I recently read G. K. Chesterton for the first time, but not the Chesterton that I’m supposed to read, the Chesterton that inspired generations (you know: the religious stalwart, the liberal-conservative, or the hideous anti-Semite). Instead, I’ve been reading a collection of essays from around 1900 before he became a monument called Tremendous Trifles.
In it, he has an essay called “In the Place de la Bastille.” You can read it for yourself here, public domain, from the good people at Project Gutenberg. It’s a reminder of the art of the essay — well shaped, clever thesis, planned digression, gorgeous style — all the things a reader could want. (His “The Twelve Men” is maybe the best little gem of an essay I have seen in a long time, too.)
His occasion is the Bastille itself as well as the art and necessity of destroying buildings:
As a matter of mere material fact, the Bastille when it was taken was not a horrible prison; it was hardly a prison at all. But it was a symbol, and the people always go by a sure instinct for symbols; for the Chinaman, for instance, at the last General Election, or for President Kruger’s hat in the election before; their poetic sense is perfect. The Chinaman with his pigtail is not an idle flippancy. He does typify with a compact precision exactly the thing the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots, that it is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy and evil magic calling monsters from the ends of the earth. The people hate the mine owner who can bring a Chinaman flying across the sea, exactly as the people hated the wizard who could fetch a flying dragon through the air. It was the same with Mr. Kruger’s hat.
Mr. Kruger is Paul Kruger, whom we know from the Krugerrand. As for his hat, it was quite a hat. After the second Boer War, he and his hat were a symbol for voters of all that was loathsome and tiresome and commercial, the “steady on” rule by bankers and international commerce that infuriated the voters.
Chesterton was suggesting that popular resentment at absurd symbols, and popular hatred vented at minority groups, was an accurate reaction, but a completely inaccurate response. It is like a body suffering from cholera: the cause is the bacterial disease, but the body’s reaction is purgation — a violent, deadly effort to eject everything from the digestive tract. If the problem were bad chicken or bread, the body’s reaction would be an efficacious response as well, but it is mortal in the case of dysentery.
Chesterton says, of the Bastille,
The people saw the building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved fact. For of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive are big buildings. Man feels like a fly, an accident, in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could unmake it. Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, a ritual meaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religious service.
It’s inarguable, I think, that we live in a similar time, or perhaps a worse one, to Chesterton’s angry voters, where a few can call “monsters from the ends of the earth” (and they can summon dragons, too) to replace workers.
As the ultimate indignity, today’s materialism and wealth can not only snap its fingers and make an army of foreign workers appear, but it can make the workplace itself disappear and fly across the globe to the “pigtailed Chinaman” (in Chesterton’s language). No longer can it merely hire off-duty police to break strikes. It can have the full efforts of the FBI flying private, unmarked aircraft over labor protests, operating Stingrays and cell-tower spoofs. The textile mill, the factory, the distribution center, the farm, and the processing plant can be whisked away with merely a word to take root in some far edge of the world, and all at the behest not of this man or that, but of “capital” and “market” and “efficiencies” and “competitiveness” — abstracted nouns that are responsible for the money justify the money, and then protect the money, with no humans involved at all.
People speak of the economic inequality of the Victorian era in London as infamous, but Edwardian England (and America) was probably more vile. The worst instances of the poor starving in the streets and the most misguided work houses had been cleaned up, so the wealthy and middle class didn’t have to see new mothers with open sores actually dying in the gutters as they went to work, but this is the Gilded Age. This is when rail, cotton, sugar, and, soon, oil tycoons competed with each other in something Thorstein Veblen called “ostentatious display” and “conspicuous consumption” — a sort of competitive waste. (Remember the naughts and the Wall Street parties where ice sculptured penises micturated vodka for the guests? Remember the solid gold toilet seat in the Merrill Lynch executive bathroom? Conspicuous consumption is a feature of radical wealth disparity.)
We are, today, in an era of unsurpassed greed, ignorance, dishonesty, and contempt. We are in an age that produces revolutions or their mirror images. This leaves us with one question, and we’ve been asking it in one form over and over and over again: How on earth did the Democratic Party become Kruger’s hat in 2016? If we have any honesty left, any intellectual capacity remaining, we must answer how Donald J. Trump, sandwich board “billionaire” for ostentatious display, become a battering ram against the Bastille?
There is a tendency I have spotted from time to time in myself, and among my political peers here, to fall into a patronizing liberalism, a paternalistic egalitarianism, where we mumble darkly that equality is far too precious to be left in the hands of the mob. We aren’t the first to say it. We aren’t being bad Americans, either. After all, we have been quick to point out that the Electoral College was supposed to “save us” from Trump because it “was meant” to save America from the mob.
It’s important to watch the words, and “the mob” is Hyde to the Jekyll of “the voter.” We see in every early discussion of democracy an invocation of the specter of that mobile vulgus — the roving mass of commoners, undirected or misdirected, which writers compare to locusts, apes, or a wildfire. Voters choose, but mobs destroy.
I sympathize. Before we all start quoting Charles Mackay, let’s assume, at least for the duration of this essay, that Chesterton is right: “the people always go by a sure instinct for symbols.” That means that the symbols they pick are properly picked on some basis.
To answer the question, let’s address it as two separate questions: First, how did our side come to be Kruger’s Hat, and, second, how did Trump fashion himself into a battering ram? Both stories are unlikely, and both are sad.
First, I freely admit that being associated with high finance and capital is unlikely to have been “the” factor in the 2016 election. Before you jump to the comments section, I am not arguing that “working class whites” decided the election. I am not arguing that the Goldman Sachs speeches moved the vote nationally. Calm yourselves. Mrs. Clinton’s perceived background in finance might have been the factor that cracked the “blue wall” in union-heavy Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan, and therefore it may be “the” factor that turned a sure victory into an electoral college loss, but, on a national scale, it wasn’t The Thing people thought about when they thought bad things about Hillary Clinton.
Part 1: The champion of the poor becomes the lady in a beaver hat
In some way, Mrs. Clinton was, in the popular imagination, the perfect image (or imago) of oppression by capital. The self-assurance, the retreat into “it’s complicated,” the reliance on elaborate laws of finance and market demand that mean that — sorry — your coal jobs are just gone forever — these fit the picture of the far away “master of the universe” who angered workers.
Even though Donald Trump spoke of money, boasted of money, displayed money with his private helicopter and plane, Hillary Clinton was the archetype and symbol of the capitalist system that oppressed those voters who fled her and who hated her. I am certain that the first or second comment will say, “Bernie Sanders is to blame for bringing up Goldman-Sachs,” when, of course, that portion of blame could go to Hillary Clinton herself for having a long association with multiple Wall Street firms or to the Russians for hacking the DNC or to Wikileaks for conducting a personal vendetta on behalf of Julian Assange against HRC or to Bill Clinton for setting out a vocal and public pro-Wall Street economic plan. There were many, many reasons for Hillary Clinton to be vulnerable to an “affiliated with Wall Street” charge, but those charges shouldn’t have stuck when running against a Republican. Furthermore, it wasn’t “spoke to Goldman Sachs” that hurt her in the mob mind, but the air of superiority and “international capital is right, and you are not” that infuriated them. Donald Trump lied, of course, but he said that every white person’s job would be back because he was a master of money who could use that malignant power to summon dragons and mines to America.
On another front, we have to separate tactical and strategic mistakes in 2016 and set aside both dumb luck and foreign involvement as outside of the scope of our analysis. (Luck and foreign involvement actually explain the loss, but if we’re trying to understand how to win in 2018, how to crush these evil people, we can’t think about that here and now.)
1a. Tactics: For tactical mistakes, we have the choice to allocate resources away from the “blue wall” in the upper midwest and toward “potential capture” states like Georgia and North Carolina. Tactically, there were lost voter registration contests here and there, and there was a pretty significant failure to heal the internal rift in the party.
1b. Strategy: Strategic factors worry me more, because these are the ones that might be repeated. Secretary Clinton’s television commercials focused on character. She talked about her own accomplishments, although these did not “land” for some reason. Her anti-Trump ads, however, were all character based. Since television and radio news were already revealing Trump’s character pretty well, the effectiveness of this was merely to add nausea, not information, to uninformed voters. Specifically, they did nothing to build up Mrs. Clinton herself, and, since Trump was running as a battering ram and a stick of dynamite, they did not attack the one axis in which he would be vulnerable: effectiveness and capacity.
The mob responded to Trump’s speeches. These speeches could be boiled down to one phrase: “Everything’s terrible.” He said this over and over again. While it was empirically untrue, the Democratic Party as a whole had missed the mood of the mob. People feel and felt that someone was in control, but basic economic operations were no longer comprehensible, much less rational or fair.
Clever leftists and economists deduce that this is because of economic inequality, but that is like saying, “Your sweating and delirium are because of a virus. Relax. We’re going to start studying that virus really soon now.” Knowing that it’s a virus is absolutely irrelevant to the person with a dangerous fever. Knowing the name of the disease does nothing to cure it, even though it might help the doctors.
Why did the Democrat — the woman running on a platform that would have, in bite size pieces, reduced the temperature of the fever — get blamed as the oppressor, the corporatist, and the money manager? Well, the other part of the strategic mistake our party made was our President’s.
It pains me to criticize one of the best presidents of the last century, but, if I’m being honest, and I ask you to search your own heart, too, the mob could only respond to, “Everything’s terrible” and “The people we have now are very stupid, believe me” if President Obama had been president for the prior eight years. This is because not only did President Obama shy away from “spiking the ball” or “doing a victory lap,” he barely even let his own supporters know when he won the game. He didn’t just need Luther as an anger translator. He needed a Luther celebration translator.
President Obama was obsessed with doing a great job in a world that was like a suicidal teenager with unlimited razor blades and the keys to the liquor cabinet: he spent every waking second trying to keep the darn thing conscious and safe. Every month brought another geopolitical crisis, and every other month brought a domestic economic murder-suicide pact. Meanwhile, he spent seven years with an opposition party that believed in being, as we see now, a disloyal opposition — a group for whom neither decorum nor national interest could reign in its contempt and hostility. Therefore, his speeches tended to be pleas and reassurances. The Republicans were excellent at opposition — indeed it’s all they’re truly good at — and ensured that every speech he gave would have to be in response to something (defaulting on the national credit, when all else failed, for example).
Still, if Donald Trump is a pathological braggart, a man whose delusions of grandeur are comically horrifying — from having the largest crowd ever gathered for any occasion in human history at his inauguration to Parisians showing up at the Eiffel Tower on Bastille Day “because they heard” he and Macron “were having dinner there” — then Barrack Obama was literally the opposite. We can’t even get the public to realize that bin Laden is dead and GM is alive because of Obama. While old people blame Jimmy Carter for high interest rates, they won’t acknowledge that Obama’s were 0%. While they whined like Wal-Mart shoppers with expired coupons when gasoline prices went up after Katrina, they won’t even admit that gasoline prices are at an adjusted low now. The CFPB saved the public over $3 billion a year in overdraft fees, but no one knows about it. The CFPB improved everyone’s (almost) credit rating by striking medical bills from credit, but no one knows it. I could go on, but I don’t know where to start, and that’s the problem.
We had a parade of opposition voices from Republicans, and our President was humble and non-antagonistic — always seeking bipartisanship that never materialized — so the public, the mob, “knows” that “everything’s terrible.” It never heard any policies from these Republicans on the radio or television, but they heard complaints, so, when Donald Trump came forward to say that everyone is stupid, bad, and rotten, and You Are Screwed, the mob didn’t object to the lack of policies. He was simply saying what Everyone Knows.
Our party, therefore, had a strategic problem, a severe one. Even as the left wing recognized that “consumers” were being preyed upon by corporations, that workers were seeing wages stagnate, that corporations were multiplying arbitration, and as it was fighting, the party itself didn’t seem to catch onto how complete the sense of unfairness is among voters. The party didn’t realize just how disaffected people are. Part of this was a fear of being “too radical” and being scared of the “class warfare” label, and part of it was fear of alienating fund raising sources. Regardless, that public mood was nasty, and the party thought it was still narrowly focused on “pocketbook” issues like specific wage and union measures.
One huge strategic mistake is to read the words “economic anxiety” and see “income fear.” Trump’s voters were fat enough. The “Obama-Trump” voters aren’t poor.
When people misread, they begin to think policies alone will address the needs of the people, but the people were/are much angrier than that. Therefore, Hillary Clinton was uniquely positioned by her party and her own rhetoric to seem like the voice of The System in 2016.
2. How Donald J. Trump, Millionaire, Who Owns a Mansion and a Yacht, Became a Pitchfork Aimed at the Fatcats
Remember that my essay is predicated not on the public who voted for Trump being right, but being emotionally inerrant. That mob was not any more clear headed in choosing Trump than it had been in choosing Father Coughlin, or even Lenin. It was a swung fist aimed at a wounded limb, a hypothermic patient stripping naked and wandering off into the snow.
In a sense, all Donald Trump had to do is what he did when he took his escalator ride of infamy: stand and deliver a jeremiad on everything. His critical appeal was disconnection. His stump speech was no speech at all. It was, instead, alternating boasts and flogging of “everyone” in Washington. Had he connected his statements, he would have created propositions, and propositions would have been constructions that needed support and defense. Shotgun blasts of hatred, opprobrium, personal taunts, and sneering, on the other hand — especially when delivered in sentence fragments and punctured anacolouthon — need no defense, can’t be recalled, and do not form whole propositions.
Watch, if your gorge can stay down long enough, that presidential announcement again (linked at “escalator ride”). Listen for how many claims of horror he makes. Immigrant rapists, trade deals by stupid people, stupid military, stupid action against ISIL, stupid in Syria, stupid people destroying jobs, and then boasting of his money, his genius, his proven powers of wealth creation (implicitly) equaling the power to solve all problems.
The biggest problem Donald Trump faced in his campaign was explaining away his own wealth, but Hillary Clinton and the Democrats never attacked him on this axis. They also never attacked him on his “record of success.” Trump’s single genius was in using stories of his lavish parties and extraordinary donations as evidence of his competence. He claimed to be a political insider because a political corruptor, and he claimed that his experience suborning politicians made him an expert at how to make politics clean. Never once did anyone ask, “Why would someone who feels no respect for law as a private citizen respect it now?”
Furthermore, he claimed to be the thing that everyone hates. He claimed to be the creature who could snap his fingers and make a thousand jobs disappear, because the factory went away. (Well, he claimed both this and that he “knew the best people, the best” who did this more directly.) He promised that this power of evil was his innately, and, in exchange for becoming president, he would begin snapping his fingers to help workers.
Now, the logic hole is vast. If he had that power and wanted to help, why hadn’t he? He claimed it was because “deals” kept him from doing the best things. I’m not sure anyone followed his syllogism as far as I just did, but there it is. It wasn’t a featured part of his speeches.
Instead, what got him votes was the complaining and the violence. He promised, effectively, to burn down all of it. “It” was anything and everything. “It” was your concern about brown people. “It” was your worry about drug dealers. “It” was your fear about terrorism. “It” was your fear for your job. “It” was your disgust at taxes. “It” was your personal unhappiness with that time the VA hospital didn’t do right by you. “It” was your ex-wife getting custody or alimony. “It” was the fire marshal. “It” was not being able to pat a woman’s behind suddenly and vigorously as a sign of great appreciation. Donald Trump would burn “it” down. As an experienced fat cat, he knew the secret wheels to knock off the cart.
3. Where we go from here: The dilemma of educating the mob or educating the dancing with it.
I completely understand how tired people are of hearing about “economic anxiety” as an explanation for the last election. I get it. Poor whites should never have been abandoned any more than they should suddenly be embraced. They are not the lost lambs we leave the flock on the hillside to go rescue. I’m not writing about them.
For three decades, at least, American families have, by and large, been one paycheck away from the street (eight million Americans are currently one paycheck from being homeless). Employees tend to feel increasingly insecure in their jobs as they approach mid-career. American workers in general are, to put it scientifically, freaked out about the security of their jobs. Therefore, one can look at employment and economic production and productivity all one wants, but the average worker has little to no savings and feels, from the bottom of the employment ladder to the middle of the ladder, as if she is about to lose her job at any moment. That is economic insecurity.
Family and individual debt levels have fallen since 2008, but not necessarily for good reasons. Credit may have eased compared to 2008, it is still phenomenally tight for consumers. As banks have begun lending, they have leaned increasingly on poor credit ratings as a source of profit.
The average American is stuck in an annual contract for a bundled cable or satellite television, an annual contract for a cell phone, car payments, and either rent that is above 30% of gross income (government guidelines suggest that it should not exceed 25% of net) or a mortgage payment with an unstable rate. These all create anxiety. For every story of abuse from Wells Fargo, there are other consumers being abused and not getting relief or not forming a class or being forced to arbitrate, and for each one on the news, there are likely many cases not proven, not prosecuted, but still abusive. How many consumers get $8/$15 a month in mystery fees from the bank, a brand new debit card that uses an RFID chip that the consumer didn’t ask for but which is costing $2/month for extra convenience?
All of these things make the consumer, the worker, the employee, just as Chesterton said of man facing the large buildings: he “feels like a fly, an accident, in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could unmake it.” We want to throw a hammer through the pretty glass windows, just to remind the world that the hand of man comes first, the worker must exist before there is a “consumer.”
So, do you want to try to tame this fever? Do you want to persuade people that their concerns are exaggerated, that these are the natural stresses of a growing economy, and everything will be fine, if they just calm down and trust the markets?
Those of you who have read my comments know my sentiments on the subject. I say, “No.” I feel the frustration, too. Life on the bottom rung is no fun, and being two rungs up isn’t that much better. Knowing that at any minute some pinch-faced Republican Congressman might cancel my retirement to save money or “teach self-reliance” among the elderly is unpleasant.
For prescriptions, I would argue a few obvious ways forward, but I am no prophet (and here is no great matter). I propose that we Democrats:
BRAG: We need to boast, with facts, with documentation. We need to be sure that the public knows, that it can’t forget, every good thing we’ve done. We need to have simple phrases for all of these things, too. “Dodd-Frank” can’t be “Dodd-Frank”: It has to be “bank solvency act.” Each of the CFPB’s accomplishments needs to be trumpeted. Screw the feelings of the bundlers: we need every labor victory shouted from the rafters in language that passes muster. Perhaps we don’t say “union protections,” but we should be talking about “job security for manufacturing” in every part of the country. When Obama got a regulation saying that a plant had to put up notice 100 days in advance of closing to off-shore jobs, it was sad, except that, before, there had been no requirement at all.
We must brag, and we must brag uniformly. We need to brag no matter what reporters ask our people. “So, what do you think about North Korea?” “Well, Jim, I’m just delighted that Democrats were able to pass a bill, with no Republican votes, that will allow every American to get two free doctor’s visits a year for preventative medicine. This is going to lower medical costs overall tremendously and make us a healthier nation….”
We need to send our members to the cameras, too, to brag. I don’t care that the representative from West Virginia is nervous about being a known Democrat. He’s getting funds from the DNC, and (D) will be on the ballot; might as well get the voters over the shock now.
Stop the false dichotomy of “economic populism” and “identity politics”: There is a genuine argument between these two philosophies. It doesn’t apply, and it isn’t meaningful, when it comes to winning elections. If you are in graduate school somewhere, and if you want to have a nice little fight and pick out a clique of cool kids to hang with, then go at it. Otherwise, cut it out. The Republicans can read our blogs, you know. The Russians can, too. They’ve been fostering and inflating this false division, and they really want us to fight “Bernie Bros” and Clintonites. The least we can do is not help them.
Recognize economic anxiety as a broad phenomenon: Now that it isn’t our President as incumbent, perhaps we can admit that the overall economic sentiment in America can best be characterized as “afraid” and “frustrated.” The wealthiest are having parties that would shame the Vanderbilts, but the rest of us are underemployed and threatened more than ever before by both magically disappearing workplaces and automation.
We must promise and deliver jobs and job protections. This is not easy. We will be taken seriously in a way that Trump never was, because we will do what we say.
If we do as I say, some of the big bundlers will desert us. This is a fact. On the other hand, the lesson of Bernie Sanders is that small contributions can almost equal these large donors. I’m sorry, fans of democracy, but they can’t equal right wing dark donors en masse (2016 saw billionaire brawl on the right; so we still haven’t seen the Armageddon of Adelstein, Koch, Mercer, Walton, DeVoss, and the rest all backing the same candidate; this is the scenario that the “serious people” at the DNC were afraid of and the reason they were eager to see Clinton be the presumptive candidate with her three SuperPAC’s — they anticipated JEB being a super-GOP candidate).
I cannot see any way to win back the union workers we lost, erode the weak Republican voters, and activate young voters except by making realistic populist appeals. They can’t be technocratic, either. They can’t be adjustments to little laws. While all of that might be good policy, it is losing politics when the people are a mob.
The people hate The System. Anything that is quiet, light footed, temperate, and sweet hearted is going to miss the mood.
Show the ineffectiveness/uselessness of the right: After the election, Trump voters had never heard he was a bankrupt. His disaffecting voters now are mainly complaining that he isn’t able to get anything done. Use it. We need to show voters what the right has done and what it hasn’t tried to do.
Make it clear to them that they don’t care about jobs, but they really do care, quite a bit, about slashing Medicare and hurting people.
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My apologies for the length of this, and my thanks for those who read it through.
I apologize in advance for typos and in particular words. I always end up dropping a word or three I meant.
Peace and comity to all.