
Image by Jon Tyson.
Garbage, apparently, isn’t what it used to be. Last week someone in a luxury van trolled my street, rifling the stretch of bins for items of value. He refused my refuse but found caches of worth in many of my neighbors’ receptacles, spending close to a half hour in his pillage. Who knows how much he culled from block after block. If he went at it for an eight-hour day, perhaps he could buy a house in our neighborhood or buy stock in the post-election economic ripple. At least he’ll be able to barter his survival for another day, even keep up the payments on the van.
Puerto Rico, that island floating in the ocean, was made garbage by the baggage of its colonial owners who’ve extracted gems from the detritus to support lifestyles elsewhere. The people of this lovely island are targeted—the victims berated—while the brutal policies are erased from public consciousness. The Trump campaign let this distortion slip through an SNL-like tasteless parody that most took as such, according to the election results. But Biden offered his own version of this illusion, instantly targeting Trump’s people, the legions that voted for him from—mostly—the rural-red states, as garbage, slighting the policies.
The irony here is that the residents of the rural-red states are victims too of colonial-like policies. Poverty and inequality are much greater in the Republican controlled red states. They’re deficient in medical care (many refusing Medicaid funds from the Federal Government), education, union representation, etc., from continuing to vote Republican.
But these deficiencies didn’t lead to Democratic gains. The party refused to target the working class in the election campaign, believing it could win without it (an attitude in sync with Biden’s vitriol toward Trump’s supporters). And because it couldn’t compete with the populist messages delivered by the perversely charismatic Trump through circumscribed bytes and images.
The Democrats were doomed at any rate. The glaring truth that surfaced from the election-night map was a striking disparity between blue-urban and red-rural America. This persistent divide—with us now for at least a generation—seems unbridgeable. There can be little progress in uniting the country and advancing democracy until steps are taken to reverse this fracture. The Republican victory will make this more difficult.
The real obstacle, however, is the brand of populism synonymous with the rise of Trumpism. It launched the MAGA movement proper and has kept it securely in place as Trump’s base, especially in the red states. And its ideological power has served to counter the interests of the people it purportedly represents. Thanks to the commercial media, this distortion has become synonymous with populism generally, the more complex historical idea that encompasses the larger political spectrum. ///
Populist movements exist because of insufficient representation from the powers that be. People from diverse political persuasions excluded from the social contract—validating the limits of existing democracy—battle to rectify their circumstances. These movements germinated in the late 19th century, after the Civil War, mostly in rural regions according to Catherine McNicol Stock in Rural Radicals.
The liberal version of populism derived from the Progressive Movement that formed in the 1890s—its catalyst the fledgling People’s Party founded in 1892—and influenced politics through the first three decades of the 20th century. As a radical, reformist force it believed in busting the trusts and eradicating poverty. It was for immigration, the working class, and women’s rights. It was strong on protecting the natural environment. And it advocated forms of direct, popular democracy. It supported Prohibition, however, in the belief that this would help fight the epidemic of corruption during those years, a move which helped spawn organized crime. In short, it was “woke,” which explains why the left-liberal coalition in Congress, represented by Bernie Sanders, AOC and the rest of the “squad” are labeled “progressives.”
There are similarities between the politics of the Progressive era and those of the progressive coalition in Congress today. The former surfaced at a moment of severe economic upheaval, when the gilded elites ruled and when capitalism was in constant crisis. There were yet no government structures in place to stabilize the economy, and the elite pigged out while immiserating the working class. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats of that day were willing to mount a sufficient corrective, opening a space for an alternative.
The progressives of today are a meager force compared to their predecessors, not formidable enough to begin fashioning a party. Though independently minded, they play on the fringes of the Democratic Party. They gained pre-eminence in the wake of the Occupy Movement in 2011, which focused its wrath on the excessive accumulation of wealth, the widening gap between the top one percent and the bottom ninety-nine percent. This theme vaulted Bernie Sanders into the national limelight and led to his run for the presidency in 2016. Bernie and his colleagues were critical of the mainstream Democrats for not acting on this crucial issue. And like their predecessors, they’ve been outspoken on the issue of deregulation—especially the spate of laws enacted under Clinton in the late 90s to spur the neoliberal economy—believing this lack has been responsible for this widening.
These current-day progressives have been unable to power their designs into a series of successes. Bernie and his colleagues continue talking about taxing the rich and breaking up the monopolies and oligopolies, but the numbers aren’t there. The progressives’ constant refrain about giving more representation to the working class has been effectively slighted by the Democratic Party’s sizable bloc of corporate interests. In fact, it claimed a few months before the election that it was not targeting the working class in its campaign strategies. This made it difficult for the progressives to deliver on its rhetoric and secure gains with the working-class members of MAGA in the red-rural states where so many of the immiserated reside, like their predecessors did. The electoral map from 1900 reveals that the Democrats, the party the pre-Progressive progressives attached themselves to, secured a significant number of what we now label the red states. This party, unlike the Democratic Party of today, successfully captured working-class voters in both urban and rural areas.
Today’s weak left populism pales before the conservative strain marketed successfully by the MAGA Republicans who control most of these immiserated rural spaces, especially since the demise of the Southern Democrats. They’ve been able to convince them to vote against their economic interests by appealing to deep-seeded prejudices and values. Like the long-standing hostility toward government and elites, a fixation ever since Tocqueville’s study of the cultural habits of Americans in the 1830s. Religion has been a major force. The “Bible Belt” suffuses the red states, shaping the moral landscape and especially the values of family and personal responsibility which condition pro-life perspectives. These values have traditionally trumped social issues and even interfered with the people’s ability to fully grasp their economic conditions and take charge of their lives. The fundamentalist fringes spurn issues of social justice, stressing the need to transcend worldly circumstances. These opiates are formidable barriers.
But in our current election world Trump sold the issue of the economy to the red states. Exit polls revealed this was the main issue that drew voters to the Republicans. He convinced the people they were much better off in his first term than now, benefiting from polls showing a high degree of dissatisfaction with Bidenism on the economy. The issue he especially capitalized on was deindustrialization, the long-term process of gutting our industrial base from, mostly, the corporate escape to more wage-friendly regions overseas since the mid-1970s. The consequent loss of quality jobs hit the rural, red states—where many of the job-dispensing companies were located, as J. D. Vance and his Appalachian upbringing argued—particularly hard.
The Democrats partially addressed this issue with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Bill, and the CHIPS Act. But they mostly targeted the future and not the immediate needs of the working class.
Trump and the Republicans struck a chord with the deindustrialization argument, thanks to the Democrats whose passionate commitment to globalization blinded them to this domestic crisis which has festered now for half a century. But even a cursory look at the Trump record during his first term reveals that little was done to seriously address the deindustrialization crisis. That his supporters in these areas remain undaunted, however, speaks volumes about his talent for capturing their hearts and minds, neutralizing the impact of the decaying economic conditions. The “garbage” people were apparently susceptible to a particular accent of garbage talk. The MAGA members, especially, are immune from ever even wanting to consider the slips, falsehoods, evasions, etc.
No one among the Democrats—and certainly the progressives—has stepped up to match wits with Trumpspeak and talk to the “garbage” people with the correct accent. So talking down to Trump’s supporters is a guaranteed loser. Instead of bashing Trump as a fascist, they need to recycle the baggage that lets “garbage” people exist in the first place. And instead of writing the red-state nation off as racist, homophobic, etc., as Hillary did when she lost to Trump in 2016. No matter how culturally unacceptable, they need to convert his supporters to build a coalition that does more than just reverse the Republican victory.
This will be a challenge to convert MAGA supporters who are so emotionally enveloped in Trunpspeak—so blind to what the Republicans have done to their social worlds that they vote against their own interests. Since many MAGA supporters—especially its working-class members—were former Democrats excluded from representation over the course of the party’s corporatization, treat them as victims and not as enemies. Since the progressives can’t force the necessary legislation to deal with issues of urgent concern through the corporate-dominated majority of the party, they should activate legions of civil society supporters—organic intellectuals in touch with the people they’re hoping to change, not the PMC, the professional managerial class which speaks jargon from a distance—to match the efforts of the Republicans in the campaign in getting to these victims through their field organizing.
In other words, they should go right to the local arena and engage in a variant of direct action. Instead of sit-ins and the occupation of spaces reserved for whites that motivated activists in the Civil Rights era when Congress wouldn’t act, they should bypass the local power structures and saturate localities with town halls to explain how the Republican programs go against the people’s practical interests. They should connect the dots, make a better case for the radical perspectives that can change their lives. Many fear what “radical” means when it comes to practical options. Alleviate this fear by providing sufficient context for them to understand that these options are merely a correction to injustice.
In doing this, the progressives in Congress will have the opportunity to upgrade their approaches and ideology. They spare no flagrant rhetoric in criticizing the corporate faction of the party, but they’ve also compromised their positions too often. The rhetorical excesses have allowed the right to position them on the far left, even label them Marxists and communists. But the compromises in policy have alienated the legitimate left.
Bernie Sanders browbeats audiences with repetitive doses of working-class support and criticism of corporate America, but he offers very little analysis of how capitalism actually works so that the victims can understand. His social democracy is well shy of the northern Europe variety, which is marginally socialist, so his claims of being a socialist are suspect. Here again, he doesn’t explain what socialism is, especially what it means for the victims. The main difference between social democracy and democratic socialism pertains to the issue of capital. The latter mandates the transfer of capital assets to those who lack them in the effort to make gains in equality. This involves establishing a legal basis for this transfer that helps to ensure the growth and permanency of these assets. Sanders and the other progressives fall short in pushing this alternative. As a result, the transfer of vast sums by the Biden Democrats to build up the post-Covid economy was mostly irresponsible liberalism, stopgap transfers lacking the potential for growth and the constructive redistribution of assets. The right’s claim that their lavish spending constituted socialism is therefore utter fantasy.
The progressives need to renew their vision for change by modeling the populist goals and strategies from the Progressive era. Only then will the Democratic Party cease moving further away from its roots and finally morph into the one the working class has always hoped for.