Beneath the current anti-Trump exasperation and anger at the costs of living he’s pushed beyond many Americans’ capacity to meet, beneath even the rising prospects for Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections, there’s a rumble of a shift in our politics, a hint that some of its tectonic plates are beginning to move.
A fundamental aspect of any popular politics is the identity of the people’s enemy, the nefarious force that threatens life and values. As is normal in nations with unregulated capitalism, late-19th-century America saw the rise of a populist movement of workers and farmers who understood that the robber barons of that time—the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Goulds—were exploiting them in ways that kept them in or near poverty. This mass anger at economic elites persisted, powering the New Deal of the 1930s, until the regulations and reforms of capitalism that the New Deal had instituted created the broadly shared prosperity of the three decades following World War II.
It was during those three decades, however, that the modern American right took shape, beginning to refocus populist anger on a different elite: a liberal cultural elite that was shoving its cosmopolitan values down ordinary Americans’ throats. That wasn’t the only focus of the right, of course; Americans and immigrants who weren’t white or Christian or male had always been the kind of “others” who could serve as threats to values and hierarchies of power. But beginning with Joe McCarthy and then George Wallace, the right began to define a new elite: the “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” as Wallace called them, the Ivy League leftists like Alger Hiss, whose elitism McCarthy went after almost as much as his Communist leanings (for which reason, McCarthy also went after the anti-Communist elitists like Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson whose own elite status and softness on liberalism made them suspect as well).
By the late 1980s, the leading Republican strategist of the time—Lee Atwater, who shaped George H.W. Bush’s successful 1988 presidential campaign—noted that a foundation of Reagan-age conservatism was its success in turning populist ire on the cultural elites who infested big government rather than the economic elites who ran and owned big business (who were, of course, the chief beneficiaries of Reagan-age conservatism). Four years later, Pat Buchanan, while waging a failed primary challenge to Bush, declared that the central issue in American political life, given that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, was the need to defeat the cultural elites who threatened American values. While Buchanan never won the Republican nomination, his politics came to define Republicanism; Donald Trump is very much his successor.
What post-Buchanan Republicans failed to realize was that the capitalism they had deregulated created a new generation of oligarchs and robber barons whose misdeeds and depredations could give rise to an economic populism so sweeping that it might just eclipse some or all of the cultural—and racist, religious, and sexist—populism on which the right depended.
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This week, a convening in D.C. to demand a stop to the coming of AI, and the threats it poses to communities (data centers), jobs, and perhaps lives, was keynoted by Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, each not only castigating AI but also the oligarchs behind it. The mass anger at corporations and the very rich has been evident in polling for some time now, and the push by the Zuckerbergs and their ilk into promoting AI may well be prodding America into a full-blown form of economic populism.
Given that, the Republicans’ sole advantage in the upcoming midterms—the massive support in funding, which is being heavily provided by the selfsame oligarchs—could be one more weight pulling the Republicans down if the Democrats know how to exploit it. As both The New York Times and, this week, the Financial Times have documented, it’s basically our billionaires who are keeping the Republicans tenuously afloat. As the FT reports, “America’s mega-donors are overwhelmingly backing Donald Trump’s Republicans in this year’s race for Congress, as billionaires from Silicon Valley to Wall Street bankroll the party’s midterm push.” The FT’s list contains no real surprises; there we find Musk, Andreessen, Horowitz, Griffin, and Schwarzman, Singer, and other usual suspects. Big money generally favors Republicans over Democrats, the FT acknowledges, but notes that this year, that dynamic is “especially skewed.”
Can the Democrats find a way to make clear to the electorate that the folks who are skewing big money to the Republicans are the same folks who are screwing the public? That the Republican ads blanketing the airwaves are paid for by the very oligarchs who threaten Americans’ livelihoods (if not their lives)? Can the Democrats sense this tectonic shift—if you will, a “techtonic” shift—in America’s political fundamentals? That would require a number of Democrats to turn against the interests of some of their wealthiest supporters, of course—at least by embracing such progressive populist economic policies as wealth taxes. Given the turn in American populism, not to do so would be a form of political malpractice.
