So it happened, just like we all knew it would. And now we all know it won’t go anywhere in the senate. But what does it mean? Honestly, I think the answer has more to do with some major transitions in American politics than it does with Trump himself.
One author I follow argues that impeachment shows the cracks in our constitution, and that since we have such strong parties what we really need is a parliamentary system (warning to conservatives: this is a liberal perspective):
I think there is some truth to the point that our founding fathers didn’t really anticipate the extent to which parties would govern politics. But would a parliamentary system do a better job of providing a check on the power of the nations leader? Prime Ministers have quite a bit of power, with the primary check being that they need to retain support of their whole party (at least in the UK).
Speaking of the UK, it is fascinating to compare what is happening in the US with what has recently happened in the motherland:
Basically, the conservatives in Britain won over the working class. This is a huge shift in British politics, but I think something similar is happening in the US. One way to think about impeachment is that it simply represents the fallout from a political realignment. People are bitter simply because we are in a phase of shifting alliances.
Changing Bases
So let’s talk about that shift for a little bit. Here are some quadrants to frame the discussion:
Basically, the elite base of the progressives is in academia, and the elite base of the conservatives is in business. Who are the masses that each side caters to? It used to be that progressive elites catered to blue-collar workers. But then they shifted from talking mostly about class struggle (i.e., labor vs capital) to talking about social justice (i.e., race and gender). This means that progressives are now appealing to a different base. It used to be labor, now it’s a coalition of women and minorities. In response, Republicans have become much more focused on social issues (i.e., abortion, religious freedom, etc), and they have found a lot of success with these values among blue-collar workers.
Democrats lost the South after the civil rights movement. This could be attributed to the fact that Southerners who wanted to preserve Jim Crow laws felt that the Republican support of states rights made this more feasible. In other words, an emphasis on social justice led to a major political realignment. Now it’s happening again. Only this time, the Democrats are losing the Midwest because they are too ‘woke.’
This isn’t to say Democrats completely ignore economic issues. They certainly have ideas ranging from Medicare for all to a Universal Basic Income. But the purity test for being progressive centers around social justice. And the working class just aren’t pure enough for progressives.
Personally, I am not a fan of Trump. A part of me wishes Mitt Romney would lead a Never Trump Coup. But I think that a lot of the Trump hatred among progressives essentially represents loathing of their own former base. They are so appalled that normal people would vote for Trump that they are trying everything to discredit him…and nothing seems to stick!
Human Capital
So why have progressives become less interested in the conflict between labor and capital in the first place? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that capital is not really the main cause of inequality anymore. Passive income (i.e., land ownership) no longer defines the classes. Instead, these days inequality is largely about human capital (i.e., education).
A few years ago I went through and (almost) got a teaching degree from the University of Utah. One of the main things that struck me is just how intensely focused on social justice people in education programs are. Mercedes recently finished her degree in early childhood education and noticed the same thing.
Take a look at the above image. I would argue that this graph (and others like it) is the #1 obsession of college education programs nation-wide. Notice that the racial achievement gap was going down pretty steadily until about 1990 as access to education improved for black students. And then the progress stopped. Even if race is a social construct (which to at least some degree it almost certainly is), the racial disparity in education is a serious crisis if differences in human capital are now the main driver of inequality.
I do believe that education disparity is is a social issue worth addressing, but I was shocked at the degree to which my education program was focused on it. At times, I felt alienated because I just wanted to learn how to teach without focusing on trying to eliminate inequality. I imagine that the working class feels kind of the same.
Winning the Argument
One of the main reasons the UK Labour party lost the support of Labor is that people hate Jeremy Corbyn. For those not familiar with UK politics, I would argue that Jeremy Corbyn is a pretty typical woke progressive, if just a tad more smug than usual. There are a lot of good reasons to hate Jeremy Corbyn, just like there are a lot of good reasons to hate Donald Trump.
Even after his crushing defeat, Corbyn claims that he “won the argument” on things like inequality and climate change. But I think his problem is that he was having the wrong argument to begin with (from the perspective of the working class). In a sense, he was arguing with his own base, trying to convince them to care about social justice and climate change.
So perhaps Democrats US are more interested in winning the argument than winning the vote. As a result, the working class went out and elected a president almost perfectly suited to annoy anyone with a progressive bone in their body. They are like the proverbial woman scorned:
“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” — The Mourning Bride by William Congreve
Trump reminds Democrats that even if they “win the argument” they can still lose the election. The things Trump says and does don’t make sense to elites. But they aren’t supposed to. He isn’t really trying to win the debate in the way the Left is. He’s just trying to win. And in doing so, he has thrown the rules of argument out the window.
The Future
So what is my prediction about the future of US politics? Will the Left permanently abandon the working class as their base? If I had to guess, I would probably say that the era of Labor vs. Capital is over. It’s going to be social justice from here on out.
Bernie Sanders is the Hero of the Left at the moment, and the main quote on his website reads:
I’m running for president so that, when we are in the White House, the movement we build together can achieve economic, racial, social and environmental justice for all.
Note that he lists economic justice first. But what does he mean by economic justice? Bernie is not really a socialist because he doesn’t advocate for government ownership of the means of production. What he means is that people should get services like medical care and education for free. Basically, he thinks people are entitled to services for being human, which is distinct from believing that people deserve to own the means of production. The difference is the connection to work. It’s no longer there.
Work may just be the primary value of the working class. To argue that people deserve something because they work plays to this value. To argue that people deserve something regardless of whether they work pushes against it. Democrats still use both kinds of labor, but I think something like the Andrew Yang and the Universal Basic Income are the future of the Democratic Party. That is, they will move away from the idea that work is the origin of value toward the idea that all people have inherent entitlements.
If we are moving toward a future where robots do all of the work, this might be the right move. In the meantime, it is what leads working class areas like the Midwest to feel alienated from their party, and vote for someone like Trump.
