US: rise of populism

S P SETH

First Brexit, the referendum in Britain to leave the European Union, and now Donald Trump’s election as US president, show how far populism has come up in developed (for want of a better word) western societies. It is the world that prided itself on ‘Enlightenment’, meaning the triumph of reason over ignorance and prejudice, even though it also coincided with European colonialism and worse. This too perversely became, in the eyes of many, a part of the ‘Enlightenment’ process of ‘civilizing’ the rest of the world. And even when colonialism came to an end, with or without the civilizing mission, it took a new and different form. And this was because the old type of colonialism of ruling over distant people and lands was no longer profitable and feasible for a number of reasons, chief among them the weariness and destruction wrought by WW11.

Precisely because of this, there was a need to create a new international order where old colonial powers, led by a new imperial centre, the USA, continued to exercise their dominance economically, politically and militarly. But the challenge to this dominance came in the form of Cold War pitting the west against the Soviet Union, which the US and its allies portrayed as a struggle between good and evil--- between the ‘free world’ and ‘iron curtain’. The ‘free world’ was built on democracy and ‘free’ trade, a sort of ideal global society with free movement of capital but restricted movement of labour to maintain and enrich western countries.

However, the stupendous task of reconstruction after WW11 required importing labour that was in short supply, which led to regulated immigration. It served two purposes. First, it filled acute labour shortages. And, at the same time, it kept a lid on excessive wage growth. This was largely fine with the first generation of imported labour as they kept their heads down and worked hard to enrich their new societies. In the process, they didn’t make extravagant demands by generally living in their ghettoes. But, it started to change with the second and third generations, particularly in Europe, as they were much more conscious of discrimination in all aspects of life. Even as this was happening, the al Qaeda inspired 9/11 terrorist bombing in the US added a new and much more dangerous dimension to a growing crisis in western societies, where its immigrant population was starting to loom large and was seen as threatening its privileged white population.

About the same time, the so-called ‘free trade’ wasn’t entirely working to the advantage of advanced industrial economies. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization enabled it to flood the world with cheaper goods, particularly to the US in early stages, with growing trade balances in China’s favour. It was a boon for consumers in western countries, but it also led to the de-industrialization of vast swathes of regions in the US with the shifting of industrial production by increasing number of US corporations to China to partake of the low costs of production and exporting them back to the home country. In the process, all sorts of dodgy tax evasion practices became the hall-mark of these companies, thus depriving the US of much-needed tax receipts even as it was accumulating a huge debt by way of trade surpluses in favour of China.

It affected the poorer and middle classes in two ways. First, with de-industrialization, unemployment increased and even where workers were able to hold their jobs, their incomes were largely stagnant. The unemployment indeed was even worse, going by under-employment and because many people had stopped looking for work when there was not much work available anyway.  Combined with the global financial crisis, when those responsible for bringing the financial system into virtual ruin, like banks, insurance companies and the likes, were not only rescued but even prospered at the cost of the taxpayers, there was an overwhelming sense of despair among many people.

It seemed like there were two parallel universe in the US, one where the rich and the powerful ruled and prospered and felt virtuous and others they regarded as whiners and contemptible. Mitt Romney, as presidential candidate in 2012, and Hillary Clinton during her 2016 candidacy, aptly described this divide in their own self-virtuous way. Romney had said, patronizingly, that 47 per cent of the people in the US had come to depend on welfare and paid no tax. And Clinton talked of Donald Trump’s supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’, which didn’t go well with many Americans not necessarily supporters of Trump. In other words, many aggrieved voters with varying degree of grievances, chief among them economic insecurity for which they blamed anyone and everyone, found in Trump an aggregator and articulator of their anxious state of mind.

In her profile of a small West Virginia Logan County, which once used to solidly vote Democratic and now turned to Trump, New Yorker reporter Larissa MacFarquhar has a local history professor, Brandon Kirk, give his own take on supporting Trump, which is an interesting insight into the sort of people, across the board, falling for populism. As MacFarquhar reports that like everyone in West Virginia, where Logan County is, Kirk is distressed by the poverty he sees around him, and he thinks Trump’s protectionism by way of slapping high tariffs on exports from China, Mexico and elsewhere is worth trying. And Kirk also likes building a big wall to seal off the immigration route from Mexico.

His reasoning is multi-pronged. MacFarquhar quotes him at length to give a sense of what has motivated so many people to vote for Trump. According to Kirk, despite the craziness of the idea of building a wall, “You’ve got to have something big you build… there is a grandness to it. And I think it could do a lot of good. I think it would deter illegal immigration. I think it surely would help with the illegal drug trade… I think a wall would help with control…” And he is worried about the direction the country is taking. He adds, “For me as a historian, it is the heritage. I like borders, whether it is a country or a locality. You’re open to diversity, you welcome people, but you don’t want to give up everything you are. And that can happen. History teaches that mass migrations of people, they caused great stress for the Roman Empire, maybe caused it to collapse.”

Here then we have it: a profound sense of disquiet and despair among many Americans that unless something big is done to retake charge of the country, its people might lose everything they prize, and Trump is the guy who is promising to make “America Great Again.”

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au