The Roots of American Populism: Are Trump and Vance Populists?

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Let us hope that whomever ascends to the leadership is a populist in the full sense of the word, channeling Emerson and his fellow critics of what we now call neoliberalism.

What does it mean to say a politician is a populist? Over 30 years ago, Christopher Lasch observed in his book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics that populism had been applied to such a wide swath of individuals and causes that it had lost any specific meaning.

This definition is a start: A political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

Lasch, if not alone among American intellectuals, was certainly one of the few who was deeply concerned with the roots of American populism, and with its critique of the changes in the American social, cultural and economic realms that were promoted by the status quo at the expense of those social classes diminished by those changes. Those who resisted these changes were deemed populists.

Lasch meticulously traces the roots of American 19th century populism through the influential Enlightenment era thinkers of Europe, the Protestant tradition’s theological debates and American intellectual critics such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, of whom Lasch wrote: “his social views can easily be recognized, I think, as the views of a nineteenth-century populist. He has a populist distain for the fashionable life” which “fosters vanity, luxury and frivolous display.”

Emerson’s distain for the vanities of luxury was equaled by his distain for parasitic financiers, a position born of Emerson’s religious beliefs. As Lasch notes, “Emerson believes in the moral value of manual labor.” In other words, honest labor–what Emerson referred to as a calling–had a spiritual component. Here is Lasch: Emerson “would gladly sacrifice some of the ‘conveniences’ of civilization to the moral culture conferred by farming or a craft.”

In his essay Politics (1844), Emerson “argues that the prevailing social arrangements allow ‘the rich to encroach upon the poor.’” In Lasch’s summary, Emerson held that “Society needs self-respecting men and women,, not a perfect set of institutions.” He quotes Emerson: “Society can never prosper… until every man does that which he is created to do.”

Emerson also held that those seeking to get something for nothing–the essence of the parasitic financialization and speculation Emerson viewed as a mortal threat–would eventually face a reckoning akin to karma: “A ‘third silent party’, Emerson notes, attends ‘all our bargains’–nemesis or fate.”

In the broad sweep of industrialization and financialization that took hold in the 19th century and utterly transformed America, populists viewed wage labor–being paid a wage rather than earning a living from one’s own property and skills–was contrary to the American ideal and democracy, as only those with a stake in the system as owners could be entrusted to act in the interests of the nation as a whole, and only those with a path to ownership of their labor could reach their full potential and find their calling.

Let us turn now to the prevailing socio-economic arrangements in 21st century America, which are the result of 45 years of financialization and 30 years of rampant globalization, arrangement created not by forces beyond our influence but by policies promoted by political, social and economic interests on their own behalf.

These arrangements are quickly illuminated by a simple question: did they inflate your bubble or pop your bubble? In other words, did the bubble we each live in expand as a direct result of hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization, or was it popped by these forces?

That over 90 million Americans are expected to travel overseas this year offers a rough guide to the winners and losers in modern-day America: the 25% booking flights overseas who are reading articles asking if a $12,000 budget for a vacation in Europe is enough live in bubbles nicely inflated by financialization, speculation and globalization, while the bottom 60% are generally living paycheck to paycheck and cannot dream of having $12,000 available to spend on overseas travel.

In the America of today, a great many people have zero hope of buying a house in the city they grew up in and call home. Those who don’t inherit a house or fortune, or who didn’t choose their parents wisely have little hope of working their way through college with part-time jobs, as even state universities charge tens of thousands of dollars for tuition, fees and books, never mind living expenses.

I detailed these realities in “Why Are You So Negative?” Good Question. 4 Answers from Real Life (4/25/24)

Wage labor–what has been correctly identified as wage slavery–is now the norm, along with its sibling, debt serfdom. I have addressed the decline of self-employment (not gig-slavery, real self-employment) for years, and the rise of debt as the means to attempt social mobility and grab hold of a middle-class life.

A rigorous analysis of IRS data in 2015 revealed that only 1% of the US workforce of 145 million earns a middle-class income from self-employment: Only 4.48 million self-employed earn $50,000 or more, and 3 million of those are partnerships or corporations, i.e. professionals such as CPAs, attorneys, etc. That leaves leaves about 1.5 million people who aren’t in the professional class (those with advanced degrees and professional licenses and credentials) who earn a middle class living as sole proprietors. Here is the analysis:

Endangered Species: The Self-Employed Middle Class (May 2015)

As inflation in both essentials and assets have shredded the earnings and pathways to ownership of the bottom 60%, the lived reality of those who didn’t get rich from financialization, speculation and globalization is one of precarity, where any unexpected major expense such as a medical bill, car repair, insurance increase, etc. is enough to push financial anxiety into the red zone.

Precarious: One Misfortune Away from Insolvency (5/14/24)

The 45-year decline in labor’s share of the economy was not the result of fate, but of central state / bank policies promoted by those who benefited most from these policies. I covered these realities in The Bill for America’s $50 Trillion Gluttony of Inequality Is Overdue (9/21/20). This quote from Time Magazine encapsulates how policy created inequality on an unprecedented scale:

“There are some who blame the current plight of working Americans on structural changes in the underlying economy–on automation, and especially on globalization. According to this popular narrative, the lower wages of the past 40 years were the unfortunate but necessary price of keeping American businesses competitive in an increasingly cutthroat global market. But in fact, the $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn’t inevitable; it was a choice–a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people.”

I regularly repost this chart because it’s a snapshot of what’s wrong with the status quo in America and what will eventually unleash nemesis on all those living in bubbles inflated by parasitic finance masquerading as “central bank policy,” “shareholder value” and “investing” in speculation.

Those who believe that there will be no blowback from becoming a nation where the bottom 50% own a near-zero 2.6% share of the nation’s immense private financial wealth are living in a bubble in desperate search of a needle.

Unsurprisingly, those who benefited the most from the ascendancy of parasitic finance and globalization approve most heartily of their own management of the nation’s institutions and policies. The bottom 99% have a decidedly less favorable view of the nation’s self-serving elites:

All of which brings us to the potential ascent of the Trump-Vance ticket to leadership. If populism means anything, it means restoring the value of work and especially manual labor of the real-world essential sort that ChatGPT, apps, bots and marketing cannot do, restoring the ladder of social mobility and gutting the forces that have laid waste to all those who didn’t have the opportunity to buy stocks and real estate before they skyrocketed to unattainable heights: hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization.

Nemesis is running out of patience. Let us hope that whomever ascends to the leadership is a populist in the full sense of the word, channeling Emerson and his fellow critics of what we now call neoliberalism. What counts now isn’t political labels; what counts now is promoting policies that reverse the 45-year hollowing out of the nation–morally, culturally and economically–that benefited the few at the expense of the many.

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