Ever since Donald Trump shocked the legacy press, “expert” pollsters, and the political establishment more broadly in November of 2016, we’ve seen endless attempts to explain what was, at the time, seen as a perennial sea change in American politics.
A consensus quickly emerged that pointed to a “populist surge” on the right, driven by rural white voters who were angry about the financial crisis and the political class’s failure to “stem the tide” of illegal immigration. The establishment tried to frame this all in a way that was flattering to themselves. Trump’s popularity, we were told, came from a particularly nasty group of uneducated rural whites who were enraged about having to compete with non-white people and stupid enough to fall for Trump’s lies.
But anyone looking closely could see that that characterization was, at best, a gross and overly narrow simplification. While rural white populations provided a lot (not all) of the votes and fuel for the Trump movement, its ideological thought leaders were largely young men living in or around blue cities, connecting and interacting with each other online.
Also, at the same time, there was a significant populist surge on the left. This was a bipartisan, or even non-partisan, political phenomenon. Establishment Democrats have done a far better job than their Republican counterparts at keeping their populist wing in line—largely thanks to its political leader, Bernie Sanders, who was always willing to roll over and support the establishment candidate when the time came. That said, the success of several “post-woke” democratic socialists in this year’s primaries suggests that establishment Democrats are now also losing control.
So it’s not merely some handful of uneducated rural white voters. There has been a widespread sense, across the political spectrum, that America’s institutions are not merely failing, but are actively working against the interests of everyday Americans. And that is true.
The massive federal government built up in DC over the last century or so was never meant to serve the interests of the American people as a whole. It has always been a tool for enriching the political caste and their well-connected friends in the “private sector.” They’ve done that directly with tax-and-spend programs and indirectly by using rules and regulations that warp entire industries to benefit some well-connected firms already on top.
The political establishment has gone to great lengths to hide their expropriative activities behind deceptive propaganda and fake appeals to the common good. But especially after they’ve taken the opportunity to greatly ramp up their schemes in response to crises of their own making—like the 2008 financial crisis—it became a lot harder to stop people from noticing that, somehow, the elites are ripping them off.
The “populist anger” against the elites that resulted has enabled Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party and fueled an escalating civil war within the Democratic Party that appears to be nearing a similar establishment defeat. And this anger has been the defining feature of American politics for at least ten years now.
What, then, has this populist moment accomplished? What has been done to liberate the American people from our corrupt political class, or at least to meaningfully improve the safety and material well-being of everyday Americans?
The truth is, on nearly all fronts, the results have been abysmal.
Broadly, this populist wave was meant to end the “corruption” in DC—or to stop politicians and bureaucrats from using government to enrich themselves and their friends. It was meant to end the endless series of wars fought to benefit foreign groups and governments along with well-connected firms in the “defense” and energy sectors. And it was meant to reorient the American system from one that serves the interests of corporate giants and financial elites to one that serves small businesses and local communities.
On the right, populists also wanted to stop or reverse the demographic changes resulting from the post-1965 immigration system. And populists on the left wanted to reverse the rising levels of economic inequality.
Over the last decade, every single one of these problems has gotten worse. Why?
There are, of course, plenty of specific mistakes, shortcomings, or outright failures we could examine on all these fronts. But, at the end of the day, all come back to the same fundamental problem: the populist right grew bored with economics.
The truth is, the current wave of anti-establishment, anti-elite political sentiment did not really begin ten years ago with the election of Donald Trump. It began earlier, right in the wake of the financial crisis. There was, of course, the Occupy movement on the left, but that mostly boiled down to calls to send bailouts everywhere in the economy rather than just to the big banks, or even for a full-on socialist revolution. Economic literacy was never at home in that movement.
