Photograph Source: G. Edward Johnson – CC BY 4.0
The central slogan of our times should not be #handsoff but rather #handson, i.e. we need the democratic control of the economy, including firms, budgets, industrial policy and development. The wealth-generating power in the hands of oligarchs, super-wealthy individuals, mega-banks and financiers is what we need to get our hands on. We need to get our hands on the budgetary capacity which has spent trillions of dollars on the war machine. We need to get our hands on fossil fuel companies promoting ecocide and death of the planet. We need to get our hands on police forces that engage in senseless murder. We also need to gain control over the social forces promoting crime, senseless violence and sabotage (which extends from street crime to corporate crime).
A persistent problem with the Democratic Party and—to a certain extent—large parts of the left is that they only understand oppositional behavior and the politics of deconstruction. The #Handsoff slogan epitomizes this approach. At the first demonstration, protestors rallied against numerous administration policies, including global tariffs that disrupted the economy, extensive reductions to federal agencies and workforce led by Elon Musk, threats to union protections, immigration enforcement actions criticized as chaotic and political, reversals of LGBTQ+ protections, concerning alterations to Social Security, and reductions in healthcare funding and research. Beyond specific policies, participants expressed broader worries about democratic decline, increasing authoritarian tendencies, and a perception that the administration prioritized billionaire interests over working Americans. Protesters characterized their actions as defending both American democratic principles and economic prosperity. The basic ideas seems to be to protect the status quo ante.
Hillary Clintonism: Using Discourse to Displace the Redesign of Society
Trump’s basis of power, however, was based on changing the status quo ante. So a protest designed to replay the last presidential election seems like a rather bad or insufficient idea. An underlying discursive structure is what I call Hillaryclintonism, i.e. the premise that the solution to a problem is to ignore that it exists and advocate an inadequate solution which is packaging in a kind of identitarian aura. In the case in point, the problems identified by Trump included U.S. decline, inflation, problems in immigration management, and senseless wars. It does not matter that Trump’s solutions to these problems often have had a neutral to negative impact. The reason is that part of Trump’s premises were correct and the truth aspect of his statements helped get him elected and helps maintain his support. As I have said before, Trump’s discourse is based on truth and lies. Like Bill Clinton, Trump says different and even opposing things to different constituencies, doing so in the hope of collecting the votes of these opposing groups. What Hillaryclintonism does is to suggest that Trump voters were simply “mistaken” and now have “buyer’s remorse,” and did not know what they were doing and simply “lacked consciousness.” It does not matter that Hillaryclintonites themselves don’t know what they are doing and “lack consciousness,” however. The important gap here centers on what Democrats have missed and that Trump has marketed as alternatives.
Do Not Relive the Last Presidential Election: Beyond the System’s Coke and Pepsi Choices
The opposition to Trump will only make progress when it confronts the true aspects of Trump’s discourse, e.g. opposition to unnecessary and dangerous wars, alternatives to inflation, addressing massive trade and manufacturing deficits and the like. Some liberals like Ezra Klein, among others, recognize that a piece of what Trump makes sense, although Klein notes that Trump’s tariffs make no sense whatsoever. Nevertheless, Klein’s proactive message about “economic abundance” and fixing the regulations and other obstacles to need housing, infrastructure and services, does not fit into the #handsoff meme. Rather, the meme is consistent with the Democratic Party’s approach to keep the welfare state going while simultaneously funding military budgets, doing so while paying for the gaps with massive borrowing. The #handsoff slogan tells me nothing about these massive deficits or the military budget for that matter, even if some participants in these protests were cognizant of the predatory impacts of militarism.
The problem we have is that the status quo ante was in the interests of some groups and not others. Judging from the election results, we could argue that millions of persons were indoctrinated and thus through their false consciousness voted for Trump. Or, we could also argue that Trump tapped into truthful inadequacies in the status quo which led him to get a majority of votes or at least millions and millions of votes. Democracy must mean more than the choice between Coke and Pepsi, but the underlying logic of Hillaryclintonism is that our choices are so constrained and the democracy is based on this fundamental duopoly (which itself is involves brands who support massive trade and budgets deficits, deindustrialization, and militarism).
Economic Sabotage
Thorstein Veblen and Seymour Melman taught us that the established financial and managerial interests were economic saboteurs. The main argument now should be that Trump has sabotaged the economy and is undermining retirement pensions, the capacity to save money, and the ability to generate wealth. The Trump Administration counters that most people don’t even have savings and only the rich are hurt by a decline in stock prices. Parts of the left might counter that immigrants are on the front line of a Trump assault. Yet, both problems are part of a scarcity economy in which the affluent flourish and the poor are further marginalized.
The Democratic Party has represented a mix of more and less affluent voters. This combination may explain why they can help organize and design social movements that support a status quo ante that hurt some groups and helped others. A 2018 analysis by Caitlin Owens at Axios found that “Blue districts tend to have more households with incomes above $200,000 than red districts do,” even if “blue districts also tend to have more households with incomes below $10,000 than red districts do.” Various studies illustrate that substantive economic problems existed even before Trump and his regime started to assault the welfare state and civil liberties.
First, in 1960 the poverty rate was 22.2%, but declined to 11.5% in 2022. Yet, among African Americans and Latinos, the rate in the latter year was still 17%. Kylie K. Moore of the Economic Policy Institute found that in the fourth quarter of 2024, the national Black-white unemployment ratio was 1.9-to-1 and the U.S. national Hispanic-white unemployment ratio was 1.6-to-1.
Second, a study in 2020 by Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Ruth Igielnik and Rakesh Kochhar at the Pew Research Center found that inequality has risen substantially. One such measure is “the 90/10 ratio” which “takes the ratio of the income needed to rank among the top 10% of earners in the U.S. (the 90th percentile) to the income at the threshold of the bottom 10% of earners (the 10th percentile).” The authors write that “in 1980, the 90/10 ratio in the U.S. stood at 9.1, meaning that households at the top had incomes about nine times the incomes of households at the bottom. The ratio increased in every decade since 1980, reaching 12.6 in 2018, an increase of 39%.”
Third, during the Biden Administration, there were massive trade deficits with various countries. In 2024, the trade deficit with China was $295.4 billion, with Mexico $171.8 billion, and Vietnam $123.4 billionand Canada $63.3 billion. A review of studies by the Council on Foreign Relations published in 2019 described research by the Economic Policy Institute suggesting that “the surge in Chinese imports…lowered wages for non-college-educated workers and cost the United States 3.4 million jobs from 2001-2015, while research published by the University of Chicago put that number … at closer to 2 million over a similar period (1999-2011).” The Wall Street Journal reported that last year the U.S. “imported $1.2 trillion more in goods in 2024 than it exported representing “a record annual deficit.” An April 6th report in Forbes noted, however, that the U.S. stock market had “wiped out $9.6 trillion since Inauguration Day – $5 trillion of which evaporated between April 2 and April 4 which is ‘the largest two-day loss on record,’ according to MarketWatch.”
Finally, the current federal debt as of 2024 was $35.46 trillion. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation explains Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections if the status quo in regulations is maintained: “net interest payments will total $13.8 trillion over the next decade, rising from an annual cost of $1.0 trillion in 2026 to $1.8 trillion in 2035.” One significant piece of the debt comes from military spending. In 2021, Neta C. Crawford found that after “including estimate future costs for veteran’s care, the total budgetary costs and future obligations of the post-9/11 wars” was “about $8 trillion in current dollars.” So more than half of U.S. debt can be attributed to military spending.
In sum, the #handsoff agenda does not directly address poverty and unemployment, income inequality, trade and budget deficits. Rather, it is focused on maintaining a welfare state that lived comfortably along a warfare state, assorted economic maladies and advancing crises. In fact, critics from the peace movement point out that #Handsoff rallies have supported NATO and thus all the budgetary commitments that engagement involves. At the same time, Trump has promoted a military budget worth $1 trillion. So both Trump and some of his counterparts do not advocate a hands on approach to the military budget, but rather much a hands off approach to fiscal insanity.
Alternatives
The alternative to these policies are rather straightforward and can easily be spelled out. What is more difficult, however, is identifying how to change the design of social movements to embrace these policies. The #Handson agenda involves at least eight core elements. First, if debt and government spending were invested in useful infrastructure, many domestically anchored jobs could be created, e.g. in green energy, mass transit, housing and regional planning initiatives that reduce work, shopping and leisure trips. Second, such investments could come from taxing the super-rich and reducing military spending. Third, some regulatory reforms would be warranted, to facilitate infrastructure development. Fourth, a new foreign policy and support for converting part of the warfare state to civilian pursuits would be needed to promote disarmament. Fifth, one should move money from established banks, utilities and fossil fuel investments (via divestment and related actions such as political mobilization aimed at banks, oil interests, and defense firms) into cooperative and domestically-anchored platforms. This includes pressuring economic interests tied to the Trump Administration. Sixth, a program of domestic manufacturing revivalcould contribute to wealth production and making the necessary green products necessary for a green conversion. This requires attention to reorganizing of management and various supporting industrial policy measures. Seventh, a cooperative network of manufacturing and service firms, like the Mondragon industrial cooperatives case, could be promote a kind of shadow state that provides resources to pressure the existing state as well as providing direct services to local communities without interference of or beyond right-wing and dystopian political election cycles. Cooperatives can also address inequities created by automation. A network of inter-linked cooperatives, banks, and social investments could provide a basis of intra-national economic exchange where wealth generation could partially bypass the disadvantages of an inflated dollar, i.e. more insourcing, less outsourcing, transactions made nationally. We see some of this networked insourcing in Japanese and South Korean firms and their supply chains. Finally, the extension of cooperatives to the transnational sphere (e.g. via franchise cooperatives), where wealth extension rather than anti-solidaristic competition over sourcing jobs is the norm, could provide stability in communities exporting migrants to metropoles like the United States. Furthermore, new migrants or excluded groups can gain power through a cooperative commonwealth.
The pathway from #Handsoff to #Handson will not be easy and involves the creation of a set of inter-linked institutions. It will face enemies from the far right, Democratic Party elites, and even leftists who fetishize social movement designs and purely syndicalist approaches to social change. In contrast, this agenda is perfectly consistent with and part of what has been called economic and social reconstruction, what some term “Republicanism,” or the interlinking of social movements and cooperative organizations. Unfortunately, the backlash against the identarian left and the vacuum the New Left created in organizing economies was most successfully filled by the Trump regime. Parts of the New Left have reconstituted similar limits of the Communist Party, a movement in which a backlash against Stalinism manifested itself in McCarthyism. As a result, a primary starting point will be to understand how the New Left/identitarian/scarcity paradigm involved using piecemeal welfare state initiatives and social targets instead of socializing wealth creation must be transcended. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was too fragmentary to address the multiple contradictions of the status quo. While Biden combined “guns and butter,” Trump advocates “guns without butter.”
© Counter Punch
