Angry white men

The direct solution to angry white men is to outvote them. It is possible, but there is no reproducable formula beyond waiting for a once-a-generation genius campaigner. The Republican media, financial, and political networks have proven more reliable at scraping out presidential wins. The only other option for Democrats is a radically different messaging philosophy that can better motivate their own base and reach some “independent” voters, but that is mostly a “then a miracle happens” solution. Beyond the difficulty of conjuring that new approach, there’s been lots of evidence the party structure is not interested in any “radical” changes.

“Throughout this period the Republican Party has been competitive only because, it has received the consistent support of 60 per cent of white men.”

Literally just as accurate a statement: Throughout this period the Republican Party has been competitive only because it has received the consistent support of over 50 per cent of white women.”

Discussion of 2024 election deleted, as per OP

Not only will anger be amplified by a permissive attitude on the part of those whose voices will not be shut down, it will be intensified by the fact that some of those angry white folks are beginning to realize they’ve been had.

See the HB-1 dustup. (Full disclosure: I’m here in the US because my Canadian father took a faculty job at an American medical school, a job thousands of Americans would have jumped at. He wasn’t even cheaper. All five of us arrived with green cards, if you can believe it.)

The Democrats haven’t shown any ability to deflect that anger from themselves, since the Republicans are better at identity politics, so good at it that not enough people recognize their version of identity politics as the first and most basic version in US politics.

I’m sympathetic to Sashas’s prescription above, pessimistic because I tend to agree with somebody who walked down the street.

With the possible exception of the era of Eugene Debs, there has never been a prospect of a mass-based socialist (or strongly social-democratic) political party in the US. That said, in quite a few other respects domestic politics in the US has roughly mirrored the kinds of divisions and contests that other “advanced” or “developed” countries have experienced. In some respects, e.g. the absence of a single-payer national health system, the U.S. is an outlier, but in other respects it isn’t. Partly because the baleful legacy of slavery and segregation continues to influence, albeit in sometimes complicated or indirect ways, the contours of American politics, it is not difficult to jump to the kind of view expressed by “somebody who walks down the street” @2, who sees basically the entire history of the U.S. as consisting of angry white men “spitting on” everyone else. However, that this is a rather incomplete view should become clear, I think, to almost anyone who sets aside some time to read a narrative account of U.S. history, whether as told by a Howard Zinn, an S.E. Morison, or pretty much anyone in between.

It seems to me as a boomer (generation) that for a while after WWII there was a heightened sense of the benefits of morality (as in, we are all in this together) (e.g., the first bosses I had, who had served in WWII, took pride in supporting their workers; one told me that he believed if a person had worked at GE for 20 years, they deserved a job at GE until retirement–try telling that to the managers of today–they won’t believe you) , which was wearing off by the 1980’s and is largely gone. Hence the majority of those with some social privilege accept immoral actions (such as gross lies) which they think might benefit them. This behavior seems to be self-sustaining unless and until some catastrophe forces people to rethink it.

As an angry white man, I’d like to point out that you need to make quite a few unlogical steps from that to voting republicans (or AFD here). The huge male/female split also exists in Europe now, with men more likely to vote for far right parties. That has not been the case in the past.

Don’t know, being angry because you feel disadvantaged based on your gender seems to be socially accepted both ways. Just like being angry at foreigners. Being angry because you are disadvantaged due to your kronical mental illness, or even a physical disability – something that makes you actually less functioning, just most of the time by far not to extend you are treated as such usually does not even reach the stage of self acceptance. Even feeling disadvantaged based on your social class background sometimes seems to be covered by so much shame that it may not be.

There are many more or less conscious efforts by rich people to construct the conflict lines that way, and politics just is not very responsive to the most disadvantaged groups, no matter in which party. That is utterly frustrating. Even in a party system where 5 or so parties regularly matter, you are stuck with voting or even being a member of a party that barely represents you. But why, oh why, does one go with the obvious fraudster representing one’s own interests the least.

I believe you’re missing a closing parenthesis in your ninth paragraph, after “ non-Christian white men mostly support the Democrats,” which sort of stands the rest of the paragraph on its head.

Fixed, thanks

It may be that a read of the works of some post WW2 Fascist theorists is called for to understand the appeal of the radical right to angry white men.
Robert Bardeche theorised that fascism was an ideology for youthful and heroic rebellion against mainstream culture, for those who were anti-egalitarian- seeing it as social insubordination- wanted to defend their nation against infiltration and subversion by foreigners and opposed self serving elites.
It was an organic, heirarchial and irrational set of ideas and practices based on the ideal values of the soldier- brave, loyal,disciplined and faithful.
I would speculate that this is how angry white men see themselves.

One hitch with the pew data in OP is that partisan identification in 2023 =/= actual votes cast in 2024. Hence, the 2023 Hispanic party identification as republican for men and women at 39 and 32% respectively ended up “averaging out” to… 42% when the rubber hit the road.

Of course, this in itself is chump change compared to the rocksteady Angry White Man vote, but it’s not nothing either.

As far as what can break the back of this bloc? Heck if I know, and even if I did know, it’s unlikely that such a solution would be actionable by anyone commenting on this philosophy blog I’ve been reading off and on for two decades now.

But I know some things that probably don’t help.

One (but not the only) reason African-American support has remained so solid for Democrats my entire lifetime is that most of them understand the undercurrent (an in the case of Confederate flags, the overcurrent) of racial animus emanating from segments of the Republican base — and this transcends any policy specifics, since there are comparatively few de jure anti-black racist policies being put forward by the national GOP.

One (but not the only) reason the Angry White Man Bloc has been so unbreakable is that many of them intuit that “cis-het white men” are often conceptualized as a form of almost cosmological evil among segments of the activist and academic classes — and this understanding likewise transcends any policy specifics.

The grievances are irrational and opportunistically stoked by oligarchs, but this perception wasn’t conjured out of thin air either. You can only have so many T-shirts with “grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man” before people start to suspect they might be less than welcome in the presently constituted left of center coalition.

Not the whole story, but that perception certainly doesn’t help.

The title of this post jumped out at me, because last night we watched “Twelve Angry Men”, the 1957 Henry Fonda et al. jury drama. And yes, they were all white. (And all men—did juries back then exclude women?)

I had sometimes thought about using it in class to illustrate the concept of public reason; it’s the best popular portrayal I know. But I never did, because I thought a lot of the film’s elements would turn off students or at least be a distraction. In particular, the overdramatization and crude portrayal of prejudice might lead to debates over how realistic it was.

I’m mentioning all this not because of the verbal overlap in the titles, but also because (a) the mindset of the most vociferous bigots in an almost 70 year-old movie reflects what we’re talking about in 2024, and (b) in our America Ed Begley and Lee J. Cobb win and Henry Fonda loses. (That could be an obscure yard sign.) I broadly agree with JQ about why that is. The Republican Party, hesitantly in 1964 and with increasing gusto thereafter, pursued and validated the resentment constituency, while the talk radio etc. media infrastructure platformed it. It also matters that a significant portion of the capitalist class either shares the angry white men ethos or is willing to nurture and exploit it.

So what to do? As much as I admire Fonda’s open-minded, reasonable approach in principle, I doubt it offers a roadmap for where to go. It helps, after all, that the jury room was closed, and his opponents couldn’t just walk out. Also that there were no media, um, mediating between them; it was all face to face. But here are a few thoughts anyway. (1) Unions are very important. They offer a venue for personal interactions across the anger divide, as well as alternative directions to channel that anger. Not a total solution (I remember the Nixon hardhat business), but something. (2) Anything that can reduce the influence of concentrated wealth on politics is a plus, the occasional enlightened plutocrat (like Soros) notwithstanding. This needs to be a central political demand. (3) Attention really needs to be given to reducing the political power of the police and making them less likely to collude with the paramilitary right. In many communities, the police are the armed wing of the angry white men movement. IMO, the starting point is getting rid of police unions. (4) In the very long run, Dewey was right: either democracy yields visible results in resolving social problems, or it won’t survive. (“Intelligent action.”) That requires a broad political vision that connects individual issues, generates narrative and practical continuity, and provides an alternative to inchoate anger on a personal level. In the absence of that we see the fragmented, poll-chasing political spasms of the current center-left.

Professor Quiggin, your analysis looks at race and gender, but not class or education. Over the past 30 year the tendency of rich states to vote D but rich people to vote R has ended, and people with higher education have become weighted towards D whereas previously they were divided evenly between the major parties. I think that helps to explain (for example) why many Hispanic-Americans were willing to vote for someone who threatens to deport millions of Hispanic people, because Hispanic-Americans are not a wealthy or highly educated demographic.

I see a lot of Americans saying “Trump is rich, his buddy Elon Musk is rich, therefore R are still the party of the rich” but apparently that is not how rich Americans as a class donate or vote any more.

It seems to me that the most critical problem – as demonstrated by those handy graphs – is that US voters are just utterly calcified in their political allegiance.

Either of the party duopoly can change massively.. and the vast majority voters don’t reconsider their allegiance, but instead work overtime convincing themselves to remain loyal.

This is not how politics works in other places. This means there is something different about US politics.

The obvious culprit is, of course the two party system.

I think it interacts very badly with some of the more common flaws of human reasoning.

By only having two options, you are asking people to not just abandon their previous allegiance.. but to switch sides to the Enemy.

And people are very, very reluctant to do that.

Because it would involve writing off emotional investment, admitting error and joining the outgroup, all in one go.

Iow my strategy is to give people something to vote for and address some of the things they’re angry about (namely the things they’re right to be angry about) instead of telling they’re idiots/bigots/yokels/losers who don’t even deserve what little they have… sounds crazy but it just might work.

So basically there has been an increase in inequality, so in the last decades most people lost economically in relative terms. …
There is also the problem that the increased levels of inequality are actually a return to the norm and the end of the controlled capitalism of the post war years, but most people do not understand this so they (the angry white men) think that someone is cheating.

Somebody is cheating: the owners and the bosses are cheating. They’re the only people who benefit from increased inequality. (They can lose through it, too, because increased inequality can hurt everybody, just as decreased inequality can benefit everybody; but they’re the only people who can derive benefits and not just losses.)

If you actually think to yourself ‘Increased inequality is bad’, in just those words, then that obviously points in the direction of voting against parties which stand for increasing inequality (for example, by cutting taxes on the rich and reducing legal restraints on employers) and for their opponents: in the USA, that means voting against the Republicans and for the Democrats. Obviously lots of people are not thinking ‘Increased inequality is bad’ in just those words.

The decreasing salience of climate change in exit polls ought to tell us something. Americans are devoted to trucks and SUV’s, plenty have jobs involving fossil fuels, and practically everybody resists admitting that they might be wrong, that they aren’t the heroes of the story.

It may be so that it’s rare for US politicians to change partisan affiliation, but then again perhaps it’s not so; I don’t know how to test the issue properly. That’s not my point, though. Even if it is rare for US politicians to change partisan affiliation, that’s not strong evidence that it’s rare for US voters to do so, whereas the fact that US politicians do it at all is a reasonable basis for concluding US voters also do it, although with undetermined frequency.

Making this site widely available may help!
http://www.jefftiedrich.com

While addressing their real issues is a good thing to do, there are few to no signs that actually doing so shifts votes or opinions. Biden was openly pro-union and got a bunch of stuff through that benefited this group. Many state-level politicians did the same. They were not rewarded.

The same is true of refraining from criticism. People who are happy to see ‘Fuck Your Feelings’ on shirts are not going to respond to nice words (or no words – nice words would often be hypocrisy).

US elections are becoming less racially polarized over time, with this most recent election the least polarized, and it seems plausible this trend will continue. On your account, this shift away from racism is correlated with the end of liberal democracy, which is surprising.

Is it an important question whether these are men who were raised in a more liberal culture and are now rejecting it, or whether these are people who were raised in a world where what we’d call bigotry is the norm and are only now attaining a kind of political and cultural power they’d lacked? Or even who existed in the shadows within a liberal society and always exerted power covertly?

In all but the first case, we have the question how far we can go in compelling people to reject their upbringing and community, and whether this is the same for all people or depends on class or other marks of origin. In the first case it’s more of a question how much we value conformity as contrasted with authenticity.

It seems to me there’s a kind of consensus among some liberals that it’s the first of these, and also that we don’t value authenticity as much as say Gen X thought we did. I suspect it’s really some combination of the second and third, and a valuing of authenticity only among those conforming to a traditional, supposedly “European” culture.

Also, our attitudes towards especially white people who aren’t economically upper middle class are incoherent.

Any theory of changes in US voting patterns over the last 30 years also has to explain the changes in voting geography as well. 30 years ago, the American West was nearly solid Republican and the Midwest sent plenty of Democrats to Washington, DC. The media makes much of the failure of the Midwestern “blue wall” in recent elections; not so much about the Democrats’ gains in the West. Even without the Pacific states, the 8-state Mountain West now sends one more Democrat to the US Senate than the 13-state Midwest.

Another thing I think is indicative of the change… Per the NCSL, after the 2025 election, the following state legislative chambers are 50% or more female:

Arizona Senate
California Senate
Colorado House
Nevada House
Nevada Senate
New Mexico House
Oregon House

The Washington House is one seat short of being 50% women. All in the West.

Although I expressed the same cynical hope, seeing several others now write that a sufficiently catastrophic ending of far-right ‘populism’ will cause people to rethink, it should be added that most people never change their minds about something they are deeply invested it. They will continue to believe they were entirely right, only “it wasn’t done the right way” or “we were stabbed in the back”. The hope can realistically only be that the next two or so generations learn something.

qwerty at 14,

That doesn’t make sense to me. First, in multi-party systems, you have more than one anti-establishment guy. In France, you can vote Le Pen, or you can vote Melenchon. In Germany, you can vote AFD, or you can vote Greens or, apparently, currently also a personality cult of a self-serving alleged leftist. The angry racist doesn’t have to vote the racist party. He votes the racist party because he is a racist who would rather lose a thousand dollars and see an immigrant suffer than gain a thousand dollars in the knowledge that the immigrant is happy.

A world model that allows that some people are bad people is a much better fit to empirical reality than a world model that does not have that parameter.

Also, “fix your SPD” implies a world model in which there are two kinds of people, one kind responsible for making a political offer, and another kind whose agency is limited to making self-harming voting decisions. In reality, they are both citizens who can found or join political organisations. Conversely, I cannot fix “my” SPD, but that doesn’t mean I will ever vote AFD.

Mike Huben at 18,

This resonates with me surprisingly deeply. I was born in Apartheid South Africa, and my parents moved us back to their home country when I was but a few years old, because they did not want their children growing up under that system. My mother once related to me her observation that extremely incompetent whites were assured jobs and responsibilities far above their abilities, because they were whites, and blacks would not be allowed to have those jobs. She cited the example of dealing with a white clerk who needed to consult a calculator to add single digit numbers.

And then it all clicks into place: the common thread across opposition to integration and diversity, to affirmative action, to rules and transparency, to academia and experts, to the EU and NATO and UN, is an instinctive preference for a system where losers can get benefits, power, and privileges for who they are (white and male, or white first-world-country) as opposed to for what they have done and because it is the right thing to happen (qualifications, expertise, hard work, decent behaviour, evidence).

And that is also why, sadly, they won’t change. Yes, diversity, rules, and evidence would be win-win, everybody would be better off, and they also would be better off. But better off than in an impoverished swamp of corruption isn’t enough; only better off than the black guy because of their identity will do, even if in absolute terms everybody is worse off.

Thomas Jørgensen at 27,

No, the same happens everywhere, e.g., with Labor voters here in Australia or in the UK who are deeply in denial about how far right their parties have shifted. It is just that the more your electoral system allows for more than two parties, the more the voters who aren’t working overtime to convince themselves to be loyal can make a difference.

Peter T,

Make a few pro-union and public investment decisions but signal otherwise that you are a stable hand who doesn’t want to make any big changes? Well, of course you will then be perceived as centrist, as establishment, as pro-corporation and pro-billionaire class by those who understand that radical changes are required to combat inequality and climate disaster. And I also think that perception is correct. I understand the logic of lesser evil, I really do. But from my spot on the political spectrum, Biden and Trump, or Merz and Scholz are so close to each other they are effectively all in the same spot. Do you expect me to be impressed by a president who makes some investments and decisions that amount to a bar so low that you can shuffle over it without even lifting your feet, when what we need is 70-90% top marginal tax rates, turning Google and Microsoft into non-profit utilities, and making it illegal to sell petrol cars?

@49, Alex SL, “First, in multi-party systems, you have more than one anti-establishment guy. In France, you can vote Le Pen, or you can vote Melenchon.” etc.

I don’t know: is Melenchon ritualistically denounced non-stop on every TV station as devil incarnate? If Melenchon was vilified loudly enough by the establishment, then you would have a point, but I don’t think that he is. I suspect it’s more in the “oh, sure, communism is a beautiful dream, but we already know it’s unattainable and troublesome” vein.

And German Greens, they are quintessential establishment! Surely you can’t get more establishment-like than the Annalena woman.

Let’s make that ‘Angry Men’ –
(as we never have seen a woman do what angry men do)

This analysis, while true, leaves out a lot and implies that there is far less fluidity and vote shifting than there actually is. For example, college-educated whites have shifted left while non-college whites have shifted right. Similarly, rural whites have swung right while suburban whites have swung left. There are a lot of Romney-Harris voters, and even more George W. Bush-Harris voters out there. It’s just that these swings have cancelled out mostly when you look at bigger groups, like white men as a whole.

But to me, this fluidity of support is optimistic. It means that, in theory at least, the group of truly unpersuadable “angry white men” is smaller than “white men” or even “white men who voted for Trump”.

qwerty,

Anti-establishment is a gradient, or perhaps even multi-dimensional. The German Greens have been minor partners in lots of coalitions at state level and a few years at the federal level, but they have never yet had the chance to show what they could achieve if put in charge. In terms of whose policy preferences have created the conditions that people are frustrated by, that is entirely CDU/CSU and SPD. Even for the FDP it could be said that nobody has seen the disaster they could create if their libertarian dreams were ever given free reign, although there is a much stronger argument for calling them establishment than for the Greens, as they have been part of so many governments over the decades and had a lot more influence on policy where and when it actually mattered.

But if, as it seems, your only criterion for non-establishment is not policy-related but instead whether somebody is being vilified, then Corbyn was anti-establishment despite leading one of the two major parties of the UK and promoting economic and tax policies that would have been centre-right in the 1950s-60s. Conversely, under your criterion Trump has to be (correctly, of course) classified as establishment because the US media handle him with kid gloves instead of constantly, as they would in a sane world, discussing how deranged, immoral, corrupt, and uninformed he actually is or outright de-platforming him for his criminality, posing a risk to state security, and whipping up xenophobia.

The Democratic Party has not won the white vote since 1964. There is a reason for this, and the reason is fairly obvious. There is a lot more to systemic racism and unspoken caste than outright discrimination. Our politics continues to suffer from the sins of the past.

What to do about it? Keep fighting. There is no other choice.

Economic anxiety is just used to give cover to the “angry white man.” The media did all it could to hide the economic accomplishments that the Biden admin were able to enact. Even the policies that Senator Sanders lambasted Harris for running on were praised by him when Biden implemented them. But then the solutions Sanders has to offer were never meant to offend the “angry white man”

Comparing Trump with Friedrich Engels is high on the list of the dumbest takes ever proposed on CT.

Qwerty claimed on the other thread, Biden is „an irrelevant figurehead controlled from the outside“. His comments here are of similar quality. I’m not engaging with fascist trolls and regret having taken the bait.

qwerty,

If you don’t understand the difference between a wealthy person who agitates for a revolutionary new order and a billionaire who agitates for oligarchy to entrench the current establishment order even further and who bases his appeal on nostalgia (MAGA), I don’t really know what to say. Trump and his equivalents in other countries are reactionaries, not anti-establishment. At most one could argue that different parts of the establishment are fighting each other, technocratic centrists who serve the corporate and billionaire interests while throwing the poors and minorities a bone or two versus mask-off, naked expression of corporate and billionaire interests.

@Alex SL
Why can’t a reactionary also be anti-establishment? How does this sound: ‘the thermidorian reaction against the Jacobin establishment’? ‘A free market reactionary against the socialist establishment’?

“Undemocratic” is a matter of opinion, but I don’t think this is routine. To avoid vote-splitting a party could drop out altogether, this I understand. Or, several parties could organize an official coalition. But not what they did in France this time. If it occurs fairly routinely, you should have plenty of examples.

For anybody who may not be following: in elections for the National Assembly, to win a seat in the first round of voting a candidate needs to receive more than half of all valid votes cast and a total equal to at least 25% of the number of registered voters. If no candidate achieves this in the first round, the top two candidates proceed to the second round and so do any other candidates who received total votes equal to at least 12.5% of the number of registered voters; but candidates who qualify for the second round may choose to withdraw from it.

In the 2024 National Assembly elections, a large number of qualified candidates withdrew from the second round. I don’t know how the number of such withdrawals in the 2024 election compares with past elections and obviously neither does qwerty. However, even if the number of withdrawals is unusual that doesn’t make it undemocratic. If qwerty is suggesting that when a large number of people do something which is undeniably legal and has been done in the past that’s an argument in favour of making it illegal, it’s a peculiar kind of reasoning.

Trump’s first presidency was characterised by the appointments of oligarchs/pro-oligarchs (Secretary of State and former Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Commerce and “King of Bankruptcy” Wilbur Ross, Treasury Secretary and investment banker Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of Labor and union-busting corporate lawyer Eugene Scalia, etc.) and pro-oligarch policies (such as tax policies which favoured the wealthy, appointing anti-union members to the National Labor Relations Board, making it easier to fire and/or penalise striking workers, reducing workplace safety, reducing access to overtime, working to reduce insurance coverage, etc. etc.).

These don’t strike me as particularly anti-establishment actions, unless one doesn’t consider the billionaire bourgeoisie part of the establishment.

If you are actually interested in France, remember that the NFP is a multiparty alliance and Mélenchon is not its leader. His party LFI overall won 65 seats, NFP in the aggregate won 192 out of 577 seats (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lections_l%C3%A9gislatives_fran%C3%A7aises_de_2024#R%C3%A9sultats_nationaux). If you care to know how many French voters like a truly anti-establishment politician: LFI got 10.5% in the first round. In the presidential election 2022, Mélenchon got to 22%, which is not too bad but not really good either.

And now back to regular programming: Don’t feed the trolls folks. You know it’s pointless.

@noone 72

To your point (2), yes but voters could simply abstain, or vote right; (3) thus forcing people into “tactical voting”, it is the whole point; (4) it is not “personal feelings”, it is a matter of different programs: to the degree that Macron represents “the estabilishment”, Melenchon is perceived as “anti estabilishment” as much as Le Pen (I’m using the names of the leaders because they are more familiar, I could use the names of the parties).

Nobody, [Trump] himself included, knows where this amalgam of ideas that he has put together will take the United States, the political West, and the world. Years from now, we shall see their logic. Elon Musk might represent them the best. He calls for the creation of a global elite, unmoored to nationalism ideologically, sentimentally and psychologically, yet using it for political purposes to assuage the lower classes. It is global Caesarism: it pays tribute to lower classes, collects their votes, pays for their outstanding credit card bills, but gives them low paying jobs and ignores them as active participants in politics except at four-year intervals. It does the same thing as the traditional middle-of-the-road Democrats and Republicans do but because its cynicism is new, it is less obvious, less resented and more believed.

By its bareness and freshness, it is a break from the ideology that reigned supreme for forty years: the threadbare rule of plutocrats that pretended to be poverty-fighters. Neoliberalism was not an ideology of blood and soil but it managed to kill many. It leaves the scene with a scent of falsehood and dishonesty. Not often has an ideology been so mendacious: it called for equality while generating historically unprecedented increases in inequality; it called for democracy while sowing anarchy, discord and chaos; it spoke against ruling classes while creating a new aristocracy of wealth and power; it called for rules while breaking them all; it funded a system of schooled mendacity that tried to erect half-lies as truths.

It ends on January 20.

‘It ends on January 20’.
and then we’re going back to an ideology which was
FIRST –
in being utmost mendacious:
it never called for equality while generating historically unprecedented increases in inequality; it NEVER called for democracy while sowing anarchy, discord and chaos; it just pretended to speke against some ruling classes while creating a new aristocracy of FÜHRER; it NEVER accepted any rules while breaking them all; it funded a system of unschooled evil mendacity that presented the GREATEST LIE(S) as truths.

engels: “Neoliberalism … leaves the scene”

You are completely deluded if you think Trump’s government of the billionaires for the billionaires is a break with neoliberalism.

“But on the understanding of neoliberalism as a serious attempt to revive market-oriented versions of classical liberalism, Trump represents a final break.”

More like the primacy, nay: even the rule, of global finance, if you ask me. Confronted now by American nationalism (MAGA).

But what’s the reason to believe that we’re seeing the final days of it? Wishful thinking, methinks. I’m not even convinced that Bezos and Zuckerberg are really jumping the ship. They can easily jump right back tomorrow.

#77 was a quote from Branko Milanovic’s substack (the HTML got chewed up).
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/to-the-finland-station

But what’s the reason to believe that we’re seeing the final days of it?

From the same piece:

Both of its components are gone. Globalism had now been converted into nationalism, neoliberalism has been made to apply to the economic sphere only. Its social parts—racial and gender equality, free movement of labor, multiculturalism—are dead. Only low tax rates, deregulation and worship of profit remain.

engels @77 is quoting Branko Milanovic.

Disgust at the messy and often corrupt manoeuvrings of party politics leading to welcome for a new, fresh leader who will do away with it all is so old as to be a trope. At least as old as Caesar, and probably in the rhetorical stock of every Greek tyrant. In our age, the promise of every caudillo and strong-man from Napoleon on. That there are still intellectuals who fall for it is a sad comment on the human condition – it always leads to death squads and mostly to war.

Milanovic and many others have somehow also convinced that Trump will turn away from US bellicosity abroad, even as he utters threats in every direction (Greenland, Panama, Canada, Gaza …). Next they will convince themselves of his piety.

JQ I strongly disagree, and agree with Alex. If you reduce economic neoliberalism to the question of trade and tariffs, you are erasing a whole body of economic discourse of the last 50 years. Neoliberalism as we on the left have been criticizing for ages now is a package that inlcudes privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, the gutting of the welfare state, to name the most important. All of these are embraced in radicalized form by Trump and nearly all the other fascist movements.

Trump’s obsession with tariffs doesn’t fit with neoliberal orthodoxy but for Trump, this isn’t about economic policy at all, it’s about bullying.

It’s interesting that one of Trump’s biggest “accomplishments” of his first term nobody talks about any more, least of all himself. Does anybody even remember that Trump renegotiatzed NAFTA? NAFTA doesn’t even exist any more, it has a different name now. Did you all notice how fundamentally the North American trade regime was transformed by Trump’s “break with neoloberalism”?

Me neither.

Correction, the name is Milanovic. Also, I neglected to mention anti-unionism in my list of the defining features of neoliberalism.

My two cents: what actually killed “neoliberalism” was the 2008 crisis[f1], and we are now watching the political effects (it tooka a generation to get there, because it takes some times for ideologies to readapt to changes in the world).

What happened after 2008 is that many people in the USA started to believe that they were on the losing end of international commerce, hence the ideas of tariffs and so on. But in reality the USA is still on the winning end of it, though not as much as it was before, so it is impossible for it to districate from international commerce because this would entail a serious fall in income for USAns. IIRC in Trump term the USA trade deficit increased, for all his talk of tariffs, for example.

But this situation creates some existential anxiety in large swaths of the USA (and other counties) public, so many of them are going to vote Trump or similar characters because they talk though, and because they project scapegoats that can easily be hated (e.g. immigrants, or being pissed at the trade deficit while lowering taxes and increasing the government deficit, which is what causes the trade deficit to begin with).

It is arguable if these problems could be solved via leftish politics, e.g. by increasing taxes and public services, but these increases should be huge to work and so look unlikely, and unlikely for unlikely the guy who talks though looks more beliavable to many.
But since he has to look tough he (and other similar politicians elsewhere) might end up being very aggressive, precisely because their stated policies cannot work so they have to look twice as tough.

[f1] because the neoliberal order namely was based on free trade, but actually relied on the USA as the buyer of last resort and therefore on the growing USA debt/finacial assets/bubble.

If I take over your barn, and then burn it along with a part of your house, how is it that it’s me who’s losing? Even if I did brag at some point that I will keep the barn and will burn your whole house.

So I checked the data here and the trade deficit actually increased with Trump, but not by much (nominally it increased more under Biden, but since the GDP also increased as a percentage it didn’t).

@engels 94
About Ukraine, initially most people believet that Russia would have steamrolled Ukraine very fast, so relative to initial predictions we already “won”, meaning that Putin is very significantly weakened, even if he will win something at the end.
About Palestine, I’m not sure when “we” stood for something specific.
Anyway “empire as usual” is not the same thing of neoliberalism.

@Tm 96
Basically neoliberalism is an ideology that started in the 80s as a response to the previous keynesian/social democracy compromise/whatever you want to call it, so the idea was that the state was unefficient. The right-side neoliberals (Reagan, tatcher) used the idea that countries had to compete against each other to cut wages and benefits, the left-side neoliberals (Clinton B., Blair) tried to strike a compromise between market efficiency and leftish measures.
In modern days, neither the right (Trump, who wants tariffs) nor the left (Biden, who also wanted some tariffs and was quite pro union) are all that keen on the free market.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we are going to become non-market economies in the next 3 weeks, but the attractiveness of the “pro free market” ideology waned both in the left and in the right. But this IMHO happened in 2008, and we are just watching the fruits of the 2008 crisis now. (Brexit also was an “end of neoliberalism” thingie).

Read the second link (the review of Gerstle). Neoliberalism as a political order requires broad buy-in through ideology. That was never really about relentless profiteering or privatisation (ok maybe a bit in Britain with BT shares and Right To Buy). What was it? Off the top of my head: there was the liberal feminism and anti-racism drum this post is still banging to a mostly empty concert hall. There’s the rules-based international order which was already tottering after Iraq. Free trade bit the dust when China got too good it at. Trickledown barely merits a mention and the less said about human rights in 2025 the better. Whatever uncharted waters we’re heading into now—and I don’t doubt that some of the most repulsive aspects of neoliberalism will remain part of it–it isn’t the same thing

If I take over your barn, and then burn it along with a part of your house, how is it that it’s me who’s losing?

If you take over my barn and then burn it along with part of my house, what are you winning?

I’m not sure why even mentioning the genocide the incumbent US administration has been supporting for over a year, with barely a protest from its supporters in academia, the media, the policy world, etc—in the context of a discussion of the “racism” of the people who didn’t vote for it—qualifies as snark but for the record I’ve never defended Russell Brand (I’m more of a Marx Brothers guy).

MisterMr 192: “Fascism!=Neoliberalism”

It is an old hat that fascism isn’t antagonistic to capitalism. The Trumpist version of fascism isn’t antagonistic to capitalism in its neoliberal form.

I have been among those who already in 2016 understood that Trumpism is a form of fascism, when plenty of people not least here on CT adamantly claimed (and did so until quite recently) that Trump was just another ordinary Republican pursuing neoliberal economic policies. There’s a bit of irony in the pushback that I’m now getting for pointing out that Trump’s policies are almost 100% compatible with neoliberal orthodoxy. Economically, Trump is clearly a neoliberal and observe that nobody has offered an actual argument disputing this fact.

ETB 100, absolutely, so revealing.