| Prospects for orderly governance took a big step forward in America this week as the country’s delusional, tantrum-prone incumbent president finally acceded to the bare requirements of a formal transition for the incoming Biden administration. But in a bigger-picture sense, there’s precious little cause for Democrats to look upon the national political scene with complacency. The party’s anemic showing in down-ballot races points out far-reaching structural woes that will continue to make a viable Democratic coalition a daunting prospect indeed, as New Republic contributor Christopher Caldwell reports. To begin with, of course, there was President Trump’s far stronger than anticipated showing in key swing states—a robust tributary of support that stemmed in no small part, Caldwell argues, from the Trump White House’s economic record. While Trump’s emergence in 2016 as a self-styled tribune of ordinary working Americans against the unchecked forces of globalization and plutocracy was in many ways a stretch—and certainly a scandal to the political elites in both major parties—the numbers tell a strikingly different story, Caldwell observes: |
Trump didn’t sell out his supporters. In fact, his presidency saw something extraordinary, even if it was all but invisible from the country’s globalized cities: the first egalitarian boom since well back into the twentieth century. In 2019, the last non-Covid year, he presided over an average 3.7 percent unemployment rate and 4.7 percent wage growth among the lowest quartile of earners. All income brackets increased their take. That had happened in the last three Obama years, too. The difference is that in the Obama part of the boom, the income of the top decile rose by 20 percent, with tiny gains for other groups. In the Trump economy, the distribution was different. Net worth of the top 10 percent rose only marginally, while that of all other groups vaulted ahead. In 2019, the share of overall earnings going to the bottom 90 percent of earners rose for the first time in a decade. What upended this trend, of course, was the coronavirus lockdowns, which proved “draconian enough to disfigure the economy,” Caldwell writes, with a 31.4 percent contraction of growth on an annualized basis over the second quarter of 2020 alone. By the time those numbers rebounded, with a 33.1 percent annualized surge over the third quarter, the perception of fatal economic decline was impossible to dislodge—and when those numbers were released the Thursday before Election Day, “much of the country had already voted.” This all translates into an awkward realization for Democrats: “Uncomfortable though it may be for many Americans to admit, Trump got extremely unlucky. It was not his election that was a fluke but his removal.” That could bode ill for the new Biden presidency and the Democratic Party going forward. Over against the Trump presidency’s abortive pivot toward significant wage growth, the Democrats have acquired the profile of the party of entrenched economic privilege, Caldwell argues: Nine of the 10 richest states went for Biden. Fourteen of the 15 poorest went for Trump. Should the District of Columbia be made a state, as many Democrats are urging, it would be the richest one in the union, with a per capita income 17 percent higher than its nearest rival’s (Connecticut). It would also be the most Democratic. The District voted for Biden over Trump, 92–5. The Democrats are also the party of the news media—as Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty pointed out a few years ago, 90 percent of the people working in the news industry live in a county Hillary Clinton won, and the numbers will surely be similar for Biden. Finally, the Democrats are the party of the global economy and of two things it brings with it—inequality and ethnic diversity. The deeper conflict stoked by this realignment concerns the relative appeal of dynamism and tradition in a mass democracy—a dispute that often triggers a movement of elite capture of the dynamists or cultural secession among the traditionalists. All that can be said about this fraught new moment, Caldwell contends, is that we haven’t really seen anything like it before—and that it’s likely to produce still greater instability ahead. The defining conflict of our time, he writes, “is not between two visions of America but between two peoples, one deserving (in fact, America incarnate), the other undeserving (or anti-American).” And even though Joe Biden’s popular-front appeal as the anti-Trump candidate carried the day—albeit amid unprecedented ideological strife in the election’s wake—the country he plans to lead now looks all but unrecognizable to Biden’s own cohort of political leaders. —Chris Lehmann, editor |
