Dems need alternative to four decades of neoliberal failure
By Mark Weisbrot - 11/09/16 06:28 PM EST
The polls were wrong, the unthinkable has happened, and Donald Trump Donald John TrumpPompeo changes staff for Russia meeting after concerns raised about top negotiator's ties: report House unravels with rise of 'Les Enfants Terrible' Ben Carson: Trump is not a racist and his comments were not racist MORE has been elected the 45th president of the United States, with a Republican Congress.
The swing voters, as in most presidential elections of the past few decades, were white working-class voters. It would be worthwhile therefore to think about how a large majority of this group ended up voting against their own interests.
Many liberals will blame the voters themselves, seeing them as racist, misogynistic and otherwise backward and ignorant.
There is no doubt that Trump voters are worse than average in attitudes toward non-white Americans, immigrants and women.
After all, most of them are Republicans; about 90 percent of Republicans voted for Trump and that is the bulk of his base. The Republican Party, since at least the civil rights movement and legislation of the 1960s and its "Southern strategy," has been a white people's party. It has also engaged in a "war on women" before Trump took the stage to literally add a lot of insults to the injuries.
So, no surprises there, even if he used a police whistle instead of just a dog whistle.
The more important question is what moved the swing voters.
And here it must be acknowledged that while racism and sexism were factors, there were also millions of protest votes. Trump posed as an outsider and many of his supporters liked that he was giving the middle finger, so to speak, to people they didn't like, including the mainstream media and politicians.
But to see how they might be angry enough to vote for someone like Trump — whom many did not even like — we have to look at the economic policies that Democrats and Republicans alike have implemented, and how these have ruined the lives and futures of so many Americans.
The media has focused on trade, partly because Trump opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other trade agreements and attacked Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonTrump thanks 'vicious young Socialist Congresswomen' for his poll numbers Will Trump's racist tweets backfire? Democrats fret over Trump cash machine MORE for supporting them.
Although Clinton took a position against the TPP in the campaign, she had previously supported it and there was reason to believe that she would do so after the elections.
It certainly didn't help that President Obama launched a serious effort, in the middle of the presidential campaign, to pass the agreement — aiming for the lame-duck Congress, where the swing votes would be unaccountable and many would soon be taking new jobs as lobbyists.
But the TPP and "trade" — the quotes are necessary because the most economically important features of the TPP agreement are not tariff reductions, but rather rules that give corporations and patent and copyright holders new rights and privileges — are mostly stand-ins for a larger set of neoliberal policies that have hurt the majority of Americans over the past few decades.
These include, for example, the country's most important macroeconomic policies: fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policies.
Trade is a surrogate because people often do not understand these macroeconomic policies. This is not their fault: the media does not tell them that when the Fed raises interest rates, as it will likely do next month now that the election is past, it is deliberately slowing job growth and wage growth for workers in the bottom half of the wage distribution.
Or that the lack of job opportunities for millions of Americans could be remedied by increasing government spending, with no real cost to society since real interest rates are at zero.
Or that an overvalued dollar is responsible for many more jobs going overseas than even the worst trade agreements.
Or that the U.S. Treasury can determine the value of the dollar, and therefore our trade deficit, no matter what China does or wants.
So "trade" agreements and "globalization," as they are represented and misrepresented in the media, take on an outsized importance.
Of course, they have played an important role in the past in deindustrializing parts of the country and destroying good-paying manufacturing jobs.
But today, they are the most visible manifestation of neoliberal economic policies that have destroyed the livelihoods, hopes and dreams of millions. The neoliberal structural reforms of President Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonMore adult Twitter users follow Obama than Trump: survey Pro-impeachment Democrats wary of Al Green's floor vote push Marching toward a debt crisis MORE — NAFTA, the World Trade Organization (WTO), welfare reform and financial deregulation — did so much damage that there wasn't much left for the next president, George W. Bush, to do.
When center-left politicians — in this case from the Democratic Party — abandon much of their base in important ways, that base can end up voting for right-wing demagogues.
We see this in other countries: in the Brexit vote in the U.K., where Britain voted to leave the European Union, or in France, where the right-wing National Front has made large gains in recent years. This can create a vicious circle, where the center-left dismisses such voters as "backward" or "xenophobic" and pushes them further into the hands of the right, rather than looking at their legitimate grievances and trying to do something about them.
Partly because of Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernie SandersSanders to call on 2020 Democrats to reject money from drug, health insurance industries The hidden connection between immigration and health care: Our long-term care crisis Harris tops Biden in California 2020 poll MORE's (I-Vt.) campaign for the Democratic nomination, the Democratic Party produced its most progressive platform ever this year. But this was not enough to convince swing voters that Clinton, given her record, would implement it.
All this is not to ignore the fact that Republicans are reliant on voter suppression, and gerrymandering for the House of Representatives, in order to get the power they now have.
Without these anti-democratic tools, the Republicans would be a permanent minority party. Voting reform is essential to a democratic transition for America.
But the Democrats will also need new leadership that is willing to provide an alternative to the past four decades of neoliberal failure.
Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington and the president of Just Foreign Policy. He is also the author of the book "Failed: What the 'Experts' Got Wrong About the Global Economy" (Oxford University Press, 2015). You can subscribe to his columns here.
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