CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS (SEPTEMBER 9, 2016)
Let’s talk about presidential elections. What’s the earliest one you remember?
I remember 1936, when I was eight. The election was discussed a lot in school. In fact, I remember having big arguments with a classmate. He was in favor of Alf Landon and Frank Knox, the vice presidential candidate; his favorite slogan was “Landon Knox Out Roosevelt.” In our circles, it was basically a hundred percent for FDR.
A couple of years ago, I was talking to an old friend, roughly my age, about family doctors. I couldn’t remember our family doctor’s name; the only name coming to my mind was “Roosevelt.” After a while, I figured out why. Whenever my little brother had a cold, my mother assumed he was dying, and would call the doctor. Doctors used to come to the house in those days, and as soon as our doctor walked in, the whole mood would change. He had a deep, mellifluous voice and an air of authority. It’s all under control, everything’s fine. My mother would immediately feel better.
Roosevelt used to give Fireside Chats on the radio, I think on Friday evenings. My mother was extremely nervous about everything. Of course, there was plenty to be nervous about—Hitler, the war. But as soon as Roosevelt started talking, with that quiet, serious voice of his, everything would calm down, very much like with the doctor. Which is why when I was thinking back to our doctor, Roosevelt came to mind. I still can’t remember what his actual name was.
Do you recall a political period in which there was as much vitriol and recrimination, rancor, and rage as there is today?
The viciousness and vitriol of the personal attacks in some of this country’s earliest elections are pretty shocking. But there’s been nothing like what we have today. The current campaign is absolutely astonishing, partly because the major issues that humans face right now are simply not discussed. In the Republican primary, just about every single candidate denied anthropogenic climate warming—simply denied it, even though the facts are overwhelmingly clear. There was only one exception, John Kasich. He admitted that it’s happening but said we shouldn’t do anything about it, which is even worse.1
On nuclear war, too, there was virtually no discussion, just a few side comments here and there, usually framed in terms of Russian aggression and how we should respond to it. The fact that this is happening in the most powerful country in world history—by comparative standards, an educated, privileged country—is just incredible. I don’t know how to even comment on the total denial of matters of such immense significance.
And the denial is not just abstract but is having real consequences. So, for example, the Paris climate negotiations, COP 21, though not as strong as they should be, were at least a step in the right direction, perhaps the basis for further action in the future. But the summit did not establish a treaty with verifiable goals—only an informal agreement. The reason was very clear: a treaty couldn’t get through the Republican Congress. So here you have a political organization that is essentially saying, “Let’s race to the precipice as fast as possible.”
Donald Trump is being condemned for all sorts of things by liberal commentators, but not for the most important thing: his policies on the climate. He’s calling for more fossil fuels, more coal plants, ending EPA regulations, possibly getting rid of the EPA altogether. He wants to dismantle the Paris agreements and stop giving support to developing countries for addressing climate change. That really is saying, “Let’s race to the precipice.” It’s very serious. And the precipice is not far off. We’re already close to—if not past—the limits that were proposed in the Paris discussions, a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade.
What is Trump saying that some people are receptive to? The standard explanation is that good-paying blue-collar jobs have disappeared, leaving a Rust Belt and angry workers in their wake.
There’s surely something to that. The white working class has indeed been pretty much abandoned. The Democrats gave up on white workers forty years ago. They don’t offer them anything. The Republicans offer them even less. Or, rather, what they, including Trump, offer them is a punch in the nose. The health care system is scandalous? Let’s make it worse. Trump’s proposed budget, which is basically Paul Ryan’s, is devastating for working people. There’s increased spending on the military and reduced taxes on the rich. There’s essentially nothing left for any moderately constructive part of the government.
But the Republicans do have a rhetorical style that makes it sound as if they’re working for working people. That’s the rhetoric: “We’re for you.” It’s not true. But what is true is that the white working class feels that is everyone is against them. Nothing has been offered to them by either political party.
It’s also true that close, careful analyses of Trump supporters have shown a close correlation with authoritarian personalities—patriarchal, authoritarian, racist, ultranationalist, and so on.2 That’s significant as well.
But I wouldn’t discount the idea that the white working class is just extremely angry, and for good reason. They’ve been cast to the winds. Real wages are roughly what they were in the 1960s—and have actually declined since the latest recession.3 Meanwhile, there’s enormous wealth, which has become very narrowly concentrated and very visible. Why shouldn’t they be angry? The solutions proposed by Trump will make the problems worse, but that’s a different issue.
I’m hesitant to use the word “fascist,” because it’s bandied about quite promiscuously, but there’s a whiff of fascism in the air. Is there any credence to the notion that there are fascistic tendencies in Trump’s campaign?
Something is coming out in the Trump campaign, but I think to call Trump a fascist is highly misleading. It attributes too much to him. I don’t think he has any ideology, or pretty much anything except “Give me what I want, and somehow I’ll do something for you. I’ll make America great again.” For example, he was asked in a debate what he would do about ISIS, and his answer was something like: Well, first I’m going to make America great again. And I’m going to call the generals, and they’re going to give me a plan. And I have my plan, and I’ll decide which plan is best, and then we’ll go ahead and get rid of them. But first I’ll make America great again.4 Whatever that means, it’s not fascism. It doesn’t rise to that level. There’s no plausible political category that it belongs to.
That slogan, “Make America great again,” taps into a nostalgia for an imagined past, an America that never really existed.
Not entirely imagined. There was a time when the United States had a lot more clout on the international scene than it has today. As I’ve said, in the period right after the Second World War, the United States had overwhelming power. The United Nations was a tool in the hands of the U.S., a battering ram against Russia. That’s all over.
Or take the International Monetary Fund, which is pretty much run by the U.S. Treasury. The IMF defers to the Europeans in dealing with Europe, but where the rest of the world is concerned, it also functioned as a tool of U.S. dominance. That, too, has changed radically since the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, when Asian countries have been refusing to accept IMF loans. And in the current millennium, Latin American countries have simply kicked out the IMF. They don’t take IMF loans, with all their conditions. This is a radical shift, and another sign of the decline of U.S. power worldwide. It’s not something that’s in the headlines, but it’s very significant. The power of the U.S. to dominate the world has declined.
On the other hand, if you look at U.S. corporations, their ownership of the world has remained very stable. Take your iPhone. Apple has a Taiwanese corporation, Foxconn, which runs huge assembly plants in China and employs Chinese workers in miserable conditions. The value added in China to the iPhone is very slight. Almost all the profit goes back to Apple and its subsidiaries. That means a large part of the gross domestic product of China is actually owned by Apple and other U.S. corporations. Even though U.S. power to run the world has declined, U.S. corporate power is still extraordinary.
And, of course, there’s another respect in which there’s some truth to the nostalgia. The 1950s and 1960s saw the highest growth rate in U.S. history. There was plenty of turmoil, conflict, and so on, but nevertheless there was a sense that the country was growing and developing. Young people, college students, could say, “I’m going to have a decent future.” That’s pretty much gone. There’s a sense of hopelessness, of decline, a sense that we’ve reached our peak and the current generation won’t have a better life than their parents. That kind of feeling is very widespread—and there is some reality to it. So the talk about “making America great again” is not totally empty.
Thomas Frank, who wrote What’s the Matter with Kansas?—in which he explained how working-class people actually vote against their own economic interests—told me recently that he’s concerned that there’s going to be a “smooth-talking” Trump the next time around, one who “will not piss people off.”5 He regards that as an ominous prospect.
We already have him. His name is Paul Ryan. I think he is more dangerous than Trump because he comes across as serious, thoughtful, with numbers and spreadsheets. But when you take a look at his programs, they’re devastating. And, yes, he may run for president. On the other hand, four years of Trump could very well bring us to a tipping point on climate change, which would render other questions moot. That sounds apocalyptic, but if you take a look at the actual developments today and Trump’s policies, assuming he implements them, it’s a very dangerous mixture.
Hillary Clinton’s comments at the American Legion National Convention in Cincinnati were saturated not just with boilerplate rhetoric but with constant use of the words “exceptional” and “exceptionalism.” America is “the indispensable nation,” she said.6 What do you think about Hillary Clinton?
Who doesn’t use that terminology? It’s absolutely standard in liberal Democratic rhetoric. There’s simply no deviation from it. “The indispensable nation” phrase comes from Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton.7 Look at what are called the liberal intellectual journals. Samantha Power, writing in the New York Review of Books, starts by favorably quoting Henry Kissinger, his usual rhetoric.8 But he’s not quite correct, she says, because he doesn’t recognize how important it is for us to enlist other countries in our marvelous efforts to do good all over the world. You find this everywhere.
Take, say, the simple word “aggression.” Nobody has any hesitation in describing Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Crimea or his actions in eastern Ukraine as aggression. That’s aggression, no qualification. But have you ever heard the term used for the U.S. invasion of Iraq? Ever? Could any member of the articulate classes use that phrase in the mainstream? It’s virtually inconceivable.
In fact, let’s look again at Crimea. Whatever you think about it—the takeover was indeed an illegal act—does the United States have a better claim to Guantánamo Bay than Russia has to Crimea? No. We have much less of a claim. We took it at gunpoint over a century ago; it has no historical connections to the United States. Then we refused to give it back, even though Cuba, once it achieved independence from the United States, immediately demanded it back.
There’s absolutely no justification for this. The United States is holding Guantánamo Bay only to impede and undermine Cuba’s development. It’s a major port. It’s also the site of the worst human rights abuses in Cuba by far—in fact, the worst in the whole hemisphere, except maybe for Colombia. Is it aggression? Is that even a question?
The inability to face elementary facts is overwhelmingly true of the liberal, intellectual, articulate sectors of the population that are involved in commentary and discussion. And the rhetoric you quote from Clinton comes straight out of that.
In a recent Gallup poll, more than three-fourths of respondents said the United States is “on the wrong track.”9 Both Trump and Clinton are deeply unpopular. They’re regarded as untrustworthy and dishonest.10 Have you ever seen that before in a presidential campaign?
I have never seen anything quite like this, but it’s an instance of something much broader. For several decades now, attitudes toward a number of key institutions have become very negative. Support for Congress has sometimes been down to literally single digits.11 Banks are hated, corporations are hated. The Federal Reserve, which people don’t know anything about, is hated. The government, of course, is hated. About the only institution that gets consistently pretty high ratings is the military, for other, separate reasons.
I think the distaste for the candidates is just a reflection of a pervasive malaise, a sense that everything is going wrong. And that’s been increasing for quite a few years. There are polls going back decades showing that some 70 percent of the population believes that the government doesn’t work for the people but, rather, is “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.”12
It’s that feeling that Trump-style rhetoric about making America great again is attempting to appeal to. Everything’s going wrong, everyone in the world is pushing us around, nobody is listening to us. Trump is now being violently denounced for saying that Putin is a stronger leader than Obama, because Putin gets what he wants and we don’t.13 But that’s a feeling that people definitely have. Why isn’t everyone in the Middle East doing what we want them to do? Why is China building bases in the South China Sea when we don’t want them to?
Note, all of this assumes that the world is supposed to be ours: the South China Sea is supposed to be an American lake, the countries on the Russian border are ours to control. Of course, we would never accept, say, Russian forces in Mexico or Chinese aircraft carriers off the coast of California. The world is supposed to be ours, but people aren’t listening. Why? What’s happening? We’ve got to make America great again. All of this is part of the sense that we’re going in the wrong direction.
At the same time, parents can see that their children do not have the kind of future that they themselves aspired to. In fact, social mobility in the United States, contrary to the Horatio Alger myth, is quite low compared to other developed societies.14
And, of course, there’s tremendous poverty. Just travel around Boston. It looks like it’s collapsing. I can remember the first time I went to Europe, in the early 1950s, when Europe was still recovering from the war. When you came back home, it was like returning to some kind of paradise as compared with Europe. Now it’s the other way around. If you go to a poor country, like, say, Portugal, and come back here, it looks like you’re returning to wreckage. The infrastructure is collapsing, the roads don’t work, the bridges are falling, we don’t have a health care system, schools are declining.
Back in the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about “private affluence and public squalor.”15 But now it’s become much more dramatic. Private affluence for very narrow sectors has gone through the roof—and public squalor is almost everywhere you look. People can see that. They can see their children loaded down with school debt, lacking good opportunities. It’s easy to blame foreigners, immigrants, people who are worse off than you are. That’s Trump’s line, his standard misdirection. But the background phenomena are real.
Student debt is at $1.3 trillion.16 I talked to a couple of young people in Boulder, Colorado. One is $40,000 in debt, the other one $100,000 in debt.
Furthermore, student debt is designed so you can’t get rid of it. You can’t declare bankruptcy the way a business can, the way Trump has done over and over again, and then start over—the debt is with you forever. Even your Social Security can be garnished by the government to pay it. So it’s a permanent burden—and a very strong disciplinary force. It means your options are limited.
In the 1960s, there was a general feeling of, Well, I can take off a couple of years and become an activist. Then I’ll go back and pick up my life. That has changed. Now you’re trapped. If you try to go back, you won’t be able to. You don’t have the same choices available to you. You’ve got to subordinate yourself to power.
What do you think of the Our Revolution organization formed in the wake of Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the Democratic primaries?
Personally, I would prefer that he drop the word “revolution,” because what he’s proposing are mildly reformist initiatives. Which is not to say they’re bad. We could use mildly reformist initiatives, but let’s not give people the illusion that there’s some dramatic change taking place. Sanders’s proposals, which I favor, are basically a version of New Deal liberalism. They would not have surprised somebody like Dwight Eisenhower, who famously said that anyone who doesn’t accept the New Deal doesn’t belong in American politics.17 That was a long time ago, and it’s significant that in today’s context Sanders is seen as so extreme. His proposals don’t challenge or question the fundamental system of capitalist authoritarianism. That’s not even under discussion, obviously. What he proposes is a good basis for doing better, but it’s not a revolution.
There are now a number of popular movements developing out of the Sanders campaign, like the Brand New Congress group, which look quite sensible. They’re also reformist, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
Can you talk about what’s being called lesser-evil voting or strategic voting? How do you respond to people who say, “I want to vote my conscience”? Or, conversely, “Bring it on. I’m going to vote for Trump, because that will break the system and speed up the revolution”?
Lesser-evil voting should be simply called elementary rationality and elementary morality. If you live in a swing state, you have several choices. One choice is to vote for Trump because you honestly think he’s better. Fine, nothing strategic there. Another possibility is to vote for Clinton because you think she’s genuinely better or because you find Trump extremely dangerous. A third choice is to abstain or to vote for, say, Jill Stein, which works out to much the same thing. It’s basic arithmetic: if you put one less vote in the Clinton column, you’re making it easier for Trump to win. That’s just a matter of numbers. If you think you’re voting your conscience when you vote for Jill Stein, what you’re saying is “My conscience prefers Trump.”
It’s the same with lesser-evil voting in general. The question about voting your conscience is, Do you care about what happens to the world or do you really only care about what you feel? If you only care about what you feel, you don’t have any conscience, you’re not a moral agent at all. So stop talking about conscience. If you care about the effect on others, then you’ll ask, Well, what are the consequences of subtracting a vote from the only person who can plausibly beat Trump in this election? Again, it’s simple arithmetic, elementary rationality.
Frankly, I think this entire discussion should take maybe five minutes of our time, period. If you think it through, the facts are obvious. After that, go on with the things that matter: activism, organizing, popular movements. That’s what people should be engaged in. Maybe electoral work at lower levels, school boards, activism on the environment, and so on. That’s what should be taking our time.
The fact that there’s even discussion about this is an indication of how the Left is trapped by the propaganda system. We have an enormous propaganda system that tries to focus people’s attention and energy on the quadrennial extravaganza. You shouldn’t fall for that. The presidential campaign is not insignificant. But it’s not the main story.
As to the idea of “bring it on”—let’s heighten the contradictions—we’ve lived through that. The German Communist Party in 1932 was one example.
They voted for Hitler?
They said, Well, there is no difference between the Social Democrats and the Nazis, so let’s just bring on the Nazis and we’ll have a revolution. Yeah, there was a revolution, but not the one they were talking about.
The United States is not in a revolutionary situation by any means. And if you want it to get there, you’re going to have to build the popular base for it. If you take the word “revolution” seriously, if you want to get rid of the capitalist system altogether, what you have to do is press the options within the system as far as you can. If the public agrees that it wants to go further, and the resistance of the system is too strong, then you have a revolution. But not before, not just from a small sect saying, “Let’s go break windows in the banks.”
What do you think about the Brexit vote and the rise of right-wing political parties in Europe?
First of all, it’s not very clear that Brexit will be implemented. There are lots of possible arrangements that might be worked out. So I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that Britain will literally be out of the European Union. It may be in some respects, not in others.
There is a feeling in England, including on the British left, that Brexit will free them from the reactionary policies of the European Union, but that’s misleading. For one thing, Britain has been a sponsor of those policies. So it’s not that the European Union is imposing them on England. England has been supporting them and advancing them. Furthermore, what’s been happening in England, from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair to David Cameron, is not an effect of the European Union, it’s internal. So separating themselves from the European Union and the Brussels bureaucracy is not any kind of panacea for their problems. In fact, it could very well make them worse. It will weaken England and could leave it, even more than it is now, under U.S. influence.
The rise of right-wing parties is scary. Norbert Hofer, virtually a neo-Nazi figure, came very close to the presidency in Austria in 2016.18 A large part of the reason is anti-immigrant feeling. In Denmark, you also see anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim feeling against the tiny fraction of the population who are not blond and blue-eyed.
Europe has always been much more racist than the United States, in my opinion. The racism hasn’t been as visible because the populations have been fairly homogeneous. But as soon as the homogeneity begins to change, even slightly, the racism comes out into the open.
Take France, for example. The North African population there lives under awful conditions. They’re a very small percentage of the total population, yet around 60 or 70 percent of the incarcerated in France are Muslim, mostly from North Africa.19
The rise of right-wing parties is largely a result of the willingness of the centrist parties, including the social democrats, to tolerate economic and social policies that are highly destructive. The austerity policies imposed by the “troika”—the European Commission, the IMF, and the European Central Bank—have been extremely detrimental. And there’s good evidence that they were deliberately designed to undermine the welfare state.20 As I’ve said, the purpose of austerity was not economic development—in fact, austerity is very harmful to that. The goal was to dismantle welfare state programs: pensions, decent working conditions, regulations about labor rights, and so on.
And you see the right-wing backlash as a result?
Yes. But you have to trace that back to the willingness of the moderate and moderate-left parties to accept those policies.