Part 1
A century ago, the UK was dominated by the Liberal and Conservative parties. Both of which were political constructions of the rich designed to benefit the rich. However, following electoral reforms that allowed more British men and, later, women, to get the vote the independent Labour Movement arose and eventually became the Labour Party. For the first time, the proletariat had political representation leading the Liberal party to being consigned to irrelevancy by 1945.
However, by the last quarter of the 20th century, the Right began to regain lost ground and so reverse the economic gains of the poor made over the previous 50 odd years and also enacted massive economic liberalisation and deregulation in order to consolidate that reversal. All the while, buying off the proletariat by dangling temptation before them on the form of “right to buy council house” schemes and shares in privatised utilities and all the rest.
By the mid eighties, the centre Left, both here and in America had capitulated to the Capitalist onslaught and publicly taken on the mantle of free-market capitalist ideology into their policies and quietly dropped an overtly socialist policy agenda. This all eventually culminated in the personas of Blair and Clinton. Both the Democrats and Labour, by this point, calculated that the proletariat would keep voting for them out of political habit. And, for the last 30 years, that calculation has paid off, more or less. It was during this time that the Labour Party, a socialist party that had a fair deal of liberal values infused in it, began to morph into a party of primarily liberal values with now only a smattering of socialist values on the side. The question for me is why did this happen?
I think the origins of the change come down to the nature of the Left as a political force in conjunction with having lost the economic wars to the neo-cons in the late 70s and early 80s. Firstly, the Left has always been a coalition of two groups; the poor and others who, for ideological reasons, claim to care about the poor. I would argue that the socially liberal/libertarian agenda has always had its base amongst the second of these two groups. For the poor, it really has always been primarily about the economy and, in fact, the poor are often quite socially conservative.
Having lost the economic wars to Reagan and Thatcher, the liberal flank of the mainstream Left, both here and in America, began to take over the levers of power in their respective parties. With them they brought a much greater emphasis on socially liberal values (that would play well with their own liberal electoral base) and significantly diluted, or just simply quietly dropped any macro-economic commitments to the poor. To be replaced with lots of small ameliorations within a now fully accepted free-market capitalist system. In other words, they set about consoling themselves with winning the cultural wars if they could not win the economic ones.
But, the result of this renewed and ever growing loss of representation of the poor in our governing systems has been the slow and steady re-growth of a political climate where the only issues allowed for debate are, once more, those that favour the interests of the economically rich and socially liberal/well educated at the expense of the economically poor and socially conservative/less well educated.
Examples include:
* Rising house prices, born on the back of bank-lending deregulation – favouring those who own houses but penalizing those who must rent their homes or who must buy into the sector at now extortionate prices, offset only by the fact of unsustainably low interest payments.
* The perennial cutting of taxes and the consequently starved social programs designed to minimise wealth inequality. All of this benefits those in well paid work by penalising those on low-waged incomes or who are unemployed. And no amount of “equality of opportunity” will offset that structural inequality.
* (the most contentious one for the liberal/libertarian flank of the Left) Encouraging unrestricted immigration into a country that already has millions of people permanently out of work and encouraging the off-shoring of jobs so that the unemployed are left to compete for an ever shrinking pool of work. In a capitalist system, the law of supply and demand applies to labour no less than any other commodity. If you increase the supply of workers and decrease the demand for their services, wages WILL be driven down. The rich benefit from this, since they pay less for services, but the working poor and the unemployed do not, since they receive a lower income, assuming they can find a job. It has, of course, become a standard trope of both the mainstream Left and Right that immigration benefits the economy as a whole. But, who receives the bulk of the benefits and who carries most of the costs? That’s not something that anyone in the mainstream body politic has been willing to discuss for the last thirty years.
To repeat, all of this has led to the political wheel turning full circle and to a government by the rich and for the rich leading to a society that has collapsed once again into two parts comprising of a dominant minority who run the political system and obtain all of its benefits and a proletariat that bears most of its costs. This, in turn, had led to the proletariat rejecting not only the mainstream body politic’s leadership but also its other attendant social values and ideals as well. Values that would otherwise be well worth holding onto. In other words, the baby and the bathwater. A notable example being much of the Green agenda. Now, of course, ecological issues are really ones belonging to science and so should be free of cultural/political contamination. But, since the liberal bourgeoisies have so taken green issues to their heart, the proletariat have rejected them along with all other bourgeoisie values. This is precisely why Trump’s rejection of such green issues played so well with the American proletariat.
So, given where we are, what does the future hold and how do we mitigate against the worst visions of that future? Frankly, at this precise moment, I am short on hope and long on pessimism. But, a start would be an absolute and unequivocal recognition that the internal proletariat of both the USA and UK are at the end of their tether and if their immediate economic concerns are not rapidly addressed, then they will turn to whatever snake oil salesman will offer to smash the whole house down and start again. Never mind all of the other horrors that will come with that. We can be certain that the proletariat’s instinct for economic survival will drive their votes. It’s already been allowed to happen in America and the Left’s job, here in the UK, is to not make the same mistakes.
In policy terms, this means putting an immediate and total stop to further inward migration of low skilled workers. It means putting a stop to companies off-shoring production and other services by imposition of massive tariffs on them if they do, it means a massive wealth redistribution program using all of the levers of government. This is not just about “equality of opportunity” (another empty fig-leaf to the poor). It is about making some people poorer, by policy design, so that others don’t have to be as poor as they are. And, finally, a massive social house building program which will serve two purposes; firstly it will ease the housing crisis for the poor. Secondly, it will cause the whole stinking pile of debt ridden corruption that is the real estate sector to come crashing down. Which will be a hell of a wild ride for our economy. But, it is necessary. And all of that is just for starters.
It will not have escaped some people’s attention that a number of the policies I have just outlined sound not that dissimilar to some of Trumps. That’s because they are not. But, crucially, they do not originate from the same place. And that’s the critical point. In order to combat the rise of Trumpism, both in America and across the world, there has to be an acknowledgment by the Liberal-globalist-bourgeoisies of the very real and very legitimate pain of the internal proletariat of nations. If that pain is not acknowledged and addressed rapidly, then what follows Trump will look tame by comparison.
Part 2
Clearly, something is happening at a deep structural level in political terms. But, many in the liberal intelligentsia are currently quite unwilling to acknowledge it. They seem to be still clinging to the laughable notion that Clinton and all she represented was somehow a better and safer option for the American working class or, indeed, the world when the evidence is absolutely and incontrovertibly to the contrary.
It hardly needs stating here that Trump is a misogynistic, bigoted, snake-oil salesman. However, in contrast to Clinton’s war-mongering rhetoric, he has stated that he wants to enact a Grand-Reset of the relationship with Russia and so put the brakes on a renewed cold war (growing hotter by the day). Furthermore, he is a political isolationist who has publicly stated he is against any significant further military adventurism in the Middle East and beyond. Or, at least, unless there is a direct and immediate threat to the US. Of course, this may all be bullshit. And, undoubtedly, some of it is. However, to the average Joe-Six-Pack in America, who is hurting badly, what he said was bound to make a hell of a lot more sense than anything Clinton said
Clinton, on the other hand, whilst professing to be a social progressive, was simultaneously at the centre of a political establishment that had stripped the American working class of their dignity, their security and their hope for the future. Meanwhile, she had a direct hand in pretty much every disastrous military adventure in the Middle East for the last decade. On top of all of that, she was at the centre of a vast web of political and financial corruption.
Given all of the above, why on earth would the American working class have voted for Clinton? Especially in the areas that have been savagely de-industrialized on the back of policies of which Clinton and the sections of society she truly represented have been fully complicit?
Why would anyone, with a view on who was the most likely to lead their country into ever more disastrous military adventurism in other countries, have voted for Clinton, who had a direct hand in many of the most recent of those disasters?
Why would anyone who wished to a see a de-escalation of a dangerously renewed Cold-War between Russia and the US have voted for Clinton who was the “front-man” for the very same corporate capitalist class who are hell bent on renewing that cold war?
Why would anyone, who wished to see the whole stinking pile of debt-ridden, corrupt, BAU overturned, but who was left with absolutely no realistic prospect whatsoever of that with Clinton, have voted for Clinton?
The liberal left, who, in the greatest of ironies, have allowed themselves to be aligned with the interests of the corporate capitalist elites, have absolutely no cultural currency left at all with the mass of the population, both in America as well as across much of the Western world, including the UK. What the Yank electorate have done is to not elect a warmongering politician who was no friend of the blue collar working class and was corrupt on a grand scale. Granted, that has been on the back of voting in a boorish, buffoonish, and quite possibly dangerous salesman. But, it was Hobson’s choice and they have made their choice.
Despite all of the above, many on the liberal left are still insisting it must be down to the fact they are all bigoted morons in much the same way as they insisted that the Brexit vote was all down to half of the UK being comprised of bigoted morons. For the record, as it happens, I think Trump is most unlikely to be able to follow through on many of his promises to the poor and the dispossessed and that will fuel God knows what levels of anger come the election next time around. But, what I am saying is this was inevitable. Not because America is full of morons (though, it has to be conceded that they are one of the least well educated 1st world populations). But, because around half of the American people are desperate and feel they have nothing left to lose by voting for Trump, even if that means risking burning the house down.
Maybe now – finally – the smug, self-satisfied, liberal intelligentsia will find the moral courage to stop looking admiringly in the mirror at their own resplendent reflections long enough to see the anger in the faces of the mob that is growing all around them.
Maybe…..but I doubt it.
Stephen Cook
