At the beginning of Robert E. Quirk’s The Mexican Revolution, 1914-1915: The Convention of Aguascalientes, he gives an overview of Mexico in the last years of Porfirio Diaz:
In September 1910 Mexico celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Father Miguel Hidalgo’s “Cry of Dolores” which launched the war of independence against Spain. It was a magnificent occasion, with honored guests present from many countries. There were public speeches, banquets, and grand official receptions for the foreign visitors, the higher clergy, and the diplomats. Money seemed no object as the government of Porfirio Diaz demonstrated the wealth and good fortune of Mexico. And there were many reasons for celebration. Mexico was prosperous, more so than at any time in the previous hundred years. The budget was balanced; Mexican currency was solidly on the gold standard. The money of foreign capitalists was safe and returned comfortable dividends to those wise enough to buy agricultural lands, oil properties, and mining or railroad stocks. It was indeed a golden age, and Diaz was understandably proud of what had been accomplished since he became president more than a quarter of a century before. To the casual visitor, to the investor abroad, Mexico presented an imposing façade. All seemed well in the best of all possible worlds.
The facade of prosperity was a cruel illusion, however, for the Mexican economy was basically weak. Most outsiders remained blissfully unaware of the extreme disparity between the wealthy few and the masses of the poor. A balanced budget meant little to an Indian agricultural worker whose standard of living plummeted while the national income rose. Real wages were lower than they had been a century earlier under Spanish rule. With the approval of the government of Diaz the Indian pueblos were despoiled of their lands, and where fields were once held and worked in common by villagers, large estates now kept the workers tied to the soil as effectively as had medieval feudalism. By 1910 less than five per cent of Mexico’s population owned almost all of the arable land. And no escape seemed possible for the landless peasant who tilled the soil for the master of an hacienda. To flee from his debts and obligations was virtually impossible, for the government maintained rural guards to run down and return those who sought to escape. In any event, a family was made responsible for the debts of its head, so that even death provided no relief for the perpetual indebtedness of the peasant classes. In the cities the industrial workers labored for little pay under hazardous and unsanitary conditions. Strikes were repressed by the army with extreme brutality. Nor did the government seem inclined to remedy the inequities of the system. The philosophy of positivism, which dominated the thinking of the chief members of the regime, sanctioned the worst excesses, and malcontents were silenced by imprisonment or exile.
One thing that Kamala Harris touts and will continue to tout is the “strong Biden economy.” That ignores a simple fact that the Democrats of all people should know: that a strong economy doesn’t mean much when it’s fruits are not well distributed amongst the population. That’s a lesson from Mexico that the last years of Porfirio Diaz teaches us. He too had a country with a strong economy but that didn’t prevent the Mexican Revolution.
There are several parallels of our situation to that of Mexico in 1910, which I’d like to point out:
- The effect of the post-COVID inflation basically gave Americans a 20% pay cut, as the cost of living mechanisms prevalent in the 1970’s were mostly gone. That, more than anything else, makes this election a contest. The Democrats’ obsession with identity politics has obscured that fact.
- The COVID inflation came at the end of a long decline in the economic status of the majority of Americans relative to those at the top, a process that also began in the 1970’s. That too has made this election a contest (and quite a few before it.)
- The centralisation of wealth includes both income and property holdings. We see our houses–the central piece of wealth for most Americans–bought up by large corporations and our country transformed from a nation of owners to a nation of renters. Unlike Mexico, it wasn’t necessary to expropriate our people: the credit system, combined with real income declines and previous crashes like 2008, did the job for our oligarchs.
- The student loan crisis is basically the product of the fact that these loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and for all of the loan forgiveness schemes the Biden administration comes up with, that simple fact never gets mentioned.
The really bizarre part of all this–from a historical standpoint–is that the left in this country no longer is the “vanguard of the proletariat” or even their true representative. Zapata and Villa were “men of the people;” Kamala Harris isn’t “of the people” in any sense of the word. Joe Biden is to some extent but he’s too much of a political opportunist–which has gotten him and his son Hunter in trouble–to be up to the level of those Mexican heroes. The left is basically content to shill for the oligarchy and do their bidding when a volte-face is required, as we just saw in the Democrats’ nominating “process.”
People say that we are heading towards a civil war. Instead of always looking at our own Civil War, maybe we’d be better off studying the Mexican Revolution, a chaotic, multi-sided business with fluid geography and frequent side-switching. The end result of that messy process didn’t work out as expected: the “Conventionalists” like Zapata and Villa lost, the “Constitutionalists” like Carranza won, but the agenda of the former ultimately became the agenda of the latter. Since Trump has chosen a Scots-Irish loudmouth like J.D. Vance as his running mate, and the Scots-Irish are notorious for “winning their battles by losing them,” (as my mother used to say) the populists may come out ahead one way or the other.
Porfirio Diaz said that Mexico was “so far from God, so close to the United States.” The American left wants to reverse that for this country so that we are “so far from God, so close to Mexico” where the border stampede–their hope for ultimate victory–has come from. Anticipating unintended consequences is something Americans aren’t very good at, and that blind spot may take us to places that none of us really want to go.
Positive Infinity 