Doug Henwood

Abstract

It’s hard to think clearly about Trump and his change he represents. Is it too distressingly moderate to say that there’s more continuity in Trump than the screamers say, but that he does mark a turn for the worse?

Decades of economic and geographic polarization have produced a harder, meaner edge to American politics (not that they were ever absent). The working class no longer enjoys the rapid income growth it did from the end of the Second World War to about the time Nixon resigned in disgrace. Entire regions – former industrial cities like Detroit, the inner suburbs of older cities, much of the hinterlands – are in varying stages of decay. The old WASP ruling class that ran the US into the 1970s has faded, replaced by a horde of new plutocrats who made their fortunes in tech and finance. The WASPs were a relatively coherent, stable formation, concentrated in the Northeast, married from the same pool, belonged to the same clubs, and had some capacity for thinking about the future. (It was this class that designed the post-Second World War structure of the American empire.) But their fortunes declined with the old-line industries and companies they were rooted in.

The new class, which came into being with the boom of the 1980s – a milestone in its development was freebooting oilman and takeover artist Boone Pickens’ 1983 attempt on Gulf Oil, a pillar of the old Pittsburgh corporate establishment – is a much less organic thing. It’s more geographically and socially diverse and less inclined towards noblesse oblige than its predecessor. That new class – or class fraction, if you want to be wordy – has had a heavy role in transforming the Republican Party, once a coalition of liberals, moderate, and conservatives, into the rightmost mainstream party in the First World.

From: Socialist Register 2019, vol. 55

Editor: Wang Yi