https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/dealignment?pc=1639
Tim Barker
11 November 2024 Politics

It wasn’t close. Donald Trump’s reelection may not make the history books as a landslide: measured by share of popular vote or of the electoral college, his margins are historically in the middle of the pack. But it is decisive nonetheless. In 2020, there were seven swing states in which the margin was less than three points. Six of those went to Biden. Last week, Trump won all seven. In nearly every one of the country’s thousands of counties, he improved on his 2020 numbers.

The result fits awkwardly with Democratic Party rhetoric, in which all manner of compromise has been justified as part of a broad front against fascism. Even on the drawing board, the class basis of this strategy was more union sacrée than Front Populaire. In terms of the American experience, the Harris campaign seemed to aspire to something like Nixon’s 1972 project for a ‘new majority’. To be sure, today’s Democrats lack Tricky Dick’s swagger and agility. But, like him, they imagined building a coalition that spanned the AFL-CIO, the Business Roundtable and the neoconservative movement (nascent in 1972, senescent in 2024). Like Nixon, Biden sought to bolster domestic support for the costs of US international hegemony by administering homeopathic doses of economic nationalism. Both administrations balanced reductions in US military commitments (Vietnam then, Afghanistan now) with redoubled support for brutal regional gendarmes (the Shah then, MBS now).

The quest for a broad centrist majority requires an antagonist who can be framed as utterly outside of the national mainstream. George McGovern – despite being a pastor’s son from South Dakota, and a war hero to boot – provided the necessary basis for such an appeal. One reason was that his platform did in fact call for a radical reordering of American society: cutting military spending by one-third, redistribution via steep taxation of inheritances and capital gains. During the summer of 1972, Business Week reported, ‘even those who claimed to be lifelong Democrats talked of “opening Swiss bank accounts” and supporting President Nixon in November’. Searching critiques of the national character were also unappealing to many people without offshore deposits, particularly if they happened to work in the armaments factories which McGovern threatened to close.

Donald Trump is not George McGovern. The attempt to portray him as foreign to the body politic failed, because there is nothing remotely un-American about him. His political DNA links him directly to Nixon, via echt-Americans like Roy Cohn and Pat Buchanan. The things about him which are supposed to be deal breakers – racism, xenophobia, misogyny – can only be seen as outside the American mainstream by someone with the mental equipment of an earnest child. The slogan Make America Great Again is borrowed from Ronald Reagan, an American hero who mocked the poor for being hungry, compared African diplomats to monkeys and (on the advice of Pat Buchanan) proclaimed the Waffen SS to be ‘victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps’. The idea that Trump could be banished to the margins by getting Reagan appointees to endorse Harris never made sense to anyone not already opposed to Trump.

The Democrats were prepared for a close election, or even for a loss in the electoral college which could be contrasted with an anti-Trump popular vote. But the ‘coalition of all democratic forces’ approach left them singularly unprepared for a popular defeat. Among the hardest core of party ideologues, the response was an abrupt pivot from jingoism to anti-Americanism. As Rebecca Solnit put it: ‘Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do’. The New York Times described ‘a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip’.

If Trump’s democratic victory scrambled the notion of the Resistance, then the class composition of his majority unsettled the self-congratulatory narratives around ‘Bidenomics’. Over the summer, as Biden’s senility slipped from open secret to front page news, one of the key architects of the administration’s policy reached for the economy as a life preserver. The US economy, she tweeted,

is currently near perfect. As we navigate the hardest political moment for dems in my lifetime, just a PSA to not forget that this Administration has delivered a new brand of economics. It is working wonders, and whatever happens, it shouldn’t go anywhere.

At that point, ‘whatever happens’ referred to the question of whether Biden would be replaced by Harris. The words now have a more ultimate meaning, as two-thirds of voters told exit pollsters that the economy was ‘not good’ or ‘poor’, and voters who prioritized the economy broke overwhelmingly for Trump. In the aftermath of the election, Bernie Sanders noted that ‘It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them’. Others denied that the Democrats had abandoned the working class, but agreed that the working class had abandoned the party, either because they positively desired fascism or, more charitably, because they had been subject to misinformation about the state of the economy.

I don’t think it is possible to say with confidence that Harris lost because of the economy, much less that she or another Democrat could have won with different economic rhetoric. But it is simply not serious to claim that workers who rejected Harris were ignoring objective economic reality. As Biden’s own outgoing Council of Economic Advisers observed last month, ‘workers’ share of national income took a hit during the pandemic inflation’, with the result that the labor share – ‘an important indicator of how the economic pie is divided’ – was lower in 2024 than it had been under Trump. Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything. The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle.

What has been the elite counterpart to the dealignment of working-class votes? Harris won voters with household incomes over $100,000, but that is a fairly large group equivalent to more than one-third of households. She prevailed by similar margins among those making over $200,000, a more select group equivalent to just over 10% of all households. This group is also roughly equivalent to the 10% of American households which own 93% of the stock market, which has been the clearest winner in the Biden boom. This same top decile, according to a study by Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm, captured 59% of the overall increase in household wealth created since 2019. In turn, this wealth explosion set the pattern for a highly inegalitarian consumption boom, with the top 10% of US households accounting for 36.6% of the overall increase in consumption between 2020 and 2023. If you add in the next richest decile, the top 20% of households accounted for over half of the increase.

The distinctive Marxist position has been that class is a relationship, not an income percentile, much less the possession of a diploma. In this connection, it is relevant that Trump received the support of important sections of American capital, whose concerns have less to do with how much money they have (too much to count, no matter which party rules) and more to do with power and prerogative. Over the summer, the New York Times reported that ‘Nonunionized construction companies are furious about rules requiring agreements between contractors and unions on large federal projects’. The cryptocurrency lobby, working on behalf of an ‘industry’ whose very existence requires friendly politicians, spent nearly as much on federal elections in 2024 as all other corporate interests combined. More generally, some meaningful fraction of Silicon Valley has decided that the ‘techlash’ has gone far enough.

These forces are more publicly associated with Trump, but they are well represented within the Democratic Party by figures such as David Shor, the pollster who once said that ‘it was smart for Obama to try to ingratiate himself to the tech sector . . . and Democrats have made an enormous error by backtracking’. According to the NYT, the Harris campaign gave Shor’s consulting firm, Blue Rose Research, ‘agenda-setting power’ over a $700 million budget, much of it raised from tech. Most crypto money went to Republicans, but enough went to Democrats to get Chuck Schumer to proclaim at a ‘Crypto4Harris’ event that ‘Crypto is here to stay no matter what . . . we all believe in the future of crypto’. For most of society, class dealignment means polarization. But at the commanding heights of the economy, those with enough money to hedge their bets set themselves up to succeed in any eventuality.

That said, neither option is, from the standpoint of capital, ideal. Over the summer, the Business Roundtable (composed of 200 executives from large corporations) met with both campaigns. Trump told the group that ‘he would like to cut the corporate tax rate’ as well as further boosting oil production. Biden’s emissary, Jeff Zients, said that the Democrat’s ‘emphasis on global alliances’ and his respect for central bank independence ‘fostered the kind of trust worldwide that allowed US capitalism to thrive’. Antonio Gramsci himself could not have scripted a better example of the choice between capital’s narrow interest in maximizing returns and its broader ‘hegemonic’ interests. Paul Heideman, writing in 2021, observed along the same lines that the GOP’s ‘rightward peregrination has also produced quite a few negative externalities for capital, from needless uncertainty around the national debt to a devotion to minority rule that is threatening the legitimacy of a political system that has worked remarkably well for the corporate rich since the nineteenth century’. The most dramatic example of the latter was the January 6th incident, which briefly united the organized business community, aside from small business, in horror.

From that perspective, the fact that Trump won a popular majority makes life simpler for American business. As for central bank independence, if the Business Roundtable is not especially worried about that right now, it may be because they remember 2019. Throughout that year, Trump complained about the chairman of the Federal Reserve, tweeting at one point: ‘Who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?’ But when he asked his inner circle whether he could legally fire Powell, they told him immediately and unequivocally that he could not. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Fed correspondent, even someone like Larry Kudlow – a television personality and ‘ingratiating loyalist’ – knew that firing Powell, or even the rumour of it, would ‘accelerate the markets’ tailspin’. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin – enough of a loyalist to remain in his position for Trump’s entire first term – texted regularly with the Fed chairman and ‘made clear he had Powell’s back’. When Trump appeared at the Business Roundtable in Summer 2024, he brought along Kudlow – a reminder to the executives of the emergency brake they had pulled so easily last time Trump’s ‘economic populism’ had threatened to escape from the realm of rhetoric.

Capitalists have been led astray by complacency before, including about Trump, and it is safe to assume that his unpredictable, personalist style will create new tensions with important sections of the business community. Wall Street’s euphoric response to the election suggests that ‘the market’ doesn’t think Trump is serious about mass deportations and punitive tariffs. But even if he doesn’t go as far as he promises, any serious steps in the direction of economic nationalism will have differential effects on business which could turn into political fractures. The same may develop with regards to the budget deficit, particularly if inflation returns for whatever reason.

The biggest wild card is probably the Atlantic relationship. NATO, as one of its founders explained, did not originate from a ‘strictly military calculus’ but reflected broader concern ‘whether our kind of society could continue with democracy destroyed in Europe and our opportunities for economic expansion narrowed’. Even in 1949, it was no simple matter for the Truman administration to convince the American business community that their prosperity depended on transcontinental security guarantees. It is possible that, if the debate were reopened, everyone would ultimately decide that the old corporate internationalist creed remains as compelling as ever. But however it resolved, the mere reopening of the debate itself could be counted on to illuminate fractures within the capitalist class.

NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie proclaimed that ‘Most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election’. Without giving any hostages to fortune, one can say that this is wrong. The idea of a political order, alluded to by Bouie, was introduced to the study of American politics by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, whose first volume on the age of the New Deal was titled The Crisis of the Old Order. For volume two, The Coming of the New Deal, Schlesinger picked an epigraph from Machiavelli: ‘There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things’.

Both the Age of Roosevelt and its predecessor had rested on durable class alignments. The System of 1896 was founded on the consolidation of corporate capital in a world-historical merger movement, and secured at the polls – not once, but repeatedly – with the support of industrial workers who believed they had an interest in tariff-protected industrial development. The New Deal order represented the incorporation of organized labour as a junior partner behind those businesses which would benefit from, or could at least tolerate, Roosevelt’s unprecedented combination of free trade, social welfare and trade union legality. Even the fractured age of neoliberalism was preceded, in the 1970s, by an unprecedented mobilization in which, as Thomas Edsall put it, ‘business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative arena’.

Hegemony is more than a vibe, and critical realignment is not just a fancy name for a dramatic election night. It may be that one day it will be possible to interpret 2024 as a stage in the casting of a new political order. But that will depend on what happens next: what Trump does with his victory, and how everyone else responds to the domestic and international forces unleashed by his second administration.