30.06.2016

Two roads to ruin

Republican establishment figures are unsure whether to throw their weight behind Donald Trump or wait for better times. Jim Creegan reports

In the United States, as in Britain and most of the European continent, the political shock waves now coursing through political parties and markets are coming mostly from the right. This is partly the result of a certain inversion of political terms that has taken place over the past several decades. In what now seems an irretrievably distant past, the working class and socialist movements were associated with internationalism, and the bourgeoisie with national egotism. Yet globalisation, combined with the decline of the working class and its parties, has allowed the capitalist classes for a time to usurp the banner of cosmopolitan modernity, with support among the petty bourgeois professional sectors who live in close geographic and cultural proximity to places like Wall Street and the City of London.

On the other hand, ever larger numbers of ordinary people - workers and more plebeian petty bourgeois - have since 2008 been catching on to the reality that the new bourgeois cosmopolitanism has little to offer them. Far from being empowered or internationalised, they remain mired in provincial local realities, where good jobs are scarce, wages are falling and all the action seems to be going on somewhere else. The reformist left has been, at best, ambiguous and inconsistent in its response to this reality, partly because, for all its opposition to neoliberalism, many of its more prominent representatives (eg, the leaderships of Syriza, Podemos and Die Linke), exist firmly within the orbit of the cosmopolitan middle classes (Syriza gave dramatic proof of this last summer, with its determination to cling to the European Union and euro zone, no matter what). The socialist left has little presence in the daily life of those who feel ignored and left behind, and has been unable to articulate a new working class internationalism to counter that of the globalising forces of high technology and high finance.

It is therefore no surprise that much - if by no means all - of the popular rebound against neoliberalism is backward- rather than forward-looking; that it should take the form of nostalgia for the pre-globalised glories of western capitalism’s post-war heyday. The blessings of this idealised past have, according to far-right propaganda, been progressively undermined by hostile and opaque alien forces: aloof politicians, financial speculators, faceless bureaucrats and job-and-benefit-stealing immigrants. This outlook corresponds closely to the spontaneous perceptions of the atomised and beleaguered ‘little man’, bereft of working class organisation or party leadership.

Thus, by a peculiar - and, let us hope, temporary - historical turn, internationalism has come to be perceived as elitist, and nationalism as demotic. This right-populist upsurge, with affinities to inter-war fascism, is potentially lethal to the working class. But it is at this juncture by no means welcome to the topmost tiers of the ruling classes or their traditional political parties; it throws a huge spanner into their grand vision of freely flowing capital and debt-manacled peoples. In the US, the neo-populist challenge has assumed both right and left forms; but for now its right-populist standard-bearer, Donald Trump, has been more successful in taking on the establishment of his party than has his left-populist opposite number, Bernie Sanders. Trump seems to appreciate the similarities between his campaign and parties like the Front National and Ukip. On a business trip to promote his golf links/resort near Aberdeen, the man who promises to “make America great again” congratulated pro- Brexit voters on their success in “taking Britain back”.

Since Trump won enough convention delegates in the primaries to secure his nomination in July, Republican politicians, donors and opinion-makers have faced a tough choice: either refuse to endorse the nominee and take the blame for the possible break-up of one of the two political parties that have dominated the electoral field since 1860; or fall in line, swallow hard and hope for better times four years from now. The previous Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, is refusing to support Trump or attend the convention. Prominent Republican senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina is doing the same. Brent Scowcroft - a former ‘national security’ advisor under presidents Gerald Ford and Bush the First - has endorsed Clinton. Several media pundits of the ‘responsible’ right - William Kristol, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker and George Will - are refusing to back Trump under any circumstances.

Many of the party’s big campaign contributors are also pulling the plug, and some are contemplating a switch to Clinton. Even the country’s most notorious far-right activist billionaires, Charles and David Koch, have refused to underwrite Trump’s bid with their super-PAC (political action committee) millions, and are making pro-Hillary noises. As for the prominent Republican politicians - including house speaker Paul Ryan and senators John McCain, Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio, who have given Trump their backing for the sake of party unity - their endorsements are offered only reluctantly and with the express hope that the deep-pocketed, ugly American who has hijacked the party will modulate his tones and become more ‘presidential’, as November nears.

No retreat

Trump has thus far said and done nothing to encourage such hopes. The candidate who has promised to build a wall along the Mexican border (and make Mexico pay for it), deport all 11 million illegal aliens, make the Nato member-countries pay “their share” of military expenses, under threat of reduced American support, and renegotiate the Iranian nuclear deal has not retreated an inch from any of these positions. He continues to denounce the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a “giveaway to China”, and has moderated his pledge to ban all Muslims except Sadiq Khan from the United States only by promising instead to exclude people not on the basis of their religion, but of their geographical origin: nobody from areas of the world where terrorism is widespread would be admitted under a Trump presidency. Nor have the ethnic slurs, personal insults and outright threats, for which Trump became infamous during the campaign, abated since he became the presumptive nominee.

The man who a few months ago urged followers at campaign rallies to “beat the crap” out of protestors and “punch them in the face” responded last month to a reporter’s question about funds Trump claimed to have collected for veterans, but apparently never delivered, by calling the enquiring newsman a “sleaze”; when asked if this is how he would conduct White House press conferences if elected, he answered, “Yes, it is”. He also promised to recast the country’s libel laws to make it easier to sue media that cover him unfavourably. Leading print and online journals - The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Politico, The Daily Beast - have already been banished from his rallies for articles he deemed too critical.

Then there are his attacks on the federal courts. A circuit-court judge, Gonzalo Curiel, subpoenaed the financial records of Trump University in a lawsuit brought by former students who were defrauded. They claimed they were told that Trump was personally involved in supervising the school’s curriculum, which promised to share his secrets of business success, when in fact he had nothing to do with the school apart from collecting its profits. The instructors were touted as highly-qualified business people, when in fact the experience of many of them was limited to high-pressure salesmanship, aimed at bilking naive clients out of their last dime. Trump denounced Judge Curiel for being biased against him because he is a ‘Mexican’. (Curiel was born in Indiana to Mexican parents.) Trump hastened to add that he had no particular animus toward Mexicans; he also thought that a Muslim judge would be too prejudiced against him to preside over any legal case in which he was involved.

Trump’s openly chauvinist and violence-tinged rants have placed party-loyal Republican politicians in the unenviable position of having publicly to repudiate the statements of the candidate they have just endorsed. Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the country’s most powerful Republican elected official, denounced Trump’s remarks about judge Curiel as conforming to “the textbook definition of racism”, before going on to say that he still backed the racist Trump as the lesser evil compared to Hillary Clinton. Mark Kirk, a Republican senator from Illinois, withdrew his initial endorsement.

The straw that may break the elephant’s back, however, came in the form of Trump’s reaction to the Orlando shootings. Giving short shrift to the obligatory expressions of sympathy for the victims, Trump emphasised that the events proved he had been right all along about the administration’s failure to combat terrorism effectively. He called upon Obama to resign, and said that the president’s refusal to use the phrase, ‘Islamic radicalism’ suggests that “there is something going on”. He went on: “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands. It’s one or the other.” The suggestion that Obama sympathises with, or is somehow in league with, Islamic terrorists, reminded anyone who may have forgotten of the real-estate mogul’s previous championing of the ‘birthers’ - rightwingers who questioned whether the president was born in the US.

It now looks as if these remarks are giving Trump’s endorsers second thoughts. There are rumours of a move by some Republicans to introduce a ‘conscience clause’ into the rules for the convention, which would release delegates from their obligation to vote for the nominee they backed in the primaries. And in a television interview on June 20, Paul Ryan, while not withdrawing his endorsement, said he, as the convention’s chairman, would never want to prevent delegates from “voting their conscience”.

Trump’s salvoes may be less spontaneous than they appear. If nothing else, they are a sure-fire way to dominate coverage of the campaign, with the assistance of media that wait for his latest scurrilities like flipper-clapping seals for sardines. They also galvanise his hard-core constituency of beleaguered white males, and get the attention of others who welcome utterances, no matter how outrageous, that stand apart from the pabulum and platitudes of politics-as-usual.

Bigotry à la carte

In his 2004 book, What’s the matter with Kansas (America),Thomas Frank asked why white Americans of modest means vote time and again for Republican politicians who make the rich richer at their expense. The answer lay in the time-honoured ruling-class art of misdirecting real grievances at bogus targets. Their goal of reducing government entitlements (welfare spending) was sold by stoking resentment of lazy blacks and Latinos said to be getting something for nothing. The decline in wages was blamed on immigrants stealing across the border to take American jobs at half the pay, or on the diabolical Chinese government, which was flooding the country’s markets with cheap imports.

The racism and xenophobia encouraged by such tactics was there to be stoked in the first place. But ever since the late 60s, when Richard Nixon launched his ‘southern strategy’, aimed at capturing the votes of white Democrats disabused of their party’s pro-civil rights and welfare-state politics, the Republicans have succeeded in raising these resentments to a higher power. Now it seems that a perverse reactionary prise de conscience is finally taking place. The Trumpist hard core still blame blacks and immigrants for their declining fortunes. Many, however, have begun to notice that racism, xenophobia and economic individualism are less than paramount in the political agendas of those accustomed to playing these keys for political advantage. The pawns of the financial industry who rail against government handouts to the undeserving poor were less than vociferous in their objections when the bankers bayed for - and got - one of the biggest bailouts in history in 2008.

Those who rail against immigrants seem privately more sensitive to the needs of employers for cheap foreign labour than to those supposedly losing their jobs to immigration, and have quietly allowed legislation aimed at stricter border controls to languish in Congressional committees. The same rightwing senators and congressmen who deplore the loss of American jobs to Chinese imports and offshoring are more often than not eagerly raising their hands for the trade pacts that promote these very things. Entitlement cuts may have been popular with the party base when the entitlements in question were seen to benefit only ‘them’ - ie, poor people of darker hues - but the budget proposed by house speaker Paul Ryan takes aim at the Republicans’ latest targets, social security (government old-age pensions) and Medicare (old-age health cover), vital to ‘senior citizens’ of all colours.

What the Trump campaign offers to the disillusioned elements of the Republican base who took their party’s rhetoric at face value is, as one pundit put it, racism and xenophobia à la carte: ie, unlinked to the ruling class aims they have traditionally been used to supplement or conceal. Trump has proclaimed his intention to preserve social security, and loudly denounces the trade agreements that have become a hallmark of allegiance to the ruling class, and hence enjoy the support of leading politicians of both parties (despite the fact that Hillary Clinton, who has promoted such pacts throughout her career, has been forced by Sanders to abandon her support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership).

Trump regularly excoriates Clinton for having been too quick on the trigger, when it comes to foreign adventures, and especially for her pushing of US intervention to topple Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. While he promises decisive actions to “take out” foreign terrorists, he generally advocates a quasi-isolationist, ‘America first’ foreign policy. He has also taken a leaf out of Sanders’ book by calling Clinton “Hillary the crook” and saying that she is beholden to moneyed interests, pointing to the millions she and her husband have collected from big corporations in speaking and consulting fees.

Little man, big bucks

Donald Trump is indeed an oligarch in his own right. Yet he represents no major current of ruling class opinion. He has shown himself to be profoundly ignorant on policy matters, and boasts of getting most of his information from the Internet and Twitter feeds. His voice is distinctly that of the little (white) man on the adjacent bar stool, boasting of his sexual conquests, lamenting the passing of the ‘good old days’ when men were men and America was number one; castigating the government for putting the interests of foreigners before natives; deploring the constraints of ‘political correctness’; proposing simple, commonsensical, often violent remedies for society’s ills; scorning ‘intellectuals’ with their outrageous demands for things such as logical or factual consistency; giving vent to a deep sense of grievance against all those hyper-educated politicians and social engineers who consider themselves above him, his problems and his homely wisdom.

The adjectives in Trump’s vocabulary run the gamut from ‘great’, ‘terrific’ and ‘beautiful’ (usually when applied to himself and his endeavours) to ‘terrible’, ‘disgusting and ‘sleazy’ (applied to his critics). Not a seasoned bourgeois politician practised in the use of dog whistles and deceit, but the ‘man in the street’ with a $10 billion bank account - that is Donald Trump. His candidacy represents a profound dysfunction of ruling class politics - one, moreover, that may not end with him, despite the fondest hopes of Republican higher-ups that he will prove no more than a flash in the pan. Voting patterns in the primaries indicate that he has wide support not only among Tea Party types, who tended to be lower middle class, but also among large numbers of white workers in depressed, deindustrialised areas of the north and midwest.

But even this maverick member of the big bourgeoisie may be in for a hard lesson in political reality. It is unlikely that Trump can continue to substitute media attention for the nuts and bolts of a well financed and organised campaign, as he has done thus far. He is already beginning to feel the effects of donor chill; his campaign now has only a little over $1 million cash on hand, as opposed to Hillary’s $41 million war chest. Whether his declared intention to finance his campaign if necessary from his personal fortune is real, or more hot air from one whose limitless supply of that is undisputed, remains to be seen. Moreover, it is unlikely that the calumny and gasconade that has proved so appealing to parts of the Republican electorate will go over nearly as well with a November electorate far wider than his primary base, and much more heavily black, Latino and female.

Polls have confounded the widespread expectation that the Orlando killings would give Trump a bounce. In an election campaign in which both candidates are more disliked by the general public than at any time in recent history, and are therefore competing for the lowest unfavourability ratings, Trump is losing. An ABC News/Washington Post poll taken the week after Orlando showed Trump with a 70% unfavourability rating, as compared to Clinton’s 55%. This bad news has led to tensions within the campaign, as a result of which Trump fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. It is the prospect of a humiliating November rout that has the party establishment grinding their teeth and desperately casting about for a way to dump Trump. Republican members of the House of Representatives, all of whom must stand for re-election in four months, and those senators who must face voters in November, are deathly afraid that Trump’s unpopularity may rub off on them, and that their party could thus lose control of either the house, the senate or both.

Yet the Republican nightmare is Hillary’s heaven-send. It will help her bury the class issues raised by the Sanders campaign in a ‘progressive’, fight-the-right unity fest. Clinton is now appearing on the hustings side by side with the darling of the Democratic left, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. Even at this late date, however, Sanders has yet to concede to Clinton formally, and he and his followers are vowing to take their fight to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July. To what extent they will do so, and with what results, will be the subject of a future article.

Jim Creegan can be reached at egyptianarch@gmail.com