There have been a lot of lowlights in Trump’s short presidency so far, from candlelit ballistic missile summits at Mar-a-Lago to unfiltered, angry tweets about department stores. But from a resistance perspective, it’s still hard to beat the low reached on Trump’s first full day at the office, on the Monday after inauguration. That’s when a group of smiling US union leaders strolled out of the White House and up to a bank of waiting cameras and declared their allegiance to Donald Trump.
Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, reported that Trump had taken the delegation representing more than half a dozen unions on a tour of the Oval Office, showing a level of respect that was “nothing short of incredible.” More praise came from Doug McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. He described Trump’s inaugural address—judged by most to have been a belligerent spoken-tweet storm—as “a great moment for working men and women.”
It was hard to watch. Trump was already waging war on the most vulnerable workers in the economy, and there was talk of budget cuts so draconian they would mean mass layoffs for public sector workers like bus drivers. So why were these labor leaders, representing around a quarter of all unionized workers in the United States, breaking the most sacred principle of the union movement—solidarity with other workers? Most of the unions whose leaders toured the White House had been loyal to the Democrats for decades. Why choose this moment, when so many were in pain, to heap praise on Donald Trump?
Well, they explained that part of their deal with the devil had to do with Trump’s energy plans—all those pipelines. And some of it had to do with Trump’s pledge to spend on infrastructure (though it went unsaid, they may even have been buoyed by talk of spending $21 billion on the border wall with Mexico). But the clincher, the union heads were clear, was that here, finally, was a president who had their backs on free trade.
Indeed, Trump had wasted no time on that front. That same day, shortly before meeting with the union delegation, he signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the eleven-country trade deal that he’d railed against on the campaign trail as the “rape of our country.” At the signing ceremony where the US officially left the TPP, Trump announced, “It’s a great thing for the American worker.”
Subsequently, a few people wrote to me to ask if this might be the silver lining in Trump’s presidency. Wasn’t it a good thing that trade deals that many progressives had been criticizing for decades were now on the chopping block or, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, set to be reopened and renegotiated to “bring the jobs back”? I understand the desire to find bright sides to the daily chaos unfolding in the White House. But Trump’s trade plans are not one of them.
The whole thing reminds me of all the liberal hawks who backed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq because the war coincided with their desire to liberate Iraqis from Saddam Hussein—the “humanitarian intervention” argument. There was nothing in the Bush—Cheney track record or worldview to suggest there would be anything democratic or humanitarian about their invasion and occupation of Iraq—and, sure enough, the occupation rapidly became the site of killing fields and torture committed by the US military and its contractors, as well as out-of-control war profiteering. So what is there in Trump’s track record, in his treatment of his own workers, in the appointments he has made, in the pro-corporate policies he has already pushed through, that should cause anyone to believe that the way he will renegotiate trade deals, or “bring back the jobs,” will in any way be in the interests of workers or the environment?
Rather than hope that Trump is going to magically transform into Bernie Sanders, and choose this one arena in which to be a genuine advocate for anyone who isn’t related to him, we would do far better to ask some tough questions about how it’s been possible for a gang of unapologetic plutocrats, with open disdain for democratic norms, to hijack an issue like corporate free trade in the first place.
Trump has made trade deals a signature issue for two reasons. The first, on full display that day at the White House, is that it’s a great way to steal votes from the Democrats. The right-wing pundit Charles Krauthammer—no fan of unions—declared on Fox News that Trump’s cozy union summit was a “great act of political larceny.”
The second reason is that Trump—who we know believes his own super-negotiator PR—has said he can negotiate better deals than his predecessors. But here’s the catch: by “better,” he doesn’t mean better for unionized workers, and certainly not better for the environment. He means better in the same way he always means better—better for him and his corporate empire, better for the bankers and oil executives who make up his administration. In other words, trade rules, if Trump gets his way, are about to get a lot worse for regular people—not just in the United States, but around the world.
You only have to look at what Trump has done since taking office. On the same day he flattered the union leaders by giving them a private tour, he also met with business leaders and announced plans to cut regulations by 75 percent and cut taxes for corporations to 15 percent. It’s workers who pay the price for policies like this. Without regulations, their jobs become more unsafe, with more on-the-job injuries, and it’s workers who use the services that are getting slashed to pay for tax cuts to the wealthy. Trump has already reneged on his promise to make sure the Keystone XL pipeline would be built with American steel, an early indication of the depth of his commitment to “Buy American, Hire American.”
There is also every reason to suspect that the administration’s plans to attract manufacturing back to the States will rely on rolling back many of the protections that unions have won over the last century—including the remaining protections for the right to bargain collectively. Many around Trump have pushed hard to make it more difficult for unions to organize, particularly with so-called right-to-work legislation, and with Republicans in control of the House and Senate, that priority will remain on the agenda.
The long list of gifts the Trump administration has already handed out to corporate America makes it clear that Trump’s strategy for “making America great again” by reviving manufacturing is to make American manufacturing cheap again. Without all those pesky regulations, with far lower corporate tax rates, with Trump’s all-out assault on environmental protections, American workers will indeed be closer to competing on cost with workers in low-wage countries like Mexico.
Trump told us all we needed to know about his attitude toward workers with his first pick for labor secretary, the cabinet post that is supposed to protect the US workforce. He chose Andrew Puzder—a nomination that ultimately failed, but one so egregious that it’s worth recalling as a marker of Trump’s intentions. Puzder is the CEO of a restaurant empire that includes the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., and he is widely considered to be among the most abusive employers in the country. Dozens of lawsuits have alleged that his company and its franchises have failed to pay workers for overtime and other work, leading to millions in settlements. The correct term for this is wage theft. He has also mused publicly about the benefits of working with machines instead of workers: “They never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” he told Business Insider. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer called Puzder, worth an estimated $45 million, “probably the most anti-worker” choice ever. What Trump’s admiration for Puzder suggests is that his real plan for luring back manufacturing is to suppress rights, wages, and protections to such a degree that working in a factory will be a lot like working at Hardee’s under Andrew Puzder. In other words, it’s yet another plan to take from the vulnerable to benefit the already outrageously rich.
What we are witnessing is not a silver lining of any sort. It’s the push to the finish line in the “race to the bottom” that opponents of these corporate trade deals always feared.
Trump is not planning to remove the parts of trade deals that are most damaging to workers—the parts, for instance, that prohibit policies which are designed to favor local, over foreign, production. Or the parts that allow corporations to sue national governments if they introduce laws—including laws designed to create jobs and protect workers—that businesses deem to be unfairly cutting into their profits.
Contrary to campaign pledges to penalize companies that move production outside the United States, the actual plan seems to be to expand protections for corporations that move production offshore. This is not speculation. Just two months into the new presidency, a draft letter was leaked of the administration’s notice to Congress stating its intent to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). According to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch’s analysis, the administration plans to take the worst elements of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and add them to, or strengthen them in, NAFTA—while not even scrapping the language that denies the US the right to implement “Buy American” rules. As Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, put it, “for those who trusted Trump’s pledge to make NAFTA ‘much better’ for working people, it’s a punch in the face.”
One of the most insidious parts of many trade deals is the aggressive protection they provide for patents and trademarks, which often puts lifesaving drugs and critical technologies out of reach for the poor. The Trumps have built a global empire that relies, above all else, on being granted trademarks and licenses and having them fiercely protected—so we can expect the parts of deals concerning intellectual property to become more harmful, not less.
The strongest evidence of Trump’s plans is the person he has chosen to oversee his trade negotiations. His commerce secretary is Wilbur Ross, a former banker and billionaire venture capitalist who made a fortune taking over firms and restructuring them to make them more profitable—a feat almost invariably accomplished by laying off workers and moving production to cheaper locations. In 2004, for example, he bought Cone Mills, an American textile company. After less than a decade of restructuring, corporate mergers, and outsourcing, the US workforce in one North Carolina factory dropped from over 1,000 to just 300 while Ross expanded production in China and Mexico.
Putting a CEO like Ross in charge of trade is just one more example of the corporate coup—cutting out any pretense of a neutral government mediator and instead placing corporations directly in charge of the final stage of the decimation of the public sphere and the public interest.
If this agenda is fully realized, workers in the United States will find themselves with fewer protections than they have had at any point since the Dickensian nightmares of the Gilded Age.
But resistance is rising. Andrew Puzder was forced to withdraw his nomination for labor secretary, in part because of organizing by restaurant workers across the country. And when Trump was invited to address a convention of two thousand members of North America’s Building Trades Unions, the organization that had sung his praises at the White House, a group of workers decided they were fed up with their union’s decision to cozy up to the “billionaire-in-chief.” When Trump spoke to the room packed with union members, they stood up, turned their backs on him, and held up signs that said #RESIST—until they were removed by security.
Not all trade unions have fallen for Trump’s trade swindle. Most labor leaders, particularly those representing multiracial workforces—including National Nurses United, unions representing public transit workers, and the Service Employees International Union—understand that Trump represents an existential threat to their movement and are organizing accordingly. And yet the earlier question remains: how could Trump’s transparently absurd posture as a champion of the working man find a ready audience with a not-insubstantial part of the US labor movement in the first place?
A large part of the answer has to do with the fact that much of this political battleground has been ceded by liberals to the Right.
Beginning in the 1990s, I was part of a global movement warning that corporate free trade agreements, and the model of global commerce they accelerated, were leading to a level of human dispossession and environmental destruction that would rapidly be untenable. It was a multigenerational movement that spanned dozens of countries and sectors, bringing together nonprofit organizations, radical anarchists, Indigenous communities, churches, trade unions, and more. It was messy, ideologically inchoate, imperfect—but it was also large and, for a time, powerful enough to clock some major wins.
Indeed, it came close to being, in some important ways, the kind of broad-based coalition that is needed at the present moment to take on the pseudo-populist Right. So now seems like a good time to look at the lessons of our movement’s rise—and fall. Because if that movement had been able to translate its street power into more policy victories, it would have been unthinkable for Trump and his corporate cabinet to tap into the rage at unfair global trade rules and wrap themselves in the cloak of “fair trade.”
In the late 1990s through to the early 2000s, from London to Genoa, to Mumbai, to Buenos Aires, Quebec City and Miami, there could not be a high-level gathering to advance the neoliberal economic agenda without counterdemonstrations. That’s what happened in Seattle during a summit of the World Trade Organization, where the city was completely shut down by protesters, derailing the meetings. It happened a few months later at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, and at summits to push the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a deal that would have stretched from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. And this movement was no small thing: by July 2001, roughly 300,000 people were on the streets of Genoa during a G8 meeting.
Unlike today’s hypernationalist right-wing movements that rail against “globalism,” our movement was proudly international and internationalist, using the novelty of a still-young Internet to organize easily across national borders, online and face to face. Finding common ground in how those deals were increasing inequality and looting the public sphere in all our countries, we called for open borders for people, the liberation of medicines, seeds, and crucial technologies from restrictive patent protections, and far more controls over corporations.
At its core, the movement was about deep democracy, from local to global, and it stood in opposition to what we used to call “corporate rule”—a frame more relevant today than ever. Our objection was obviously not to trade; cultures have always traded goods across borders, and always will. We objected to the way transnational institutions were using trade deals to globalize pro-corporate policies that were extremely profitable for a small group of players but which were steadily devouring so much of what used to be public and commonly held: seeds, water rights, public health care, and much more.
One of the early fights that typified what was at stake involved the Bolivian city of Cochabamba and the American corporation Bechtel. As part of the push to privatize the city’s services, Bechtel won a contract to run the local water system. As a result, prices for this most essential of services soared, and it was even deemed illegal to collect rainwater without special permission. Residents of Cochabamba rose up in what became known as “the Water War” and threw Bechtel out of the country. But then Bechtel turned around and sued Bolivia for $50 million in damages and lost revenue. So even when the people reclaimed their democratic rights over this corporation, they were still vulnerable to brutal claims in trade court. Which is why we saw trade policy as such a core fight between democracy and oligarchy.
Anyone who has paid attention during Trump’s first months in office, or seen who he has surrounded himself with, knows that he is not going to reverse these trends, but accelerate them.
One area of concern was how these deals were leading to devastating job losses, leaving behind rust belts from Detroit to Buenos Aires, while companies such as Ford and Toyota looked for ever-cheaper places to produce. But for the most part, our opposition was not grounded in Trump-style protectionism; it was trying to stem the beginning of what already looked like a race to the bottom, a new world order that was negatively impacting workers and the environment in every country. We were arguing for a model of trade that would start with the imperative to protect people and the planet. That was crucial then—it’s urgent now.
The movement was even starting to win. We defeated the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. We brought World Trade Organization negotiations to a standstill. And the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund could no longer speak of “structural adjustment”—meaning forcing neoliberalism on poor countries—in the open.
Looking back, one of the reasons we succeeded was that we stopped fixating on our differences, and came together across sectors and national borders to fight for a common goal. There were plenty of conflicts over tactics, and environmentalists and trade unionists still had large areas of disagreement. In spite of that, however, on the streets of Seattle you had trade unions like the Teamsters marching alongside environmentalists under the banner Teamsters and Turtles: Together at last!
That’s a long way from those trade union leaders outside the White House, cheering on Trump.
So what the hell happened?
The short answer is: shock happened. The September 11 attacks, and the whole era of the so-called War on Terror, pretty much wiped our movement off the map in North America and Europe—an experience that started me off on an exploration of the political uses (and misuses) of crisis that has gripped me ever since.
Of course, the movement never disappeared completely, and many organizations and good people continued to work diligently to raise the alarm about new unfair trade deals. In Latin America, opposition forces came into government in such countries as Bolivia and Ecuador and set up their own “fair trade” networks. But in the Global North, we rapidly ceased to be an unignorable mass movement that changed the conversation in dozens of countries. After September 11, 2001, we suddenly found ourselves under attack from politicians and media commentators equating rowdy anticorporate street demonstrations (and yes, there had been battles with the police and broken store windows) with the deranged forces that had staged the attacks on the World Trade Center. It was a vile comparison, entirely without basis. But it didn’t matter.
Our movement had always been a very big tent—a “movement of movements,” as we called it (a phrase that has come back into the lexicon). But after September 11, large parts of the coalition got spooked by the “with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric. The nonprofits who rely on large foundations feared losing their funding and withdrew, as did some key unions. Almost overnight, people went back to their single-issue silos, and this remarkable (if imperfect) cross-sectoral alliance, which had brought together such a diversity of people under a pro-democracy umbrella, virtually disappeared. This left a vacuum for Trump and far-right parties in Europe to step in, exploit the justified rage at loss of control to unaccountable transnational institutions, direct it toward immigrants and Muslims and anyone else who makes an easy target, and take the project of corporate rule into new and uncharted waters.
Many stayed active in this period and joined other broad coalitions, but by comparison these were thin and tactical: “Defeat Bush,” “Stop the War.” The deeper analysis of the global economic forces we were all up against regardless of which party was in power was largely lost.
This is important to remember because there’s a real risk today of repeating those mistakes—of coming together around lowest-common-denominator demands such as “Impeach Trump” or “Elect Democrats” and, in the process, losing our focus on the conditions and politics that allowed Trump’s rise and are fueling the growth of far-right parties around the world. One thing we know for certain from the Bush years is that saying no is not enough.
I’ll never forget that, just a few days after the September 11 attacks, the National Post—a right-wing paper in Canada—ran a story headlined ANTI-GLOBALIZATION IS SO YESTERDAY. They couldn’t wait to bury our movement. But they were spectacularly wrong—there is nothing “yesterday” about the alarm we raised. The pain and dislocation didn’t go away just because the media decided it was time to talk about terrorism 24/7.
On the contrary, the crises deepened, forcing millions to leave their homes in search of a better life. A 2017 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that Mexico’s poverty rate has risen since the 1994 implementation of NAFTA, with 20 million additional people now living in poverty—a major factor pushing Mexican migration to the United States. Meanwhile, in North America and Europe, white workers grew progressively more pissed off at having their voices ignored. This opened the space for demagogues like Trump to step in and direct workers’ rage away from plutocrats like him, who had profited so lavishly from the outsourcing opportunities enabled by these deals, and at Mexican migrants instead, victims of the same policies that were hollowing out their communities, the very same bad deals.
This is the space the Brexit campaign usurped, under its slogan “Take back control!” And it is the same rage that France’s Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National speaks to when she tells crowds that globalization has meant “manufacturing by slaves for selling to the unemployed.” Around the world, far-right forces are gaining ground by harnessing the power of nostalgic nationalism and anger directed at remote economic bureaucracies—whether Washington, NAFTA, the WTO, or the EU—and mixing it with racism and xenophobia, offering an illusion of control through bashing immigrants, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women.
It’s a toxic combination, and it was an avoidable one. Confronting the cruelties of a system designed by and for the wealthiest interests on earth is terrain that rightly belongs to the Left. But the hard truth is that after September 11, large parts of the progressive side of the political spectrum got spooked, and that left the economic-populist space open to abuse. Politics hates a vacuum; if it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
The good news is that the progressive anti-free-trade coalition has finally started to revive in the past couple of years. In Europe—particularly in Germany, France, and Belgium—there has been a big recent surge of unions and environmentalists coming together to oppose corporate trade deals with the United States and Canada. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, came out powerfully against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, slamming it as “part of a global race to the bottom to boost the profits of large corporations and Wall Street by outsourcing jobs; undercutting worker rights; dismantling labor, environmental, health, food safety and financial laws; and allowing corporations to challenge our laws in international tribunals rather than our own court system.”
If Sanders had run against Trump on that message, he might well have peeled away some of the white and Latino workers who ended up voting Republican in 2016. But Sanders didn’t run against Trump—Hillary Clinton did. And with her long history of both backing and personally negotiating precisely these sorts of deals, she had no credibility when she criticized them on the campaign trail. Whenever she tried, it became one more opportunity to paint her as a typical shifty politician.
Tired of the betrayals, some gave up on centrist parties and voted for self-styled “outsiders” and “insurgents” like Trump. Many more around the world have just given up, period—staying home during elections, disengaging from electoral politics, convinced that the whole system is rigged and is never going to help improve their lives. This phenomenon was most evident in the United States, in the 2016 elections, when despite unprecedented wall-to-wall coverage, despite the presence of a flamboyant and dangerous demagogue in the race, and despite the chance to make history by voting in the first woman president, approximately 90 million eligible voting-age Americans shrugged and decided to stay home instead. Far more would-be voters chose not to vote—roughly 40 percent—than chose to cast a ballot for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, who each got roughly 25 percent of total eligible voters. That is a staggering level of disengagement in a democracy.
Which brings us back to those labor leaders at the White House. Yes, it was a deal with the devil. But the mere fact that these union heads were willing to align themselves with an administration as regressive as Trump’s reflects the systemic neglect of and disdain for workers that has characterized both the Democratic and Republican parties for decades.
Trump’s path to the White House was partially paved by two men who are beloved by many US liberals—Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. That may seem counterintuitive, but bear with me.
Donald Trump stood before the world and proclaimed he had one qualification to be president: I’m rich. To be more specific, he said, “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” He presented his wealth as evidence that he was “very smart,” and indeed superior in every respect. So magical were the powers that flowed from the mere fact of having accumulated this much cash (how much, we don’t know) that it would surely compensate for complete political inexperience or lack of the most basic administrative or historical knowledge. Once in office, he extended this logic to other members of the super-rich club, filling his government with individuals whose sole qualification for public office was their enormous, often inherited wealth.
Above all, Trump extended the equation of wealth with magical powers to members of his own dynastic family, bestowing on son-in-law Jared Kushner (a real estate developer born a multimillionaire) a portfolio so overstuffed with weighty responsibilities it rapidly became a media joke. Tallying up the duties so far—brokering Middle East peace, planning the Mar-a-Lago summit with China, monitoring US activities in Iraq, ordering drone strikes on Yemen, making government run more like a business—New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wondered, “Why don’t we just stitch him a red cape, put him in spandex, affix a stylized ‘S’ to his chest and be done with it? SuperJared has taken flight.”
It would be reassuring if we could pin this billionaire-as-savior complex on Trump’s Twitter-addled brain, or on his advisers at the Heritage Foundation, with their Ayn Randian worship of “free enterprise” and men who build tall things. But the fact is, Trump and Kushner are not the first to imagine that their great wealth endows them with Marvel Comic-like superpowers, nor the first to be encouraged in their delusions.
For two decades now, elite liberals have been looking to the billionaire class to solve the problems we used to address with collective action and a strong public sector—a phenomenon sometimes called “philanthrocapitalism.” Billionaire CEOs and celebrities—Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, and always, for some reason, Bono—are treated less like normal people who are gifted in their fields and happen to be good at making a great deal of money, and more like demigods. Business Insider ran a listicle in 2011 headlined “10 Ways Bill Gates Is Saving the World”—a perfect distillation of the enormous powers and responsibilities being delegated to, and projected upon, this tiny clique and their charitable foundations.
The Gates Foundation alone is worth $40 billion, making it the largest charitable organization in the world. In key sectors including agriculture in Africa, infectious diseases, and the US education system, the foundation’s power rivals that of major United Nations and US government agencies. And yet, despite this unprecedented influence, the foundation’s inner workings are notoriously secretive, with key decisions made by Bill, his wife Melinda, his father William Gates, and fellow multibillionaire Warren Buffett (a nepotistic hiring policy worthy of the Trumps). And it’s worth remembering that Gates was not always seen as a world savior. Indeed, in the 1990s, Gates was widely regarded as a corporate villain, known for exploitative employment practices and for building what looked like a predatory software monopoly. Then, with Flash-like speed, he reinvented himself as a global superhero, one who could single-handedly fix the most intractable of social crises. Never mind whether Gates has any specific expertise in the areas in question, or that many of the Gates Foundation’s silver-bullet fixes have backfired badly.
Gates and his fellow world-saving billionaires are part of what has come to be known as “the Davos class,” named for the annual World Economic Summit held at the top of a mountain in Davos, Switzerland. This is the hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are cozy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. At Davos’s 2017 summit, for example, Shakira spoke about her charitable work on education in Colombia, and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver discussed his plan to fight diabetes and obesity. Gates featured prominently, as always, announcing with other partners a new $460-million fund to fight the spread of infectious disease.
The power of the Davos class exploded in the 1990s, with US president Bill Clinton and UK prime minister Tony Blair as charter members. Once out of office, both Blair and Clinton continued their involvement. The Clinton Foundation established the annual Clinton Global Initiative, a kind of “Davos on the Hudson” featuring a continuous parade of oligarchs who, rather than pay their taxes at a fair rate, publicly shared their plans to fix the world out of the goodness of their hearts.
For many, the Clinton Foundation was the embodiment of the public merger of the Democratic Party—the traditional party of workers and unions—with the wealthiest interests in the world. Its mission can be summarized like this: there is now so much private wealth sloshing around our planet that every single problem on earth, no matter how large, can be solved by convincing the ultrarich to do the right things with their loose change. Naturally, the people to convince them to do these fine things were the Clintons, the ultimate relationship brokers and deal makers, with the help of an entourage of A-list celebrities.
For those involved, it no doubt seemed righteous. And yet for multitudes around the world, the whole Davos class came to symbolize the idea that success was a party to which they were not invited, and they knew in their hearts that this rising wealth and power was somehow connected to their growing debts and powerlessness, and the increasing precariousness of their children’s futures. The fact that politicians who promised to protect working people’s interests were so entangled with the Davos class only increased the rage. The debate over Barack Obama accepting $400,000 for a speech to a Wall Street audience needs to be understood in this context.
Trump didn’t run with the Davos crowd (indeed, he tapped into the rage against it). And many from that glamorous, liberal-leaning world are horrified by the Trump presidency. Yet the precedents set by mountaintop do-gooderism are part of the reason it became fathomable for Trump to run in the first place, and for millions of Americans to vote to hand over their government directly to a man whose sole qualification for the job was his wealth. This is not just about those who cast ballots for Trump. A great many of us who would never have voted for him have grown numbly accustomed to the notion that the mere fact of an individual having a large bank account (or many bank accounts, lots of them hidden offshore) somehow means they have bottomless expertise. Indeed, governments of all stripes have been happy to hand over more and more of what used to be seen as public policy challenges to a tiny group of very high-net-worth individuals.
Trump’s assertion that he knows how to fix America because he’s rich is nothing more than an uncouth, vulgar echo of a dangerous idea we have been hearing for years: that Bill Gates can fix Africa. Or that Richard Branson and Michael Bloomberg can solve climate change.
The divide between the Davos class and everyone else has been widening since the 1980s. But for a lot of people, the breaking point came with the 2008 financial crisis.
After forcing decades of grinding austerity on people, Treasury secretaries and finance ministers and chancellors of the exchequer suddenly found trillions of dollars to rescue the banks; people witnessed their governments printing vast sums of money. They had given up so much—pensions, wages, decent schools—when in fact, contrary to what Margaret Thatcher claimed, there were alternatives. All of a sudden it turned out that governments can do all kinds of things to interfere in the market, and have seemingly unlimited resources with which to help you out if only you are rich enough. At that moment, everyone on earth saw that they had been lied to.
The implications of this unmasking are still reverberating. The anger that is roiling electorates, on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum, is not only about what’s been lost. It’s also about the injustice of it all, knowing that the wrenching losses of our era are not being shared, that the Davos class were never really looking after those at the bottom of the mountain.
Which means that defeating the rising pseudo-populist Right is not just a matter of electoral strategy, not just about finding the right candidates. It’s about being willing to engage in a battle of ideas—during and, more importantly, between elections—that will take on the corrosive, and deeply bipartisan, wealth-worshiping worldview that created the backlash in the first place.
Unless progressives learn to speak to the legitimate rage at the grotesque levels of inequality that exist right now, the Right is going to keep winning. There is no superhero enlightened billionaire coming to save us from the villains in power. Not Oprah, not Zuckerberg, and not Elon Musk.
We’re going to have to save ourselves, by coming together as never before. And in 2016 we caught a glimpse of that potential.