Donald Trump's success in the 2016 Republican
Party primaries has mostly been interpreted by speculating about his local appeal. He’s speaking to disaffected white men
– capitalising on American racism – catching the fear and alienation of the
American working class – and so on.
There’s doubtless truth there.
But something more is going on, and it’s not just a local issue.
What is Donald Trump, after all, if not a billionaire who broke free of the usual organizational bases of
conservative politics? Trump’s
media career already pointed in that direction.
Normally in liberal-capitalist regimes, there’s a clear
specialization between the business and the political leadership. Family or personal wealth can help a
politician to rise in a party (David Cameron and Malcolm Turnbull show that),
but it’s not essential. What is
essential is the network that links the business leadership to the political
leadership. That is a very complex
tangle of connections – going far beyond official funding committees - through
which conservative party machines and campaigns are funded, short-term deals are
done and long-term strategies evolved.
That was the structure behind Menzies, Eisenhower, Thatcher,
Fraser, and Reagan. We got
glimpses of it from time to time in corruption scandals, for instance when some
of Nixon’s funding network came to light.
Most of the time the connection worked without publicity. From the business leadership’s point of
view, a grey anonymity was best.
The political and social stance too was normally ultra-conventional.
Something in the neoliberal era has shaken this
pattern. Trump is definitely not
the first owner of a large fortune to use it in a personal bid for power. In 1992 the billionaire Ross Perot ran
for president of the United States, campaigned against the Washington
establishment, and was actually leading in the polls until his political
naivety derailed his campaign. In
the early 2000s the oil company oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky seemed to be
launching an independent political project in post-communist Russia, until he
was crushed by Putin.
Australia launched a variation on this story. Rupert Murdoch
started out in the conventional way, using a media fortune to back professional
politicians. But he took a
different turn post-Reagan.
Especially through Fox Channel, the Murdoch empire became a stridently
right-wing mobilizing force in its own right.
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| Birds of a feather... |
The most spectacular example of the rogue oligarch, however,
is Silvio Berlusconi. Starting as
a property developer, becoming quickly rich as a media magnate, Berlusconi
moved into electoral politics in the early 1990s. At that moment, the established parties in Italy were massively
discredited by corruption. Berlusconi
improvised a new party on the basis of his company, named it after a football
slogan, and managed, through spectacular ups and downs, to be the centre of
Italian politics for more than a decade.
In these careers, anonymity and conventionality have gone by
the board. Publicity is the breath
of life to their campaigns (notice the connection with electronic media). Being a bit shocking is one way to get
attention; Trump plays this card repeatedly. The Big Man image is important, so trophy wives can be
expected; in Berlusconi’s case the display of virility went beyond this.
There’s an absence of detailed or coherent policy – of
course! That would be a hindrance. There’s a good dose of nationalism and
xenophobia (Berlusconi called his party “Forza Italia”, i.e. “Go, Italy!”;
Perot became a noted opponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement). Trump seems to have gone farthest towards
racism and and is certainly using sexism. This
feeds the diagnosis of an appeal to anxious white working-class men. No rogue oligarch, however, supports
unionism, or any other effective form of working-class organizing.
Two background conditions seem important for this kind of
politics. One is the collapse of
unionism, and mass party membership, since the 1970s - the latter has affected the
political right as well as the left.
Mass organizations once provided political education as well as policies
and campaign workers. Now the
parliamentary and presidential parties are suspended over a void. Mobilizations like Obama’s internet
campaign in 2008 can work electorally, but they don’t remain as a presence in
working-class life.
The second condition is the corrosive effect of
neoliberalism on the ruling class itself.
It’s significant that Trump displays no solidarity with the institutional
system that made him very rich. The
outsider image matters. Social solidarity at the elite level has badly
frayed in the era of neoliberal globalization. The old ruling class held together by conventional religion, dynastic
marriages (you don’t get that with trophy wives), bourgeois high culture,
establishment charities. Neighbourhood networks in Belgravia or the Upper East
Side are not what they were!
The first of these conditions makes a Trump-style campaign
possible. The second suggests that
even if this one crashes and burns, we are likely to get more Trumps in future.