way through Thomas Frank’s new book, “Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?”
Frank’s thesis is that beginning in the late 1960s, the Democratic Party gradually moved away from being the Party of the People and gradually became the party of educated elites – what he calls the “Professional Class” – doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, scientists, technology entrepreneurs and programmers, and so on.
I agree with this assessment, and I think it was, at least in some respects, a result of liberalism’s success.
The late ’60s were perhaps the high water mark of the egalitarian ethic of the New Deal consensus. It was considered completely unremarkable that blue-collar workers and white-collar workers would live next door to each other, drive similar cars, and shop in the same stores. The distinction between blue- and white-collar workers had more to do with sensibilities and taste than with economic disparities.
White collars golfed; blue collars bowled. White collars drove Cadillacs; blue collars drove Pontiacs. White collars hunted quail; blue collars hunted deer. White collars were Andy Williams; blue collars were Ralph Cramden.
The baby boomers had never known the economic world to be anything but like the world they grew up in, and (judging by their policy priorities) considered the economic and class divide issues that had motivated their parents and grandparents to be already-solved problems of a bygone era.
The world the boomers grew up in was not a stroke of luck, but was the result of several policy approaches of their elders: high taxes on excessive wealth and incomes; a labor-friendly policy regime; and a trade regime designed to protect the jobs and wages of ordinary American workers.
As that policy regime has unraveled, the result has been a reversion to the situation that obtained before the boomers were born: a yawning chasm between the lives of the rich and the rest, an end to defined benefit pensions and job security, and a growing anger in the people left behind, particularly in older people who remember the world as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
John Steinbeck spoke of a similar anger in his masterpiece, “The Grapes of Wrath”:
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.