The roots of Trumpism

In 2016, a radical, right-wing, middle-class insurgency displaced the hegemonic capitalists in the Republican Party, at least temporarily. Donald Trump’s nomination and election is the most recent chapter in an ongoing leadership struggle that began in the aftermath of the global recession and the 2008 Democratic electoral victory. Capital successfully beat back the first wave of middle-class radicalism in the Republican Party—the Tea Party—during the 2014 Congressional elections, but these rebels were not vanquished. They were radicalized.

Since the 1960s, the mass voter base of the Republican Party has been made up primarily of older, suburban, White, middle-class small businesspeople, professionals, and managers and a minority of older White workers. Until recently, the particular passions of the Party’s base —especially its hostility to the democratic gains of people of color, women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people—could be contained. Minor concessions to the social conservatives on abortion, affirmative action, voter restrictions, and same-sex marriage/legal equality maintained their loyalty, while capitalists set the substantive neo-liberal agenda for the Republicans (and the Democrats as well). As in the Democratic Party, the non-capitalist elements of the Republican coalition were clearly junior partners to capital.

The Bush and Obama administrations’ bail-outs of banks, the auto industry, and some homeowners changed this dynamic, catalyzing a radicalization of the Republican electorate. The “Tea Party” began as an alliance between a grass-roots rebellion of older, White, suburban small businesspeople, professionals and managers, and elements of the capitalist class. While the middle-class ranks of the Tea Party railed against “corporate welfare” and “bailouts for undeserving homeowners,” in particular people of color who held sub-prime mortgages, capitalists like the Koch brothers saw an opportunity to advance their libertarian agenda of defeating Obamacare and privatizing Medicare and Social Security pensions (Skocpol and Williamson, 2013). Broader layers of the capitalist class encouraged the Tea Party’s mobilizations as long as it targeted unions and social services and supported the continued deregulation of capital.

This alliance continued through the 2010 Congressional elections, when the Republicans won a majority in the House and deprived the Democrats of their filibuster-proof “supermajority” in the Senate. While particularly right-wing capitalists like the Koch brothers helped finance the Tea Party, most capitalists continued to hedge their bets electorally, with capitalist donors slightly preferring the Democrats over the Republicans in 2010. Capital was more than willing to use this nativist, racist, and anti-union movement when their interests coincided. However, the new right has an agenda independent of and, at points, opposed to that of capital. ¹

Unlike the political establishment, the Tea Party right supported mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and was willing to risk a Federal credit default. The minority of older White workers who voted Republican viewed undocumented immigrants as competitors on the labor market, while the older small businesspeople and professionals who made up the majority of the Tea Party cadre and voters viewed undocumented immigrants as a threat to their “quality of life” and competitors for scarce social services. The forcible removal of most and denying the undocumented any path to citizenship (and access to social services) would protect the “earned benefits” (Social Security and Medicare) upon which they relied.

Capitalists, however, have a very different perspective on immigration. Not only do high-tech industries want access to skilled foreign professionals, but labor-intensive industries like agriculture, construction, landscaping, domestic service, child care, health care, and hospitality rely on low-wage, vulnerable immigrant labor. Capital wants a precarious migrant workforce without legal status and disciplined by selective deportations to labor for substandard wages in these industries.

The two most important “business lobbying” organizations—the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—oppose wholesale deportations and other policies that reduce the size of the immigrant workforce. Instead, they are leading the fight for an immigration reform (the Schumer–McCain proposal) that would create massive “guest worker” programs and a long, difficult, and complex “path to citizenship” for those in the United States without papers.

Capital supports massive social spending cuts and a reduction of the Federal budget deficit. However, the Tea Party’s political brinkmanship—its willingness to let the United States default on its public debt by refusing to raise the debt ceiling in 2011—estranged capital from the Tea Party. Both the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable opposed attempts to “shut down the government” as a threat to the US and global financial systems.

The uneasy alliance between the Tea Party and the capitalist class ended in the autumn of 2013. The campaign to “Fix the Debt,” launched in 2012, brought together dozens of former Senators and Congressmen and over 150 CEOs of US transnational corporations in support of a “grand bargain” to close corporate tax loop-holes and lower the overall tax rate in exchange for “restructuring” federal pensions, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The campaign garnered the support of Obama, the Democratic leadership, and mainstream Republicans, but the Tea Party refused to accept the compromise, sparking the government shut-down of late 2013. ²

Capital was not pleased. In 2014, it waged primary campaigns against the Tea Party (organized primarily through the US Chamber of Commerce). Scott Reed, the Chamber’s chief political strategist, launched “Vote for Jobs,” targeting key Senate and House races to defend incumbents like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and defeat Tea Party intransigents. “Vote for Jobs” was effective in shaping the Republican Congressional primaries and the November 2014 general election. Only one Republican was elected to the Senate without the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce.

Initially, attempts by the capitalist class to discipline the Republican Party appeared successful. Despite the greatly reduced Tea Party Congressional contingent’s success in blocking serious discussion of a pro-corporate immigration reform and forcing John Boehner out of Congress, calls by the Tea Party contingent to shut down the government to block Obama’s Executive Order on immigration failed. Bipartisan coalitions in both the House and Senate pushed through the nearly US$1.1 trillion spending plan in late December 2104.

But the radical revolt symbolized by the Tea Party did not disappear. Donald Trump’s “outsider” campaign for President marked a deepening of the right-wing radicalization of sections of the middle classes. When Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in June 2015, few political commentators took his campaign seriously. With a field dominated by mainstream Republicans like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, most believed that Trump’s campaign would be short-lived. However, within a month of announcing for the Presidency, Trump was out-polling a crowded Republican field. In July 2016, he became the official nominee of the Republican Party.

What made Trump unacceptable to the Republican establishment and their corporate backers was not merely his unabashed racism and misogyny or his casual references to his penis size. Trump champions an economic nationalism that rejects central tenets of the bipartisan neo-liberal agenda that has impoverished segments of the middle and working classes. Capital was uneasy with Trump’s stance on immigration and the Federal debt—he floated the idea of trying to persuade creditors to accept less than full payment on loans to the US government (Appelbaum, 2016a).

The corporate elite opposes Trump’s stance on foreign policy and global “free trade.” Trump claims to reject the established “US role in the world” based on an alliance system, in particular NATO that has maintained US dominance since World War II. An advocate of “America First” politics that have been rejected by the US corporate elite since the 1940s, Trump is perceived as an unreliable agent of US capital (Lander, 2016; Sanger, 2016; Sanger and Haberman, 2016).

Even more disturbing for the corporate elite are Trump’s positions on “free trade.” The removal of political obstacles for the free movement of capital and goods—but not labor—has been a fundamental element of neo-liberal orthodoxy for well over 30 years. From Bill Clinton’s signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the entire US capitalist class and its political representatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties have promoted the liberalization of trade and investment. Trump blames NAFTA and other trade deals for the loss of US manufacturing jobs and calls for tariffs as high as 40% on imports to protect US jobs against “unfair” competition—despite warnings that this could spark a global trade war that could damage the role of US corporations in the world economy (Appelbaum, 2016b).

Trump’s nomination sent the majority of the capitalist class, including traditionally Republican capitalists, running to support the reliable neo-liberal politician, Hillary Clinton. According to Opensecrets.org, Clinton received over 92% of corporate contributions in the 2016 election cycle, including over 80% of the contributions from finance, insurance, and real estate; communications/electronics; and health care, defense, and “miscellaneous business.” Trump’s support was limited to 60%–70% of contributions from construction, energy and natural resources, transportation, and agribusiness—which together accounted for less than 10% of total capitalist donations.

So how did Trump win? Despite losing the popular vote by over 2 million votes, Trump swept the Electoral College. Voter participation among traditionally Democratic segments of the electorate fell. ³ African Americans dropped from 13% of all voters in 2008 and 2012 to 12% in 2016. In some communities of color, the drop was even more precipitous: In Milwaukee’s Council District 15, which is 84% Black, voter turnout was nearly 20% lower than in 2012 (Tavernise, 2016). Similar drops in African American voter participation took place in Detroit, St. Louis’ northwestern wards, West and North Philadelphia, and East Flatbush in New York City (Karp, 2016). Households earning less than US$50,000 per year, who made up 51% of the US population in 2014, dropped from 41% of voters in 2012 to 36% in 2016. The percentage of households earning over US$100,000, a mere 17% of the population, rose from 28% to 33% of voters between 2012 and 2016. Put simply, the electorate in 2016 was ever more disproportionately well off than in the last three elections.

Within these key categories, there were also small, but significant shifts in voter preference. While 60% of voters in households earning less than US$50,000 a year voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, Clinton’s share of these voters dropped to 52%. Clinton only won 88% of the Black vote, down from 95% and 93% for Obama in 2008 and 2012, respectively. Especially alarming for the Democrats was their falling share of the Latino vote. Democratic pollsters were confident that Trump’s racist diatribes would allow Clinton to sweep this key sector. However, the Democrats’ share of the Latino declined from 71% in 2012 to 65% in 2016. Finally, the percentage of union households voting Democratic fell from 58% in 2008 and 59% in 2012 to a mere 51% in 2016.

Trump’s ability to retain the core sectors of the Republican’s voter base since 1980—primarily the traditional (self-employed and small businesses with less than 10 employees) and new (professionals, mangers, supervisors) middle classes, including evangelical Christians, and a minority of older, White workers—was clear in all of the exit polling.

Trump’s margin of victory came from a small minority of voters who had supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 (Collingwood, 2016; Uhrmacher et al., 2016). Of 700 counties that had voted for Obama twice, nearly one-third (209) swung to Trump, and of 207 counties that Obama won once, almost 94% (194) went to Trump. The swing to Trump was concentrated in traditionally Democratic states of the Great Lakes and Midwest that had suffered the loss of manufacturing jobs and were experiencing a rise in the Latino population. However, Trump’s victory was primarily a result of a sharp drop in the participation of traditionally Democratic voters, rather than a sharp swing to Trump. Trump did gain approximately 335,000 more votes than Romney among households earning less than US$50,000 per year in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. However, Clinton received 1.7 million fewer votes than Obama among the same group (Kilibarda and Roithmayr, 2016). It was these miniscule shifts in voter preference that gave Trump his razor-thin margins in a number of key states: less than 0.25% in Michigan, less than 1% in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and less than 1.5% in Florida. According to one analysis, had about 100,000 Trump voters in these areas voted for Clinton instead, she would have swept the Electoral College.

Trump’s populist nationalism appeals to elements of the older, White middle class who fear downward mobility into the working class. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s (2016) study of southern Tea Party and Trump supporters reveals people who believe they are “hard workers,” who “play by the rules,” and never ask for “handouts” (government subsidies, etc.) but are constantly falling behind socially and economically. They are threatened both by powerful economic and social elites and “line jumpers”—African Americans, Latinos, and women who benefit from affirmative action, and undocumented immigrants and refugees.

In certain respects, the attraction of the middle classes (small business, professionals, technicians, managers, supervisors) to right-wing populist demagogues is clear. The middle classes are attracted to political “strong-men” who promise to defend the “little man” against the forces that squeeze them from above and below. Yet, progressives often falter in explaining why a minority of workers support right-wing politics. Why have approximately 40% of union households supported Republicans or other right-wing candidates (e.g. Ross Perot in 1992) in most elections since 1980? (Bump, 2016). Why did another small, but significant group of White working class voters embrace the nationalist populism of Trump, giving him his margin of victory?

Historically, many progressives treat working-class support for the Right as a form of “false consciousness.” Capital’s control of the means of ideological production (press, media, etc.) allows them to distort workers’ thinking. For others, working-class racism and sexism are the defense of ”White” and “male” “privilege” against threats from women, queer folks, and racialized minorities. Both of these explanations are inadequate. “False consciousness” presents capital and its ideologists as all powerful and portrays workers as passive consumers of capitalist ideologies. Meanwhile, simplistic notions of “defense of privilege” ignore the increasing precarity all working people face today.

Grasping the contradictory character of capitalist social relations of production allows us to transcend both of these explanations. The objective, structural position of workers under capitalism provides the basis for collective, solidaristic radicalism and individualist, sectoralist, and reactionary politics. As Bob Brenner and Johanna Brenner (1981) pointed out in their analysis of Reagan’s election,

… workers are not only collective producers with a common interest in taking collective control over social production. They are also individual sellers of labor power in conflict with each other over jobs, promotions, etc. This individualistic point of view has a critical advantage in the current period: in the absence of class against class organization. It seems to provide an alternative strategy for effective action—a sectionalist strategy which pits one layer of workers against another. (p. 30)

As competing sellers of labor power, workers are open to the appeal of politics that pit them against other workers—especially workers in a weaker social position. Without the lived experience of mass, collective, and successful class organization and struggle, it should not surprise socialists that segments of the working class are open to right-wing politics.

Workers in the United States have experienced 40 years of attacks on their living and working conditions. The labor movement has responded with one surrender after another, as concession bargaining and futile attempts to forge “labor-management cooperation” have destroyed almost every gain workers made through mass struggles in the 1930s and 1970s. Faced with an impotent labor movement that tails after an ever-rightward-moving Democratic Party, it is not surprising that a minority of older, White workers are attracted to politics that places responsibility for their deteriorating social situation on both the corporate “globalists” and more vulnerable workers—African Americans, Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, women, and queer folk. Kirk Noden (2016) grasped why the Republican right wins working-class votes:

Two narratives emerged about the collapse of the industrial heartland in America. The one from the right has three parts: First, that industry left this country because unions destroyed productivity and made labor costs too high, thereby making us uncompetitive. Second, corporations were the victims of over-regulation and a bloated government that overtaxed them to pay for socialist welfare systems. Third, illegal immigration has resulted in the stealing of American jobs, increased competition for white-workers, and depressed wages … The second narrative, promoted by corporate Democrats, is that the global economy shifted and the country is now in transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy. This story tacitly accepts the economic restructuring of the heartland as inevitable once China and other markets opened up.

Trump and his nationalist populist ideologues from Breitbart and the “alt-Right” added a fourth element to the right’s narrative—the role of globalizing corporations and “free trade.” Given a choice between an elitist neo-liberal who refused to speak to the realities of their lives (and rejected Sanders’ social-democratic program as “unrealistic”) and a populist demagogue who offered an illusory solution to their problems, it is not at all surprising that a minority of White workers embraced Trump (Longworths, 2016; Parenti, 2016; Rommel, 2016)

Trumpism is the fruit of decades of “lesser evilism,” where progressives follow the official leaders of the unions and social movements, who continually surrender to capital, while tailing after a rightward-moving Democratic party in the name of “fighting the right.” Without a clear and potent independent working-class political alternative—one rooted in mass struggles in workplaces and communities—more and more workers will see no alternative to the neo-liberal capitalist offensive other than White populist nationalism.

What can we expect from a Trump administration? ⁴ We can expect a continuation and intensification of the attacks on working people that every administration—including Obama’s—has carried out since the late 1970s. We should expect even more deportations of “criminal” undocumented immigrants (Obama set the record for deportation), more cuts to social services (Obama made the deepest cuts in food stamps), and removal of remaining regulations on capital, especially in terms of energy production.

Despite the presence of Steve Bannon and other nationalist populists in the administration, it is highly unlikely that Trump’s promises to roll back neo-liberal “free trade” agreements or to renege on US commitments to imperialist diplomatic and military alliances will come to fruition. Trump himself has already back-pedaled on his threats to deport all undocumented workers, reinstitute water-boarding, withdraw from the Paris Climate accords, indict Bill and Hillary Clinton, or ban all Muslims from entering the United States. His proposals to renegotiate NAFTA and impose tariffs on China, withdraw from the negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, build a wall on the Mexican border, or shift US military and diplomatic alliances from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Putin’s Russia will face concerted opposition from both the establishment-dominated Republican Congress and the permanent officialdom of the Federal government. Put another way, Trump will likely face the sort of structural–institutional obstacles social democrats face when attempting to implement anti-capitalist reforms through the capitalist state. This will, of course, demoralize many of his middle- and working-class supporters and make it easier for the mainstream Republicans to regain control of the party, possibly through the creation of a system of unelected “super-delegates” like those the Democrats created in the 1970s.