Donald Trump, Popularism, and the ‘Character’ of American Democracy: a Seriousness that Failed? (Part Two)
Ethical Liberalism
In an article published in The North American Review in 1891, entitled “Favorable Aspects of State Socialism,” the energetic and forceful British politician Joseph Chamberlain pointed out that, fifty years ago, Birmingham, the city in which he had become Mayor in 1873, “was a town in which scarcely anything had been done either for the instruction, for the health, for the comfort, or for the convenience” of the working classes. Criticised by his detractors for his ostensibly arrogant, competitive, and domineering behaviour and labelled, consequently, “Pushful Joe,” Chamberlain rightly claimed that, under his leadership of the City Council, “nothing less than a revolution” had been “peacefully accomplished.”
Opposed to both the utopian optimism of socialists, who naively proposed to sever effort from reward in economic matters in the expectation that freeloading and laziness would disappear once everything had been dragged “down to one dead level,” and the selfish optimism of laissez faire liberals, who defended the radical inequalities of early Victorian Britain which condemned the vast majority of working people to health-destroying toil and equally health-destroying housing, bringing Britain to the brink of revolution and civil war in the 1830s and 40s, Chamberlain offered an efficacious alternative. He called it “municipal socialism.”
During Chamberlain’s tenure as Mayor of Birmingham, a system of sewerage was completed. A system of sanitary inspection was created and routinely carried out. The gas and water companies—wastefully managed businesses, presiding over natural monopolies and providing poor value for money—were municipalised with a radical improvement in both the price and quality of the supply of gas and water. The town was paved. The footpaths were repaired. An infectious diseases hospital was built. So, too, were public baths, parks, and recreation grounds, and, in the spirit of the Midlands Enlightenment of the previous century, libraries. An art gallery and museum was erected. Schools with large playgrounds attached were built. Technical education was offered at the Midland Institute and Mason College and art education at the School of Art.
By forcibly purchasing three failing companies and raising taxes temporarily to achieve this vast programme of improvement, far from making life intolerable for the City’s rich, life improved for all of Birmingham’s inhabitants, who experienced or witnessed a reduction in disease, a lessening of crime and the threat of crime, an increase in life expectancy, an advance in the quality of labour, a refinement of individual intelligence and the capacity for civic engagement, more opportunities for business, and a dramatic enhancement of the City’s appearance as well.
“Endowed,” as the historian Travis L. Crosby put it, “with a strong social conscience,” Chamberlain may have “had above all a passion for the well-being of working people,” and he may have referred to his physical and economic transformation of Birmingham as municipal socialism, but what Chamberlain’s pluralist, practical politics actually amounted to was ethical liberalism—liberalism tamed and made decent, but liberalism all the same, with its respect for private property, individual industry, and market economies.
Atlantic City
Now compare Chamberlain’s accomplishments as Mayor of Birmingham with Donald Trump’s record as a businessman in New York and beyond.
One of Trump’s first investments was in culture, theatre specifically, namely the Broadway production Paris is Out!, as we heard in the first part of this two-part article. With his father, Trump built and managed middle class homes. He renovated the Grand Hyatt Hotel, next to New York’s Grand Central Terminal, one of many hotels in Trump’s extensive property portfolio. He built Trump Tower, a 58-story skyscraper—a tourist attraction and source of civic pride—which houses shops, cafes, offices, and residences and a 60-foot-high waterfall in its atrium. In 1986, Trump won the contract to repair Wollman Rink, a public ice rink in Central Park. Operating the rink for a year, Trump donated some of the profits to charity and other public works projects.
The various casinos and golf courses Trump owns and owned are widely known about, as are his bankruptcies. Less well known, however, is Trump’s investment in sport.
Trump invested, for instance, in the New Jersey Generals football team; he hosted boxing matches at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City; and he lent his name to the Tour de Trump, a cycling stage race set up in 1989. Motivated to turn his daughter, Ivanka, into a model, Trump of course owned beauty pageants—Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA—and his for-profit education company Trump University will also be familiar to many. More obscure is the charity Trump set up, the Donald J Trump Foundation. Established for the purpose of redistributing the proceeds from Trump’s 1987 book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, the foundation, which was dissolved in 2018, contributed to healthcare and sports related charities, as well as conservative groups.
As with almost everything Trump does, many of these business ventures have been beset by controversies, relating, primarily, to legally dubious and improper activities. Yet, sharing some of the same characteristics of the so-called Victorian “strong man,” Chamberlain, a leader who likewise celebrated the traditionally masculine virtues of strength, resilience, courage and vigour, if Trump is not quite an ethical liberal—to put it mildly, after his unethical and illiberal term in office as President of the United States—he is, or has been, a businessman with an ethos which combines profit-making and civic engagement.
The Common Good Trump invoked in the previous part of this article—the non-instrumental populist, or popularist—is by no means a whimsical fiction. This, moreover, is borne out by Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his Vice Presidential running mate. As the journalist and political thinker Sohrab Ahmari recently argued, “Trump could have tapped a more conventional nominee to please the Republican Party’s plutocratic and hawkish donor class,” but, “attracted to Vance’s bootstrap biography,” Trump chose Vance, a proponent of exactly the kind of tough love social democracy discussed in the first part of this article, instead. In so doing, Trump has transformed the Republican Party. That at least is the view of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, another potential Vice Presidential candidate who Trump rejected in favour of Vance.
Plutocracy in America
A friend of Ahmari, Vance may not be as radical as the Iranian-American postliberal thinker, a self-described “pro-labor right-winger” and advocate of a new New Deal-style socially managed capitalism. It is worth remembering, however, that the New Deal itself was realised in a “spirit of pragmatic experimentation.” With an army of out-of-work military veterans camped out in Washington, DC in 1932 and unemployment at 25 per cent, in pledging and enacting the New Deal Franklin Delano Roosevelt was simply responding to events, as opposed to implementing ideology, or long held economic convictions.
The situation now is not the same. Even during the Great Recession, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression—after, that is, the Covid-19 recession of 2020 caused by the global lockdowns enforced by governments—unemployment did not exceed 10 per cent of the working population. Nonetheless, the fact that “21 per cent of all children in the United States live in poverty;” the fact that US infrastructure is graded at a D+—i.e. the fact it is in poor condition and at risk of collapse; the fact that inequality stands “at levels last seen during America’s Gilded Age;” and the fact that “the typical American worker has seen virtually no real wage growth since the 1970’s” is seriously problematic, if not yet an actual crisis as the economist Stephanie Kelton argued in The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy, published in 2020.
More challenging still for long-term US economic prosperity and short-term public order and safety and security is the system of class-based tyranny, the domination of employers over employees, sellers and advertisers over consumers, and financiers over every type of US citizen, described so powerfully by Ahmari in Tyranny, Inc. We now know that the resuscitation of a bowdlerised Enlightenment conception of progress, championed most clearly by the neo-Hegelian political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, which merely universalised the principle that greed is good and the role of government is simply to fix market failures, has been a disaster.
The faux-meritocracy—the only kind of meritocracy possible under a neoliberal economic regime—which followed in the 1990s led directly to wokism, a camouflaged species of class combat, which led in turn to a new counter-enlightenment, the rise of neo-reaction in the 2010s, which rightly identified wokism for what it was—or is?— namely soft totalitarianism while proposing, at the same time, to replace our elected leaders with monarchs.
With its competing elites comprised chiefly of illiberal and deceptively self-serving wokists on the one hand, and self-loving and self-destructive libertarians and authoritarian reactionaries on the other, the American Republic is indeed in crisis territory now, in 2024. Throw in human-induced climate change, with the inevitable increase in wildfires, hurricanes, and other “freak” weather events and the global movement of displaced people fleeing uninhabitable lands which will soon ensue, and the schizophrenia machine that is social media and the United States, clearly, is in danger of imminent collapse—within four years, ten years, twenty years, fifty, it is impossible to say.
However, it is possible that, together, Trump and Vance will transform the economy and cultural and social life of the United States. It is possible they will enact the ethical liberal policies that will stymie and reverse US decline and, instead of handing the future to its former Cold War adversaries, the New Leviathans, Russia and China, they will set the agenda for a renewal of true liberalism across the world. It is possible. But is it likely?
Po’ Folks
Unlike Trump, a phenomenally confident and often arrogant man, Vance is a notably modest person. In the first paragraph of his extraordinary and extraordinarily moving internationally best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he confides to the reader that he finds the very existence of the book “somewhat absurd,” having “accomplished nothing great” in his life.
In 2016, when the book was published, Vance was not “a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary;” he had not “started a billion-dollar company or a world changing non-profit.” Eight years on, Vance, presumably, feels somewhat differently, having become senator for Ohio in 2023, Trump’s nominee for Vice President in July of this year, and being widely tipped to become Trump’s successor as leader of the Republican Party.
Branded “weird” by Tim Walz, the Democratic Party’s nominee for Vice President, the only weird thing about Vance is the fact that he has broken the almost impenetrable class ceiling in US society and could one day be President of the United States himself. A hillbilly from Middletown, Ohio, where nearly a third of the town lives in poverty and a large majority live in conditions not far from it, where people are physically unhealthy, poorly educated, addicted to prescription drugs, and where there is the phenomenon known locally as “Mountain Dew mouth,” namely “painful dental problems in young children” caused by the consumption of too much sugary soda, Vance is indeed a total weirdo. Unforgivably so, maybe, for some Americans?
Vance and Trump are well matched. They have both, certainly, been inconsistent in their political beliefs and attachments—Trump, typically, for opportunistic reasons, for the sake of acquiring power, Vance for more personal and earnest reasons. For Vance, evocative for his sister, who partly helped to raise him, of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” is undeniably earnest, which, of course, actually makes him complex. At a time when politics has mostly descended into mindless conformism, when the state is pretty much a committee for maintaining the supremacy of the financial and big business elite, combined with some deleterious virtue-signalling on cultural and social issues, Vance is a conviction politician, which is to say, he is an anomaly. Vance is in politics not for the spoils of office, but because he wants to bring change to US society.
Mutual Aid—A Factor of Evolution
In office, Vance’s record has been emphatically social democratic. When, for example, a train was derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, revealing “the dangers associated with under-regulation of the train industry,” Vance signed a letter with Marco Rubio which “blamed the neoliberal just-in-time model of ‘hyper-efficiency’,” before drafting reform legislation on the issue with Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senator from Ohio. Vance, similarly, collaborated with the decidedly social democratic senator for Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, in drafting a bill “that would claw back executive compensation at banks that end up being bailed out by taxpayers,” after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
Vance introduced a bill to “eliminate tax breaks for large corporate mergers. He called for raising the minimum wage.” He “worked on a bill to prevent insurance companies from charging new mothers co-pays. He proposed legislation to crack down on the Visa-MasterCard duopoly” and Vance “praised Biden’s trust-busting Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.”
Prior, however, to joining “the Resistance,” participating in the formation and consolidation of what has become known as the “New Right” or “National Conservatism”—an intellectual movement which, broadly, is Left on economics and Right on culture—Vance was a libertarian. Mentored and promoted by the neo-futurist founder, trader, and investor Peter Thiel, Vance, like many ambitious young Americans, was seduced momentarily by the rational egoist objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, which makes “productive achievement” the most noble pursuit for human beings.
The politics of Hillbilly Elegy is, accordingly, somewhat mixed, vacillating between a servile low expectation optimism which foregrounds the Franklinite Protestant work ethic and urges Darwinian adaptation to an unsatisfactory status quo, and a stoical or phlegmatic social democracy, which holds both the working class and the overclass (the political theorist Michael Lind’s term for the new university-educated managerial elite) to account for their poor or vicious decisions.
A perceptive psychologist of class, sensitive to the self-inflicted and other-inflicted injuries the American poor and working class sustain, in Hillbilly Elegy Vance indirectly narrates the story of the USA’s industrial decline. In the form of a personal memoir the reader is invited to observe how a species of Chamberlainite ethical liberalism or a capitalism of limits was subsumed in the 1980s and 90s by the crony liberalism and monopoly capitalism that we know today.
The Fall
At the outset of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance states that, as a child, he always distinguished between his “address” and his “home.” His address was where he spent most of his time with his mother and sister, “wherever that might be,” and his home was his “great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky.”
Growing up, Vance’s home was his grandmother and grandfather’s—mamaw and papaw’s—house in Middletown. Given up for adoption by his biological father when he was 6, Vance’s own mother was “more roommate than parent,” addicted to alcohol, conflict, and, later, prescription narcotics, while passing through a “long line of failed paternal candidates.” Ultimately loving and intermittently supportive even, during Vance’s childhood his mother was selfish, neglectful, and sometimes abusive—on one occasion, extremely abusive. His immensely tough, hard-working, flawed, yet long-suffering grandparents, by contrast, were solidly dependable—for him and his sister at least—providing love, stability, and guidance when it was not forthcoming from its traditional parental source. Democrats of the Rooseveltian variety, who believed there was “no greater disloyalty than class betrayal,” in 1984, antagonised by the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Presidency, the “well-educated Northern liberal” Walter Mondale, Vance’s papaw cast his vote for the Republican Ronald Reagan.
The election of Reagan marked the beginning of Middletown’s deterioration.
My Hometown
Middletown was effectively built by Armco Steel, the company for whom Vance’s grandfather worked. Born into poverty, the company brought him and his wife “from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class.” It furnished Vance’s papaw with secure and meaningful employment. It was a company he loved. He took “genuine pride” in its production, knowing “every make and model of car built from Armco steel.” “Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steelbodied cars,” Vance recounted, “Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. ‘Armco made this steel,’ he’d tell me.”
Armco treated its workers well. Identifying with the company because of this, Vance’s papaw owned Armco stock and he retired with a lucrative pension. Armco funded schools, it provided scholarships, it built parks, and it threw free concerts. As with the Sorgs, the wealthy industrial family which operated a large papermill in Middletown who “donated enough money to put their own names on the local opera house” and helped attract Armco to Middletown in the first place, the proprietors had a sense of obligation to the town.
With the crass economic individualism unleashed by Reagan and the supposedly perpetual peace-enforcing process of globalisation, which made national economies increasingly interdependent—enmeshed indeed—Armco merged with the Japanese company Kawasaki, the culture of the business changed, and the quality of life in Middletown continued to worsen. “In the 1980s,” Vance notes, “Middletown had a proud, almost idyllic downtown,” with (among other things) “a bustling shopping centre,” restaurants which had been in business since before the Second World War, and a local grocer—Dillman’s—with three or four stores in different locations. “Today,” he goes on, “Middletown is little more than a relic of American industrial glory,” defined, chiefly, by its abandoned shops with broken windows, its pay-day lenders and cash-for-gold stores, and the presence of drug-addicts and drug-dealers on its Main Street. Living opposite a once well-kept park, as a small child Vance witnessed the tennis court decay, becoming “a cement block littered with grass patches;” he learned that his “neighbourhood had ‘gone downhill’ after two bikes were stolen” in the course of a single week.
Vance’s hometown is the new America, in essence—the America of class-based law, exploitation, poverty, and irrational death-drive economics—described by Ahmari in Tyranny Inc.
Self-Help—Character—Thrift
Moving in with his recently widowed mamaw as a teenager, when living with his mum and her partner became untenable, there were three rules in Vance’s grandmother’s house: “Get good grades, get a job, and ‘get off your ass and help me.’” Vance obeyed all of them. Getting a job as a cashier at Dillman’s, Vance became more intensely acquainted with both class privilege—the trust accorded to people who did not look like him and his friends and family by his boss—and the dependency culture of the poor. He grew to resent the federal and state income taxes that were deducted from his wages, when it was apparent to him that some of his fellow citizens were exploiting the welfare system, and, like his grandmother, Vance would consequently criticise the government on one day “for doing too much” and on the next he would criticise it “for doing too little.” He was at that time, depending largely on mood, alternately, “a radical conservative or a European-style social democrat.”
After 9/11, instead of attending college at Ohio State as planned, Vance joined the Marine Corps. Before travelling with his unit to Iraq where Vance spent two years as a public affairs marine, he was taught “learned wilfulness” at bootcamp, a lesson which stayed with him and informed his view that the thing he would most like to change about the white working class is the feeling that individual choices do not matter. Eschewing “learned helplessness,” in the military Vance had learnt that they do.
Arriving eventually at Ohio State in 2007, Vance excelled. Taking on three jobs to support himself during his studies he once relied on a pay-day loan to avoid a significant overdraft fee and criticised naïve legislators who proposed a bill to restrict pay-day lending practices, chastising them for attempting to help people like him without making the effort to properly understand them first.
Familiar with economic capital, or the lack of it rather, at Yale Law School, under the guidance of the well-known lawyer, scholar, and writer, Amy Chua, Vance gained first-hand experience of what cultural and social capital looked like. Empirically, he learnt that the much lauded, and ostensibly egalitarian, system of meritocracy was rigged, strongly favouring those who already belong to discreet networks of privilege. Still, Vance played the game and even, in a conflicted way, identified with its winners, most of whom had not fairly won the race we are now all compelled to compete in, until, that is, he discovered that the woman he wanted to marry was unimpressed by the acquisitive, status-centric meritocratic ideal of “achievement” that he had imbibed and, reluctantly, accepted. Unmaterialistic, temperate, and family-oriented, she, on the contrary, just wanted him to be “a good person.”
After Virtue
Raised mainly as a non-denominational Christian, converting to Catholicism in 2019, Vance rediscovered the “language of virtue.” Tempering his belief in individual responsibility, Vance also began to pay more attention to economic and social structures, adopting—to adapt one of Karl Marx’s famous utterances—something like the following maxim: “People do make their own choices, but they do not make them as they please; they do not make them under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from their families and society.” Vance, in other words, remains a liberal, viewing the world, primarily, from the point of view of the individual, rather than the group, which explains, in part, his qualified support for trade unions, his willingness, on the one hand, to join a picket of striking workers when he thinks the strike is just, and his opposition, on the other, to overbearing trade union power.
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance identified “two separate sets of mores” among the white working class (a term, which, it ought to be noted, could probably do with some further refinement. Certainly, a regional descriptor is required to give it its intended nuance). His grandparents embodied the first set: “old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking.” His mother and, increasingly, his entire neighbourhood embodied the second: “consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful,” and dependent. An ethical liberal in the nineteenth century Chamberlainite mould, Vance is an advocate of the first set. He is a proponent of helping people to do without help, more inclined towards the private property-celebrating Christian philosophy of distributism than the state-led collectivism of Marxism.
Ahmari, by contrast, is often more liberation theologist than Christian socialist in Tyranny, Inc. Extremes, however, beget extremes, and when the retrospective, undirected Keynesianism which undergirded the $787 billion rescue package Congress passed in response to the global financial crisis of 2008 in February 2009 (this listless, unconscious Keynesianism is a core feature indeed of the Clintonian Third Way, which helped create the crisis in the first place) gave way, immediately, to austerity American society had indeed become notably extreme, tyrannical in fact, with “deaths of despair,” a fentanyl epidemic, record high in-work and out-of-work homelessness, a new convoluted and paranoid class war in which fact and fiction merged, and a rebellion which ended in the sacking of Congress.
Not that anyone would necessarily learn any of this from the Left—the traditional torchbearers for working people and the poor—which has succumbed instead, as Ahmari cogently argues, to a species of “lifestyle” politics that focuses on matters of cultural sensitivity, rather than class inequality and economic exploitation.
The Old Class War
In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, cited in modified form above, Marx wrote that “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice… the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” If modern socialism in the United States, brought into existence by German immigrants and brought to prominence by leaders such as Daniel De Leon and Eugene V. Debs and authors including Edward Bellamy and Upton Sinclair, was uncompromisingly committed to the notion of class struggle and abolishing the system of wage-labour, and modern socialists were prepared to suffer, going to the gallows and prison, to achieve their goals, their contemporary heirs among the university-educated managerial and professional elite, often represented by literary agents—i.e. insiders as opposed to outsiders, anywheres rather than somewheres—are more concerned with the use of inclusive language in the workplace and diversity in the boardroom than with large scale wealth distribution or abolishing capitalism.
Ideologically innovating out of necessity (struggling for power and place as part of a surplus, or oversubscribed, elite) and for convenience (maintaining the managerial elite’s hegemony as a class “for itself”), the contemporary Left frequently portrays the oppressor as the oppressed, leaving the work of illuminating the stupendous class-based domination that has emerged in recent decades, and calling for its end, to conservative postliberal Catholics like Ahmari. A former atheist and Trotskyist, who grew up in a single-parent family in a mobile home in Utah, Ahmari is more than capable of completing the task. It is, however, a travesty that the legacy of working-class organisations such as the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Party of America should be left to a religious conservative to revive, even if it is probably also for the best.
One can quibble with Ahmari’s definition of liberty, which gives it a so-called “positive” meaning, which makes liberty commensurate with power, the power to do things, namely, that one would like to do. And one should quibble with this definition. Liberty, fundamentally, is not about individual empowerment but rather the absence of coercion. As the historian of ideas and philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it: “Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.” This, however, is not the place to argue the case. Nor does Ahmari’s inflated sense of what it means to be free detract from the persuasiveness of the book’s central thesis, namely the contention that “U.S. workers have lost many of the political gains they made in the twentieth century.”
For Ahmari, as this article has also argued, both justice and prudence dictate that capital’s almost total domination of labour abates and abates quickly. Realistically, only government can make that happen, meeting coercion with coercion—the coercion of the market with the coercion of law, law which operates not in the interest of a particular class or group but for the well-being of the entire nation.
Catechism of a Reformist
Tryanny, Inc. is not a pithy manifesto, like The Manifesto of the Equals, written by the French revolutionary Sylvain Maréchal in 1796 or the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels published in the year of revolutions in 1848 or the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which warned of the danger of nuclear warfare and species annihilation over a hundred years later in 1955. Tyranny, Inc. cannot be read in a single sitting. It is, however, a momentous piece of writing which ought to provide the orientation for both a Trump Presidency and a Kamala Harris one.
Ahmari rightly cautions about how the current hegemonic ideology of “market utopianism” has given rise in practice to something more akin to an “economic dystopia.” Clearly, when crony capitalism becomes parasitic capitalism, as it has done to a significant extent over the last two decades, the organism on which the parasites feed will eventually cease to exist, and before that, weak and ill-equipped to defend itself from external attack, it will become vulnerable to predators and competitors. Citing at one point the British political and cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s own influential manifesto-cum-book for a nominally viable twenty-first century socialism, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Ahmari’s text might have taken the same name with only one small change to the subtitle: Capitalist Realism: There Is No Alternative. For American society now, it is, simply put, a new New Deal or it is despotism and anarchy.
11,000 Assēs?
Just-in-time scheduling, “sometimes with the aid of computer programs, designed to ensure that the shop or restaurant expends the strictest minimum of labor costs needed to meet customer demand.” “[C]lopening shifts,” where “workers are scheduled only for the opening and closing of the store.” “[P]recarity,” such as the conditions in which a third of America’s twenty five million food-service and retail workers are employed, receiving less than a week’s notice of their upcoming weekly schedule, making it difficult, if not impossible, to organise childcare, reliably pay the rent, and lead a psychologically healthy, relatively stress-free life, which, combined with low wages, makes it necessary in turn for many working families to seek help from the state in the form of public welfare benefits. Frequent cancellations. Digital surveillance. And labor contracts which include “non-disparagement” clauses, which prohibit an employee from criticising their employer both whilst they are employed by them and after; technology policies which give an employer the right to sell a worker’s image or a recording of their voice to Apple, maybe, or a pornographer; and clauses which compel a worker to forgo their right to sue their employer in the event of injury on company recreational facilities, or at off-site events.
These are some of the things that Ahmari rails against in Tyranny, Inc. It “is the lot of most Americans,” and Ahmari shows us how this ethos of ruthless profit maximisation and the profound imbalance of power in the workplace which accompanies it came into existence.
Western Civilisation—A Good Idea
Pointing to the absurdity of regarding liberty of contract as “a constitutional principle as sacred as free speech” when, often, contracts are signed by hourly workers, desperate to work, who do not speak English as a first language, contracting with “corporate behemoths” such as Walmart which employs 150 lawyers, not to mention the outside attorneys it relies on to “troubleshoot legal problems worldwide,” Ahmari begins with the US Supreme Court’s infamous Lochner era (1897-1937), or rather the Tennessee Supreme Court’s decision in 1884 to uphold the right of a railroad to prohibit its employees from buying whiskey from a vendor near its rail yard. Workers and employers do not reach agreement about the terms of employment on an equal footing. Theoretically, the propertyless railroad employees had the right to “refuse to work.” But in the absence of alternative options—other railroads, other sources of employment— that right must have felt somewhat chimerical for many. The same is true now of course for the 45 per cent of American adults who “would struggle to come up with $400 in cash to pay for an emergency expense” and the additional 12 per cent “not able to pay for the expense at all.” They, likewise, occupy a weak position from which to bargain effectively.
The Lochner court, which took its name from “a 1905 case that overturned a New York law limiting bakers’ workweeks to sixty hours,” invalidated or avoided implementing numerous reforms, Ahmari writes, “aimed at improving workplace conditions and redressing the power imbalance between capital and labor.”
In 1908, it “declared unconstitutional a federal law that banned employers from requiring workers to renounce union membership as a condition of employment.” It ruled, similarly, that “the federal government couldn’t regulate child labour, or tax businesses that employed children, or mandate a pension scheme for railway workers.”
The Supreme Court, during its long Lochner era, was, in other words, the embodiment of a liberalism red in tooth and claw, vicious liberalism, lying liberalism—the Lochner court was the cornerstone of an unethical iteration of capitalism which Britain, unlike America, where capitalism emerged more slowly, chiefly after the Civil War, had already begun to dispense with in the late nineteenth century. In the US, capitalism had to wait for Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and, most pointedly, FDR to be civilised.
The State of Bourgois Society
“The New Deal tamed the Lochner court.” It did so when Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, in 1935. The Wagner Act granted workers the right to organise and join unions. Laws guaranteeing a federal minimum wage and overtime pay soon followed. Yet, from a historic peak of a third of all workers in the 1950s, trade union membership declined in the following decades, reaching a low of “6 per cent of the private economy labor force in 2022.”
Ahmari documents a “hidden revolution” in the US legal system where the anti-union ethos and pro-corporate agenda (measured simply by profit) of the Lochner era was revived in the 1980s. This made private arbitration of workplace disputes increasingly normal, making each individual worker responsible for pursuing legal action against their employer, as opposed to the class-action lawsuits which sought to vindicate the rights of workers collectively, characteristic of the preceding fifty years.
In 1992, “the share of nonunionised companies subjecting their workers to mandatory agreements” was just 2 per cent. By 2017, the figure was 54 per cent, with a correspondingly high figure of legally owed wages each year—3 billion owed to workers in Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles alone—among other extant workplace injustices.
Pushed back onto their own individual resources and know-how, confronting arbitration clauses which often erect impossibly high barriers to justice, such as holding the arbitration proceedings in a court in a foreign land with built-in delays designed to exhaust or bankrupt the claimant, workers are vulnerable now in the way they were when the term “Robber Barons” was used to describe America’s business elite. “The private arbitration chamber,” Ahmari concludes, “is the true court system of Tyranny, Inc. It is the bosses court.”
Uncivil Law
It is not only the workers, either, who are ill-served by this new, yet historically recognisable, system of “justice.” Consumers suffer too, as courts offer corporations ways to evade their responsibilities to customers, like the customers given cancer by exposure to asbestos by the healthcare firm Johnson & Johnson (J&J) or the victims of opioid addiction or overdose created, in part, by the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma.
Ahmari introduces us to the concept of the “Texas two-step,” which J&J exploited to claim bankruptcy, instead of paying out what was properly due to the 21 women diagnosed with ovarian cancer through their exposure to the toxic substance in J&J products. The so-called “Texas two-step,” better described simply as corporate evasion or delinquency, involves a corporation splitting itself in two, offloading its liabilities onto the new unit which then files for bankruptcy, while keeping the rest of the firm intact and shielding it from the normal legal process.
We learn also about the phenomenon of “courthouse shopping,” which Purdue successfully made use of to limit their personal liability for America’s opioid crisis.
Courthouse shopping is a colloquial name for the process in which debtors file “their petitions in specific circuits and districts in search of legal advantage.” With the freedom, sanctioned by law, to file in a district entirely unconnected to the corporation (i.e. in a place where the corporation has neither business operations nor its headquarters), corporations have the power, in short, to select the judge who handles their bankruptcy, and many corporations, dismally, but unsurprisingly too, exercise that right. In 2020, of the country’s 375 bankruptcy judges just 3 “handled nearly two-thirds of the 155 restructurings involving the companies with more than $100 million in assets.”
This is not, strictly speaking, corruption. Rather, it is class-based law, which privileges a selfish minority at the expense of an increasingly defenceless majority, which has led in turn to the enthusiastic uptake among sections of America’s alienated and disrespected working class of Trump’s demagogic appeal to “drain the swamp” in Washington. It is an unhappy irony perhaps that the judge that sat in judgement for Purdue, one of the most prominent, pro-business judges in the country, is called Robert D. Drain—an irony not lost on Ahmari who subtitles this section of the book, “Draining Justice,” a more pacific formulation than the praxis-oriented alternative, “Swamping the Drain.”
High Finance and Low Finance
In 1916, Vladimir Illich Lenin wrote Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Imperialism for Lenin did not mean colonial conquest but rather a stage in the development of capitalism in which competition had given way to monopoly. A cosmic optimist, on Lenin’s view, as the forces of production were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands that made imperialism “the eve of the socialist revolution,” when the state could simply step in and take control of capitalist combines, unprecedented in their scale and, frequently, their efficiency, and repurpose them as nationalised industries.
Lenin’s text drew heavily on the English economist and social liberal, John Hobson’s book Imperialism: A Study, published in 1902. It also drew on the Austrian-born economist and social democrat and, later, Finance Minister of Germany in 1923 and 1928-9, Rudolf Hilferding’s 1910 analysis of monopoly capitalism Finance Capital: A Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. Lenin’s fellow Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin tackled the same topic in Imperialism and World Economy, which was written more or less simultaneously.
In the 1960s the concept of monopoly capitalism was given a fresh lease of life by the American economists Paul Sweezy and Paul A. Baran. Yet it is a descriptive term we hear only infrequently now, which is to say, we have become so accustomed to the transnational economic dominance of a small number of monopolists we have ceased to see this phenomenon as strange, indeed illiberal. Liberalism, like socialism, has been coopted by impersonators and parodists, who set very little store, in reality, by basic liberal principles such as competition, freedom of speech, tolerance, and freedom of assembly. The defence of localism and market economies in which competition still operates as it did for much of the nineteenth century is left instead, once more, to postliberals and conservatives.
Ahmari, however, distancing himself from the so-called culture wars which have absorbed the attention of most political commentators for the past 5, 6, 7, 8 years, perhaps—a convenient distraction—is the first to focus sustained attention on the oligopolistic and increasingly parasitic nature of contemporary capitalism.
Industrial Devolution
Borrowing from the political economist Oren Cass, Ahmari distinguishes three types of company in the modern American economy, according to what they do with their capital: namely “Growers,” “Sustainers,” and “Eroders.”
“Growers” are innovatory; they seek, as one might guess, to grow, turning to financial markets to raise funds for investment, because their profits do not match their ambition.
“Sustainers” use their profits to replenish their capital bases, to invest in growth, and to provide shareholders with a return. “From 1971 to 1985, the vast majority of American firms… were Sustainers.”
“Eroders,” meanwhile, are firms which are profitable enough “to grow their capital bases like Sustainers and still return cash to shareholders, but they choose not to. Instead, they actively disinvest from themselves, allowing their capital bases to erode even while paying to shareholders the resources they would have needed if they wanted to maintain their health.”
Being an Eroder is, in short, insane. Yet, as of 2017, Eroders account for 49 per cent of market capitalisation. They are a symptom of the death drive economics that animates contemporary American capitalism, where capitalists, typically, no longer invent things, create things, or build things, but design “byzantine schemes to extract value without producing anything ordinary people might ever consider useful.”
After a century as the global policeman the responsibility evidently was finally too much for the US’s decadent elite, which cannot muster the will anymore to reproduce the conditions for its continued existence. As Lenin reminds us in Imperialism, parasitism and decay go hand in hand.
Empowered by the state, which has reverted since the New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” and “War on Poverty” to an anarchy-plus-the-constable model of governance, Big Finance, according to Ahmari, is guilty of looting the real economy. Hedge funds and private equity either “gamble on things no other person would think of as an ‘investment’, including law suits, insurance claims, and distressed government assets in the developing world,” or they drive companies into the ground, undermining the quality of employment with schemes such as incentive-based wage structures and commissions, the quality of the consumer-experience, as consumers are “upsold” goods and services—i.e. manipulated—and sold shoddy goods and services due to staff being generally underpaid and overloaded, and leaving company infrastructure looking like “war zones,” as one Kmart executive put it, after fixtures, lights, and potholes at Kmart stores were all left in a state of disrepair as part of a profit-maximising initiative.
They also pillage sectors of the economy usually reserved for the state to organise or services which require a peculiarly moral ethos to run effectively, such as firefighting and emergency services. Here, too, standards are in sharp decline, with the adoption of ruthless billing practices and collection tactics, delays, and shortages of life-and-death materials, giving rise to a condition of postmodern anarchy in hospitals and leaving parts of modern America without a reliable water supply.
What is more, public pensions have become “a crucial driver of the current boom in the private-equity industry,” which is to say, seduced by the nominally large returns generated by public equity, pension trustees deposit “their contributors retirement funds into these investment vehicles,” the same vehicles which weaken the economy and privatise the jobs of “the very public servants whose retirement contributions are being invested.” This, needless to say, frequently leads in turn to a reduction of working hours and job losses and a general lowering of working conditions for current employees.
A Manic Depressive State
This behaviour, in short, is not rational; the economic death drive can be found both at the top of American society and at the bottom. The problem is not that the hidden hand of the global market sometimes carries a knife or a gun and is not afraid to use its weapon of choice but, rather, that Americans of all social classes are guilty of arranging their economic affairs in the shape of a noose—a noose designed for their own necks.
This is, perhaps, not, however, altogether attributable to a Freudian cause. One must also account of course for the demise of reliable sources of news and information in the wake of the digital revolution and the concomitant expansion of Big Finance into the newspaper industry.
Somewhat blind to the potential for trade unions to merely reproduce the coercive behaviour of employers, maintaining closed shops and engaging in intimidatory picketing, and silent on the relationship between the Mafia and the labour movement in the United States—unique in the history of the global labour movement—Ahmari is nonetheless brilliantly astute in his analysis of the need to make journalism honest and professional again.
Readin’, Rightin’
As with good mental health, trustworthy local news is an essential ingredient of a healthy democracy. Plainly, as we have seen over the course of this two-part article, democracy in the USA is not in a healthy state. As Ahmari shows, the reason for this is in part due to the slow collapse of the newspaper industry, caused by the plunge in print-ad spending when advertising migrated online with the emergence and consolidation of the internet.
It is demonstrably true, for instance, that where there is a dearth of local news coverage, “when public officials don’t face media scrutiny,” festering government corruption and waste tends to follow. Public officials “tend to misbehave more and get away with it.” Ahmari cites a study undertaken in 2018 which shows that “borrowing costs for local government jump by five to eleven points, or roughly $650,000 per bond issue, following the closure of the local newspaper.” A separate study established that, of the top twenty polluters in every state “only 4 per cent… received any coverage at all” in the local press, yet “‘among those that were subjected to negative press,’ polluting emissions dramatically decreased.”
The scholar who carried out the research speculated that this may have been due to a lack of environmental specialists at local papers, and it is certainly true, as Ahmari demonstrates, that with increasing Wall Street ownership and hedge fund control of newspapers, quality has been sacrificed to profit. Where once journalism was impartial and opinion rational, staff lay-offs, infrastructure sell-offs, and the use of wire copy, instead of original reporting, has led to plummeting standards in the industry.
In 1920, independently owned papers, as opposed to corporate chains, accounted for 93 per cent of market share. By 2000, that figure had dropped to 23 per cent. Half of all US dailies are now controlled by hedge funds and about 200 counties, typically the poorest, least educated, and the most “culturally and physically distant from the centers of power and commerce,” do not have a local newspaper.
The consequence of this is diminishing political competence—voters simply voting on party lines, identifying with a particular leader, instead of assessing the capacity of their local candidates to serve them, and voting accordingly; political apathy, with total voter turnout in decline in counties where a local paper is in the hands of private equity; and civic disengagement.
“Americans who don’t follow local news,” Ahmari writes, “are less likely to know their neighbours and more likely to report feeling alienated from their community.”
What is Romanticism?
If liberal democracy requires transparency, then transparency is pointless unless democratic subjects have acquired the habit of inquiry, and the habit of inquiry—or scrutiny—is unrewarding unless the labours of inquiry are given publicity.
In the late eighteenth century, the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as human beings’ emergence from their “self-imposed immaturity.” Criticising his fellow subjects for their laziness and pusillanimity, Kant urged them to have the courage to use their own understanding. Sapere Aude!—"that is the motto of enlightenment,” he wrote.
Even in “an age of enlightenment,” it “is so easy to be immature,” he complained. “If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.”
Anesthetized by the befouled hedonism of a decadent consumer capitalism and infantilised and rendered dumb by modern celebrity and sub-celebrity culture, where argument-averse “journos” chase “likes” and “views” on what really ought to be called anti-social media, spending their working days posting poorly expressed and unevidenced political and scientific statements in 280 characters or less, we are, I venture to say, on the precipice of an age of ignorance or stupidity rather.
We do of course have our own UnGreat Men and Women, the vernacular philosophes of contemporary conspiracy theory who push back against the haughty complacency of a highly biased and partisan mainstream media and the Unlettered Misleaders of men and women, the Little ones, who Thomas Carlyle mistakenly thought it was possible to overlook, who have stepped in in recent times to fill the information void left by woke and prejudiced legacy media journalists. Yet, while conspiracy theory is all well and good where it excavates actual conspiracies, and attempting to perform the role of journalist when real journalists, or credentialled journalists, have ceased to do so, even when these noble volunteers are notably ill-equipped to assume these yet-to-be vacated positions, is something, these alternatives and surrogates have tended to do more harm than good.
We must, in short, return to the age of enlightenment before we move forward again.
We must adopt the clubs and coffee houses and taverns of the eighteenth century Brimingham lunaticks, where regular lunaticks and others used reason publicly, submitting their ideas and schemes to be tested in open discussion and debate, and acquired in the process the dignity of maturity, regardless of age.
We must treat magazines—where argument is considered and supported by evidence—and newspapers worthy of the name—where news is diligently gathered and impartially reported—as the American Founding Fathers did, with respect namely, enacting laws to facilitate the circulation of the produce of a free press.
To Kant’s “Have courage to use your own understanding,” however, we must add: “And have the decency to use that understanding responsibly.” It might be wise to make it, informally, a condition in future—as H. G. Wells did for his ideal non-hereditary nobility, the Samurai, in A Modern Utopia—for magazine and newspaper editors to “be something,” like a qualified editor, or to have “done something,” like written a book, before it is possible to assume a position of such immense power in a liberal democracy. It is imperative, as Ahmari fully recognises, that unelected guardians or gatekeepers are, for the most part, both competent and benign.
A liberalism able to withstand the pressures of the digital age must be ethical and muscular in equal measure. Liberalism in its minority, when reason was in its majority, was heroic. Liberalism must learn to be heroic again. The time for cowering before degenerate vested interests, intent on the spoliation of the economy, the nation, and the planet we collectively inhabit, is over.
In advocating a capitalism of limits—an end to unrestrained capitalism and a rediscovery of the merits of the kind of Keynesian policy-making that led to the public works projects which put the unemployed back to work in the 1930s (the construction of the Hoover Dam, the Triborough Bridge, LaGuardia Airport, Lincoln Tunnel, Arroyo Seco Parkway etc., not to mention the new schools, roads, hospitals, storm drains and sewer lines which were built and the 24 million trees which were planted) and the value of the recalibration of the relationship between capital and labour, sharing power more equally between them, which occurred under FDR—Ahmari, certainly, does not cower. If anything, his instincts are too benevolently statist and too paternalistic. Vance, by contrast, a tough love social democrat, is consistently disdainful of freeloading and sloth.
California Dreamin’
Loyalty, honour, and toughness. Family, forgiveness, and a refusal to despair. God helps those who help themselves. These are the principles and values that infuse Hillbilly Elegy.
Taught how to live like an adult by the Marine Corps, Vance could teach the United States of America a thing or two about what it means to behave in an enlightened way.
Vance, to be sure, is far from infallible. His comment about “childless cat ladies,” for instance, dating back to 2021, was insulting and plainly ill-judged. His willingness to “create stories,” such as the false and xenophobic rumour of pets being abducted and eaten by Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, “so that the media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” likewise, puts a huge dent in Vance’s credibility as a decent, reliable, and trustworthy politician.
The Republican Vice Presidential candidate is certainly no saint.
From an ethical liberal perspective, Vance’s views on abortion—basically, he is opposed—are also troubling. The right to abort an unwanted pregnancy, along with the legality of divorce and homosexuality, is fundamental to a decent and just society in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, Vance should not be demonised by illiberals for holding the position that he does. Denied “a fair shot at the American Dream,” Vance’s grandparents lost one child in infancy and his grandmother suffered eight miscarriages. If Vance has a tendency to rigidity, he understands the value of life.
What Vance also understands is trauma and—uniquely—the effect that a traumatised mind can have on the body. Extreme stress, he notes in Hillbilly Elegy, “can cause miscarriages,” and Vance discusses how the “never-ending conflict” he experienced when living with his mother manifested itself on him physically, giving him severe stomach aches and often making him feel sick.
It is easy to assemble examples of how the mind effects the body: the way we cry or blush or shake or sweat, for instance, when we experience a particular emotion—sadness, embarrassment, anger, fear. Our emotions, as the neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan demonstrates in It’s All in Your Head: Stories from the Frontline of Psychosomatic Illness, published a year before Hillbilly Elegy in 2015, can—and do—"produce serious disability” too. Indeed, psychosomatic illness is so prevalent that on “any average day perhaps as many as a third of people who go to see their general practitioner have symptoms that are deemed medically unexplained,” O’Sullivan writes. “In these people the medically unexplained symptoms are present, wholly or partially, for psychological or behavioural reasons.” Vance grasps this inarguable, yet widely ignored, fact. The implications for healthcare and welfare are, in any case, enormous.
A psychologically healthy nation is, simply stated, a nation unburdened by undue stress on its healthcare system and with fewer people dependent on the state for their lives or their livelihoods. It is a functioning nation. For the psychological wounds Vance acquired during his dysfunctional childhood, “the best medicine,” he writes, “was talking about it” with people who understood. For Vance, that meant the other members of his extended family.
Writing about a failing nation, Vance records that, “unique among all ethnic groups in the United States, the life expectancy of working class white folks is going down.” “American working class families,” he goes on, “experience a level of instability unseen elsewhere in the world.” Yet Vance is not sentimental. Reproving the section of the working class and poor in America that he knows most intimately for their profligacy, their sense of entitlement, and their irresponsible approach to familial relationships, normalising the phenomenon of the single-parent, Vance argues in Hillbilly Elegy that the source of the problems afflicting many American workers is, primarily, “what happens at home.” It is a question of social mores, or culture, as opposed to the absence of opportunities.
That was the Vance of 2016. And he was not wrong—or at least not entirely. The “opportunities” Vance invoked may have been limited in number or otherwise undesirable; all the same, wokism was beginning to become the greatest barrier to advancement working class Americans from dependable families would face. The Vance of 2024, however, is more obviously responsive to the arguments so adroitly laid out by Ahmari. Both an intellectual and a politician, it is conceivable that Vance, an ethical liberal at root—at once liberal and conservative with a disposition, perhaps, towards a pragmatic distributism also—could persuade Trump, a Chamberlainite figure in his own right, to transform the American economy, and society in turn, in the ways Ahmari suggests.
With Vance’s singular childhood experiences, combined with his inquisitive and creative turn of mind, he and Trump could lay the groundwork for a new New Deal, which is neither ideological nor mimetic, foolishly ploughing money, for instance, into treating physical illnesses which are not in fact physical at all. In addition to stable families, or in order to get them, Americans of every class must have reliable, meaningful, and properly remunerated work. Trump has a demonstrable capacity to build things and an interest in civic infrastructure and entertainment. He must deploy the skills he has cultivated and acquired as a businessman as President too.
Together, Vance and Trump—or Harris and Walz—must rescue the United States from its current economic indolence and concerted elective idiocy. Should they choose to do otherwise and pretend that the USA is not currently a basket case nation, then the notion of pet-eating will presently cease to be fictitious and not seem so far-fetched, as anyone familiar with John Steinbeck’s realist Great Depression novel, set in Dustbowl Oklahoma and labour-saturated California, The Grapes of Wrath, will know already. Famished people will eat whatever they have to.
In Hillbilly Elegy Vance complained that many European countries seem “better than America at the American Dream.” Whoever is elected in November must make the American Dream—a life “better, richer, and fuller for everyone”—a reality for all Americans.
Then they can think about making global free markets fair, giving the huge number of economic migrants—both legal and illegal—a reason to stay where they are, among their families, friends, and communities, in their homelands, where most people want to be.