Yves here. This post provides a useful reminder that the hidden disease at the heart of the politics of most economies is neoliberalism. And as we have pointed out since the financial crisis, in bad economic times, voters tend to move to the right. That propensity is if anything more pronounced when government budget-cutting makes social safety nets a prime target. So the rejection of a working class faux friend like Biden in favor of a wrecking ball like Trump should not be a surprise.
However, there is one claim that needs to be addressed, which is the continued depiction of Trump’s fanbase as consisting only or mainly of less educated whites. In fact, for a Republican, Trump has been getting so much support from Hispanics and blacks that the Democrats are in freakout mode.
One assumption is that the men in these demographics like Trump’s macho posturing. But it seems to go beyond that. Consider this eye-popping factoid from New York Magazine’s The Cut, which Lambert included in last Friday’s Water Cooler:
“How Black Women Feel About Biden, Kamala Harris, and 2024 A Cut survey shows a warning sign for Democrats ahead of Election Day” [New York Magazine]. “The Cut asked 1,200 Black women how they feel about the candidates and which issues are most important to them. More than half said they plan to vote for Biden, foreshadowing a weaker level of support than the 95 percent who pulled the lever for him and Kamala Harris four years ago. ….The survey is the first of four the Cut is running between now and November. It polled Black women ages 18 to 55 between June 3 and June 14 — notably, before the president’s disastrous debate performance sparked calls for him to exit the race, a gunman made an attempt on former president Donald Trump’s life, and Trump announced J.D. Vance as his running mate.”
Only some unspecified “more than half” for Biden????? That means at best three-quarters and strongly implies barely more than half. This is stunningly bad. Black women have long been seen as a core Dem faction. Mind you, that does not mean they would vote for Trump, unlikely their male peers who might admire, erm, Trump’s force of personality. But it’s still terrible.
Admittedly, the same story says these women think better of Harris, but only by five points, and well below the historical 90% black propensity to vote Democrat:
“[T]he survey found that more Black women approved of Harris’s job performance than Biden’s. Sixty-eight percent approved of how the vice-president is handling her role, compared to 63 percent in Biden’s case. Black women ages 18 to 34 were more likely to say they feel moderate or strong pressure to support Harris.”
Perhaps this survey was an outlier. But the sample size makes it hard to dismiss.
By Aman Sethi, editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, who previously was deputy executive editor at HuffPost, executive editor for strategy at BuzzFeed, editorial director with Coda Media, editor-in-chief of HuffPost India, associate editor with the Hindustan Times, and foreign correspondent (Africa) and Chhattisgarh correspondent with The Hindu. Originally published at openDemocracy
Until last week, it appeared the US elections would be about one single issue: Joe Biden’s age. Biden has since stepped aside, and Kamala Harris’s nomination as the Democrats’ presidential candidate is now a near certainty.
This leaves the Democrats facing an arguably even bigger issue. Having been in charge for 12 of the past 16 years, they are the party of the status quo – but US voters clearly want significant change.
In a New York Times poll of voters in six crucial battleground states this May, 55% of respondents said the current political and economic system needs major changes, with another 14% saying it should be torn down completely. Some 70% of respondents felt Donald Trump is the man who could achieve such an overhaul, with 43% thinking that the changes he would make would be good for the country.
Only 23% expected Biden to do the same; he isn’t on the ticket anymore but his vice-president, Harris, doesn’t appear the sort of politician who will torch the system.
Over the coming weeks and months, the Trump and Harris campaigns will seek to frame the election on terms favourable to their respective candidates, but it is worth taking a moment to understand why so many Americans think ‘the system’ needs to change and that Trump is the man to do it.
Wendy Brown is a political theorist at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and the author of several books including Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West.
Brown spoke to openDemocracy in what seemed like another lifetime, but was in fact, just last week when Biden was yet to withdraw from the presidential race. This interview has been edited for clarity.
openDemocracy: When we look at geographies as dispersed as the US, the UK, Europe and India, there seems to be a pattern of technocratic liberal political parties almost unwittingly laying the ground for reactionary right-wing forces that shift politics so far away from the centre that when the progressives get a chance to rule again, the terms of the debate have shifted decisively right-wards. As a consequence, we never seem to actually get progressive rule even when a new government is voted in.
I’m thinking here of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party coming in after 14 years of Tory rule in the UK; Barack Obama after George W Bush and Biden after Trump; even India’s authoritarian turn under Narendra Modi after Manmohan Singh. How do you read the present? Is there a common strain here or are we confusing categories?
Wendy Brown: I do think there’s a common strain, even as it has diverse tributaries and works differently in different places. Decades of neoliberal devastations of middle- and working-class prospects, combined with fears about climate change, set the ground for our politics today.
The dismantling of social states – the social provisions and social commitments that put a floor under working- and middle-class people when things go wrong – is key. That floor is gone. At the same time, wages became stagnant or worse. Unions became so severely weakened that they lost their capacity to work against capital, and states largely gave up regulating capital. The rise of finance capital which spikes the cost of everything from housing to health care made things worse.
When this kind of thing happens, ordinary people either develop a radical critical analysis, if one is available, and say, ‘What the hell is going on? Capital needs to be leashed and states need to provide provisions and protections of all kinds’ or they turn to the right, and look to protect just their own. And it may be just fantasies of protection, but fantasies are very comforting when you’ve got nothing else.
So a social compact that says or implies, ‘We’re all here, we all deserve at minimum food, shelter, protection from extreme penury’ – that’s gone. What we have instead is ethno-nationalist huddling under the promise that a small group will be taken care of, and everybody else left to suffer or perish.
This huddling is anointed by charismatic figures who proclaim that a certain group of people – whether it’s Hindus in India, or white people in the US – will be made safe again through a multifaceted ‘project of restoration’. Restoring the family, restoring gender roles, restoring racial and ethnic separations and hierarchies, restoring religious supremacy in places where it is faltering.
That restoration promise is false, of course, but very powerful.
One of the things that I struggle with is this trap, where we know the promises of these authoritarians are false, which suggests that ‘the people’ are somehow being misled. But are people really being misled?
On one level, there’s just no question. I think that the ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda – you’ll have lower prices, more money in the bank, better jobs, intact families, an end to an opioid crisis – it’s bullshit, no doubt about it. It’s not going to be delivered.
But what is delivered? What is delivered is the anointing as valuable people who have felt disvalued…in their jobs, in their school curriculums, in representations of them by a liberal elite.
So ‘the people are being misled’ analysis holds on the matter of economic interests because the economic promises won’t be delivered on. But people don’t just have economic interests. They also have psychological, social, emotional and political ones, even if and when they tell you that the economy is their most important political concern. And the right-wing strong men are doing a beautiful job of addressing those other interests by anointing the pain and lifting up the value of their followers.
That’s what ethno-nationalist rhetoric and heteronormative family rhetoric does. It says: ‘You may be suffering. You might have a hard time paying the bills and some of you may be struggling with addiction, depression, anxiety, obesity, or fear of the future. But you’re good people, the best people. Your values are right, and your desires are right. And I will protect you against all of those liberal elites and hipsters, not to mention the radical left totalitarians, who mock those values and assault your worth.’
That’s where we have to complicate the ‘people are being misled’ analysis, by remembering that we are not just economic creatures. Ironically, it’s leftists and liberals who reduce us to this by treating working-class right-wing attachments as false consciousness, insisting that the interests of working- and middle-class people line up only with Biden or Harris.
But the working class will not get what they want from a Biden or Harris agenda.
That’s interesting because if you listen to Democrats and their supporters, all you hear is ‘this is the best economy in a decade’, ‘this is the best economy in a generation’, ‘Biden is the best president we have seen in a long time’. And here in the UK, I can imagine Starmer and his cabinet may just deliver what they brand ‘the best economy in 14 years’ and still lose the election in 2029 to a right-wing reactionary.
The issue you raise adds another layer to what’s wrong with the false consciousness claim. Because the ‘best economy’ does not reach to a lot of the elements neoliberalism has gutted so deeply, for example, affordable homeownership everywhere, or in the US, accessible, affordable health care and higher education. For the working class, these things are gone – basically gone to private equity – and ‘the best economy in 14 years’ doesn’t change that.
You’re in London, right? There’s no chance in hell that a working-class person without inherited wealth has access to home ownership. To have a working-class job and be able to own your own home is nothing more than a generational memory.
So when you say, ‘I’m delivering the best economy we’ve ever had’, how does that actually reach a working-class person? Maybe with a slight rise in hourly wage and with more jobs available.
But a ‘good economy’ – for example, Biden’s economy – that has new infrastructure investment and a roaring stock market and strong growth and low unemployment, does not reach to those crucial places – affordable housing, health, higher education – where families have just slipped and slid down, with no prospect of climbing back up,
And that’s why the myth of restoration is so important and effective.
It’s a myth, but when Trump says, ‘I’m gonna give it back to you, I’m gonna give you back what you or your parents had’, that’s far more powerful as a way to mobilise the working and middle classes, than a low unemployment, modest inflation, high-growth economy, one that still is not making all the important things accessible again.
This is a favourite tack for journalists towards the end of an interview, but what is the way out here?
Look, this is the tough question, not just for me, but for the left more generally. Why has the left been so unsuccessful in harnessing the enormous discontent that most people have with the state of the world? Offering a vision that deals with the very same fears and anxieties that the right has mobilised is utterly crucial.
That means taking very seriously that most people are rightly terrified about the future and are also dealing with a deep sense of loss; lost affordable transportation, education, housing and health, but also lost stability of family, identity and place and with all of this a lost sense of safety, security and futurity. These fears and losses need to be addressed directly – not with the kind of technical accounts that people like Biden offer about insulin prices or a bit of debt relief – but with a compelling way forward to a different order. Even with Starmer, as you say, there’s no clear agenda, no manifesto, no big picture. Yet the big picture is exactly what the right offers, and wins with!
So we need to begin by taking seriously that many working- and middle-class people feel great anxiety, fear and loss, and articulate a collective path forward that is deeply compelling, not one built on technicalities, identities and small fixes.
