David Remnick, in “It Happened Here” (New Yorker, 11/28/16), quotes from Richard Rorty’s 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, in which Rorty refers to the plight of the American working class in the age of globalization, which incentivizes corporations to seek cheap labor pools in developing countries, thereby dooming the merely high-school educated to a marginal economic status.
“Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for–someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. [ . . . ] One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. [ . . . ] All the resentment which the badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
So now we can see why the Black Lives Matter movement had (and still has) the unintended consequence of fueling the rage of the white working class, and why the “gains made in the past forty years” by the previously marginalized–homosexuals, “people of color,” Native Americans, women–are at risk. For the white working class, comprising as much as 42% of the population (2010 census data)–has become itself another marginalized group. In the post-war period of the 50s and 60s, when indeed all boats were lifted in the rising tide of the American economy, the white working class could believe in the American Dream. As President Clinton put it in 1993: “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one: If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.” But the rules changed, and not to the benefit of the working class. In 1999, for example, on Bill Clinton’s watch, the 1935 Banking Act (aka the Glass-Steagall Act) was repealed, enabling commercial banks to practice investment banking, thus putting deposits and loans at risk, and this eventually resulted in the collapse of the mortgage industry and massive foreclosures throughout the country. The deregulation mania begun by President Reagan in the 1980s and continued by Clinton in the 90s and Bush in the first decade of the millennium led to the financial crisis of 2008, from which the nation has only incompletely recovered. Everyone has been negatively affected by this crisis, but the group whose fortunes have fallen the farthest is working class whites of European background.
The above is by now a familiar post-mortem. What I’m concerned about now is to focus on the mortem. What has died? And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Washington to be born?
A friend has characterized the Trump “election” (the scare quotes are to acknowledge the College, despite the 2.5 million plurality of the opposition) as a wake-up call to the educated fully-employed elite of “symbolic analysts” that in effect have constituted a political-economic-cultural oligarchy. She says that this will be an “exciting” time. That’s a positive spin on what seems to be a crisis of confidence in the System that brought us to the prospect of the leadership of a man whose public record is that of a crude and vulgar huckster. True to the instincts of the demagogue, Trump saw his opportunity for power (“the ultimate aphrodisiac,” as Henry Kissinger once said) in the 2008 election to the presidency of Barak Hussein Obama–a mulatto with a name that conjures up “black African,” “Muslim,” and the late dictator of Iraq. Obama won the election in large part for the same reason Jimmy Carter won in 1976: his predecessor was despised, and Obama, like Carter, was regarded as a consummately decent man who could cleanse the White House. While those who voted for Obama saw a Kennedyesque young man of character, intelligence, and hopeful vision, Trump saw a foreigner–black, Islamic, essentially “unAmerican”–whose image he could exploit by focussing attention on Obama’s surface appearance, which coincided neatly with that of of America’s present enemy, Islamic terrorists. By pushing forward and sustaining against all evidence his allegation that Obama was born in Kenya, the birthplace of Obama’s father, Trump sent an unmistakable signal to the “nonsuburban electorate” of Middle America that he knew was his core constituency. His message to that resentful group was this:
“The Ivy League multiculturalists of the coastal cities and suburbs are now in charge. They don’t give a damn about you. They are the cosmopolitan elite whose allegiance is to themselves and their privileged kids. To justify their greed they spout idealistic crap about ‘social justice’–raising the fortunes of blacks and Hispanics and Asians–instead of the real Americans of white European descent, the people like you who built this great country, which is being given over to this pack of losers from loser cultures. This Harvard-educated law professor with his African father and flower-child hippie mother looks down on you. This fucking nigger looks down on you! He condescendingly says you ‘cling to your Bibles and your guns’ to keep ‘meaning’ in your lives, as if religion and your Constitutional right to protect yourself and your families were things to be pitied! And how did this uppity nigger get to be President? Two things: the System, which is designed for them, not for you; and, I have to tell you, your own passivity! You let this happen! And why? Why? Because you put your trust in the System! The very System that screws you right, left, and center! I know this better than anybody! I’m fabulously rich because I know the System, I play the System! I know how fucked up it is! But I’ll be damned if I let it beat me! And now that I’m at the top, I look out over this great country, this once-great country, and I see that all my wealth and fabulous success is not enough to fill my cup. What I want now, more than all my wealth, more than anything, is to help you help me to make this country great again! You are what made this country great, and we can make it great again! Hillary says we can be ‘stronger together.’ I like that. It’s a good slogan, but . . . ‘together’ with whom? With the colored? With Lakeisha and Wing Dong and Pablo and Ahmed and Ramaswamy? I don’t think so!”
What Trump intuitively understands is deep motivation. Despite rational self-interest, despite law-based community, despite the Christian love ethic, despite e pluribus unum, Americans share with everyone else the social ethics and instincts of the tribe. Tribalism is based on the identity of blood, whereby one’s neighbors are kinfolk. The automatic assumption of tribalism is that anyone outside a broad kinship network is a potential enemy. The primary reason a stranger enters your neighborhood is that he wants something you have. He may want to trade or barter, but until he gives convincing proof that he’s willing to give you something he has in return for something you have, you must assume that he is prepared and willing to take what you have by force or swindle. The liberal left naively prefer to assume goodwill; the conservative right, believing in the power of Original Sin more than the power of Love, prefer to assume ill will. The multicultural experiment of the liberal left, Trump says, is now exposed as a Trojan Horse. Opening the gates of the Promised Land to the non-Europeans is like ancient Israel accommodating the Assyrians or Judah accommodating the Babylonians–an invitation to dissolution and destruction.
The election of Trump is a crisis, not only for America but for the world. The vision expressed in the Declaration of Independence, instituted by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and reaffirmed by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, is now under siege by a counter-statement of what may be called “neo-tribalism,” a tacit doctrine that posits racial and ethnic identity as the primary glue of social cohesion. This doctrine defined the human social systems of the pre-modern world. With the founding of the United States of America in 1776, inspired by the Enlightenment doctrine of Reason, a new basis of social cohesion emerged, most eloquently and succinctly stated in the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our father brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That is, America is based on an idea rather than blood relationships. What binds Americans together is not blood kinship, which implies racial and ethnic identity, but a common belief: that the values and ideals of freedom and equality define an American’s personal and social and political identity. It is this fundamental belief that the election of 2016 has put in question. Americans now must decide whether they belong to the party of Lincoln or the party of Trump.
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