Will neopopulism collapse under the weight of its own contradictions?

Black is white and night is day when it comes to contemporary political alliances

Vance argues that economic policy over the past few decades has been focused on the drive for cheap labor, and says he wants “the inversion of that,” with restrictions on immigration, the imposition of tariffs, and a sharp increase in the minimum wage (he mentions $20/hour) in order to apply “as much upward pressure on wages … as possible.” He’s eager to find a language in which Republicans can talk about issues like this to an electorate hungry for a change of direction.

It’s therefore entirely fitting that the opening evening of the Republican convention culminated in a lengthy speech by the head of the Teamsters union, as the Trump/Vance ticket looked on and listened respectfully. The right-populist ideology emerging from that ticket aspires to be a party of workers that puts their interests first. Will that ever be more than rhetoric? We don’t yet know. But with Vance lined up to serve as Trump’s vice president, the achievement of that revolution over the coming years has now become vastly more likely.
Damon Linker, Notes from the Middleground, 17/7/24

I suppose the world of your childhood always looks much simpler than the present. However, there’s no getting around the fact that, at least politically, the world of my childhood was much simpler.

There were centre-left parties, which people who were impecunious (or bohemian) voted for. Then there were centre-right ones, which people who were affluent (or authoritarian) supported. A comparatively small number of middle-of-the-road, middle-income voters lived in the handful of ‘swing seats’ that decided elections. (In post-war Australia, around 40 per cent of the population always voted for the ALP, around 40 per cent voted for the Coalition, and around 20 per cent of voters were up for grabs.)

When I was a boy, Australians were more inclined to define themselves as Labor or Coalition voters, yet society was much less politically polarised. Indeed, it wasn’t uncommon for Labor and Coalition voters to form close relationships, up to and including marriage.    

Even back then, things weren’t quite as simple as might be assumed from the above paragraphs. There have always been both working-class conservatives and aristocratic/upper-class radicals. (The year before I was born, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers was published. It detailed the strange fascination New York socialites had with Black Power activists, a short-lived dalliance that rhymes with the events of 2020.)

Nonetheless, if you met a construction worker, you could reasonably assume they supported the centre-left party. If you met a doctor, you could reasonably assume they supported the centre-right party. Centre-right voters were keen on keeping as much of their money as possible, therefore in favour of low taxes and keeping wages (for the common man) low. In contrast, centre-left voters favoured ‘Big Government’ tax-and-spend policies and other measures that raised living standards for those on low-to-middle incomes.

The neoliberal political realignment
I was born in 1971. By the time I turned four, the Keynesian dispensation described above was already collapsing, along with the long post-war boom that had fuelled the growth of an unprecedentedly large middle class.

I suspect many people fail to recognise just what a magnificent achievement the post-war era of widely shared prosperity was. The default setting for (post-agriculture) societies is a small elite waited on hand and foot by a mass of people enduring nasty, brutish and short existences.

But for a brief shining moment there – albeit after two world wars and a savage economic downturn – we had societies shaped like footballs rather than pyramids. For around three decades – the glorious thirty years, as the French call it – most of the citizens of the Anglosphere and Western Europe could live, if not like kings and queens, then at least like castle-owning dukes and duchesses.

Centre-right parties then decided lazy workers and “irresponsible union leaders” were entirely responsible for the West’s decline and set about rectifying that situation. Secure, well-paying union jobs were offshored, the unions that facilitated them were busted, and workers’ bargaining power was undermined by the throwing open of the mass-migration floodgates.  

One might have expected centre-left parties to attempt to safeguard the economic interests of their traditional constituency. But by the 1980s, the professional-managerial class had seized control of the Anglosphere centre-left parties formed to represent those who were neither managers nor professionals.

Not only are highly educated, cosmopolitan PMCers uninterested in the bread-and-butter material issues that most concern working-class and lower-middle-class voters, they are also frequently hostile to those voters. Especially if they have recently failed to demonstrate the requisite enthusiasm for the latest identity-politics cause célébre.

As an aside, it was this, dare I say, Great (class) Replacement that prompted Kim Beazley Snr to observe, “When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now, all I see are the dregs of the middle class.”

A dirty deal
Centre-left and centre-right parties, now both dominated by the university educated, appeared to reach a tacit settlement following the election of Thatcher and Reagan.

The Right could have the economy, the Left the culture.

The result has been four decades of unprecedented, uniparty economic and social liberalism. Anglosphere voters have long had the choice between voting for a centre-right party that champions economic liberalism and tolerates – and sometimes celebrates – social liberalism, and a centre-left party that champions social liberalism and tolerates – and sometimes celebrates – economic liberalism.

That’s fantastic if you are economically and socially liberal, as incumbent Anglosphere elites typically are.  

It’s not so fantastic if you’re part of the 70-80 per cent of the population that believes Anglosphere (and Western European) societies have gone overboard with economic and social liberalism.   

The neopopulist realignment
An argument was often made back in the day, most famously in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas (2004), that the low-information lower orders were either too stupid to recognise their economic interests and/or so worked up about “God, guns and gays” that they would happily vote to send their job to China and have their social security benefits slashed.

Frank’s thesis may or may not have been correct around the turn of the Millennium.*

However, in the wake of the GFC, those in the bottom four quintiles of the income distribution have been more focused on their material circumstances. And more conscious of how their constrained existences differ from those of globalist elites. A gnawing status anxiety that’s been turbocharged by social media, which has allowed the nouveau riche to showcase their good fortune in pitchfork-grabbing detail. (Facebook launched in 2004; the first iPhone dropped in 2007.)

As indicated by the Vance quote above, non-elites are no longer under any illusions about where their interests lie, are and have run out of patience with politicians who continue to claim:

*Globalisation has been all upside

*Unprecedentedly high migration levels can never, ever be wound back

*Civilised, first-world nations don’t need a manufacturing sector and, frankly, probably don’t need anything other than a finance industry

Trump doesn’t seem to consistently believe in much other than himself, so I always had doubts about his commitment to neopopulism. But Vance is a true believer. He’s a member of the underclass who improbably rose into the upper reaches of America’s elite, was disquieted by what he saw there, and opted for a risky political career over continuing to make bank as a venture capitalist.

The one problem with centre-right workers' parties
There’s just one problem with centre-right and centre-left parties swapping constituencies.

Historically, centre-left parties emerged to champion the interests of workers. In contrast, centre-right parties have long sought to represent the interests of those who aren’t workers. Farmers, small businesspeople and university-educated professionals, for instance.

Much has been made of the Left’s incoherent ‘coalition of the fringes’ but the Right has its own headaches in that department. These were on full display when the head of the Teamsters union addressed the Republican National Convention earlier this week.

Can the party of capital represent labour?
Marxism may have fallen out of fashion, but everyone still accepts that the interests of Labour and Capital will often be at odds.

Trump and Vance need to appeal both to traditional ‘Country Club/Chamber of Commerce’ Republicans (who love low wages and low taxes) and workers (who at least want a pay rise after decades of stagnant incomes).

This conflict is personified in JD Vance, the fire-breathing tyro on the record calling for big tech companies to be broken up. Reportedly, Vance got the VP role – against fierce lobbying from the Chamber of Commerce faction of the party – because Elon Musk, David Sacks and Peter Thiel lobbied Trump on his behalf.

Will Vance risk alienating the alpha tech bros who put him a heartbeat away from the presidency?

And will he and Trump be able to put “maximum upward pressure on wages” given their party has spent the last 44 years exerting maximum downward pressure on them?

I guess we’ll soon find out.

*Frank followed up Kansas with Listen Liberal, in which he gently tried to explain to his fellow intellectuals that snooty PMC elitism might also have something to do with the Left’s travails. That was a message left-leaning intellectuals – in the US and elsewhere – were much less receptive to.