Tag: populism
Don Jr. Touts Populist Cred Because He Once Tended Bar In Aspen (VIDEO)

Don Jr. Touts Populist Cred Because He Once Tended Bar In Aspen (VIDEO)

Donald Trump Jr., the first son of billionaire ex-President Donald Trump, suggests that he is more average American than political elite because he had worked minimum wage jobs — an experience he said could teach lawmakers the “hustle” culture.

In last week's second — and arguably most embarrassing — episode of the nascent far-right podcast Triggered With Don Jr., Trump Jr. sat down with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to discuss a panoply of right-wing talking points, spread alt-right misinformation and conspiracy theories, and attack Democrats.

In a cringy portion of the show, the Trump Organization executive sought to validate his fear-mongering by claiming a connection with everyday Americans and their hustle, saying he once worked for tips.

"I understand where I come from and my background — I get it. But my father made sure I worked minimum wage jobs… I also worked for tips, which is something that's really important that everybody should understand,” Trump Jr. told McCarthy, according to Newsweek.

Seeking to distance himself from the political elite in Congress by citing his supposed work experience, Trump Jr. added, "They've never actually had that hustle."

Trump Jr. has often brought up his bartender gig in Aspen, Colorado, in sit-downs with media outlets, recalling that he lived in a truck at the time.

According to Politico Magazine, though, the Trump son — who grew up in the ostentatious 53-room penthouse atop Trump tower, cared for by nannies and protected by bodyguards — moved to Aspen as a raging alcoholic “to keep the party going” and returned to New York a year later after “he grew tired of the mindless high life in Aspen.”

The news outlet also reported that Trump Jr. had, during summers, tended to boats as a dock attendant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and worked at Trump Organization construction sites while in high school.

Trump Jr. suggested that many in Congress can't connect with the constituents who elect them because the lawmakers lacked “so much” of the work experience he’d had.

"No one's ever had to make payroll. No one's signed the front of a check, as opposed to the back," Trump Jr., a millionaire, told McCarthy. "You always come to expect that not to exist in these offices."

Trump Jr., a culture war troll on Twitter, has repeatedly assailed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for her political views and frequently made fun of the Democrat’s stint as a once-struggling bartender, portraying as suspicious her eventual rise to the People’s House.

While McCarthy and Trump Jr. performatively recited right-wing lies on the podcast, the speaker suggested that impeaching Biden is on agenda for House Republicans, possibly in retaliation for Trump’s impeachments for extorting Ukraine and inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

“After watching what they did to your father about impeachment, using it politically, I’ll never send use it politically, but that doesn’t mean we won’t use,” McCarthy said. “We’re going to investigate ‘why is the border like that,’ which could lead to an impeachment inquiry.”

Twitter users ridiculed the Trump spawn for peddling populist commentary and offering faux menial job experience as his connection to the struggles of regular Americans and for repeatedly talking over at a point during the show in which both men struggled to outdo each other in praising Trump.





What’s So Bad About ‘Coastal Elites’?

What’s So Bad About ‘Coastal Elites’?

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

There was a time when "coastal" was an innocent geographical adjective, as in "coastal islands" or "coastal flooding." It referred to events and places located on large bodies of saltwater. But somewhere along the way, "coastal" gained a sinister, shameful connotation.

Populists and pseudo-populists have long fulminated against elites. But these days, the only thing worse than being one of the elite is being one of the "coastal elite."

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Interview: Historian Rick Perlstein On The Conservative Roots Of Trumpism

Interview: Historian Rick Perlstein On The Conservative Roots Of Trumpism

This interview with historian and author Rick Perlstein originally appeared in the Berlin daily Neues Deutschland

After Trump won the election you published an essay titled “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” How did Trump’s election change your view of American conservatism?

The conservatives’ own story about their evolution has been that there were two streams of conservative political activity in the US: one that was extremist and conspiratorial, often viciously racist and even violent. And then there was a mainstream movement that policed those boundaries, associated with the figure of William F. Buckley and the magazine National Review. That mainstream conservatism, as the story goes, had largely prevailed, and the extremist elements were pretty much vestigial. What Trump demonstrates is that those much more feral streams in the movement never really went away. Knowing about Trump, it was a lot easier to see in retrospect how often that extremist underbrush was part of the story.

Is Trump even a conservative in the traditional sense? The National Review published an issue during the 2016 primaries titled “Against Trump,” in which various conservative intellectuals stated that a true conservative could not support Trump, because he violated conservative principles.

Yes, but if you look at the National Review website in the years before that, pretty much everything nasty and politically grotesque that we associate with Trump could be seen in National Review, too.

But weren’t there also actual policy disagreements, regarding the economy or trade for example? Did Trump in that sense violate the principles of US conservatism?

The problem with that idea is that if you survey self-described conservatives, about 90 percent identify with Trump. So you have to question the conservatives’ own story about what was at the heart of their movement. Conservatism, in the basic sense of valuing authority and hierarchy over equality and fluidity, has taken different forms in different times and different places. In the US in the 1920s, the strongest conservative force was the Ku Klux Klan; they ran some states. I saw KKK pamphlets from that time that supported universal government-provided healthcare — because of the fear that dirty immigrants would bring disease with them. The precise policy formulae that conservatism has exhibited over time have to be analytically subordinated to the bottom line: That they are the forces of order, hierarchy, and frankly, the strong leader.

You have used the term “Herrenvolk Democracy” to describe this kind of right-wing social populism.

Yes, but Trump seems to have largely abandoned that by now. Herrenvolk democracy would have been, if he had spent a lot of money on infrastructure, which he promised to do, and provided blue-collar construction jobs; if he had worked to shore up programs that serve mostly middle-class and elderly people, like Social Security or Medicare. But instead he has gone with the more traditional right-wing laissez-faire economic program.

Tucker Carlson of Fox News, one of the most vocal supporters of the President, has recently aired a segment which was very critical of neoliberal capitalism, which he said destroyed families and the social fabric of the country.

Tucker Carlson is a proponent of “herrenvolk democracy”. This has always been a tradition in American conservatism, but very minoritarian. You would never see this kind of thing on Fox News until now. But American right-wing populism has always seen the white middle class in kind of a pincer movement between the rich liberal elites from above, and the rent-seeking, parasitic poor from below.

Steve Bannon often speaks of the Davos Class.

The form that this “herrenvolk democracy” takes seems to be a dog-whistle for anti-Semitism: the idea that unseen, mysterious moneylenders and financial elites are determining the fate of ordinary Americans.


As you said, the actual practice of the Trump administration is not much different than how a traditional Republican would have governed. Traditional, more libertarian Republicans like Paul Ryan found a lot of common ground with Trump, regarding tax cuts, cuts to welfare programs, or gutting environmental protection.

Yes, but there are important differences, too. Ronald Reagan, for example, was actually quite reverent about the idea of immigration to the United States. He was very sentimental about it, he loved the idea of people wanting to come tot he US. That was a central form that his patriotism took.

But mobilizing white racial resentment has always been central to US conservatism, such as Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”  Is this racial politics under Trump more central to the GOP, or is it just different, or more honest and open?

It’s more central and it’s more open. Historically, elite conservative politicians did a much more careful job of stoking racial resentment without actually using the language of racial resentment. There is a civil religion in America that includes equality and a rejection of ethnic particularism. You see this in figures like Reagan and Newt Gingrich and generations of conservative politicians. And then you see Donald Trump, starting his campaign in Trump Tower by saying that Mexico is sending us their rapists. He ripped off that skin of civility and was perfectly willing to show the ugliness that other people were careful to hide.

After the election, there was lots of talk about how Trump was very successful with the “white working class,” which maybe hadn’t been voting Republican before. Do you think that the social base of Trump is different than the one that elected George W. Bush or Reagan?

That’s been exaggerated a bit. He got plenty of support from richer white suburban Republican voters as well, even though that is the most vulnerable part of his support. But he did receive an enormous emotional affection from this white working class in the areas of the country that were ruined by neoliberalism. Ronald Reagan had a lot of affection in those areas, too, where his voters were called “Reagan Democrats”: unionized workers who were doing very poorly in the international economy in the late 70s. So it’s an acceleration of a trend that’s been going on for a long time.

In Nixonland, you describe how Nixon in the 1960s engineered a realignment by using racial and culture war issues to split the Democratic voter coalition and create this new social base, on which the power of conservatism rested in the next decades. Is this still the basic split in the population?

Yes, it’s still indispensable to understand our time. In fact, I have a placard from a Donald Trump rally I went to that said: “Donald Trump Stands with the Silent Majority,” which of course was the central slogan that Nixon used back then. And Trump used the same slogan as Nixon did in 1968 in his acceptance speech: “Law and Order.” Donald Trump came out of that world, the early 1970s.

The way you describe Richard Nixon’s emotional appeal seems very similar to Trump today, how he presented himself as the advocate of the common man against the arrogant liberal elites.
To quote Nixon’s vice-president Spiro Agnew, “an effete corps of impudent snobs.” He was talking about the press, but the idea is that people who are more liberal are part of this Davos Class of international ruthless snobs who look down on everyone else.

 One central concept in this regard is resentment.

Resentment is contempt mixed with envy. And even though Trump is a very wealthy man, his habits of mind are very status conscious. He constantly talks about how he went to an Ivy League school, because he felt condescension by the intellectual class that also went to Ivy League schools. Trump went to a college that was very much on the lower rung of the Ivy League. This game started with Richard Nixon. This kind of class politics is very surreal, because Trump wraps himself in all this refinement, but it’s been said that Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of what a rich person looks like. His aesthetic is very much a brutish, arriviste flaunting of wealth.

And very vulgar too, like when he ordered cheeseburgers for his guests in the White House. It’s almost like he is doing it on purpose, to provoke the liberal condescension.

That was a call back to Michelle Obama, who had a vegetable garden in the White House, and made her big public issue healthy food for children. You see Republicans rebelling against this idea, as in “eating what you want to eat is what a real American does.” While Obama was eating all this fancy food that no one knows how to pronounce. It’s very much part of the class template of American politics, and Donald Trump is playing it to the hilt.

Very few Republicans still criticize the president, Mitt Romney for example. Did Trump take over the Republican Party, or is there any chance that it could revert back to more traditional, less populist styles?

No, these people have no popular constituency. They have a lot of articulate spokesmen, but no bodies on the ground.

Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan and Nixonland:The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. 

 

Book Excerpt: Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?

Book Excerpt: Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?

In Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2018), Robert Kuttner refreshes the great tradition of political economy to examine the upheavals of our era. From worsening inequality and the domination of global finance to the rise of fascist movements masquerading as populism, he reveals how the U.S, economy went wrong and why bad policy threatens democracy both here and abroad.  The following is excerpted from the preface:

A quarter century ago in the glow of post-communist triumphalism, many were predicting that globalization would link democracy with capitalism in a splendid convergence. Instead, we are witnessing a primitive backlash against both the global market and liberal democracy.

In the United States, the rise of Donald Trump revealed broad disaffection with both economics and politics. The British vote to exit the EU reflects a comparable spasm of right-wing populism. Ultra- nationalists who reject both the EU and the doctrine of liberal trade are now the second or third largest party in much of Europe, and some are in government. Democracy itself is under siege.

This upheaval is occurring not just in nations with weak democratic roots such as Turkey, Hungary, Egypt, and the Philippines, but in the democratic heartland—western Europe and the United States. Autocrats are using the forms of democracy to destroy the substance. As a whole other model, China’s state-led semi-capitalism shows no signs of evolving into liberal democracy. Nor is China embracing anything like free markets.

This ultranationalist reaction is compounded by resentment of immigrants and refugees, as well as resurgent racism. But the fundamental driver of these trends is the resurrection of heedless, globalized capitalism that serves the few, damages the many, and breeds anti-system politics. Though the turn was abrupt and extreme, the mass frustrations have been brewing for decades, under the noses of elites.

Today, large numbers of citizens throughout the West are angry that the good life is being stolen from them. They are not quite sure whom to be angry at—immigrants, corporations, the government, politically correct liberals, the rich, the poor? The anger is both unfocused and inchoate, but increas- ingly articulated by a neofascist right. The election of Donald Trump and the British vote to exit the European Union, neither of which will remedy the pocketbook grievances, are emblematic of this muddle.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, some commentators declared a “clash of civilizations,” as Samuel P. Huntington famously termed it—the democratic West against a barbaric form of radical Islam. Well before 9/11, fellow political scientist Benjamin Barber’s book title Jihad versus McWorld summed it up: the commercial, often tawdry norms of the globalizing West promoting primitive reaction rather than spreading liberal democracy.

But recent events signal something worse. The threat to democracy is increasingly within the West.

The deeper story is about the fraught relationship between socially bearable capitalism and robust democracy. When the system is in balance, strong democracy tempers market forces for the general good, in turn reinforcing democratic legitimacy. Democracy must be national because the polity is national. As a citizen of the United States, I can vote for my leaders. My government has certain rules and procedures that are relatively transparent and can be contested.

But there is no global government and no global citizenship. To the extent that democracy requires taming of the market, globalization weakens that endeavor. Today’s globalization undermines national regulatory authority. There is no global lender of last resort, no global financial supervisor, no global antitrust authority, no global tax collector, no global labor relations board, no global entity to enforce dem- ocratic rights or broker social contracts. Quasi-governmental global organizations, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, are far less transparent and less accountable than their domestic public counterparts, and easier for corporate elites to capture and dominate. Globalization tends to alter the political distribution of power domestically, and to increase the influence of elites who favor more laissez-faire and more globalization, so the process feeds on itself.

A key aspect of the postwar system was the very tight regulation of finance, which remained mostly private but was turned into something close to a public utility. Uniquely in the history of industrial capitalism, the ability of private finance to operate globally was tightly limited. The system constrained international move- ments of capital. Banks, for the most part, could not do business outside the borders of their home countries. There was no speculation in currencies because exchange rates were fixed. Entire categories of financial products that operate globally today and thus add to the system’s ungovernability and instability, such as credit default swaps, did not exist.

The tight national controls on financial capital had significant con- sequences for the broader political economy of the era. In the real economy, finance was the servant, not the master. Interest rates could be kept low, providing cheap capital to the real economy, with- out the worry that easy money would fuel speculation, instability, and investment bubbles. With strict limits on what finance could do, the wealth and power of financial elites were also constrained, reinforcing the power shift that undergirded the entire social compact.

The unraveling of the several elements of the postwar social settlement had multiple sources. “Globalization” in the current usage— meaning deregulation of constraints on transnational movements of money, products, services, and labor—was not the only element. But it was clearly a driver and an intensifier. Globalization was a key vector in the transmission of neoliberal policies and values. New global rules not only restored the ability of finance to operate speculatively across national borders, but undermined the capacity of national governments to regulate it. Globalization helped to restore the temporarily suppressed political power of corporate and financial elites, as well as their wealth. Globalization of capital created a reality, even for left-of-center governments, in which there seemed to be no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, to even more laissez-faire, because of the need to reassure markets. The process was cumulative, both politically and economically.

The fact that the far-right backlash is occurring in nearly all Western nations at the same time is no coincidence, nor is it accidental contagion. It is a common reaction against the impact of globalization on the livelihoods of ordinary people. The resulting sentiments produce a politics that is sullen, resentful, and perverse, further undermining democracy. Elites have won the policy debates but have lost the citizenry.

Far-right sentiments are always lurking around the fringes of society, but when democracy does a good job of managing capitalism, they remain at the fringe. When capitalism overwhelms democracy, we get the alt-right with a friend in the White House. We get Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon, and Donald Trump.

Globalized capitalism, increasingly deregulated and unmoored from national restraints, undermines a balanced economy in multiple, complex, and cumulative ways. With global markets and no global standards, domestic workers are thrown into direct competition with more desperate overseas workers. A century’s worth of democratic struggles to regulate labor standards are hosed away. At the other end of the wealth spectrum, the worldwide liberation of finance creates astronomical incomes for the elite. The developing world gains access to world markets but, for the most part, becomes an even more extreme case of wealth and poverty. Money becomes more powerful than citizenship, corrupting both the polity and the economy.

Globalization also accelerates cross-border movements of people. Corporate leaders and their political allies have promoted international flows of cheap labor. Remittances have become an important source of income for much of the third world. The European Union requires free cross-border movements of workers as a condition of membership. Immigrants are also refugees from wars or dictators. A few national leaders, from Sweden to Germany to Canada, have idealistically opened their doors to political and economic refugees. Migrants, often poor and often scorned, are outside national social contracts; they are nonparticipants in national democratic deliberation, and vulnerable to both exploitation and retribution. Even before recent terrorist attacks, their presence undermined settled social compromises.

In the democracies, government and politics are hobbled by a seemingly opposite but complementary problem—paralysis in the face of escalating problems. In the US, three decades of cynical Republican and corporate blockage of economic remedies discredited government and politics, and paved the way for Donald Trump. In the EU, neoliberal rules have constrained policy options for member governments. The rise of far-right anti-system parties has narrowed the parliamentary space of the mainstream, necessitating weak coalition governments of center-right and center-left parties, leading to feeble compromise policies at a time when economic stagnation requires stronger remedies. This blockage, also reminiscent of the 1920s, discredits government and invites Caesarism.

Some have argued that capitalism promotes democracy, because of common norms of transparency, rule of law, and free competition— for markets, for ideas, for votes. In some idealized world, capitalism may enhance democracy, but in the history of the West, democracy has expanded by limiting the power of capitalists. When that project fails, dark forces are often unleashed. In the twentieth century, capitalism coexisted nicely with dictatorships, which conveniently create friendly business climates and repress independent worker organizations. Western capitalists have enriched and propped up third-world despots who crush local democracy. Hitler had a nice understanding with German corporations and bankers, who thrived until the unfortunate miscalculation of World War II. Communist China works hand in glove with its capitalist business partners to destroy free trade unions and to preserve the political monopoly of the Party. Vladimir Putin presides over a rigged brand of capitalism and governs in harmony with kleptocrats.

When push comes to shove, the story that capitalism and democracy are natural complements is a myth. Corporations are happy to make a separate peace with dictators—and short of that, to narrow the domain of civic deliberation even in democracies. After Trump’s election, we saw corporations standing up for immigrants and saluting the happy rainbow of identity politics, but lining up to back Trump’s program of gutting taxes and regulation. Some individual executives belatedly broke with Trump over his racist comments, but not a single large company has resisted the broad right-wing assault on democracy that began long before Trump, and all have been happy with the dismantling of regulation. If democracy is revived, the movement will come from empowered citizens, not from corporations.

A line attributed to Mark Twain holds that history doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes. The current rhyme is a discordant one, with echoes that should be treated as ominous warnings.

We have seen this movie before. During the period between the two world wars, free-market liberals governing Britain, France, and the US tried to restore the pre–World War I laissez-faire system. They put debt collection ahead of economic recovery. It was an era of ram- pant speculation and no controls on private capital. All this was sup- posed to promote prosperity and peace. Instead, it produced a decade of economic insecurity combined with heights of inequality, a discred- iting of democracy, fascist backlash, and deeper depression. Right up until the German election of July 1932, in which the Nazis became the largest party, the pre-Hitler governing coalition was practicing the economic austerity commended by Germany’s creditors and by orthodox financial opinion throughout Europe.

The great prophet of how market forces taken to an extreme destroy both democracy and a functioning economy was less Karl Marx than Karl Polanyi. As Polanyi demonstrated in his 1944 masterwork, The Great Transformation, the disembedding of markets from their societies and resulting inattention to social consequences inevitably triggers a reaction. The reaction is more often chaotic and fascistic than politely democratic. “The fascist solution to the impasse of liberal capitalism,” Polanyi wrote, is containment of the market “achieved at the price of extirpation of all democratic institutions.”

Polanyi saw the catastrophe of World War I, the interwar period, the Great Depression, fascism, and World War II as the logical culmination of market forces overwhelming society. “The origin of the cataclysm,” he wrote, “lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.”

Rereading Polanyi at a time when events vindicate his vision, one is struck by the eerie present-day ring. Polanyi, like his great contemporary John Maynard Keynes, the architect of Bretton Woods, was an optimist. With the right politics and the right mobilization of democracy, both men believed markets could be harnessed for the common good. They recognized the propensity of capitalism to create calamity but did not believe that outcome to be inevitable. Polanyi lived to see the postwar system confirm his hopes.

The great pessimist, of course, was Marx. In the mid-twentieth century, history failed to follow Marx’s script. At the apex of the postwar boom in the United States and Europe, Marx’s bleak prediction of capitalist self-destruction seemed ludicrous. A contented bourgeoisie was huge and growing. The proletariat enjoyed steady income gains, thanks to strong trade unions and public regulation. The political energy of aroused workers that Marx imagined as revolutionary instead went to support social democratic and progressive parliamentary parties. These built a welfare state, to temper but not supplant capitalism. Nations that celebrated Marx, meanwhile, were bleak economic failures that repressed their own working classes.

Half a century later, working people are beleaguered and insecure. A global reserve army of the unemployed batters down wages and marginalizes labor’s political power. A Lumpenproletariat of homeless vagrants and stateless migrants rends the social fabric. Even elite professions are becoming proletarianized. The globalized market weakens the reach of the democratic polity, undermining the protections of the mixed economy.

Ideologically, the neoliberal view that markets are good and states are bad is close to hegemonic, another Marxian concept that once seemed far-fetched, referring to the tyranny of unquestioned, self-serving ideas. With finance still supreme despite the disgrace of the 2008 collapse, it is no longer risible to use “capital,” Marx-style, as a collective noun. Goldman Sachs alums provided five of the last six US secretaries of the treasury, Democrats as well as Republicans, even under the alleged populist Donald Trump. If the state is not quite the Marxian executive committee of the ruling class, it is doing a pretty fair imitation.

But Marx got several big things wrong. In countries where rulers invoked his name, there was no “dictatorship of the proletariat,” just plain totalitarianism. Most important for our purposes, Marx—in his conjuring of a global proletariat—left out nationalism. He left out the fact that the reaction against a predatory capitalism that annihilates social institutions more typically ended in fascism.

I still believe that economies can be democratically harnessed for the general good. However, in order to achieve a democratically constrained mixed economy, almost everything has to break right. Success requires fortuitous historical circumstances, movements that mobilize citizens against elites, inspired democratic leaders, and a good dose of luck.

These moments tend not to last. The institutions often turn out to be more fragile than they first appear, and they require continual renewal. In a basically capitalist economy, financial elites, even when constrained, retain an immense amount of residual power. Only countervailing democratic power can contain that potentially destructive force.

The Bretton Woods era suggests that a more benign form of globalization is possible. But the postwar brand of globalization, balancing citizenship and market, above all required a politics. Today, a few thinkers could sit in a seminar room and design a thinner globalization and a stronger democratic national polity. Keynes and his generation did just that after World War II. But they had the political winds at their backs. Today’s architects of democratic capitalism face political headwinds. Though ideas do matter, they are no substitute for political movements.

Can we reclaim a decent economy that works for most people, and in turn restore democracy? The policies are not hard to envision. But once again, the necessary politics will take a comprehension of how things went off the rails, and a convergence of mass movements, leadership, and luck.

Excerpted from Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism by Robert Kuttner. Copyright © 2018 by Robert Kuttner. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. He is the author of 11 books and also writes for The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, and The New York Review of Books.  If you would like to receive Kuttner’s blog posts regularly, please click here.

IMAGE: Chinese President Xi Jinping (C) speaks at a U.S.-China business roundtable, comprised of U.S. and Chinese CEOs, in Seattle, September 23, 2015. REUTERS/Elaine Thompson/Pool