According to New York Times, America, right-to-left, rejected ‘extremists’ in midterm elections. In an analysis published Nov. 14, the prominent anti-Trump tribune found an electorate allegedly inclined toward “moderation.”
Indeed, the defeat of a few crazy Trumpists – notably in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Oregon – and the Democrats’ barely maintaining the Senate – gave hope that the promised “red wave” by the former president has been crushed by the countercurrent of reason.
This hope is shared by the wall street journalsupposed to be the ideological antithesis of the Times, which, like all of Murdoch’s press and television, came close to cheering the defeat of the Trump-backed candidates, though the right-wing newspaper is frustrated that Republicans missed the chance to win a bigger majority in the House of Commons. representatives. For the LogBiden and the Democrats, weakened by rampant inflation and crime, presented a perfect target for more sober candidates than the Dr Mehmet Oz, who, similar to his ally Trump, was better known for his popular television show and lucrative dealings with “health” advertisers than for his surgical or political expertise.
Too bad for Mitch McConnell, who will remain Senate Minority Leader. In any case, the bipartisan relief of the media establishment was felt across the United States. The announcement of his candidacy for the presidency of 2024 did not stop the avalanche of ridicule launched against Trump, now treated as loser, the worst conceivable insult for the former reality show host. According to many experts, Trump is finished and the country is pretty much saved.
Except that these commentators are largely wrong. Nothing was settled on November 8. On the contrary, the American political and cultural fissure widens in parallel with the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else. The famous “1%” continues to accumulate more and more money: at the end of 2021, its members owned 32.3% of the country’s wealth compared to the bottom 50% who owned 2.6 %. Even more troubling: the middle class continues to shrink—61% of adults were part of it in 1971 compared to 50% today.
The genius of American capitalism once rested on the fairer distribution of industrial goods—thanks to great innovators, like Henry Ford, but also to brilliant trade unionists, like Walter Reuther—for the workers, who could thus become part of the middle class. With the massive relocation of jobs to countries with cheap labor over the past fifty years, this social advancement has become almost impossible, for children and adults alike. The drop in wages for formerly unionized men and women — not to mention the loss of health and education benefits — is serious in itself. But the children of workers are also trapped, given the rising tuition fees in private and public universities.
This despoiling – this brutal degradation of the incomes of the entire working class – does not only affect individual bank accounts. It is a whole local culture that is attacked when a factory closes its doors. The local grocer, hardware store, voluntary and social clubs, sports leagues, and public schools (so dependent in the United States on local property taxes) are all affected. As this culture crumbles, local residents’ self-esteem tends to crumble, replaced by resentment, which is often stoked and exploited by crooks like the Dr Oz and his godfather Trump.
Even worse is the elimination of a progressive union culture like that of Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers (UAW) in an average city. The UAW peaked in membership at 1.5 million in 1979. At the height of its influence, this pro-Democratic left-wing union built an alternative and supplemental civil society in places like Flint, Michigan, Fostoria, Ohio, and Aurora, Illinois. The UAW cared for the technical training, general education, and even social life of its members to a degree unheard of today. Part of this education was in politics and democratic social philosophy.
The decline of the UAW to 391,000 members in February 2022 parallels the decline of the Democratic Party as a workers’ party. James Madison noted that “education is the true foundation of civil liberty”, and we saw the lack of it on January 6, 2021; it was ignorance, not violence, that was most striking among the Capitol rioters. We have fallen very far from Madison’s and Reuther’s ideal of the educated citizen.
A columnist of wall street journal, Allysia Finley, recently compared the popular trajectory of the fake Trump token to that of cryptocurrency “entrepreneur” Sam Bankman-Fried, a supposed champion of less “exclusive” finance, who now finds himself surrounded by the ruins of his empire. Bankman-Fried notably poured $37 million into Democratic Party coffers during his hype reign.
Unfortunately, it is wishful thinking to foresee such a collapse of the “populist” Trump. Bankman-Fried is seeking $8 billion to bail out its business. Without a James Madison or a Walter Reuther to discourage them, there will no doubt be plenty of Trumpist takers.
John R. MacArthur is editor of Harper’s Magazine.
His column returns at the beginning of each month.