One week before the 2016 US elections, I posted a prediction on Facebook that Donald Trump would win, based on two factors: the Rust Belt Midwest (conventional wisdom, nothing original there) and a more idiosyncratic feeling that the candidate whose 'turn' it was (or perceived to be) would lose. For the previous 30-40 years, voters heavily favored incumbents (with the exception of Carter and HW Bush) and tended to take the 'new' option in subsequent elections (usually switching parties, again with the exception of HW Bush). Candidates who lost primaries in previous cycles and went back for seconds, like Hillary (2008 vs. 2016), did not tend to do well; they were quite simply 'out of time,' or rather missed the boat. The same was true for McCain (2000 vs. 2008) and Romney (2008 vs. 2012). Clearly this is a small data set, so the prediction relies on the historian's extrapolation of limited trends and a gut feeling of human behavior rather than the statistical wizardry of Nate Silver and the other data journalists who have mushroomed over the past decade (itself a symptom of a neoliberal mindset that doesn't understand ideology or take it seriously, but never mind).
I deleted that post almost immediately because I felt guilty being a public naysayer and a pessimist at a time when, despite the Comey letter and obvious signs that Hillary's campaign was in trouble, there was still considerable enthusiasm and confidence that she would pull it off. Having been burned in the 2014 Indian election, the 2015 UK election, and the 2016 Brexit referendum, I judged that assuming the worst was warranted - but it was also bad form. Better make some phone calls and keep those fingers crossed.
This time, I won't delete my prediction that Trump will win by a comfortable margin in 2020, and I'm posting it early enough to hopefully rethink the Democratic primaries before the US Left faces a similar catastrophe as the UK Left in December. I'm basing the prediction, once again, on two factors. First, there is the single most important indicator of Trump's presidency - his job approval on the economy (56% last week, now 63%). As long as this number holds and doesn't dip below around 45%, where his overall approval has been for most of his term, the Democrats stand no chance no matter who the nominee is. Second, a similarly limited extrapolation since the mid-1970s (the end of the postwar Keynesian consensus and the beginnings of the modern primary system) related to this indicator suggests that no Democrat has won the presidency not in a time of severe economic crisis. Carter came to office after the oil shock and inflationary spiral (remember Ford's W.I.N. buttons?), compounded by Watergate, Clinton during the 1992 recession when HW was perceived as out of touch on the economy, and Obama - enough said. Carter, Clinton, and Obama shared some other commonalities (young, unknown, from interior states, relatively but not completely inexperienced - in contrast with Buttigieg) that amplified the 'newness' factor.
This makes sense both from the point of view of punditry and political dynamics alone (two of those Democrats overcame incumbents, which requires exceptional circumstances), and also because post-1970s 'neoliberal' capitalism is hegemonic but wobbly. On the one hand, the power of big business (and by extension, especially in the UK, its media appendage) favors Republicans/Tories (or Third Way Democrats/New Labour, but there's no reason to prefer them unless long spells of right-wing rule have gone stale, as at the end of the 80s - we are not in such a spell now in the US, where the Democrats have the House and had the presidency only three years ago). On the other hand, crises are more acute and tend to shake the system much more immediately and brusquely than in the 40s-70s period; market volatility cuts both ways.
A few more observations to support this basic framework of analysis:
1) We don't know how late 2010s populisms end in major democracies. Modi and Boris came back with thumping majorities, Bolsonaro is holding on, while France and Germany have not yet entered that phase (Macron is a singular case of a semi-populist, but he looks quite stable considering the party landscape around him). Part of the complex lesson of the 2019 UK election is that both the centrism of educated suburban elites (Jo Swinson) and the old Left with a young face in the big cities (Corbyn/McDonnell) failed decisively. In that sense both diametrically opposed post-mortems are correct. By extension, both the Buttigieg and Sanders playbooks are in trouble without a crisis (which would lead to either an Obama repeat with the former or a more fundamental structural shake-up with the latter). Of course there's always a chance that the US will be the first to figure this out, but that's in the realm of 'anything can happen'. There is no precedent for a popular revolution through the ballot box in a 55-45 hyper-polarized peacetime context. So far, big structural change only happens in the aftermath of wars and/or economic crises (taking the very very long view of someone like Walter Scheidel, inequality has never decreased in human history except after mass violence or pandemics, and wars in the West no longer rely on mass conscription, but again never mind).
1b) The most likely outcome is that clear but contested 'surprise' elections like 2014 in India, the 2016 Brexit referendum, or the 2016 US elections, give access to the levers of power to a group of people who then have the chance to hone their political skills. They also cannibalize and coopt parties from within with ruthless efficiency (Modi vs. the old Vajpayee/Advani wing, Trump bringing Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham to heel, Boris expelling Amber Rudd and Ken Clarke with zero consequences). Then they build big majorities through targeted but liminal appeals to nationalism and xenophobia enhanced by the security apparatus (CAB, Trump's border policies and Muslim bans, etc. - both are operating on the fringes or borders of the nation-state) and appropriating the offers of the populist Left (demonetization, Boris's Northern strategy and rhetorical end of austerity, Trump positioning himself as a champion of healthcare and protectionism), all the while leaving the structural features of capitalism intact (maybe enhancing cronyism or heating up the economy through deregulation). So far it's a winning combination that can't be defeated by intellectually pointing out its contradictions - only by a broad and deep crisis that viscerally delegitimizes the government itself (a hard Brexit on Johnson's watch would have been such an event). Trump's reality show State of the Union and the wretchedly tepid Democratic response tonight was a masterclass of the widening gaps in political skills in evidence. There are also fundraising and digital gaps now favoring Republicans and Tories.
Side note: the most divisive Republican Presidents since the late 60s (Nixon, Reagan, W Bush) have also been the ones to realign coalitions most dramatically (the Southern Strategy, the Sunbelt/evangelical revival, the mobilization of war hysteria and culture wars redux) and have been rewarded with more comfortable second-term victories. Milquetoast old guard-style Presidents (Ford and HW Bush) both lost their incumbency. Same goes for the 'wet' Heath, Major, and May in the UK (vs. Thatcher and Boris, Cameron is somewhere in the middle). Trump fits the pattern. A 'generic Republican' in the Kasich mould who would have defeated Hillary in 2016 would have lost in 2020.
2) Impeachment and Remoaning are analogues because they can be (and were/are) being successfully spun as trying to 'undo the will of the people.' Some segments of the Corbyn and Sanders Left have been trying to warn against overreliance on these discourses and pivoting to winning on the merits of the (economic) issues or shifting the conversation, but there are significant internal constituencies in the respective parties that prevent them from doing that. The lip-service, when it comes, exacerbates internal divisions and weakens the parties - Corbyn and Sanders take fire from both sides, and the ever-present 'Russian conspiracy' paranoia muddies the waters. As an aside, the UK proved that fear-mongering about Russia is not, and cannot ever be, a successful electoral strategy. Nor are appeals to 'civility' and 'decency.'
3) To his credit, despite these limitations, Sanders has been trying to run a campaign based on 'broken promises' to working-class voters on healthcare, Social Security, etc. It's the Democrats' best shot, but cannot stick without a severe crisis that makes people (including propertied elites) feel the pain. The 'two economies'/inequality angle of attack is an outgrowth of and worked well in the post-2008 climate - but party politics had not caught up to it then. It is now 'out of time,' too, just like those candidates whose 'turn' it is. By this metric, Sanders is also unlikely to win in 2020, and someone like Buttigieg would be favored. But then why take the chance on the empty vessel Mayor of South Bend (who lacks the charisma, experience, and appeal to black voters of Clinton or Obama) when you feel things are going reasonably well?
Sanders also doesn't have Corbyn's personal negatives. He is not yet perceived as primarily unpatriotic, excessively internationalist, and weak on foreign policy - he appeals to FDR much more successfully than Corbyn did to Attlee or Bevan. That said, if he is the nominee the Republican attack machine will go all in on Venezuela, Cuba, and honeymooning in the Soviet Union. So there is a narrow path in which other candidates remain in play well into the summer, taking some of the heat off Sanders as Trump and his acolytes talk about rigged DNC primaries to appeal to some of their shared Rust Belt voters. But politics moves quickly these days, and once the attacks come (with a fundraising advantage) they could prove overwhelming.
3b) The interesting outlier in all of this is the 2017 UK election, which proves two somewhat contradictory things: i) The strategy of ignoring Brexit and focusing on austerity's broken promises worked, but only up to a point - maybe if Labour (through some defections or backroom deals) had helped pass one of the withdrawal agreements, they would have won that election or the next one; ii) Conversely, May's government was viscerally weakened by the repeated, embarrassing failures of the agreements and she had an exceptional lack of political skill despite some populist rhetoric (unlike Boris or Trump), which approximated crisis conditions and allowed Corbyn to get close. But it is an outlier worth reflecting on. The impact of the fires in Australia on Scott Morrison, if they have any in the coming months, is another test case of what kind of crisis can delegitimize a populist regime in a democracy, this time on the structural issue that is the hardest sell of all (climate change).
4) The depressing implication for the primaries this year is that if democratic socialism or, more prosaically, sane/humane healthcare provision and the mild taming of capitalism, are to stand any chance of success over the next few decades, Sanders cannot and should not be the nominee. Whichever Democrat runs in 2020 will be walking into the lion's mouth, and Sanders should not be that sacrificial lamb. If Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham had run against Boris in 2019, Brexit would have guaranteed the same outcome - or it would have been even worse (a Tory majority on the scale of New Labour in the late 90s). True to its disregard of structural factors, the conventional wisdom would have then condemned centrism and opened the way for Corbyn - as it did in 2015, but with Brexit done this time rather than a black swan on the horizon. Another way of putting it is that Corbyn and Sanders are great candidates against austerity in lean times, but not so great ones against populists in relatively hotter economies (although again, we don't know what such a candidate would look like).
This is not a facile argument a la Zizek that electing Trump would heighten the contradictions of capitalism and should be welcomed. Such contradictions work themselves out in very marginal and surprising corners of the system (like the subprime mortgage market). We don't know when or where the next crisis will happen, and the Left must remain organized and prepared to seize the moment. If it is decimated in 2020 such an opportunity would be lost. Conversely, the risks are too great to bet on a crisis in the constricted timeframe of this election.
****
EDIT: SIX-MONTH UPDATE (Wednesday, August 5, 2020)
Well, that aged badly. But in some ways it was always the intention to show the unpredictability and contingency of history. "Events, dear boy, events," as Harold Macmillan maybe once said.
A few observations:
1) Remarkably, the post went up while the Wuhan lockdown was at its height. It's no prelapsarian relic. But I was still going on about Pete Buttigieg. Another reminder to stop paying attention to the daily news and scan the world rigorously, critically, and imaginatively. I didn't even take my own warning in the last paragraph seriously! You really never know where the next paradigm-shifting event will begin; not a butterfly but a bat flapping its wings in a cave.
2) Who knew the most important sentence would be the throwaway reference to Scheidel and pandemics? And that in fact this pandemic might be so bad (or rather not bad enough) that it might exacerbate rather than attenuate inequality.
3) I'm struck by how much of the post is a retrospective of the politics of the 2010s. We are in a different world now. Even in August, the politics of March-April (the furlough scheme in the UK, the debates over the Defense Production Act in the US) seem impossibly remote.
4) Contrary to my thesis, the biggest economic crash in recorded history seems to have favored Biden's and Keir Starmer's centrism, not Bernie's and Corbyn's radicalism. But there is time. If the crisis endures, we might see those ideas sneak into different platforms and be taken up by a variety of actors.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment