An obvious rejoinder to my previous piece can be found in the results of a new study of the January 6 insurrectionists, conducted by political scientist Robert Pape of the University of Chicago think tank, Chicago Project on Security and Threats. Pape discovered that most of the 380 people who were arrested for their participation in the storming of the Capitol were from areas where the share of the non-hispanic white population is in decline.
Thus, he concludes that cultural stress and fear of status loss explains their radicalism and propensity for violence far more than any economic insecurity or hangover from the Great Recession. But, of course, this is the kind of dichotomy I’ve been warning against. It comes about when a decision is made to explain “deplorable” behavior as wholly explained by either economics or racism, as if the reality isn’t inevitably a combination of the two. For example, the Washington Post reported back in early February that financial troubles were highly correlated with unlawful participation in the Capitol riot.
Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.
This country has a consistent history of welcoming immigrants but also enduring a backlash based in both culture and economics. The Know-Nothing Protestants didn’t like waves of Irish Catholic immigrants, but it wasn’t just because of their religion. The newcomers competed for low-wage jobs and quickly accumulated political power in urban areas. This happened again with Italian immigrants, and it northern migration of blacks was a key factor in rise of the Ku Klux Klan outside the South. When the economy has gone south, the reaction against immigrants has intensified.
A key factor is how this plays out is in how the left responds. The left has always taken the side of the immigrant, which is why the ethnic urban machines arose and functioned inside of a Democratic Party that was dominated by southern segregationists. The party shouldn’t be that elastic today, and it would fail even if it made the effort. But it should recognize that you can’t maintain the political and social cohesion of the country if you allow this to be a clean two-sided fight. To get consensus for the legitimacy of political outcomes, the losers have to accept the results.
For more thoughts on this, I recommend Daniel Block’s new article in the Washington Monthly on the potential for a nationwide conflict not seen since the Civil War.
I don’t see how you can use that as evidence of economic insecurity when that will never be how it expresses itself. The small business owners over extended themselves in debt, are taking too much risk…and that’s supposed to be sympathetic? How? Were they defrauded like during the mortgage crisis? If anything these same people would cry and moan about red tape and “the swamp” for over-regulating them.
It’s getting old.
Look at this poll from UK:
https://twitter.com/williamjordann/status/1379210271860826115?s=21
Don’t see a lot of racism? Wait till times get tough, you’ll see plenty.
It is true that many of the insurrectionists have a history of financial struggle, but perhaps worth adding a bit more context. These are hardly impoverished folks, and hardly what we would think of as the working class. These are folks who in a number instances own their own businesses, perhaps in some cases from well-connected families, and it’s not like they were unable to find room on their credit cards to board flights, rent hotel rooms, etc. Heck, at least one or two of ’em came to DC in their own private jets. One can jettison any vestige of dialectical materialism and at least accept that these are mainly part of a petit bourgeoisie, and that particular social class is a bit less secure about how well secure their lifestyles really are. Tend to be a fairly reactionary bunch, at least historically, so it’s not much of a surprise that these would be the folks who would storm the Capitol in the name of their would-be dictator. We’ve been lucky that things haven’t been worse, but we’re very far from being out of the proverbial woods. The economic side of things for this particular demographic might improve a bit thanks to the way the Biden Administration is working overtime to stimulate the economy. The perceived threat of “Other” is going to much more difficult to contain.
LA Times did a recent story on
Suburban radicals: Inside the resurgence of right-wing extremism in Orange County
What is interesting is that majority of the organizers of the MAGA movements – starting with Palin (promoted by now reformed McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt), Tea Party, promoted by the Koch Devils, to Drumpf’s ascendancy promoted by the Mercer family (among others) – are actually in the 0.01% of wealth class. How they have convinced the real economic poor that they represent their true interests is amazing – I don’t think one can find another instance in any other democracy of this level of delusion! Truly we have the market cornered on fools – as a fraction of voting population. Reminds me of the Tom Friedman inverse correlation of middle east democracy with oil wealth – America has been a resource rich wealthy nation for such a long time that the people have become the dumbest and laziest!
The problem is that people want to have it all one way or all the other. Anti-immigrant fervor and open racism flourish during economic downturns. They also move in response to the rhetoric of leaders. John McCain could have run a very racist campaign against Obama and he demurred. That mattered more than people realized, because Trump showed what the alternative looks like.
My argument is that small town America is fucked because entrepreneurialism is no match for monopoly power, and we’re seeing the discontent marshaled towards fascism because the left thinks these folks are the other party’s problem, and they’re beyond contempt anyway. The Democrats have gotten some things right, like expanding health care, but it’s no match for the severity of the problem. Biden is doing better, so far, and his policies offer more hope.
In any case, any small business owner who goes bankrupt or falls badly behind on their taxes is experiencing severe economic anxiety, and if that leads them to feel or openly express racial or religious resentment, then it is a bit of a chicken and egg question. On the other hand, it’s the ones that stoke those feelings who are truly dangerous.
You may be right that monopoly power has fucked up small town America, but I do not think the issue will resonate in an area like mine. First, nobody in my town would say that the issue here has anything to do with monopoly power. The issue here is that a mill that provided 2200 middle class jobs for unskilled people has closed forever mostly because the market for newsprint collapsed.
Second, the monopolies are a two edged sword. I think the economy of the town might be stronger if the likes of WalMart, Canadian Tire and Staples had not driven out locally owned small businesses. On the other hand, the single biggest improvement in the quality of life in this town over the past 40 years is the fact that we can now buy whatever we want without leaving town thanks to monopolies. We love Amazon. If WalMart left we would be seriously pissed. We are glad that we no longer travel five hours both ways each year to do our Christmas shopping.
I agree that antitrust enforcement will be very good for the future health of the economy and favour those policies you advocate. But I think linking that policy to economic anxiety in the rust belt is a stretch in my opinion.
A few years back we ran our racing operations out of a shop in a small town very near a racetrack. Rural areas are popular places to put tracks due to the noise. This town used to have a thriving downtown and is surrounded by strong agricultural businesses. It was a healthy small town, with many parks, depression era public spaces and buildings – a nice place to raise kids. But after Walmart came, downtown was devastated. Many small shops closed quickly. Then the blight of the shuttered stores and lack of foot traffic affected whole blocks – the local movie theater closed, the roadhouse BBQ/dance hall closed, places where local bands used to play boarded up, small hair dressers and yoga studios didn’t want to be in that part of town anymore. Most of the downtown was abandoned; places to socially interact with neighbors lost for good.
It was exactly what everyone had warned against and it played out in slow motion right in front of our eyes. Is the town better off? Just by seeing the sheer number of empty store fronts and buildings it is easy to see that job-wise the employment due to the losses of the small businesses were far more than one Walmart could ever provide. So is the demise of a town’s economic ecosystem, heart and soul worth ease of shopping? My vote is no.
This, but on the macro level. It’s not just WalMarts in small towns. It’s every large corporation that makes it near impossible for Mom-n-Pop shops to compete.
Massive corporations are essentially just vacuums that suck up money and then siphon it away. Going back to WalMart, look at a map of Walmart stores, and then look at how rich the Waltons are. Each Walmart is basically sucking up a community’s money and sending it to shareolders and Walton family members.
And we’re not even getting to the fact that so much of the products sold from Walmart COME FROM CHINA.
Hell, I’d love to see a map of the largest shareholders and their physical concentrations, juxtaposed with map of where where the corporate sales happen. You could basically draw an arrow from lots of places in the US that point to maybe 10-12 mostly urban areas of the US where the wealth flows from and to.
What the very rich, who are often the biggest Republican donors have done, is convince Americans that it’s not the rich who are siphoning the majority of the countrys wealth and then hoarding it, but the poor. That somehow some poor person getting a pittance in food stamps and rent assistance is somehow costing them money, when it’s obviously the fucking massive corporations that suck cash, resources, skilled labor, and future skilled labor, away from rural areas and to concentrated places where the rich turn it into even more money.
I don’t even think the concept is that hard to explain, but US Conservatism has become such a cult/religion that even thinking critically about what you believe is blasphemous, so there isn’t an opening to get that across to them.
Having spent a decade working in a rural environment and currently in a medium sized city surrounded by small towns, I see your point. The biggest town in the aughts had a couple decent grocery stores, some good animal feed supply stores, etc. before Walmart built a supercenter. Last time I visited, a lot of those local merchants were gone. That same town is home to a meatpacking facility. It’s kept that town and some surrounding towns stable. Populations have remained the same or even grown. Thing is, the newcomers working for the meatpacking facility mostly came from Mexico and Guatemala. Spent a decade watching discourse in my town and surrounding towns devolve pretty quickly. One local school district came up with a scheme to introduce school uniforms in such a way that migrant workers would never be able to afford them for their kids, thus precluding their kids from access to public education (it was the “Christian thing to do” as I was told at the time). Place went from electing conservative Democrats for US Congressional and state rep/sen offices to electing some very militant Republican officeholders. Where I live now is one where the small towns nearby are imploding. We’re somewhat okay, but it’s largely because immigrants have filled some voids. And I’ve seen what happens when Walmart builds a Supercenter or a Neighborhood Market, decides it’s unprofitable, and pulls out of the small towns whose local entrepreneurs were gutted. Those towns are truly screwed. They become food deserts overnight, as well as pharmacy deserts, etc. We had a candidate run for Governor in 2018 who offered a very commonsense plan for supporting small town entrepreneurs – offering necessary training and financial support to get them off to a good start. He could break it down to the simplest level necessary, and he’d seen firsthand what life along the Mississippi delta region in particular was like. Unfortunately, he had a D next to his name on the ballot, and I guess making things easier for potential entrepreneurs have the tools they need to compete is now what gets called communism. I remember knocking on doors that year. White identity politics had definitely taken hold. The plans that Biden is likely to get pushed through reconciliation are going to help us out a lot in these parts. The state and local Democratic operations really need help. We’re badly disorganized. We are desperately underfunded, and have no good way to get a message of any sort out, let alone do any of the tangible work that would have to be done to regain trust in some areas that were once part of our coalition. As a blue dot in a vast red ocean, I will say until I am no longer able to draw a breath, don’t give up on us. I know you personally would not. I am speaking to a much broader group of folks who have never experienced life outside of the urban archipelago.
The sad thing is that while lots of people like to point to Detroit as a huge failure of a city, it’s essentially the model that WalMart and other large hub corporations are actively doing right now to rural areas. When the big Kia plant goes in South Georgia, or the Amazon warehouse closes down in some other “middle of nowhere” burg, that’s it, folks, y’all are fucking Detroit now. It’s just that no one ever goes to those towns and hears about them, so people keep pointing at Detroit even though there are hundreds of smaller Detroits out there that will never have a chance at regaining any semblance of community because ain’t no one ever going to move to a rural hellhole.
Company stores are the dreams of oligarchs who want to be aristocrats. And I can assure you that they’re winning. I know it’s not pragmatic, but Democratic Socialism is the smallest political adoption that is necessary to save this country from collapse. And it has to come really, really soon. Another two decades of this current trajectory and it’s going to be 8-9 city-states with religious fundamentalist militant groups controlling the hinterlands.
I don’t buy it. I live in a small isolated town that, if it existed in the United States rather than Canada, we would be a rust belt community. Forty years ago ten per cent of the town’s population worked at the mill. Today, the mill is gone, basically because of technology and the plummeting demand for newsprint.
The result is a stagnant population. The town has no future. We are sad about that because our kids if they are smart leave for an education and opportunity. If they are not smart, they are working at WalMart. We have an opioid problem. But there is no economic anxiety. There is still a lot of wealth in the town from the boom era. People my age had long careers as millworkers. making good money. I know people who dropped out of school at 16, worked for decades in a union job, bought a home, watched their money and are very comfortable pensioners, even millionaires today. Their sons and daughters did not do quite so well because the work wasn’t as steady for them, but they still did okay. They are still solidly middle class. Their grandsons and granddaughters have to get out.
We have known for at least 40 years that the days of great blue collar jobs available to anyone with a strong back were numbered. Since those jobs were almost exclusively reserved for white men, the median income for white men has dropped relative to everyone else in my part of the country.
The only real difference between my town – and the attitude of the people – and some dead one industry town in Ohio is that we know why it happened and we know that there is no one to blame. The market passed us by and automation did the rest. We did not have a demogogue like Bernie Sanders tell us it was the fault of trade deals or evil corporations. We did not have a demogogue like Donald Trump tell us it was the fault of bad trade deals and immigrants and brown people. We would have laughed at them.
Economic anxiety among white American males? They are the single most privileged group of people on the fucking planet. The average Trump voter had a median income of more than $70,000 US and they are economically anxious?
Boo fucking hoo.
This is all largely correct Tom, but not this:
Automation is exaggerated, and market forces are not the laws of God. Trade did do this to them, economic arguments just bristled past the bad parts of it. In aggregate society is richer as a result, but they bore the brunt of it. Deindustrialization was a political choice. You are describing the neoliberal consensus, but that doesn’t mean it was correct or had to happen the way that it did. Indeed, we are seeing a revitalized economics with throwing away of this crap.
Automation killed two thirds of the jobs in this town. At the end the mill with 350 workers was producing what 1500 did 20 years earlier. I don’t know what a neoliberal is and I do not understand what political choice we made that made people decide not to buy many newspapers. Please provide the non-neoliberal solution to our problem.
I believe globalization was a political choice (and a excellent one in my opinion.) Some deindustrialation was an inevitable and foreseeable byproduct. And you are correct – people in places like mine and the rust belt paid the price for the richer and better aggregate. It was unfair.
For the most part, the Americans did nothing for the losers. Canada threw many billions at the problem with job creation schemes, retraining dollars, and a brand new national unemployment insurance program. Much of the job creation and training money was wasted except that it provided temporary income. (The UI program was a roaring success, significantly reducing poverty over the long term.)
I spent most of my career in labour market economics and all we did was grapple with this problem. At the end of the day, the best advice I could give anyone was to get the fuck out of town. Go back to school. Find something else to do. That was 50 years ago when industrial workers were first being displaced.
One of the things about living in a town like mine? Over time we are getting dumber. The best and the brightest among us leave. Anyone with half a brain leaves. They know there are no opportunities here and they know there are great opportunities elsewhere.
Now? Fifty years after the time when the handwriting was on the wall? What kind of obligation do we owe to people in small towns with a long shuttered factory? I start by asking the question, “Why the fuck are you still living here?”
The economy is an interconnected web and no one strand gets all the credit for the whole.
Labor should get paid more. And because people are way more productive, full time should probably be closer to 28 hours than 36, or whatever the Canadian equivalent is. Bumping up pay and benefits while cutting hours for full time employment is one thing that labor should have received for becoming better educated and more productive. Unfortunately, capital used its power to hoard as much wealth as possible by re-writing tax laws, regulations, and mothballing local production so they could pay slave wages to foreigners with no labor or environmental protections.
That’s the problem.
Industries come and go. We don’t need factories for buggy whips, or for newspapers. But something that capital has forgotten is that Labor Unions bringing grievances and pay raise requests to the owners IS THE COMPROMISE. The compromise is that a mob doesn’t come to the owners house with guillotines.
I’m not saying any current right or left “populists” or demagogues are the ones with the guillotines. But they are the ones shouting the loudest right before the political differences between the right and left dissolve, and it’s just a mob. With guillotines.
That’s my far-left radical view on neoliberalism. Neoliberalism only works as long as there exists a foil that forces neoliberals to give a shit about all of the labor they are exploiting. Between Thatcher and Reagan offshoring US manufacturing after slashing the tax rates, and the Soviet Union collapsing with Russia becoming a mafia state, capital decided to say “fuck this” in regards to not entirely exploiting labor. Stagnant wages, mediocre benefits, and cheap credit is what capital has allowed labor over the past 50 years.
Most of us are just renting our place in society until we die.
I agree with a lot of what you say although I think the term neoliberalism is gibberish. I would point out that you correctly state that one strand of the economy should not get credit for the whole, but then go on to give one strand the blame for the whole. This is an ideological and philosophical argument. Interesting enough, but utterly irrelevant to solving an actual problem faced by an actual person.
I am looking for a practical answer. Mine begins with the understanding that 1950 is never coming back. I have learned that there are zero solutions down the path where you shout as loud as you can and point the finger at who you think is to blame. Even if you were 100% right.
Most of us merely rent space until we die? Probably. Thoreau said that the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation and I agreed with him when I read Walden Pond. When has it been any different?
If we are debating this as a philosophical question should I not consider the fact that globalization has lifted a billion people out of poverty around the world? Why should I favour the displaced worker living a life of quiet desperation in Ohio because he is stuck in 1950, over the worker quietly and desperately struggling to get into the middle class in China or Mexico?
I give one strand – capital – most of the blame but not all of it. Politicians in capitals’ pockets are right there along with them. Labor controls almost nothing. Union membership has sunk over the past 70 years and probably isn’t coming back. Which means that it isn’t labor’s fault that factories got mothballed, or that WalMarts swoop into a small town to destroy most small businesses before shuttering and moving on to the next small town/capital mine to exploit and extinguish. All labor wanted was their fair share, and at their peak, really were there. Unfortunately, capital and their politicians said no more. So, a neoliberal for me is the same thing as saying Capital and their bought-and-paid-for politicians who write laws to heavily favor capital over labor in every aspect possible.
Globalization is fine, in the sense that there will always be capitalism. I don’t think the government should get into the business of manufacturing handbags, perfume, golf clubs, or chewing gum. And I don’t think the US should be able to tell other countries what kind of economic system they use. But most necessities should be publicly owned, which neoliberals are absolutely against. Capital wants capital from every nook and cranny. Democratic Socialism wants to subsidize water, electric, internet, healthcare and shelter. Stereo equipment and cars can remain the purview of capitalism, I have no problem with that. But all Americans should jointly own the infrastructure, so we all have a stake in properly maintaining it and extending it to everyone.
But Globalization is also creating massive amounts of pollution. GDP is just a receipt for the amount of natural resources dug up and burned over the past year. So, I believe that any sane country that gives a shit about itself and its people should be developing clean renewable energy. Energy = Wealth. Having close to unlimited clean energy means having close to unlimited wealth. Things like ocean desalinization become possible sources for clean water, avoiding that coming water shortage nightmare as we heat the planet to create new capital for Capitalists to hoard. So while globalization has been good for developing the rest of the world, this planet is truly fucked if 7+ billion people consume and emit carbon and other pollutions like 300 million Americans.
And the best part is that Democratic Socialism would not only develop clean renewable energy as a natural side effect, but clean renewable energy is how we lift every single human out of poverty. The sooner the better. And I don’t think there’s a lot of time left before it’s too late.
Yeah, well, good luck with all of that. In another life maybe.
Accept only what currently exists and just live with it.
Gotcha.
Don’t bother to try to solve real problems for real people. Instead squander political capital pursuing fantasies.
I will pass on your political strategy, thanks.
Sorry, Don. I meant this to be a standalone comment rather than a response to you.
No worries. I pretty much sorted that out.