Using populism to make way for plutocracy

This has been almost a cartoonish example of what "What's the Matter with Kansas" described 20 years ago

In his 2005 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank argues that Republican politicians have been offering voters a bait-and-switch; they make cultural promises (end abortion, protect guns, stop gay marriage, etc.) but once in office just enact economic policies heavily skewed toward the wealthy (tax cuts for corporations and the top income brackets, business deregulation, etc.). That book had some issues, but if you ever wanted an example of what he was talking about, the past few months of U.S. politics are incredibly instructive.

Frank was largely arguing that working class Republicans were being “tricked” into “voting against their interests.” I’m skeptical of that kind of framing. It’s never obvious what someone’s true interests are, and there’s no reason those interests have to be economic. (By his framing, Barbra Streisand votes against her interests all the time, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem.) You could care more about those cultural issues than economic ones, and that’s perfectly fine.

But what we’ve seen lately has really been a souped up version of Frank’s argument. Trump and his fellow Republicans largely campaigned on cultural issues (gender norms, race, immigration, crime, etc.) with a few economic issues (inflation is bad) skewed toward poorer voters thrown in. The campaign had a very conservative populist tenor to it. But in the few weeks since he became President, Trump has leaned hard in on a plutocratic agenda.

We could also see this moment in light of what Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote about in their 2020 book Let Them Eat Tweets. That book argued that one of the central problems for conservative parties in a democracy is that their voters tend to be wealthy and see their interests tied up in remaining wealthy, and there just aren’t all that many wealthy people, making their agenda pretty unpopular and hard to win an election on. The goal, then, of any conservative party is to somehow bring poorer people into the coalition who see themselves aligned with the wealthy ones on some dimension other than wealth. That is, the goal is to get plutocrats and populists in the same room. And again, what we’ve seen in the nascent second Trump administration has really been a textbook example.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the new administration has been Trump’s unofficial tasking of Elon Musk with investigating and fundamentally remaking the federal government. Musk’s team of teenage and twenty-something X employees comprising the “Department of Government Efficiency” have moved into a number of federal agencies and taken over key offices, including the federal payments system at the U.S. Treasury, USAID (which Musk wants to shut down), portions of the Department of Education, and more. This has prevented civil service employees from accessing their offices and pushed many more to quit, while giving Musk’s team access to sensitive personal financial information for millions of Americans, and with an aim toward gutting roughly $1 trillion out of the federal budget outside congressional budgeting authority.

In addition to being wildly illegal and a massive violation of the Constitution, the very act of essentially handing the federal government over to the world’s wealthiest person after that person largely bankrolled Trump’s campaign is a major coup for plutocracy. It echoed the image of the nation’s wealthiest people sitting front and center at Trump’s inauguration last month.

Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk, collectively worth well over $1 trillion, at Trump’s inauguration

Beyond that, one of the administration’s first acts was to implement a freeze on federal domestic and foreign aid. A U.S. district court put a stay on that order and the White House confusingly rescinded it, but not before it had already resulted in the closure of community health centers, Medicaid portals crashing, Head Start centers threatening closure, and more. It was hard to see this as delivering much benefit to the working class voters who supported Trump.

And then there’s the administration’s foreign policy. Trump started, then drew back from, a trade war with Canada and Mexico, which would have dramatically increased prices on produce and other goods (after running a campaign focused on inflation), and ramped up a trade war with China.

Further, after honing an “America First” narrative that talked a great deal about withdrawing from policing the world and focusing more on problems within the United States, Trump, since his election, has spoken obsessively and provocatively about the conquest of Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Mars. Most recently, he has proposed the U.S. taking over the Gaza Strip and expelling its two million Palestinian residents, which, in addition to being a crime against humanity, would mean a massive and ongoing commitment of U.S. troops. It’s hard to see this as a populist victory for the working class, although Trump and his family have talked about the monetary value of developing Gaza as beachfront property.

Now, one area where the plutocrats and populists have often found common ground is racial resentment. The Trump campaign last year was fixated on ending diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) initiatives both in and out of government, and it has definitely followed through with that once in office. But although many conservative politicians have spoken in coded language for decades about racial integration, it is striking how bluntly Trump, Musk, and others are pushing for the rollback of eight decades of racial progress since the Civil Rights Movement. Ultimately this opposition to civil rights is likely to remain the glue that holds the awkward plutocrat-populist alliance together.

The overall story here is one that is far more blatant than the framework laid out two decades ago in What’s the Matter with Kansas. It was a conservative populist campaign focused on the fears and resentments of the working class, and it resulted in an administration that has overtly ceded power to multi-billionaires. This arrangement could eventually fray, but it’s held remarkably strongly so far.