Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump
Robert Reich
I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system – I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause
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But why are we so divided? We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, gays, abortion and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. Why are we so divided now?
Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists, keeping almost everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division.
But that begs the question of why we have been so ready to be divided by Trump. The answer derives in large part from what has happened to wealth and power.
In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.
What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – angry at their employers, the government, Wall Street.
Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. Most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before, in terms of purchasing power.
I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism”.
These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. A few had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement.
The 2016 rebellion is ongoing
With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, the leaders of the Democratic party favored Hillary Clinton and Republican leaders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush.
They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging”.
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Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’ magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They prefer to attribute Trump’s rise solely to racism.
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Democrats did nothing to change a rigged system
Aided by Fox News and an army of rightwing outlets, Trump convinced many blue-collar workers feeling ignored by Washington that he was their champion. Clinton did not convince them that she was. Her decades of public service ended up being a negative, not a positive. She was indubitably part of the establishment, the epitome of decades of policies that left these blue-collar workers in the dust. (It’s notable that during the primaries, Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters.)
Clinton and Obama chose not to wrest power back from the oligarchy. Why?
In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Yet both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. Clinton pushed for Nafta and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the “confidence” of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.
There is no longer a left or right. There is no longer a moderate ‘center’
By 2016, Americans understood full well that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal – “I’m so rich I can’t be bought off” – although once elected he delivered everything big money wanted.
The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. There is no longer a left or right. There’s no longer a moderate “center”. There’s either Trump’s authoritarian populism or democratic – small “d” – populism.
Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement. Trump has harnessed the frustrations of at least 40% of America. Although he’s been a Trojan Horse for big corporations and the rich, giving them all they’ve wanted in tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, the working class continues to believe he’s on their side.
Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. They must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities and classes, and band together to unrig the system.
Trump is not the cause of our divided nation. He is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It’s not enough to defeat him. We must reform the system that got us here in the first place, to ensure that no future politician will ever again imitate Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery.
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