Big trouble ahead

The presidential election just past was a very close contest. Oh sure, Trump wants to overwhelm us with his claim that he won by a landslide. That's just authoritarian bombast. Because he won all the projected swing states, his win looks huge, especially on a map. And across the country, he did actually dig out a one percent plus actual majority. But if only 115,000 voters distributed across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin had gone the other way, we'd have a President Harris.

Since the election was so close, everyone gets to have their own plausible theory of what happened. I'm sticking with mine: COVID put us in a nasty mood and Trump was able to capitalize on this. (That's the only thing he knows how to do: turn venomous emotions into profit for himself.) I read the deluge of explanations for Harris' loss, but remain conscious that even vast quantities of data -- and there is more every day -- can't definitively account for the narrow outcome. Eventually many pundits and commentators will settle on some theory -- and then historians and political scientists will come up with their alternative takes. The 2024 election lends itself to interpretation and reinterpretation.

All that is introduction to sharing excerpts from the leftish economic historian Adam Tooze's take on our American predicament. Although I am not sure I buy it completely, I find his Olympian draft of contemporary history quite intriguing. 

... The essential fact about US politics in the current moment remains that the two party system anchored in the ancient constitution divides the country almost half and half. Those cleavages run through society including through the working-class and the business interest. ...

... If the class analytic of workers v. owners is not helpful in making sense of Trump’s victory, the idea of a revolt against the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) may be more so.

The PMC was a term coined in 1977 by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. The term designated the rising mass of college-educated white collar professional and managerial workers whose ambiguous role in modern Western politics the Ehrenreich’s were trying to explain.

In the 1960s and 1970s many professional and managerial people contributed to social movements that were clearly progressive. Furthermore, for the vast majority of folks who count themselves as progressive this alignment has a deep logic all the way down to the present day. 

As Gabe Winant, one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary scene, noted back in 2019 in N+1:

For all the cynicism and compromises that professional pretensions engender, professional labor  [i.e. the labor of the PMC, per Adam Tooze] does carry a utopian seed—in the impulse to create and disseminate knowledge, to care for the sick, or to defend the rights and dignity of the democratic subject.

And yet what is also undeniable is that in the late 1970s and 1980s large and powerful parts of the PMC broke with any association with classic, working-class. left-wing politics, rooted in the trade union movement. Instead, they provided their support to the agenda of neoliberalism. Despite its endless critiques of the state and its rhetoric about markets, actually existing neoliberalism was the latest iteration of PMC politics. Neoliberalism was a managerialism.

.. The outcome in electoral terms in the US from the 1990s onwards was an increasing alignment of the Democrats with College-educated voters, an alignment that was particularly strong for women and minorities. Figures like the Clintons and the Obamas personify this coalition.

By 2008 this corporate-PMC synthesis made a large and tempting target for populisms of the left and the right. These populisms pitted “the people” against an elite bloc that was more often than not personified, not by oligarchs or the owners of the means of production, but by members of the PMC. Perversely, the much remarked upon resentment of working-class voters, particularly men, triggered by new patterns of inequality and disadvantage, vented itself in the first instance on elementary school teachers and social workers, often women, who found themselves grouped with “beltway liberals” in the crosshairs of right-wing populist vitriol.

... Trump and Brexit in 2016 were early breakthroughs for the new anti-PMC politics.

The Trump shock of 2016 caused soul-searching in the Democratic party elite. The principal wager of the Biden administration was an effort to react to the first wave of anti-PMC revolt by widening the Democratic electoral coalition so as to attract trade unionists and working-class Americans back into the fold. In many ways this was ironic. The fact that the American working-class is increasingly feminized and diverse is no conceit of woke PMC ideology. Under Biden the party chased the image of the blue-collar production worker, almost as hard as they would eventually chase the respectable centrist Republican.

In 2020 when COVID demonstrated the harsh and dysfunctional reality of governance under Trump, the Democrats won back a majority. Though not for the anti-vaxxers, but for a majority of the population, COVID was a “PMC moment”. Nurses, doctors and lab scientists mattered, along with logistics experts and people who could get things moving again. It was not merely coincidental that COVID handed a PMC-dominated Democratic party a surprise victory. It was not for nothing that it was the Democratic majority in Congress that carried the US under Republican Presidents, both through the crisis of 2008 and that of 2020.

In 2024 with the electorate wanting a faster return to normality - resentments concentrated in the superheated discussion of “inflation” - what came back to the fore was the anti-PMC coalition that Trump rallies like no politician before him....

... What has become obvious with the Clinton-Trump-Biden-Harris-Trump sequence is that the Democratic formula is itself increasingly a driver of crisis. It is not capable of providing reliable electoral wins. And when it does have power, nostalgia for the bygone era of hegemony and the reflexes of US globalism - a quintessential product of the 20th-century PMC - tend to accelerate crisis in the form of aggressive claims to US leadership and a resurgent neoconservative revisionism. ...

In the first Trump administration, expressive gestures of rupture with the status quo were tempered by vested interests and the functional imperatives of the moment. The administration then inherited an economy with plenty of slack and a relatively calm geopolitical environment. Until 2020 few complex trade-offs were called for. When COVID hit, the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress rapidly decomposed. How the Trump administration will actually look remains to be seen, but the environment today is far more complex and will test the anti-PMC politics of the Trump administration far more seriously.

Looks like big trouble ahead, and that's aside from the Christian nationalist and cult-of-Trump fascist aspirations of the Orange Man's coalition.