Unsurprisingly, social media is awash with recrimination. Most of which attacks American voters as thick, evil, misogynistic, racist, and so on. Voting for Trump and Republican candidates is a character flaw up there with KKK hoods and membership of the NRA. It's irredeemable, the world isn't what it should be, and everything is doomed to get worse. What is absent is a willingness on the part of the Democrats and their cheerleaders either side of the Atlantic to deal seriously with the causes of defeat.
Three things are obvious when it comes to explaining this result. The first is an apparent reassertion of the old adage that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. For all Trump's awfulness, he wasn't the one on trial here. Joe Biden, Harris, and the Democrats were, and a majority of voters found them wanting. For one, the Democrats are the party of forever wars. The appeal of MAGA isolationism is an extrication from foreign entanglements and using billions expended in arming US clients for priorities closer to home. Trump is likely to withdraw support from Ukraine, as promised, while continuing to give Israel a free hand - or attempting to impose a peace that recognises the annexation of the occupied territories as reward for continuing to be the State Department's loyal gendarme. Either way it's the deal-making/war-ending/peace-through-strength vibes that matter. Relatedly, the disgusting assistance Biden's government has rendered Israel's genocide did, as forecast, demobilise Arab-heritage and left-progressive voters when the US could have decided otherwise. Just as anyone who voted for the Harris ticket because it was the lesser of two evils cannot be blamed for doing so, likewise no one can be criticised for not having the stomach for supporting hand wringing participants in a terrible and ongoing crime.
And there is our old friend the economy. On the surface, Biden has a good story to tell what with stimulus cheques and the job growth following the Inflation Reduction Act. But the problem, as the Tories found here, is how people feel now about their prospects. This is where the Democrats are on shaky ground. Americans faced an inflationary tide as well, and it's only in the last few months that real wages have risen above the rate. In other words, too short a time to feel the difference and certainly not enough to offset the price increases of the last couple of years. Yet the Democrats were content to waffle on about numbers and GDP without appreciating the cost-of-living concerns that persuaded millions of punters to give the tangerine crook another shot. Why? Again, Trump is no friend of the workers, but at least he pantomimed a concern for the lot of ordinary people and recognised incomes were stretched for millions. Had the Democrats allowed Tim Waltz a longer leash as someone who did have the charisma and common touch to connect with those concerns, it could have had an effect. But no, briefcase sensiblism and flattery toward American's middle class was what the smart politics demanded.
Thirdly, there is The Men. A lot has been made of Trump's misogyny and how that won over not insignificant numbers of Latino and African-American men. But this wasn't simply a matter of hurling insults at Harris, denigrating women, and going hard on abortion. It demonstrated the successful exploitation of the class dimension of gender politics. The crisis in masculinity is less a consequence of women claiming theirs and making men pay, but more a matter of the changed political economy. In contemporary capitalism, the shift in the ideal-typical or "hegemonic" worker from the (masculine) industrial worker to the networked socialised worker whose immaterial labour produces knowledge, data, care, and services is not without consequences for gender. It was and is the case that normative femininity and masculinity has been foisted on children long after the political economy of the advanced states, including the USA, decisively shifted away from industrial to post-industrial economies. This has meant generations of men coming into a world where the privileged wages of masculinity are not as readily available in the labour market. The dominance of immaterial labour has proceeded alongside a certain "feminisation" of work, which has meant younger men have to compete with women on increasingly equal terms for jobs, and that women are better equipped for the emotional labour and sociability that is part and parcel of work today.
As such, the promises of masculine privilege many men expect have gone unmet. Most men growing into this accept the changed reality, but significant minorities do not. Hence the explosion of misogynistic communities online, along with mass audiences for influencers that demand the return of masculine entitlements. The Trump campaign has leaned into this, but there's a more subtle appeal at work here. In places like Pennsylvania and other rust belt states, the rhetoric about repatriating manufacturing and creating "real jobs" is a call back to the industrial, masculine mass worker of the assembly line and steel mill. It's about a promise of restoring the old gendered political economy where the men went to work in manly jobs, and brought home enough money to provide for a family. It's where socialism meets social conservatism, where good jobs meant fixed gender roles and a strong purpose for men. Again, it doesn't matter that Trump will bring none of this back. What's gone is gone, and most re shored manufacturing is highly automated and relatively jobless. But this is the interplay of vibes the right are adept at playing with, and Trump's team are no different. They won't deliver, but it was a promise that helped see off the Democrats and returned The Donald to the White House.
Taken in sum, none of this is groundbreaking stuff. Political science is not rocket science. A government going out of its way to demobilise its base never ends well. Angering natural supporters and dumping on liberal and humanitarian values while pretending to be the custodian of constitutionalism and the rules-based international order is mind-searingly stupid. Presiding over galloping inflation and flatlining wages, and carrying on as if they don't matter is more insane than anything Trump has said on the campaign trail. If the Democrats were serious about winning, they should have looked into the recent past and remembered how it was done in 2020. Instead of going for the repeat, they told left wing and progressive voters to vote for them or else, and gave every impression they didn't care for how tough millions of Americans have found life since Covid and the cost of living crisis. The Democrats lost the election on their own terms, and they're guaranteed not to draw a single lesson from the experience.
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"This has meant generations of men coming into a world where the privileged wages of masculinity are not as readily available in the labour market."
ReplyDeleteWhile I accept the first two points to explain the disappearance of the 10 million Democratic votes, your third point attempts to shoe-horn a critique of the 'crisis of masculinity' and the unrealistic nostalgia amongst Trump supporters for a return to good old day of 'masculine hegemony' into that well-rehearsed theory of 'immaterial labour'.
My problem with this is that there exists a very large section of the labour market that, since the death of the welfare state and the subsequent transition to neoliberalism has grown sufficiently to change the global class structure. They are the petty bourgeoisie. This significant class, as Dan Evans makes clear, have not indulged in the ‘massification of higher education’ or taken up employment in the new knowledge economy, instead they are the new army of the self-employed. Traditionally, made up of shop keepers, small farmers and small artisans, today they are more likely to be builders, painter & decorators, freelancers, taxi drivers, hairdressers, window cleaners, management consultants, graphic designers, childminders etc. These ‘mini entrepreneurs’ are isolated, skilled and autonomous workers who have a manifest hatred of bureaucracy, taxation or any state interference and are socially conservative in outlook. There is a nostalgic view of the small family business up against big capital. In the UK, there are as many people classified as self-employed as are employed in the entire public sector (5.6 million people). Gramsci argued that fascism’s defining characteristic was that it was the first political movement that successfully mobilised the petty bourgeoisie.
As Evans argues, politics has increasingly polarised away from the centre and the small self-employed has emerged as a significant political force. They are core pillar of Trump support.
As Goran Therborn claims: if the twentieth century belonged to the proletariat, the twenty-first century, so far, belongs to the petty bourgeoisie.
Some obvious questions to ask if this are: how many of these petty bourgeoisie are really out there now (do you include gig economy workers, small-time "content creators", small time landlords etc?); and are they a single bloc?
DeleteThere are some internal fault lines which should come to the fore if this group has genuinely grown. E.g. some of them are bound to realise, especially now, that government interference at some level (ideally closer to home) is essentially their only defence against Big Capital. And the wider the pool of "occupations" which this group covers, the more that its defining political characteristics are diluted... Except perhaps for two: fear of Big Capital, and localism.
If we assume that all of the money is draining into an ever-smaller pool of capital parasites and knowledge economy workers, then the people must be draining in the other direction - but to where? If the petty bourgeoisie is really the dominant sink, then its fault lines should be developing apace. Whatever (and how many) the sinks are, these are the classes which will have a very high voter-to-capital ratio.
Another interesting book, with a US perspective, on the petit-bourgeoisie is Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank. I'd never appreciated the distinctly different experiences of small business versus big business until then.
DeleteThe crisis in masculinity is less a consequence of women claiming theirs and making men pay, but more a matter of the changed political economy.
ReplyDeleteYours is about the first (or only) comment on 'The Men' that has tried to address this. The Guardian has been telling in its shift in its gender-related election focus to (young) men. However, the focus has been either 'if only men stopped listening to Trump/Andrew Tate/Joe Rogan, then they'd vote Democrat (but how and to listen to what instead?) or 'it's all their fault' (despite a majority of white women voting Republican *yet again* as well). If Trump did well amongst men, it's because he offered to 'see' them, offered a reason (however specious) and - above all - offered them someone to blame, all as a way of explaining their material conditions (e.g. shit/no job and low/no pay). After all, it's not as though capitalism 'planned' the emergence of immaterial labour so women could thrive in it with the same gendered attributes that patriarchy insists is 'truly' female (i.e. less valuable than men's attributes) - especially given the conservative/media obsession with 'tradwives.'