Chaotic neutral, p.28
Chaotic Neutral, page 28
Only the factory closures and economic desolation part of the prophecies materialized. The part where Decatur, Illinois,iii and Kokomo, Indiana, and Saginaw, Michigan, replaced manufacturing jobs with something better did not. And by 2016 a large portion of the country was sick of hearing that the economic status quo was somehow going to work out for them, that the next scheme or public-private partnership was the one that would do the trick. Like John Kerry in 2004, Al Gore in 2000, and Walter Mondale in 1984, Hillary Clinton in 2016 represented that status quo. She had to; her candidacy made no sense in any other context.
Clearly, Donald Trump offered these voters no economic salvation either. His “populism” was at best a thin veneer over his demagoguery and sincere hatred of his fellow elites.2iv But Trump offered them something the Clinton campaign could not offer: a dyspeptic volcano to rally around, constant reminders that they’re being screwed, and a sense that the we of white, struggling America is special and important and deserves to rule the country—in their view, their country. Trump’s sole moment of actual wisdom during the campaign was to pound on globalization and free trade—two issues Donald Trump would do nothing whatsoever to fix, of course—as the source of tremendous anger among the working class. “These trade deals are all bad!” hit a nerve because—stay with me—for so much of America those deals have been very bad. Democrats and Republicans joined hands in 1992 and declared free trade both inevitable and good, while on the ground, it has been an unmitigated disaster for many people and places. How could Hillary Clinton possibly fight back? She could either alienate voters by arguing “free trade is good, don’t you people understand?” or she could admit that her predecessors, including free trade champion Bill Clinton, had screwed up catastrophically.
Absent the desire or ability to craft an appealing economic message rooted in populism, the Clinton campaign competed on competence (like Michael Dukakis did in 1988 and Jimmy Carter before him), on the ability to manage a system that it viewed as working pretty well. The emphasis was on personal virtue and contrasts. Hillary is qualified; Donald is not. Hillary is a good person; Trump, a bad one. Hillary knows how to run things; Donnie will make a mess of it. All of these statements were plausible. None were persuasive to voters desperate for someone to be on their side or, in Trump’s case, to pretend to be. Never did it occur to Democratic big brains that everything that made Hillary Clinton a slam-dunk choice among the liberal base made her unappealing to voters outside it. The dominant strategy for selling Clinton to anyone other than MSNBC addicts and Democratic consultants boiled down to pointing at her curriculum vitae and reminding everyone that Trump could be thrown further than he could be trusted or believed.
Mistakes of arrogance, cynicism, and the misguided belief that voters thought the America of 2016 was a pretty great place abounded for the Clinton camp. We were told to take the high road, while the GOP went low (and got everything they wanted). We heard that we should be grateful for the opportunity to vote for such a great candidate—the most qualified ever! We saw a campaign confident that it would win where it eventually lost, and a candidate who deferred on making an emotional appeal to struggling Americans and assumed the support of more successful ones was in the bag.
Critics of modern liberalism right and left saw—without straining—a Hillary Clinton candidacy that crystallized everything smug and unlikeable about the whole ideology. Her most genuine moment of passion in the campaign was a spontaneous onstage pledge to never, ever support single-payer health care. During the primaries she asked an audience: “Not everything is about an economic theory, right? If we broke up the big banks tomorrow—and I will, if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will—would that end racism?”
That quote is worth lingering on. It is commonly cited without the middle clause (“and I will…”), although nobody sentient during 2009 and 2010 believed the threat anyway—if not during the Great Recession, then when? But not only is the quote a cynical straw man (why would that be an either-or?), it is demonstrably flawed logic. Much of systemic racism in the United States is in fact rooted in discrimination in the financial industry. This is uncontroversial. Not only is it bizarre to argue that a presidential candidate can fix racism more easily than she can regulate the financial industry—the powers of government are in fact designed to do the latter but not the former—but it also badly misrepresents the role of that industry in instituting and perpetuating racial inequality. It suggested that the Democratic Party would seek any reason, give any excuse, to avoid confronting an economic system that so many people felt, with justification, was rigged against them and in favor of elites.
Well-off liberals hear this stuff—take the high road, everything’s fine, voters are the problem—and nod. This speaks to them. To anyone else it sounds like a tin-eared alien reading conservative talking points reworked to appeal to nonconservatives. Expecting the president to create a more active regulatory state (for example, by using the Justice Department to pursue antimonopoly action and crack down on financial crime) is Green Lantern magical thinking, and yet making economic reform and rebuilding the regulatory capacity of the state conditional on (somehow) ending racism is a more realistic alternative. In the end, it drove too many key voting blocs away. The story of 2016 was not the triumph of conservatism but the monumental fiasco of liberalism. Black and Hispanic voters—who, contrary to white Bernie Bro stereotypes, constituted some of Clinton’s most vocal critics throughout 20163—turned out in lower numbers and were less supportive compared to Obama’s performance in 2012. Clinton underperformed Obama 2012 among voters under thirty, too.4
That is the lesson worth learning from 2016: that the centrist, neoliberal economic worldview that favors a winners-and-losers economy is unpopular outside successful, highly educated, professional liberals. It is at its least likeable when liberals couch their defenses of the economic status quo in insincere social justice language,v what Daniel Denvir called “peak neoliberalism, where a distorted version of identity politics is used to defend an oligarchy and a national security state, celebrating diversity in the management of exploitation and warfare.”5 It’s not as if the 2016 version of the Democratic Party was doing a lot to address structural inequality based on race. Had that been undertaken more aggressively from 2009 to 2017, Clinton’s base of support may have been stronger and her narrow loss instead a narrow win.
Some voters do hold racist beliefs, yet Barack Obama won twice with the same electorate. Sexism? Obviously pervasive and widespread.6 Yet replacing Hillary Clinton with Joe Biden yielded only a small improvement—thankfully, enough to give Trump the boot—in 2020 despite the huge benefit accruing to Biden from an electorate exhausted by four grueling years of Trump’s daily horror show. Whatever allowed Biden to improve incrementally upon the Clinton ’16 performance to win—his gender, prevailing anti-Trump sentiment, his successful imaging as a safe moderate—it left untouched the underlying problem that the ideology for which Clinton carried the torch simply isn’t very popular. Robert Reich, a cabinet secretary under Bill Clinton and once a firm believer in the New Democrat way, was among the first prominent party members to see through the haze: “The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests. This must change. The election of 2016 has repudiated it.”7
Much has also been made of the bizarrely inept Clinton campaign strategy devised by the best professionals money could buy, but the campaign’s mistakes can be overstated. For example, “Why didn’t Hillary campaign in Wisconsin?” has become a trope, but everything we know about campaign effects suggests it is unlikely that more (or any!) visits to Wisconsin or Michigan would have impacted the outcome.8 Huge resources devoted to Pennsylvania, for example, included regular visits that did Clinton little good there. The problem reflected in the lack of visits was that the campaign simply assumed it would win such midwestern states even when its own internal data said otherwise. It devoted resources on the ground in those places almost exclusively to targeting Republicans it planned to peel away from Trump. “Only in the last two weeks,” a labor organizer in Ohio reported, “did the Democratic Party outreach effort really switch back to traditional Democratic voters.”9 Oops. The campaign bought whole hog into the “demographics are destiny” theory (more on that shortly) and assumed, crucially, not only that it would win the Hispanic and Black vote (true!) but that turnout among those voters would be robust (false!). Again, the signs were there well before Election Day.10 By mid-October 2016, with Trump persistently, worryingly close in many state-level polls, prominent Black Democrats, including House Whip Jim Clyburn and G. K. Butterfield of the Congressional Black Caucus, were openly expressing worry that the Clinton campaign’s strategy to turn out Black voters was a disaster.11
It was no surprise, then, when Black turnout fell and hurt Clinton. Who was responsible for ensuring that this essential Democratic voting bloc was primed and ready to vote in November? How did they fail? Rather than asking those questions, Democrats prefer to hand-wave this away to voter suppression. Republican voter suppression efforts are very real, but clearly they alone cannot explain 2016. Outcomes in 2018, 2020, and especially the 2020 Senate races in the GOP voter suppression mecca of Georgia undermine the idea that in 2016 the obstacles represented by voter suppression were insuperable.12 More plausibly, either the Clinton campaign failed to offer Black voters something that secured their support or did so but failed to effectively communicate it. Alternatively, some Black voters may have become discouraged after the Obama administration fell short of expectations. Finally, it could be the case that the campaign team responsible for ensuring the Democratic base turned out did not do its job.
Two things can be true. One is that racism and sexism were clearly used by the Trump campaign and were, for the people who voted for Trump, part of his appeal.vi Another is that Trump won the election narrowly in a handful of states that “share certain characteristics in common, including specialization in manufacturing, slow population growth, a common pattern with regards to Hispanic population change, and higher-than-average percentages of non-college-educated whites.”13 And in all those places, a disproportionate number of people who voted twice for Barack Obama voted for Donald Trump. Clearly, there are social and economic factors, such as the statistically aberrant appeal of Trump in so-called landscapes of despair wracked by unemployment, drug addiction, poor health, and poverty, that broad-brush conclusions about racist and sexist voters obliterate.14 We must digest the possibility that Trump’s very narrow win is better explained by a small group of voters in key places, electorally, who were furious with the establishment—which included Hillary Clinton, in their view—and despairing or mad enough to vote for a vulgar cretin who seemed to hate the powers that be as much as they did.
“Republicans are awful” and “Look at how bad Trump is” were not enough in 2016, were barely enough in 2020, and will not be enough for long. Competing with the right to appeal to latent nativist, xenophobic, misogynist, or racist proclivities in the electorate is wrong, intellectually, ethically, and politically—a complete nonstarter. That leaves two options: be a permanent minority party or come up with a political and economic worldview that appeals to a wide enough coalition of working-class voters and professional-class liberals to prevent a repeat of 2016 and return to the days when Democrats could claim with legitimacy to be “the party of the people,” fighting power rather than aligning with it and singing its praises.
If 2016 did not make that clear, I don’t want to live through whatever will.
THE CHECKLIST
While researching this book, I read (or re-read) most of the published academic papers in political science specifically about the 2016 presidential election. As researchers are wont to do for practical reasons, they focus on what is measurable and quantifiable, using tools like surveys and demographic data. It was quickly apparent that the story liberals were coalescing around after the shocking loss—that voters were the problem—seemed to have some evidence to support it. Voters who express racist and sexist beliefs preferred Trump. A paper by a major scholar grabbed headlines by concluding that status threat—fear of someone taking one’s place in the social pecking order—drove Trump voters, while economic concerns (endlessly parodied since 2016 as economic anxiety) did not.15 Did that fit the Democratic zeitgeist of early 2017 or what? Republican culture wars and white nationalist revanchism explained everything.
A meta-analysis that replicated my own unscientific review of published work on 2016 found that the studies focused almost exclusively on vote choice and survey data.16 In short, the research correlated individuals’ responses to various questions with their stated vote choices. This is an effective way to match beliefs and votes—x percent of z voters who prefer y chose Clinton. This is useful and it tells us something. What it does not do is account for the changing electorate.17 In fact, when lower turnout in 2016 and decreasing racial hostility among white survey takers is factored in,18 Donald Trump received fewer votes from whites with high levels of racial resentment than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Racists and sexists voted for Trump on balance,19 but such voters always vote for Republicans on balance. They did in 2012 and once again in 2020. They will in 2024. That sexists and racists prefer the Neanderthalvii conservative worldview is not breaking news.
That “status threat, not economic hardship” paper? A subsequent analysis found considerable evidence to undermine the interpretation of the data.viii The much-ridiculed economic anxiety was no less a motivator of vote choice than status threat.20 This is not uncommon in academia, where the first paper on a topic is rarely definitive. No malice or deception was intended by the authors of the first study. They simply produced results that happened to align closely with what political elites wanted to hear: Clinton was good, but voters are dumb and racist and hate women and so they flocked to Trump. The question is why that should be explanatory in 2016, when those statements are not only true but less true than they were in past elections won by Democrats (especially Barack Obama, who really experienced the animal side of American racism). And the answer is typically avoided or explained away with activation theories positing that Trump made identity (race and gender, primarily) the determinative issue in the election.21
If so, why didn’t Hillary Clinton’s campaign successfully redefine the election to be about something more favorable to Clinton? They tried! It just didn’t work because “qualified” and “experienced” were of very little interest to the voters (and nonvoters) who determined the outcome in 2016. The attitude that Americans more or less owed Clinton the presidency certainly didn’t help.ix (At one point the campaign seriously considered “Because It’s Her Turn” as a slogan.x) If only there were something else Democrats could offer voters who have been ground into paste by the gears of the globalized economy, something more relevant to struggling people than “but our candidate is very, very qualified.” Ah, nevertheless.
RED FLAGS, RED SENATORS
That there was competition in the 2016 Democratic primaries was not unusual. In fact, the winnowing of the field down to only two candidates by February 2 meant the field was unusually uncompetitive for an open nomination.xi Given Clinton’s enormous advantage in support among the Democratic establishment, her win was not unusual either. You will find no endorsement of “the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie” conspiracy theories here; parties are not obligated to be impartial observers in their own nomination processes, and historically they have not been. Thus, the obvious preference among establishment Democrats and the major liberal media outlets for Clinton—even in light of the extraordinary, not to say questionable, commingling of the Clinton campaign and the DNC’s finances and personnelxii—is not proof of a conspiracy.xiii It is evidence that the New Democrat revolution that rose to prominence after 1988 is firmly institutionalized in a party establishment that prefers reliable, predictable, centrist candidates with money and name recognition who promise not to rock the boat too much.
Clinton’s nomination was considered a lock from the moment Obama secured his second term in 2012. A key complaint among left or progressive liberal voters who were Clinton-skeptic was the oppressive sense of inevitability, that Clinton 2016 was “a feature of our reality that seemed intractable,” with “no room for participation beyond absolute fealty.”22 It was simply going to happen, and the voter’s job was to act thankful for the opportunity to support it.
That’s unkind, admittedly. Yet the strong primary performance by Bernie Sanders should have caused more worry than anger among establishment Democrats, heeded as a warning that the Clinton juggernaut was vincible. Sanders, often tarred as a socialist, is in practice simply a New Deal Democrat.xiv He was born in the wrong century. Slap an 1890 birth date on him, and his position that the government should robustly fund the social welfare state and focus on ensuring a minimum decent standard of living for every American would have been in perfect alignment with the rise of FDR. Crucially—and of the millions of words spilled on Bernieism since 2015 I think this best summarizes his appeal—he tells voters struggling to make ends meet despite working hard that their poverty, their needs, their failure to enjoy the American Dream is not evidence of their own moral deficiency. Lack of material success is not a personal failing. The economy needs cheap, insecure, compliant labor to function, and it has been designed to produce it.
That’s it. That’s the appeal of Bernie Sanders. He talks to people who have been shit on by a system rigged against them, a system everyone recognizes they cannot overcome by any “rise and grind” bromide, and tells them they are not morally, personally, or intellectually flawed for struggling within it. While the Democrats writ large have pivoted to the neoliberal mantra that it’s your own damn fault if the economy leaves you behind, Sanders is among the last prominent people delivering the old message of economic equality and the need for government to protect the individual from powerful economic actors.
