Richard D. Wolff — The Political Economy of Obama/Trump

US capitalism is again careening down blind alleys. Earlier it had crashed into the Great Depression from 1929 to 1933 before lurching into the New Deal. After 1945 it concentrated on rolling back the New Deal until it turned sharply to neoliberalism and “globalism” in the 1970s. That provided the comforting illusion of a few decades of “prosperous normalcy.” When the second major crash in 75 years hit in 2008, it exposed the debt-dependent reality of those decades. It also sent capitalism careening through a new depression followed by a devastating austerity regime. The economic careening provokes the political: its establishment center cannot hold....

Wolff analyzes what happened and where the US is going.

In this new period, the major corporations, the top 1% they enrich, and the top 10 % of managers and professionals they employ will no longer provide the rest of us anywhere near the number of well-paid jobs and generous government policies of the post-1945 period. Given this reality for them, they could hypothetically reduce, more or less equally across the board, the jobs, incomes, and public services available to the bottom 90 % of the US population. But at least in the short run, this is politically too dangerous.

The only other option they see is to divide the bottom 90% into two groups. For the favored one, jobs, incomes, and standards of living will be only marginally reduced or perhaps, if possible, marginally improved. For the other group, their economic situation will be savaged, reduced to conditions formerly associated with seriously underdeveloped parts of the planet. The time has thus arrived in the US for a major struggle – economically, politically, and ideologically – over just who will be in those two groups....

US capitalism used up the Obama diversion to get through most of the first decade after the 2008 crash. It is fast using up the Trump diversion. The social groups kept from system critique by Obama have become noticeably more interested in it since he departed the White House. Trump only accelerates that process. Meanwhile, Trump’s followers keep waiting for the promised protection from decline, but it does not appear. They get lots of symbolism but little substance. He and they blame their usual others, but their frustrations may soon open them too to system critiques. Meanwhile, those critiques proliferate and mature across the society.

There are essentially four critiques, two on the right and two on the left — on the right, the alt right and conservative critiques, and on the left, the liberal and progressive critiques. The conservative and liberal critiques are basically mainstream and pundit-led, whereas the alt right and progressive critiques are radical and more grassroots.

Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in the US at present and Donald Trump the least popular according to the latest Harvard-Harris poll, conducted between October 14 and October 18. The same time, the liberal faction of the Democratic Party is doing its best to exclude progressives.

Steve Bannon has declared war on the GOP establishment, promising a fight at the primaries.

"It's not my war, this is our war and y'all didn't start it, the establishment started it," Bannon said. He also said, "Right now, it's a season of war against a GOP establishment."

Political foment over what is largely a distributional problem.

Defend Democracy Press
The Political Economy of Obama/Trump

Richard D. Wolff | American Marxian economist, Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and now Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School

See also

For insight in this we can turn to the sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose famous book The Power Elite was published the same year as Whyte’s The Organization Man.Mills’s work narrows the world’s ruling bureaucracies to government, military and top economic corporations. Those who make their careers within these entities, especially the military and the government, are ideologically conditioned to identify their well-being with the specific goals of their chosen organizations. That means they must bind themselves not only to the goals, but also to the ethics of their workplace.

Those who balk are eventually punished and cast out of the organizations. Those who guide these organizations, and essentially decide how rules and ethics will be interpreted and applied, are Mills’s “power elite.”...

Running for and holding office in countries like the United States and Canada often requires one to “take the vows of organization life.” Does this support democracy or erode it? Here is one prescient answer: the way we have structured our party politics has given us “an appalling political system which is a step-by-step denial of democracy and a solid foundation for a ‘soft’ dictatorship.”

Those are the words of the late Rafe Mair, a Canadian politician, broadcaster, author and a good friend of this writer. Rafe spent years in Canadian politics, particularly in his home province of British Columbia, and his experience led him to the conclusion expressed above. How does this translate into practice?...

Consortium News
The Political Organization Men

Lawrence Davidson | professor emeritus of history at West Chester University in Pennsylvania