The “ruling” (well, sort of, and less so by the day) political class is still in shock over Donald Trump’s victory last month. How did he do it? What can we (if we hate him) do to reverse it sooner or later? What can we (if we love him) do to sustain this victory? (That question is being asked less; as is the case in men’s ministry, it’s easier to run an event-based movement than one that’s sustainable over the long haul.)
Personally I think I have the answer to the question as to why it happened. Donald Trump managed to turn his campaign into a class-based revolt without making it obvious. His supporters are the descamisados of our day. They lost their shirts in the post-COVID inflation without a compensating cost of living increase in income, and they didn’t forget it (or better were reminded of it every time they took out their wallet, physical or digital.)
Pulling this off in an American culture was deemed impossible. Americans (both native born and immigrants) are drilled from the crib that they are the masters of their own economic destiny, that, if they aren’t moving up in life, it’s their fault. Thus to admit that they’re any kind of “lower” or even “working” class is an admission that they’re a moron, and no one likes to admit that they’re a moron.
That to a large degree has inoculated the American electorate from real Marxism, which is based in the class struggle and the economics of surplus value that go with it. Faced with this reality, the American elite left (whose real interest in the welfare of working class people is limited at best) decided to end run this attitude with an oppressor/oppressed dialectic based on anything but class: race, and their favourite dividing line, sex and gender. Coupled with their concepts of intersectionality (where wrecks happen) and DEI, they thought that, with the importation of non-white immigrants, they could flood the country with people who would keep them in power indefinitely.
It didn’t work.
To start with, bringing in 10 million people in a short period was guaranteed, by simple supply and demand, to run up housing prices. Couple that with the fact that, in the wake of COVID, everyone decided to move, you have another highly inflationary event, one that a)is at the core of most Americans’ economic aspirations and b)falls especially hard on younger people, the group that the Democrats though they had in their back pocket.
Second, anyone in labour relations knows that, if you want to break a union, you bring in “scab” labour from somewhere else and replace the organised workers. In a sense the people who came here legally–whether that was at Jamestown or in citizenship ceremonies in the last year–form a sort of union, and they didn’t like the scab labour. This accounts for the dramatic shifts among non-white groups of all kinds. The problems with that importation were compounded by the fact that many of the newly arrived were criminals where they came from, and this country never wanted criminals even before World War I when immigration was very open.
Coupled with a weak candidate who was promoted on a DEI basis and you have the disaster that they experienced last month.
From what I’m hearing the Democrats are still in denial about their predicament. They’re still trotting out the old race and gender based stuff, not realising they’re up against stronger headwinds in the form of class and economics. The Democrat party has lost the working class and their elite leadership is incapable of connecting with it except through an “upstairs/downstairs” political system driven by welfare payments, and that is not sustainable for a variety of reasons.
The Republicans have challenges here also, and big ones. How do we hold together this unprecedented coalition we have? How do we continue to be the party of opportunity while representing the working class against a gentry elite? How do we make the dialectic about class stick when such has traditionally been against the grain in American life?
It reminds me of something that happened to the last Dean of the college where I teach:
One of the more amusing moments I’ve had here at UTC has been the visit of the new Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, Dr. Daniel Pack, to the SimCentre, where I just finished my PhD. He wanted to meet with the students; it’s been a rough road for the program, and he wanted to “cast a vision” for the future. Towards the end of his talk, he threw out the old B-school meme that, in Chinese, the character for “opportunity” is contained in the character for “crisis.”
However, as is the case with most gatherings of engineering students (and faculty) these days, the Chinese are well represented. Once he said that he paused in puzzlement for a second, looked at the Chinese and asked, “Is that really true?” The Chinese, after looking at each other, confirmed that it was true. Needless to say, the Dean sighed with relief.
Positive Infinity 