How to lose average Americans
Supporters of former President Donald Trump at a 2020 rally in Washington D.C. (Wikimedia Commons)
I confess. One thing I do enjoy about today’s politics is Jordan Klepper’s Daily Show interviews with Trump supporters. Visiting Trump rallies, he ties them in knots of contradiction, inconsistency, and inanity. It can be hilarious, and I smile and shake my head.
But after a good dose of this, I worry that I am being condescending. There is humor here, for sure, but also pathos. I should not be laughing, though in Klepper’s defense he tends to choose victims who are as game as he is. Still, what is happening, the reality that Klepper lampoons, is distressing and profoundly sad.
Trump has supporters of many stripes. There are the rich looking for even lower taxes, the energy barons looking for the end of “climate nonsense,” the suburbanites and country-club types who can’t imagine voting for a Democrat—the so-called traditional Republicans.
My concern here is not these predictable folks but the huge number of Americans who are drawn to Trump because they are hurting. Millions of Americans who have gravitated to Trump believe they have been screwed by the system and not helped by the Democrats, especially not by that party’s early and fulsome embrace of globalization and easy acceptance of job loss.
In much of this, they are not wrong. Across a broad front of national life, the American economy and our politics are not delivering good results for average citizens or the poor. The documented truth is that the conditions of life and living in our country are deplorable for half our people or more, with almost all measures of public well-being behind other upper-income countries. That is one of the main things fueling the widespread political disaffection in America today. When combined with extraordinary wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, the unsurprising result is widespread public anger and resentment.
And so we come to recent polling results. This is from a New York Times news story back in mid-May: "The findings reveal widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the country and serious doubts about Mr. Biden’s ability to deliver major improvements to American life. … Nearly 70 percent of voters say that the country’s political and economic systems need major changes — or even to be torn down entirely."
More recently, on June 15, The Washington Post opined: "Polls suggest that several of Mr. Biden’s core constituencies — young people, Black people and Hispanics — are increasingly Trump-curious. … For the disaffected, Mr. Trump offers the promise of radical change. In the Times poll, these ‘tear-it-down’ voters—some 15 percent of registered voters—prefer Mr. Trump by 32 percentage points. For anti-system voters, what could be better than a candidate who promises to destroy that system?"
The mind reels. So many questions swirl to the forefront.
How, in the first place, did Democrats, and progressives generally, allow the welfare of average Americans to stagnate and decline? Aren’t Democrats supposed to be looking out for the little guy? The conventional wisdom is to decry the reality that the Democrats lost close touch with working people, the non-college educated, and those in rural areas. There is truth there, but I think it is too easy merely to say that the Democrats lost sight of these Middle Americans.
The deeper truth, I believe, is that Middle Americans and the poor have been leading hard lives for decades because of the nature of the economic and political systems in which we live and work. Those systems prioritize many things, but the well-being of average citizens is not one of them. The American polity and economy are thoroughly skewed in favor of production, profit, and power at the expense of people, place, and planet. Yes, the Democrats failed to deliver, but even when they had some power, they were quite constrained. The critique of our failed and failing political economy could take forever; I have written two books on the need for system change in America. But much of it is summed up by Peter Barnes in Capitalism 3.0: “The reason capitalism distorts democracy is simple. Democracy is an open system, and economic power can easily infect it. By contrast, capitalism is a gated system; its bastions aren’t easily accessed by the masses. Capital’s primacy thus isn’t an accident…. It’s what happens when capitalism inhabits democracy.”
Here is one thing that happens when capitalism inhabits democracy: Capitalism’s growth imperative puts our politics in a straightjacket, narrowing and constricting available political choices and giving real power to those who have the finance and technology to deliver that growth.
The Democrats did have a chance for real progressive power. Way back in 2008, David Sirota wrote a prescient book, The Uprising, about the nascent populist revolt then becoming visible. “The activism and energy frothing today is disconnected and atomized,” he wrote. “The only commonality in it all is rage.” That rage, he saw, could threaten both major parties. If they played their cards right, the Democrats were the natural beneficiaries of the gathering storm, and the natural leader to make it happen was a new senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders. That now seems like a distant pipedream. Sanders almost gained the Democratic nomination for president in 2016; that he didn’t is one of the great historical mistakes in our politics. I believe he could have beaten Trump.
Our system of political economy has greatly narrowed policy options, and Democratic leadership has not been willing to challenge the system. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all been establishmentarians unwilling or unable to pursue the paths opened up by Sanders, though Biden has been a definite improvement over his Democratic predecessors.
Here are two data points that further help to explain today’s politics and the progressives’ failure to deliver for average folks. Between 1973 and 2020, the private sector unionization rate in the US declined by two-thirds, from 25% to 8%. And today US military spending is about half of discretionary federal spending. In other words, half the pie has already been eaten, and average Americans have been greatly weakened in the slicing up of what’s left.
Of course, Trump and the Republicans have exploited the Democrats’ failure. Sad to say, there is good evidence that in today’s politics it can help to be unscrupulous and shameless. For years, what average Americans have been fed for their pain by Republicans, Fox News and others is a diet of lies and misinformation, now to such an extent that a close cousin of brainwashing appears to have occurred. Trump and the Republicans have skillfully exploited the mother lode of latent American prejudice, fear, frustration, and racism, including blaming immigrants for a host of real and imagined ills. To the Democrats’ credit, they have not been willing, for the most part, to stoop to the level of fabrication and demagoguery of Trump and his allies.
Who could have imagined that an uprising against established wealth and power would eventually be captured by, of all people, Republicans led by Donald Trump?
My last question, then, is what is to be done? Millions of voters are fed up, and Trump, as The Washington Post notes, “offers the promise of radical change.” As I said, Trump is eating progressives’ lunch. The Democrats should be reaping the political benefits of the 70 percent of voters who believe serious changes are needed in our economy and politics, but it is Trump at the table. Something must change.
I think we probably all have ideas. Here is one suggestion. I wish the Democrats and allied progressives would develop a highly visible, attractive, and bold program to offer the American people. They should unite behind, and actually fight for, a half dozen programs of real change addressed to America’s challenges: income security and social justice, climate change, democracy and civic rights, foreign policy and immigration, education and health for all, and tax and economic reform. We need deep changes in these areas, and a political strategy for pursuing each. A powerful vision and a path to realize it are essential. Perhaps initial steps toward such an approach are still possible for 2024.
In developing such a plan, it would benefit the Democrats to look at the policy ideas that Sanders has put forward in books and platforms. And others have also put forward useful ideas. It would help too if we could get over our “not invented here” syndrome and start looking around the world, where problems we face are often being dealt with better. If I were young again, I would consider a new policy research center—Good Governance Globally (GGG)—that would examine and call attention, in the spirit of comparative governance, to what is working well around the world. I would ask Michael Moore to be honorary chair in appreciation for his enlightening film “Where To Invade Next.”
I recognize these thoughts run counter to the idea now in vogue that issues no longer matter in politics, only identity. To counter, I will only mention this summary of Project 2025 that highlights a portion of the large array of frightening policies Trump allies are offering.
Gus Speth is a Distinguished Next System Fellow at The Democracy Collaborative. He has worked as a key environmental movement leader and has authored several books. He was also editor of The New Systems Reader.
