Image by BP Miller.
In an Uber in Boston this past weekend, I was startled by my driver, a jovial man of Afro-Dominican descent—and an immigrant who apparently supports Trump. He offered me an impromptu political discourse in Spanish, observing that the Democrats had sent too much money abroad, which is why rent prices are too high. He then said that it was a good thing that señor Trump was in office to sort things out. Trump is a businessman, not a corrupt politician, and he knows how to handle the economy. It was late at night, I wasn’t expecting this expression of misdirected populism, and I always hesitate to debate people who have my life in their hands, so I didn’t engage the driver in this particular line of conversation or attempt to remonstrate with him. Despite knowing that identities don’t automatically or neatly translate into political affiliation (an understanding that the Harris campaign seemed to tragically lack), I was also a bit floored by the shock of meeting a steadfast Trump supporter who was an immigrant of color likely to be in the crosshairs of Trump’s frightening crackdowns on immigrants. Only a bit later did l’esprit de l’escalier kick in. It then occurred to me that if anyone is to blame for high rent prices, it is precisely Trump and the real-estate magnates like him who buy up properties across the country to extract absurd profits from hapless renters. Such an observation might have been an easy entry point for gently disabusing my driver of his erroneous notions.
In its specifics, there’s nothing too startling about my driver’s diagnosis of our political condition. And, like much of Trump’s rhetoric, it has a certain superficial plausibility. In fact, the driver’s comments are interesting because they’re an almost perfect encapsulation of Trumpism, concisely hitting many of the highlights which led to Harris’ ignominious loss this fall: from intense economic discontent to widespread cynicism about politics to the sense that things are out of control and require a firm hand to be set right.
There’s no obvious connection between Democrats’ foreign policy choices and the plight of American renters and consumers, and the Republicans are just as much to blame as the Democrats for the United States’ bloated military budget and lavish spending on foreign wars, but even the United States doesn’t have unlimited governmental funds—the national debt has now hit $36 trillion—and we must at some point choose between “guns or butter.” Military spending sucks up money that might otherwise be used for social programs, as the former general (and no liberal) Dwight D. Eisenhower observed beautifully when he said in his 1953 “Chance for Peace” speech that, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Despite Democratic establishment apparatchiks’ best attempts to spin it, the 2024 election was a pocketbook election, a referendum on inflation and the parlous state of the economy for the working class. Even if you think that the US has an obligation to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression, you might ask yourself whether it’s a good idea to be spending billions of dollars on military aid packages to a country which most Americans cannot identify on a map even as the US homeless population hit a record high in 2024 of 771,480 people and much of the country has trouble getting affordable healthcare and paying the bills. And given general unhappiness about the economy and the lack of government support to struggling, downwardly mobile members of the middle class, it wasn’t a good move in terms of political optics for the Biden administration to be so overt in its support for Israel and Ukraine.
The Trumpist desire to reduce American involvement abroad is just another eruption of know-nothing isolationism reminiscent of the original 1930s-era “America First” movement. And while Trump will benefit from the Bush era’s erosion of civil rights and liberties, and though there’s no guarantee that Trump will indeed be anti-interventionist—just to take two examples from his first term, he dropped more bombs than Obama in Afghanistan and oversaw an expansion of US operations in Yemen, and his current threats to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal would presumably entail armed conflict—Trumpist skepticism of American interventionism derives its persuasive power from generalized exhaustion at the immense expense of maintaining American empire. Trumpism can be viewed, among many other things, as a backlash against twenty years of endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that Trump is willing to break—even if only rhetorically—with the foreign policy establishment’s bipartisan consensus on projecting American power abroad is eloquent. It underscores the need for the Left to offer a clear critique of American interventionism, one which is grounded in international working-class solidarity and doesn’t succumb to isolationism and xenophobia. Trump cannot be the only one voicing opposition to the foreign policy status quo.
Evidence accumulates daily that the neoliberal consensus is dead and that many people feel profound revulsion towards our society’s grotesque inequalities: Bernie Sanders’ campaigns met with unexpected success; strikes have become more common; support for labor unions in public polling has returned to pre-Reagan era levels (70% approval as of 2024), nearly matching the all-time high of 75% in 1953; and the response to Luigi Mangione’s vigilantism revealed how much everyone loathes insurance corporations.
Yet we’ve not yet reached a point where neoliberal ideology has been vanquished conclusively, and the proof is in the persistence of the trope that—against all evidence—businessmen know best. For example, rather than being laughed at, Bryan Johnson, a venture capitalist who is bizarrely fixated on the idea of not dying and has received blood transfusions from his son as part of his dogged pursuit of immortality, has been made the subject of a new Netflix documentary. Given that we live in an oligarchy and have for decades, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that the logic which equates wealth with wisdom is alive and well. The notion that entrepreneurs enjoy some privileged understanding of efficiency, some magical access to economic wisdom, is the justification for Elon Musk’s worrisome appointment to head the newly proclaimed Department of Government Efficiency. In interviews with voters during the 2024 election, the answer came up again and again that Trump was very rich and a successful businessman and would therefore be a successful manager of the economy.
Regardless of the veracity of that claim—do successful businessmen helm corporations which declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy six times?—the interesting thing is the assumption that success in business translates into political acumen, that entrepreneurial knowledge isn’t domain specific. Such hubristic logic is common: the nonprofit sector is dominated by foundations run by billionaires, as if their money confers them with sociological insight. In the media, the über-rich are all too happy to offer their opinions on social ills, qualifications be damned. The New York Times’ op-ed page seems to be disproportionately populated with Silicon Valley tech bros, CEOs, and hedge fund managers.
If our society were studded with exemplars of political wisdom, then maybe people wouldn’t be so quick to assume that titans of industry make good politicos. Yet honest, sage, courageous politicians are few and far between these days. When the best the Democratic Party establishment apparently has to offer—Bernie Sanders aside—is Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer, is it any wonder that voters recoil at the hypocrisy, corruption, and vacuity of American political life? The Democratic Party isn’t even valiant enough anymore to defend the basic principle that America is and ought to be a nation of immigrants.
The insight that we need to revolutionize our politics, that the public sphere needs an infusion of new blood, is correct. Citizens United unleashed a deluge of dark money, a barrage from which our public life has never recovered. A political system dominated by two corporate parties which rake in billions of dollars in donations every presidential campaign is broken and needs reform. But the idea that businessmen offer fresh perspectives and any hope of achieving true solutions is hopelessly confused. While based partly in truth, the idea that all politicians are equally corrupt—and therefore that we should give up on rehabilitating the political sphere—only serves to reinforce antidemocratic forces.
In the absence of labor unions, strongly political churches or synagogues, and other social and communal institutions which politicize and educate people, many Americans are left with an ideologically incoherent welter of feelings and vague notions. This pre-political mix of perceptions can then be mobilized in any number of directions. Trumpism has managed to take nihilism, pessimism, cynicism, and despair at America’s lack of political integrity and genuine options for the working class and transmute that into incipient authoritarianism. Despite Trumpism’s virulent racism and xenophobia, it is a potent brew which has the capacity to seduce even some people of color, cognitive dissonance notwithstanding.
The intuition that things are deeply wrong today and we need radical measures to set our collective house in order is accurate; Bidenism was insufficient. We are living in a Second Gilded Age, an oligarchy dominated by robber barons. The political prospects for the next few years look bleak. But Trumpists are set to overextend themselves, and some kernels of Trumpist logic could be pointed in a leftist direction: revulsion towards elites’ corruption, the desire for social programs at home, anger at the high prices for food, rent, healthcare, and education. Republicans are currently contemplating Medicaid cuts and repealing tax credits for health insurance to fund their latest bonanza of tax cuts for businesses and the rich. As they prepare to do what they always do so well—implementing tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the rest and shredding the social safety net—there is an opportunity for the Left, if we stay focused on what matters and are adept enough to seize it.
