President Trump ran as a populist, appealing to the white working class with promises of tax cuts, curbs on foreign competition and Wall Street globalism, more American jobs and infrastructure, less immigrants, and the protection of Social Security and Medicare.
It was a popular pitch. The supply side revolution featuring tax cuts for the well-off championed by Reagan had commenced 35 years of global outsourcing of American jobs, wage stagnation and growing inequality at home. Add to that foreign adventures costing trillions and a Great Recession that never seemed to end, and by 2016 many voters were disenchanted with both parties and in the market for something different.
A year in, though, Trump continues to talk like a populist, even a white supremacist, but he and his party have behaved like the usual tools of the moneyed elite and enemies of the average worker. Eighty percent of the Trump tax cuts go to corporations and the top few percent of individuals.
Since Trump is too lazy or inattentive to deal with legislative details, the design of the tax cut fell not to populists but to two supply side zealots, Paul Ryan in the House and Pat Toomey (R-PA) in the Senate. Toomey’s previous job was heading the propaganda and lobbying home of supply side fiction, the Club for Growth, which preaches a simple gospel — government bad, tax cuts good.
This faith was never embraced by most Pennsylvanians and Toomey only eked out a narrow 1.5% victory in 2016 by keeping his distance from Trump and with the help of millions from the same cabal of billionaires who also financed The Club for Growth. Their idea of public policy is tax cuts for them and nothing for the public.
None of this is new. The previous Gilded Age was characterized by the “religious faith of all financial conservatives in the ‘drip theory’ of the economy.” According to Matthew Josephson that was the 1880s name for the same old supply side nonsense. He wrote classics about the period between the end of the Civil War and the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt. “The Robber Barons,” tells the story of those with the money, and “The Politicos,” describes those who did their biding.
Then, as now, the moneyed interest got richer and the poor poorer with the help of pliant men like Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester Arthur who, Josephson tartly remarks,” had the courage to execute unpopular measures desired exclusively by one class.”
The kingmaker behind the McKinley presidency was Mark Hanna. He made several fortunes in coal, steel, and streetcars, and eventually got himself elected to the Senate to keep his eye on his minions. He expressed the ethos of his class by observing that, “In a business state, someone must rule; the great mass of men must be ruled. Some men must own; the great mass of men must work for those who own.” Today, it seems the great mass of men must have their jobs outsourced or taken over by robots.
There were those who objected, of course. Strikers who were shot down, union leaders who were jailed, and authentic populists like Bryan. He bemoaned “the two nations of the poor and the rich, the haves and the have nots,” and warned against “the money interest of aggregated wealth and capital — imperious, arrogant, compassionless.”
Eventually, the grievances of the many became so apparent that reform could no longer be denied and the Progressive Era of trust busting, labor laws, and the like ameliorated the situation slightly. It should be noted that it wouldn’t have happened if McKinley hadn’t been assassinated and Roosevelt, his vice president, succeeded him. Hanna had opposed the choice of Teddy as running mate because it meant “there’s only one life between that madman and the Presidency.”
In our time, economist Thomas Piketty and others have shown a similar process is underway. Those with capital accumulate wealth faster than the wage economy grows, producing an ever widening inequality that will destabilize society if nothing is done. Beneficiaries of the status quo have pooh-poohed the idea.
To test the hypothesis, a study was undertaken by a Federal Reserve economist. It shows Piketty was too optimistic. Over the last 150 years, in 16 developed countries average annual return on financial assets has been 6.28%. but average economic growth and hence wags for salaried workers, has been less than half as much— 2.82%
Over many years the gap between robust market returns and stagnant wages has hollowed out the middle class and worsened the situation of an already struggling working class. Trump voters, in other words.
Their plight would be even worse if not for the social safety net erected beginning in the Progressive Era and greatly enhanced since the 1930s. Social Security keeps 26.1 million Americans out of poverty. School lunches, food stamps, and other programs help millions more to subsist. Medicare and Medicaid improve millions of lives.
But, in another echo of the Gilded Age, the faux populist Trump and his supply side Congress are not content with lopsided tax cuts for the wealthy. One Republican lawmaker says his “wish list” for 2018 and beyond is to scale back welfare spending and enrollment, healthcare, housing and food stamps for the poor.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan seconds that emotion. He said in December that 2018 would have to be devoted to cutting Medicare, Medicaid, welfare and to Social Security reform in order to solve the deficit problem that his tax cut helped increase by $1.5 trillion. Not that it will trouble his conscience since he’s admitted that it has been his dream to eliminate the social safety net ever since he read Ayn Rand.
All of this suggests that Trump is a populist betrayed by his own Congress, while he was off golfing. So he will surely rise up in righteous wrath and demand his promises be kept to protect workers’ jobs, Medicare and Social Security, and that poor minorities be given the help they need to succeed
Or, more realistically, Trump became president under false pretenses and planned all along to betray his own voters in order to enrich himself and his fellow plutocrats. Either way a real populist backlash, or the rise of a new Progressive Era, may be the result. Those who forget history get to watch it undo their supply side utopia, their thousand year Reich or their people’s revolution.