What the neopopulist new normal looks like
There are going to be a few changes around here
Video summary
This is what happens when you ignore how the White, Hispanic, Latino, and African American working-class have been completely clobbered on two sides at the same time—by a rampant hyper-globalisation that saw global firms offshore jobs to exploit cheap migrant labour overseas, and by a radicalising elite class that simultaneously ushered into Western economies masses of cheap migrant labour through illegal and legal migration to satisfy their own sense of moral righteousness… This is what happens, British conservatives, when instead of leaning into the political realignment that is still unfolding across the Western world you turn away from it, treating millions of working-class, non-graduate, and culturally conservative voters from the small towns and rural areas with complete and utter contempt. And, ultimately, this is what happens when instead of learning from the lessons of 2016, from Trump 1, and the continuing rise of national populism across the West, you instead choose to double down on your side and say to hell with everybody else.
Matt Goodwin, Matt Goodwin 6/11/24
The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.
New York Times’ columnist Bret Stephens (6/11/24)
You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?
Freddie deBoer, Freddie deBoer 6/11
In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.
Donald Trump, 5/3/24
Far too late, I’ve come to realise there are no free lunches in life.
I mean, you might kid yourself that you’ve successfully done a runner and avoided having to pony up. But you really haven’t. Trust me, the bill always comes due eventually. After four long decades of neoliberalism, mixed in with a bit of neoconservatism, the bill came due for professional-managerial class (PMC) on Tuesday.
Trump’s landslide victory is being widely hailed as a deathblow to the identity-politics-obsessed progressivism university-educated types have been imposing on Anglosphere societies for decades. It is that, of course, but it’s much more than that. As Margaret Thatcher did, Trump will now remake both the mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties in his nation in his image.
As was widely noted, Kamala spent her disastrous campaign insisting she was solidly middle-class and batting away questions about her gender and race. She even gored that most sacred of PMC bovines by kinda sorta conceding maximising vibrant diversity through massive inflows of legal and illegal migrants might just have some downsides.
But those of a certain age will remember the pre-Trump Republican Party also being a very different beast. One committed to ensuring its donor class had the maximum possible access to cheap and compliant labour at home and abroad. One willing to pander to blue-collar Americans’ cultural concerns, but only while throwing them under the bus economically. One with a seemingly insatiable appetite for ill-fated military adventurism. One in thrall to the Religious Right, at least in terms of abortion policy.
That’s all over.
It’s definitively all over in the US. Given the rest of the Anglosphere is culturally downstream from America, it will soon be over in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The UK, which recently voted in a Labour government, will probably be a little slower to de-wokify. But I suspect centre-left parties all over the Anglosphere and Western Europe will henceforth focus on the battlers' materialist concerns rather than constantly embarking on frolics related to the post-materialist enthusiasms of the well-educated and well-heeled.
What happens now?
Briefly, here are my predictions for what happens next. To be clear, I’m not making a judgement about whether these developments will be good or bad, but simply stating they are likely.
Geopolitics
The Russia-Ukraine war: I haven’t followed the conflict closely, but I get the impression that neither Zelensky nor Putin wanted a war, and both made serious efforts to avert one. Hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Ukrainians and Russians later, Trump will rapidly broker a peace deal that will please neither leader but will allow both to save face domestically. He may even manage to pull off a ‘reverse Nixon’ and abruptly make nice with Russia to prise it away from China.
China: Speaking of China, I’m nauseously optimistic that Trump will be able to come to a temperature-lowering agreement with Xi. Even if that doesn’t happen, I suspect Xi – having previously instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027 – will decide discretion is the better part of valour with a ‘madman’ in the White House and put any blockade plans on the back burner until at least 2028.
It's possible – not necessarily likely, but certainly possible – that Trump may even be able to broker a détente. That would allow both countries to spend less on building up their military capacity and more on improving the living standards of their increasingly restive citizenries.
The Middle East: He got precious little credit for it, but Trump went a substantial way to bringing peace to the Middle East during his first term, overseeing the normalisation of relations between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the UAE. It’s possible – once again, not necessarily likely but possible – that the Supreme Dealmaker could put in place some sort of durable two-state solution.
Anglosphere politics
The era of turbocharged mass migration is done: Anglosphere politicians have been lying through their teeth about immigration since Ted Kennedy pushed through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 while insisting, “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”
Anything is possible, but I don’t imagine Trump will engage in mass deportations. (Like putting 1000 per cent tariffs on China, this would seem to be a clear ambit claim.)
But he will end the illegal immigration that has seen millions walk across America’s Southern border. And if JD Vance has anything to do with it, it will also soon be a lot harder for big and small businesses to employ the ‘undocumented’.
The social-justice-inflected grift that’s allowed comfortably situated progressives to help themselves to the fruits of cheap migrant labour while simultaneously congratulating themselves on how morally superior they are would also seem to have reached its due-by date. At the very least, the size of Trump’s vote would seem to suggest it’s not just evil, embittered old white men who are weary of open/openish borders and muscular multiculturalism.
If Trump achieves nothing else, simply ending the global labour arbitrage that has so defined the neoliberal era should significantly improve the living conditions of many Americans.
That green transition is looking shaky: Aside from immigration, the biggest class-based political difference between PMC and non-PMC types is their attitudes to the environment. I’d expect fewer costly green initiatives of dubious efficacy and more fracking after January 20, 2025.
Deregulation: Attitude to regulation divides what Picketty calls the Brahmin Left from the Merchant Right. The Brahmin Left is keen on regulation because (a) they are suspicious of what businesspeople – like Trump, Elon Musk and Dana White – will get up to if given a free hand and (b) regulatory agencies provide lots of reasonably paid and secure jobs to Brahmin Left types. This is a whole other Musing, but I suspect Trump will be amenable to simply firing many regulators and automating the jobs of the rest. Ditto for a good chunk of the US public service.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: The goat cheese Left’s sacralising of some – though definitely not all – minority groups has led it down some bizarre byways. DEI was well on the way out even before Trump’s victory. Given his triumph, we can only hope no employee will ever have to sit through another diversity training struggle session ever again. More generally, we’ll see a lot more emphasis on meritocracy and a lot less on inclusion going forward.
An emperor’s new clothes moment
There’s been a lot of debate, not least in Substack circles, about how resilient wokery will be. Especially among those who came of age during the era of land acknowledgements, gender-neutral bathrooms and personal-pronoun-brandishing social media bios.
I’m uncharacteristically optimistic on this front. As a student of both history and human behaviour, I’ve long been struck with the alacrity and shamelessness with which people can shift political positions while simultaneously rewriting their personal history.
About 1-2 per cent of the French population was involved in the Resistance from 1940-1944, which means the other 98-99 per cent were active or passive collaborators. Nonetheless, post-1945, the official story seems to be that 98-99 per cent of French people were in the Resistance, and only 1-2 per cent ever co-operated with the Germans in any way.
Further east, the Stasi recruited erstwhile Gestapo agents. Reportedly, they usually made the transition from fanatical fascists to doctrinaire Communists seamlessly. And plenty of Nazi rocket scientists were happy to help the decadent, Jew-ridden Americans put a man on the Moon.
Indeed, I believe it was the non-orange Hitler who observed, “The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.”
Normies don’t overthink their political views and typically adopt whatever positions they perceive as being high status within their social and/or occupational circles. If being a cosmopolitan globalist is in fashion, many people will embrace cosmopolitan globalism. But as soon as it goes out of fashion… well, let’s just say there will be some powerful forgetting and digital-footprint scrubbing going on in the coming days. I’m writing this about 16 hours after the results became clear. I’ve been struck by the number of legacy and independent media pundits who’ve already revealed a hitherto well-disguised contempt for “liberal pieties”.
As a one-time journalist, I’ll conclude by expressing my disappointment over just how badly the legacy media beclowned itself during the Biden-Kamala era. First, the Vice President was a Dan Quaylesque figure of fun, while Biden was unquestionably sharp as a tack. Then she was a joy-dispensing mash-up of Barack Obama and Mother Teresa. At the time of writing, she’s gone more than full circle and is well on her way to ‘weakest presidential candidate ever’ status.
It’s this kind of whiplash-inducing gaslighting that’s destroying what little credibility the old-school media still has left. And I fear there won’t be much old-school media left when the next US presidential election rolls around.