August 14, 2024
In the wake of
his huge defeat on June 30, 2024, when 80 percent of voters rejected French
“centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the French people’s
anger. In the UK, Conservative loser Rishi Sunak said the same about the
British people’s anger, as Labor leader Starmer now says as the anger explodes.
Of course, such phrases from such politicians usually mean little or nothing
and accomplish less. Such leaders and their parties just keep calculating how
best to regain power when they lose it. In that, they are like the U.S.
Democrats after Biden’s performance in his debate with Trump and like the U.S.
Republicans after Trump’s loss in 2020. In both parties, a small group of top
leaders and top donors made all the key decisions and then organized the
political theater to ratify those decisions. Even surprises like Harris
replacing Biden are temporary departures from resuming politics as usual.
However, unlike
Trump, the others missed opportunities to identify with an already organized
mass base of angry people. Trump stumbled into that identification by saying
loudly and crudely what traditional politicians treated as publicly unspeakable
about immigrants, women, NATO, and traditional political taboos. That set the
tone for Trump then doubling down by insisting he had won the 2020 election but
had been cheated out of it. The mass anger of populations feeling victimized in
their workaday lives found a spokesperson loudly claiming parallel
victimizations. Trump and base grasped that together they might victimize their
victimizers.
Whether or not
they can politically exploit voters’ anger, no mainstream leader in the
collective West, including Trump, seems actually to “understand” it. They
mostly see only as far as what they can plausibly blame on their opponents in
the next election. Biden blamed Trump for a “bad” economy in 2020, while Trump
reversed the same blame over the last year and will shortly adjust to blaming
Harris. Presidential opponents blame the other for the “immigration crisis,”
for inadequately protecting U.S. industry from Chinese competition, government
budget deficits, and job exports.
No mainstream
leader “understands” (or dares to hint or suggest) that mass anger these days
might be something more and different from any collection of specific
complaints and demands (about guns, abortion, taxes, and wars). Even the
demagogues who like to speak about “culture wars” dare not ask why such “wars”
are hot now. Angry “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) folks are notably vague
and poorly informed as their critics enjoy exposing. Rarely do those critics
offer persuasive alternative explanations for MAGA anger (explanations that are
neither vague nor poorly informed).
In particular,
we ask, might the anger that the MAGA movement enrolls express a genuine mass
suffering that has not yet understood its cause? Might that cause be nothing
less than the decline of Western capitalism and all it represents? If
ideological taboos and blinders preclude admitting it, might that decline’s
results—anxiety, despair, and anger—focus instead on suitable scapegoats? Are
Trump and Biden, Macron and Sunak, and so many others competitively choosing
scapegoats to mobilize an anger they misunderstand and dare not explore?
After all,
Western capitalism is no longer the world’s colonial master. The American
empire that succeeded the European empires has now followed them into decline.
The next empire will be Chinese or else the era of empires will give way to
genuine global multipolarity. Western capitalism is likewise no longer the
world’s dynamic growth center as that has moved eastward. Western capitalism is
clearly losing its former position as the self-confident, unified, ultimate
power behind the World Bank, United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and
the U.S. dollar as world currency.
In terms of
global economic footprints as measured by national GDPs, the United States and
its major allies (G7) comprise a total, aggregated GDP now that is already
significantly less than the comparable aggregated GDPs of China and its major
allies (BRICS). The footprints of the two global economic power blocs were
roughly equal in 2020. The difference between the two footprints has been
widening ever since and continues to do so. China and its BRICS allies are
increasingly the world economy’s richest bloc. Nothing prepared the populations
of Western capitalism for this changed reality or its effects. Especially the
sections of those populations already forced to absorb the costly burdens of
Western capitalism’s decline feel betrayed, abandoned, and angry. Elections are
merely one way for some of them to express those feelings.
Western
capitalism’s rich, powerful, and small minority practices a combination of
denial and adjustment to its decline. Prevailing politicians, mainstream media,
and academics continue to orate, write, and act as if the collective West were
still globally dominant. For them and their ways of thinking, their global
dominance in the second half of the last century never ended. The wars in
Ukraine and Gaza testify to that denial and exemplify the costly strategic
mistakes it produces.
When not denying
the new reality, significant portions of Western capitalism’s corporate rich
and powerful are adjusting their preferred economic policies away from
neoliberalism toward economic nationalism. The chief rationale for that
adjustment is that it serves “national security” because it may at least slow
“China’s aggressiveness.” Domestically, the rich and powerful in each country
use their positions and resources to shift the costs of Western capitalism’s
decline onto the mass of their middle-income and poorer fellow citizens. They
worsen income and wealth inequalities, cut governmental social services, and
harden police behaviors and prison conditions.
Denial
facilitates the continued decline of Western capitalism. Too little is done too
late against problems not yet admitted. Deteriorating social conditions flowing
from that decline, especially for the middle income and the poor, provide
opportunities for the usual right-wing demagogues. They proceed to blame the
decline on immigrants, foreigners, excessive state power, the Democrats, China,
secularism, abortion, and culture war enemies, hoping thereby to assemble a
winning electoral constituency. Sadly, left-wing commentary focuses on refuting
the right’s claims about its chosen scapegoats. While its refutations are often
well-documented and effective in media combat against right-wing Republicans,
the left too rarely invokes explicit, sustained arguments about mass anger’s
links to declining capitalism. The left fails sufficiently to stress that
government regulators, however well-intentioned, have been captured by and
subordinated to specifically private capitalist profiteers.
The mass of
people therefore became deeply skeptical about relying on the government to
correct or offset the failings of private capitalism. People grasp, often just
intuitively, that today’s problem is the merger of capitalists and government.
Left and right increasingly feel betrayed by all the promises of center-left
and center-right politicians. More or less government intervention has changed
too little in the trajectory of modern capitalism. To growing numbers,
politicians of the center-left and center-right seem equally docile servants of
the capitalist-government merger that constitutes modern capitalism with all
its failures and flaws. Thus today’s right succeeds if, when, and where it can
portray itself as not centrist, its candidates explicitly anti-centrist. The
left is weaker because too many of its programs seem still linked to the idea
that government interventions will correct or offset capitalism’s shortcomings.
In short, mass
anger is disconnected from declining capitalism in part because left, right and
center deny, avoid, or neglect their link. Mass anger does not translate into
or yet move to explicit anti-capitalist politics in part because too few
organized political movements lead in that way.
Thus, Rachel
Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain’s new Labour Party
government—its top financial officer—blithely announces, “There is not a lot of
money there.” She prepares the public—and preemptively excuses the new
government—for how little the new government will even try to do. She goes
further and defines her key goal as “unlocking private investment.” Even the
words she chooses mirror what the old Conservatives want to hear and would
themselves say. In declining capitalisms, electoral changes can and often do
serve to avoid or at least postpone real change.
Chancellor
Reeves’s words assure major corporations and the 1 percent they enrich that
Starmer’s Labour Party will not heavily tax them. This matters since it is
precisely in major corporations and the rich that “a lot of money” is located.
The wealth of the top 1 percent could easily fund a genuinely democratic
rebuilding of a seriously depleted post-2008 UK economy. In stark contrast, the
typical Conservative programs prioritizing private investment are what got the
UK to its present sad state. They were the problem; they are not the solution.
The Labour Party
was once socialist. Socialism once meant a thoroughgoing critique of the
capitalist system and advocacy of something totally different. Socialists
sought electoral victories to win government power and use it to transition
society to a post-capitalist order. But today’s Labour Party has thrown that
history away. It wants to administer contemporary British capitalism just a bit
less harshly than Conservatives do. It works to persuade the British working
class that “less harsh” is the best they can hope and vote for. And British
Conservatives can indeed smile and condescendingly approve such a Labour Party
or else quibble with it over how much harshness today’s capitalism “needs.”
Macron, also
once a socialist, plays a similar role in France. Indeed, so do Biden and Trump in the United
States, Justin Trudeau in Canada, and Olaf Scholz in Germany. All offer
administrations of their contemporary capitalisms. None have programs aimed at
solving modern capitalisms’ basic, accumulated, and persistently unsolved
problems. Solutions would require first admitting what those problems are:
cyclically recurring instability, increasingly unequal distributions of income
and wealth, monied corruption of politics, mass media, and culture, and
increasingly oppressive foreign policies that fail to offset a declining
Western capitalism. Insistent denial across the collective West precludes
admitting those problems, let alone fashioning solutions to them woven into
programs for real change. Alternative governments administer; they dare not
lead. Would a Kamala Harris-Tim Walz regime break with this pattern?
Their
administrations will experiment with and perhaps oscillate between free-trade
and protectionist policies—as past capitalist governments often did. In the
United States, recent GOP and Democrat steps toward economic nationalism remain
vote-seeking exceptions to still widespread commitments to neoliberal
globalization. Western megacorporations, including many based in the United
States, welcome China’s new role as the global champion of free trade (even as
it retaliates moderately against tariffs and trade wars initiated by the
collective West). Support remains strong for negotiations to shape generally
acceptable global divisions of trade and investment flows. The latter are seen
as profitable as well as a means to avoid dangerous wars. Elections will
continue to include clashes between capitalism’s free-trade and protectionist
tendencies.
But the more
fundamental issue of 2024 elections is mass anger in the collective West
aroused by its historic decline and the effects of that decline on the mass of
average citizens. How will that anger shape the elections?
The more extreme
right wing recognizes and rides the deeper anger without, of course, grasping
its relationship to capitalism. Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Trump are all
examples. They all mock and deride the center-left and center-right governments
that merely administer what they depict as a sinking ship that needs new,
different leadership. But their donor base (capitalist) and long-standing
ideology (pro-capitalist) block them from going beyond extreme scapegoating (of
immigrants, ethnic minorities, heterodox sexualities, and foreign demons).
The mainstream
media likewise cannot grasp the relationship of mass anger to capitalism. Thus
they dismiss the anger as irrational or caused by inadequate “messaging” from
mainstream influencers. For many months, mainstream economic pundits have
bemoaned the “strange” coexistence of a “great economy” and polls showing mass
disappointment at the “bad” economy. By “strange” they mean “stupid” or
“ignorant” or “politically-motivated/dishonest”: sets of words often condensed
into “populist.”
The left is
jealous of the extreme right’s significant mass base now in working-class
areas. In most countries, the left has spent the last many decades trying to
hold on to its working-class base as the mainstream’s center-left movement
pulled it away. That meant a greater or lesser shift from communist and
anarchist to ever more “moderate” socialist and democratic affiliations. That
shift included downplaying the goal of a comprehensively different
post-capitalism in favor of the immediate goal of a state-fostered softer,
humane capitalism where wages and benefits were greater, taxes more
progressive, cycles more regulated, and minorities less oppressed. For that
left, what mass anger it could recognize flowed from failures to achieve such a
state-fostered softer capitalism, not from Western capitalism’s decline.
As capitalism’s
dynamic center moved to Asia and elsewhere in the global South, decline set in
among its old, more-or-less abandoned centers. Old center capitalists
participated in and profited greatly as the system relocated its dynamic
center. Capitalists, both state and private, in the new centers profited even
more. In the old centers, the rich and powerful shifted the burdens of decline
onto the masses. In the new centers, the rich and powerful gathered the new
capitalist wealth there mostly into their hands but with enough trickling down
to satisfy large portions of their working classes. That’s how capitalism works
and always has. For the mass of employees, however, the ride upwards when
capitalism’s dynamic center is where they work and live is far more pleasant
and hopeful than when decline sets in. The ride down provokes depression and
traumas. When they fester without admission or discussion, they often morph
into anger.
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