The Day After Trump

                The conventional wisdom about life after Trump is that American Democracy will reassert itself and a new America will emerge to heal the damage his presidency has caused.  I think there is good reason to be skeptical of that narrative.  There is a long list of the institutions and expectations that Trump has battered into submission, but it is a mistake to see him as some isolated aberration in an otherwise healthy democracy.  Trump is proof that in the long running battle for the soul of American destiny, capitalism finally defeated democracy.  We no longer live in a democratic society; we live in a capitalist society.

                In spite of warnings from folks like Chomsky, most of us have comfortably accepted the fairy tale that democracy and capitalism were not only compatible, they were necessary prerequisites of each other.  We thought that the freedom of individual consumption was the same as liberty.  It is not.  If we had been growing in a democratic direction, so many of the people who are supposedly represented in this democracy would not be so poorly served by it.  Perhaps the crowning absurdity of the capitalist mind set subsuming a democratic mind set is the declaration that corporations are people.  We live in a political system dominated by money and the relentless redistribution of wealth to the very few.  The two are joined at the hip.  Trump and the GOP didn’t invent that dynamic, they merely stopped pretending that it wasn’t true.  In the process, they turned what had been a flawed but optimistic country into a fearful and pessimistic one.

                There was a brief period in the last century when capitalism and democracy seemed to be in synch with each other.  The labor movement and the social programs of the New Deal that lasted for seven decades bound the two together.  That was possible because capitalism used to require workers to make money, and as even Henry Ford knew, that meant that workers had to be paid and cared for.  The care never included everyone; there were plenty of folks left out.  The grand narrative, however, was one of equality and prosperity.  Since the 1970’s that narrative has held on the face of overwhelming evidence that more and more efficient production did not mean wider prosperity.  Since the 70’s, wealth has been concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, gradually creating what we now call the ‘one percent.’  This shift created a crisis for democratic capitalism.  What happens when the workers no longer matter, and the interests of capital are contradictory to the interests of democracy?

                The answer is the last forty years of domestic policy that has gradually eroded the safety net of the New Deal and the War on Poverty.  It culminates in the obsessive hatred of the very rich for health care and economic equality.  The last GOP tax bill wasn’t about ‘taxes’ or how to more equitably fund the government, it was a bold- faced heist of cultural wealth by the wealthy and their crony legislators.  Capitalism no longer needs workers, and that is going to become cataclysmically true when the rapidly approaching merger of automation and AI becomes reality.  Capitalism used to be based on a manufacturing base that required workers.  Capitalism today is based on a workerless manufacturing and an even more workerless financial industry.  Robots and computers don’t need rights or benefits, at least not yet.

                The Democratic Party has no real answer for this.  They may try to put salve on your economic wounds instead of gleefully rubbing salt and rubbing alcohol on them, but they have no idea or plan for how to fix this.  They don’t even realize the problem.  A lot of people who voted for Trump feel the anxiety of these changes in their gut.  They were fools to put their faith in him, but they weren’t wrong to sense that, for them, the system is broken.  I hope the ‘blue wave’ of 2018 is real.  I hope that Trump is impeached, and that Republican are beaten to a bloody pulp.  But that won’t really change the dynamics of this clash between capitalism and democracy.  If we stay locked in the silos of identity politics and miss the common enemy we face, then the Democrats taking power will mean almost nothing.  If we don’t realize that the form of capitalism we live under is toxic to democracy, then the first day after Trump will just be another dreary day.