Ruling a Void

OK - the last 2 posts gave the 10 golden rules for corrupting the political class – at least according to Anthony Jay the highly successful scriptwriter of the "Yes Minister" television series of 35 years ago.

The question is whether these in fact give us the basic reasons for the “hollowing out” of British (and European) democracy……during that period. 

Voters and citizens no longer consider that parties and politicians represent their concerns – they vote in decreasing numbers and with increasing cynicism. 

Let’s remind ourselves that Jay identified the following stratagems for the powerful to retain power  -

• Centralise revenue
• Centralise authority
• ensure the Prime Minister is captured
• Insulate the Cabinet
• Enlarge constituencies
• Overpay MPs
• Appoint rather than elect
• Ensure that civil servants are permanent – but Ministers highly temporary
• Appoint more staff
• Keep state affairs secret – whatever the laws about Open Government may say

I’ve read a hell of a lot about democracy during this period. You might indeed say that its been my bread and butter since, between 1970 and 1990, I got my cash variously from state coffers - a combination of Polytechnic and local government sources - operating as a local government politician and writing about the various efforts to improve its practice.

My (much better) fees since then have come overtly from commercial sources – but all of the companies I have worked for since 1991 have been under contract to the European Commission. And the focus of my work in the last 20 years has been the building of the capacity of local and central government systems in central Europe and Central Asia…….Its ironic that the democratic models we held up to those “transitional systems”  for emulation proved to be disintegrating even as we spoke……Talk about hubris!

I find it curious, first, that I seem to have been the first to upload Anthony Jay’s piece – and therefore to subject it to analysis. The academics who write about democracy (and there are thousands!) clearly view the satire as beneath their dignity….

But Jay score 8 out of 10 in my reckoning for his analysis – I would fault only his points about staffing. Civil servant contracts have actually become highly contractual – and also the subject of fairly severe cutbacks. But the fact still remains that it is the senior (rather than junior) staff who have been laughing all the way to the bank…….with inflated salaries and pensions.  

The question remains, however, whether his points (however satirically meant) actually capture the true reasons for the collapse of political legitimacy? 

One point, for example, commonly made in discussions is that the political class has now become younger and very incestuous – moving quickly from academia into think-tanks and positions as aides to politicians before themselves becoming politicians. In short, they accumulate favours and networks which make them highly dependent and malleable….. And they use a managerial language which not only alienates but reflects a consensual ideology about the limits of state action enshrined in “neo-liberalism”.

Peter Oborne is a British journalist who wrote a critical book on this subject in 2008 called The Triumph of the Political Class. A month ago he enthused about a new academic book about the “hollowing of democracy” and it is to his views I want to devote the rest of this post. The basic question about the reasons for the degeneration of politics will be continued in future posts.

Every so often one comes across a book, a poem or a work of art that is so original, perfectly crafted, accurate and true that you can’t get it out of your head. You have to read or look at it many times to place it in context and understand what it means.In the course of two decades as a political reporter my most powerful experience of this kind came when a friend drew my attention to a 20-page article in an obscure academic journal.Written by the political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair, and called “The Emergence of a Cartel Party”, it immediately explained almost everything that had perplexed me as a lobby correspondent: the unhealthy similarity between supposedly rival parties; the corruption and graft that has become endemic in modern politics; the emergence of a political elite filled with scorn and hostility towards ordinary voters. My book, The Triumph of the Political Class was in certain respects an attempt to popularise that Katz and Mair essay.

Several months ago I was shocked and saddened to learn that Peter Mair (whom I never met) had died suddenly, while on holiday with his family in his native Ireland, aged just 60. However, his friend Francis Mulhern has skilfully piloted into print the book he was working on at the time of his death. It is called Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, and published by Verso. In my view it is every bit as brilliant as the earlier essay.The opening paragraph is bold, powerful, and sets out the thesis beautifully: “The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.” 

The first half of Mair’s new book concentrates on this crisis in party democracy. He tracks the sharp fall in turn-out at elections, the collapse of party membership (the Tories down from three million in the Fifties to scarcely 100,000 today, a drop of 97 per cent) and the decay of civic participation. Mair shows that this is a European trend. All over the continent parties have turned against their members. Political leaders no longer represent ordinary people, but are becoming, in effect, emissaries from central government. All of this is of exceptional importance, and central to the urgent contemporary debate about voter disenchantment.

However, I want to concentrate on the second half of Mair’s book, because here the professor turns to the role played by the European Union in undermining and bypassing national democracy.He starts with a historical paradox. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 was in theory the finest moment for Western democracy. But it was also the moment when it started to fail. Mair argues that political elites have turned Europe into “a protected sphere, safe from the demands of voters and their representatives”.This European political directorate has taken decision-making away from national parliaments. On virtually everything that matters, from the economy to immigration, decisions are made elsewhere. Professor Mair argues that many politicians encouraged this tendency because they wanted to “divest themselves of responsibility for potentially unpopular policy decisions and so cushion themselves against possible voter discontent”. This means that decisions which viscerally affect the lives of voters are now taken by anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than politicians responsible to their voters.

Though the motive has been understandable, the effect has been malign, making politicians look impotent or cowardly, and bringing politics itself into contempt. The prime ministers of Greece, Portugal and Spain are now effectively branch managers for the European Central Bank and Goldman Sachs. By a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.In a devastating analogy, Mair conjures up Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French thinker who is often regarded as the greatest modern theorist about democracy. Tocqueville noted that the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy fell into contempt because they claimed privileges on the basis of functions that they could no longer fulfil. The 21st-century European political class, says Mair, is in the identical position. To sum up, the European elites have come very close to the abolition of what we have been brought up to regard as politics, and have replaced it with rule by bureaucrats, bankers, and various kinds of unelected expert. So far they have got away with this. This May’s elections for the European Parliament will provide a fascinating test of whether they can continue to do so. 

The European Union claims to be untroubled by these elections. A report last month from two members of the Jacques Delors Institute concluded that “the numerical increase of populist forces will not notably affect the functioning of the [European Parliament], which will remain largely based on the compromises built between the dominant political groups. This reflects the position of the overwhelming majority of EU citizens”. I wonder. In France, polls suggest that the anti-semitic Front National, which equates illegal immigrants with “organised gangs of criminals”, will gain more votes than the mainstream parties.

The Front National has joined forces with the virulently anti-Islamic Geert Wilders in Holland, who promises to claim back “how we control our borders, our money, our economy, our currency”. Anti-European parties are on the rise in Denmark, Austria, Greece and Poland. These anti-EU parties tend to be on the Right, and often the far-Right. For reasons that are hard to understand, the Left continues enthusiastically to back the EU, even though it is pursuing policies that drive down living standards and destroy employment, businesses and indeed (in the case of Greece and Spain) entire economies. In Britain, for example, Ed Miliband is an ardent supporter of the European project and refuses even to countenance the idea of a referendum.

Like Miliband, Peter Mair comes from the Left. He was an Irishman who spent the majority of his professional life working in European universities in Italy, the Netherlands or Ireland. And yet he has written what is by far and away the most powerful, learned and persuasive anti-EU treatise I have come across. It proves that it is impossible to be a democrat and support the continued existence of the European Union.

His posthumous masterpiece deserves to become a foundation text for Eurosceptics not just in Britain, but right across the continent. It is important that it should do so. The battle to reclaim parliamentary democracy should not just belong to the Right-wing (and sometimes fascist) political parties. The Left and Right can disagree – honourably so – on many great issues. But surely both sides of the ideological divide can accept that democracy is still worth fighting for, and that the common enemy has become the European Union.

The painting is Daumier's "Belly of the Beast"

Have we lost our Collective Intelligence?

Once again a video has inspired a post – this time a conversation with Geoff Mulgan about his latest book “Another World is Possible - How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination” (2022). Geoff Mulgan is a professor of collective intelligence and a Knight of the realm; a former CEO of Nesta and DEMOS think tank; Director of the government’s Strategy Unit and Head of Policy in the Prime Minister’s office. He is also the author of many books, including “Big Mind – how collective intelligence can change our world” (2018) which I’ve just started to read and which argues that -

... the world has made great strides in improving health and has accumulated an extraordinary amount of knowledge about it, yet still has a long way to go in orchestrating that knowledge to best effect.

Similar patterns can be found in many fields, from politics and business to personal life: unprecedented access to data, information, and opinions, but less obvious progress in using this information to guide better decisions. We benefit from a cornucopia of goods unimaginable to past generations, yet still too often spend money we haven’t earned to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. P13

For institutions, the rising importance of conscious collective intelligence is no less challenging, and demands a different view of boundaries and roles. Every organization needs to become more aware of how it observes, analyses, remembers, and creates, and then how it learns from action: correcting errors, sometimes creating new categories when the old ones don’t work, and sometimes developing entirely new ways of thinking.

Every organization has to find the right position between the silence and the noise: the silence of the old hierarchies in which no one dared to challenge or warn, and the noisy cacophony of a world of networks flooded by an infinity of voices. That space in between becomes meaningful only when organizations learn how to select and cluster with the right levels of granularity— simple enough but not simplistic; clear but not crude; focused but not to the extent of myopia. Few of our dominant institutions are adept at thinking in these ways. Businesses have the biggest incentives to act more intelligently, and invest heavily in hardware and software of all kinds. But whole sectors repeatedly make big mistakes, misread their environments, and harvest only a fraction of the know- how that’s available in their employees and customers.

Mulgan had rehearsed some of his arguments in a 2020 paper called The Imaginary Crisis and in this great interview a couple of years ago

One of the reasons I became interested in imagination recently was because perhaps 

there was a missing piece in the theories of change. In the past, one of the things which 

allowed change was people thinking ahead to a better possible society or utopia. And my 

worry is that that kind of imagination has almost disappeared.

Why is that?
People can picture a much worse world, with climate change, ecological catastrophe, robots 

taking over the world, populous demagogues. But very few people can give an articulate account 

of how the world might be better socially. What might our health care look like? Our primary 

schools, our libraries, our parliaments. And part of the reason is that the institutions which 

should be working on this imagination have largely vacated that space - political parties, 

universities, think tanks all for slightly different reasons. This has become part of a pathology 

of our time.

You have a very mixed background, working in government with Tony Blair, founding and 

running big think tanks like Demos and Nesta, teaching at university. What is your personal 

ambition in all of this?
I spent half of my career as an activist, from the grassroots upwards, starting at the age of 

14. I used to organize marches and pickets and I remained involved in community organizing 

and social entrepreneurship trying to find solutions from the bottom up. And I have spent 

the other half of my life working from the top down, with governments around the world, 

the European Commission or UN now. To some extent, nearly all change has to involve some 

alliance of the top down and the bottom up, the powerless and the powerful. I sometimes 

call them the bees and the trees – the people with the ideas and the big institutions with 

power. And, uh, money.

Where do you get your energy and optimism from?
I get some optimism from having seen how often you can transform things completely. 

The great lesson I have learned or relearned, again and again, is that we overestimate 

how much can change short term. But equally, most people underestimate how much can 

change over one, two or three decades. There is nothing worse than an unrealistic fatalism 

because it undermines the energy, the capacity to do the practical changes – which of 

course won't solve climate change in 2022, but actually over 20, 30 years. W

e will completely transform our economy and society.
How much of your job is to try to design options for the future?

One of the institutions that you want to challenge and change is the university – for 

THE NEW INSTITUTE you wrote a fascinating paper on what you call “exploratory 

social sciences.” Can you explain your argument?
I mainly focus on social sciences, it is a very different story for engineering and the other 

sciences. But in the social sciences, the fundamental question for an academic is: how much 

of your job is to understand the present and the past, and how much of your job is to try 

to design options for the future? Now in the 19th century, in the early days of social science,

 it was assumed you did both. The London School of Economics for example was very much 

formed as a place for academics to work on designing future health systems, welfare states 

et cetera – not just to write books and analyze what had gone wrong. Over the last 50 or 

60 years, academics have become quite fearful of designing the future. It is almost career 

threatening.

Why is that?
Some of this has to do with the rise of positivism and quantification, the in many ways quite 

welcome rise of attention to data, to empirical analysis, to looking at the facts. In many ways,

 this has been good. It has made for a much more rigorous understanding of the present 

and the past – but it squeezed out creativity and visions for an alternative future.

A scepticism vis-à-vis utopia or world-building?
There certainly was a disappointment with the grand ideological projects of the last century, 

which led a whole wave of intellectuals to move into critique rather than creative construction. 

It's a much safer place to be critiquing all that is wrong with capitalism rather than trying 

to propose alternatives to it. I believe there is a need to recover a bit of that older tradition 

of social science but align it to the best tools we have now, data and models and experiments 

– and learn methods from design and the arts and other fields, which do creativity as a matter 

of course.

Economics has been in many ways the leading social science of the last decades, and it 

has often pretended to be more than that, more like a hard science. What is your take on that?
Weirdly, economics has taken almost no methods from any other fields, including from business,

 in terms of its own creativity. There is a real intellectual narrow-mindedness, a lack of curiosity, 

lack of hunger at a time when creativity methods are so widely used in everything from 

film and design for products and services. My hope is that we will see university centers of 

exploratory social science, which try to be as good at rigor as they are at imagination. 

We have this paradoxical situation where the people with the deepest knowledge are not 

doing the creativity and vice versa – and hopefully THE NEW INSTITUTE can be part of 

changing that.
We need some really bold, radical thinking in this century

What is the politics in all of this? Traditionally, the left was aligned with the future, 

the right with preserving the status quo. This has shifted, in surprising ways, hasn’t it?
Traditionally, the conservative right was skeptical of any designs for the future because 

by definition what exists has been tried through history. For a time, that changed, left and 

right swapped places. A lot of conservatives became almost more utopian than the left. 

They pictured a future run by markets, supported by technologies, with a slightly crazed 

enthusiasm. In the last 20 years, they have returned back to a much more traditional conservative 

position, with nostalgic pictures of race and community and manufacturing-based economies.

And the left?
The left is still in a rather fearful state – a political fear of being exposed by having 

genuinely novel, genuinely challenging ideas. You are much more likely to make it as a public 

intellectual by reviving old ideas rather than coming up with new ones. Which is pretty disappointing.

 Because we need some really bold, radical thinking in this century if we are going to cope 

with climate change, with AI, with the threats to democracy. And our intellectuals are not 

serving us that well.

You explore a few tools and methods in your paper to get to that point where the 

new can happen: experimentation, complexity thinking, design. How can we unleash 

our societal imagination?
Extension is an example, you can use it for almost any phenomenon – like re-imagining your 

local library or childcare. Then you go through a series of transformations. What would 

happen if you extended one aspect of it radically, the way that we have extended ideas of 

rights to cover everything from animals to transgender. There is also inversion: What happens 

if the farmers become bankers or patients become doctors? Or grafting: You take an idea 

from a very different field and try and apply it to your library or your childcare.

What is the next step?
That is just the starting point. Then the deep knowledge comes in. You have to think about 

building your world, your designs, and see how plausible they are, what might be an evolutionary 

route for them. The challenge is to find a balance between the willingness to leap ahead 

and jump beyond what is realistic now to what might be possible in 20 years. And not to 

fall prey to what I call unrealistic realism.

What does that mean?
It is striking that many academic disciplines are very good at explaining why change won't 

happen. And when it does come, they have no way of explaining why it did happen because 

they hold on to their unrealistic realism. And at the same time avoiding fantasy, illusion, 

ideas which have absolutely no plausible prospect of ever happening. I would like to see in 

universities cross-disciplinary teams becoming good at creating these alternative worlds, 

interrogating them, seeing what their implications are, what their economic base might be, 

the legitimacy of them.

Imagination as practice.
Every society needs some sense of where it might be headed in the future in order to be 

healthy, just as we do as individuals. We need some shared pictures of where we could be 

headed 30, 50, 70 years into the future, pictures which aren't only ecological disasters 

or technological determinist triumphs. That's the missing space in our collective imaginaries 

which we really need to address. Because the downside is that all sorts of other dark forces 

may fill that space instead.

Evil Returns

I don’t like giving the orangutan any coverage but can’t ignore Trump’s reelection in the US – how on earth did a felon and rapist manage to convince so many Americans?? Michael Roberts is one of my favourite bloggers and has a good account here

As the FT put it: “In the end, it wasn’t even close. A presidential 

election long forecast to dance on a knife’s edge very quickly turned 

out to be a rout for Donald Trump.” Trump polled 73.4m votes or 50% 

of the those who voted, while Harris polled 60m or 47.7% of the vote. 

Third party candidates mustered just 1.6%. Trump’s 4.3m lead was more 

than Biden had in 2020, or Hillary Clinton had over Trump in 2016 (in fact - 

as of 13 Nov - Trump had 3.2 million more votes than Harris).
Trump’s vote did not rest on small margins in a handful of swing states, as was the 

case when he won in 2016. Instead, he gained support across the electoral map in 

states both red (Republican) and blue (Democrat). Even in his birthplace of 

New York state, one of the bluest strongholds in the country, Trump winnowed a 

23-point gap down to 11.

The biggest caveat to Trump’s voting victory is that contrary to the usual hype of a 

‘massive voter turnout’, fewer Americans eligible to vote bothered to do so compared 

to 2020. Then over 158m voted, this time the vote was down to 143m. The 

voter turnout of those eligible fell to 58.2% from the high of 65.9% in 2020. 

Around 40% of Americans registered to vote did not do so. And the number of 

Americans who failed to register rose to 19m from 12m in 2020. So, although 

Trump got 51% of those who voted, he actually got only 28% support of Americans 

of voting age. Three out of four Americans did not vote for Trump. The real 

winner of the election was (yet again) the ‘no vote’ party. Indeed, Trump polled 

fewer votes in 2024 than he did in 2020. But Harris lost around 11m votes compared 

to Biden in 2020.

An interesting article has a sceptical look at some of the conventional 

explanations 

Donald Trump has won, and most shockingly, he won the popular vote. Unlike in 

2016, which could be explained as a rejection of Hillary Clinton concentrated in 

the crucial mid-western states, this year he won convincingly. He has increased 

his share of the vote, as a percentage of the overall national popular vote, in each 

of the three elections he has run.
One explanation for Trump’s victory is an across-the-board collapse in turnout 

and increased apathy caused by an unpopular presidency, an uninspiring president 

and an ideologically spent brand of liberalism. There is some merit to this, but 

on closer inspection, it’s not why Kamala Harris lost.
First, it’s important to note that counting votes in the United States takes a 

very long time. By the time it’s all said and done, it’s quite likely Trump received 

more votes in 2024 than he did in the record turnout 2020 election, probably 

millions more votes.

The second flaw in this idea is that the turnout change wasn’t uniform, nor was the 

change in voting behavior. In most swing states, turnout was actually up from 2020, 

setting records. In the states that decided the election, Democrats got their base 

voters to the polls and had the electorate they needed to win (and even did win in 

many cases in the Senate and down the rest of the ballot). The problem was she 

lost on persuasion: many voters who chose Joe Biden four years ago and even voted 

for other Democrats this year chose Donald Trump.
However, problems with persuasion weren’t the only issue: Democratic turnout did, 

in fact, collapse in the less competitive states, especially in blue states. 

This is a unique shift in voting behavior nationally and can’t be explained obviously 

by most existing theories of the electorate.
Another explanation is that Democrats have become the party of college-educated 

voters exclusively, and shed working-class voters, especially working-class voters 

of color. There is some truth to this, especially over the long term. But this 

explanation is also flawed. Trump did better consistently with every demographic 

almost everywhere in the country, including college-educated white people and 

women. While these numbers were more pronounced with young voters, Latinos 

and men, it was only slight. Most highly-educated areas that had swung consistently 

against Republicans in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 moved back toward Trump this 

year. His victory was not with any one demographic. It was total.
As with any massive election loss, recriminations have been swift, and factions 

inside the Democratic party are jockeying to make their narrative about the 

election the conventional wisdom that shapes the future of the party, while 

Republicans are claiming a sweeping mandate for reshaping society in a darker, 

more authoritarian way. However, conventional ideological explanations also don’t 

stand up to scrutiny.
One of the most common centrist takes has been: Democrats have become too 

progressive and “woke” on social issues and obsessed with identity politics, and 

Democratic staffers and consultants live in a bubble and speak in alienating ways 

that have made them seem radical and off-putting to the median voter. 

The solution is a relentless focus on bread-and-butter issues and moderating, 

mostly ignoring culture war issues, besides abortion, and aggressively playing up 

moderate and bipartisan bona fides.
It seems quite likely this narrative will win out among Democrats. It has already 

been expressed by elected officials and influential Democratic pundits. The key 

problem with this narrative is that while it may have had merit in 2020 or 2022, 

the Democratic party has, over the last few years, aggressively purged “woke”

-sounding language from their messaging and policies from their agenda. 

The Harris campaign was almost monomaniacally focused on projecting moderation 

and bipartisanship and on basic, kitchen-table economic issues. 

They relentlessly hunted the median voter with targeted messaging. 

They ran the campaign the popularists wanted, and lost.
This theory is also belied by the fact that the most well-known progressive and 

radical politicians mostly did better than Harris. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also 

won more votes than Harris. Understanding why thousands of people might vote 

for Trump and an avowed democratic socialist and vocal supporter of “woke” 

causes like trans rights is a key to understanding the election.
Progressives see the flaws with the centrist analysis and also have an explanation, 

typified by Bernie Sanders: Democrats lost by abandoning the working class and 

unions. Like the centrist narrative, it is an outdated explanation that was once 

true and may be true on a generational scale but is inadequate to capture what 

happened in this specific election fully. While Democrats have, over the last 

50 years, shifted away from unions and redistributive politics, allowing inequality 

to grow, and this is the correct explanation for Clinton’s loss in 2016, it doesn’t 

quite fit here. Joe Biden actually did shift to the left on economic issues after 

winning the primary in 2020, largely due to the mass movement that formed around 

the Sanders campaign. And while, in the past, this may have been lip service, the 

Biden administration, for all its shortcomings, did follow through in real, measurable

 ways. Income inequality, the central theme of the progressive movement in the 

2010s, decreased under Biden. The poorest workers were better off. 

Biden also pursued aggressive pro-labor and pro-consumer policy through the 

executive branch. Biden was the first president to walk a picket line, and put 

political capital on the line to bail out union pension funds.
For many years, it was easy to explain why workers would leave the Democrats: 

they were making less money and losing rights. But, while the Biden administration 

should have been far more assertive in redistribution and class-war policy on 

ideological and moral grounds, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny that workers moved 

right because of an ideologically neoliberal or austerity-focused policy. 

Though Democrats have mostly abandoned class as a mode of communication, 

and struggled to name an enemy and construct a compelling economic narrative, 

the material explanation for Harris losing votes among the working class and union 

members doesn’t hold as it may have in the past.
The right has its own explanation, seeing a sweeping mandate for the culture war. 

But Republican candidates who made their campaigns into referenda on culture war 

issues have uniformly lost or underperformed, in the past, and also this year. 

Trump is the only candidate who ran aggressively on the persecution of trans 

people, for example, and also did better than the partisan baseline.
And the idea that this is why voters flocked to Trump is just not compelling. 

Fifty-four percent of voters thought Trump was “too extreme”, 65% were 

pro-choice, and, even on immigration, 56% of voters supported a pathway to 

citizenship rather than mass deportations. Millions of voters voted for Trump 

at the top of the ticket and Democrats down-ballot to check his unpopular agenda. 

It would be a mistake to think Trump has a mandate to remake society in a 

hard-right, socially conservative image.
So why did people vote for Trump? Most voters still actively dislike him personally 

(53% of voters had an unfavorable opinion of him) and most of his policies. 

The obvious explanation is that people trust him more to handle the economy. 

Although voters didn’t like his presidency, they felt like they were better off four 

years ago. This is true, but also so obviously true as to be facile. 

More interesting is why, materially, voters trust him more to handle the economy.

I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare 

state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety 

net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy 

changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, 

Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, 

extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers 

from the American government.
Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 

2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. 

They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for 

their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to 

look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. 

At the end of Trump’s term, the American standard of living and the amount of 

economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, 

and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left 

office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. 

This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.

The American journalist/historian, Thomas Frank, (also the editor of the 
Baffler) is perhaps the best person to consult about all this. He anticipated 
the first Trump victory in 2016 – not least in an early book What’s the Matter 
with Kansas? How Conservatives won the heart of America (2004) and had just 
written this piece -
Twenty years ago I published a book about politics in my home state of Kansas 
where white, working-class voters seemed to be drifting into the arms of right-wing 
movements. I attributed this, in large part, to the culture wars, which the right 
framed in terms of working-class agony. Look at how these powerful people insult 
our values!, went the plaint, whether they were talking about the theory of evolution 
or the war on Christmas.
This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul 
of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not 
long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking 
officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were 
very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for 
Donald Trump.
My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way the 
Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. 
Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade 
and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had: All those 
manifestoes about futurific “wired workers” or the “learning class” … all those speeches 
about how Democrats had to leave the worker-centric populism of the 1930s behind 
them … all those brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right. 
When I was young, it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was 
making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,
” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom 
everybody admired.
Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get, and now 
here we are. At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination 
visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of 
which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the 
Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the 
vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull 
over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there 
by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, 
with Democrats.
By comparison, here is Barack Obama in 2016, describing to Bloomberg Businessweek 
his affinity for the private sector: “Just to bring things full circle about innovation 
— the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together 
my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”
I hope Mr. Obama finds his silicon satisfaction. I hope the men of capital whose 
banks he bailed out during the financial crisis show a little gratitude and build him 
the biggest, most expensive, most innovative presidential library of them all. 
But his party is in ruins today, without a leader and without a purpose.
It would have been nice if the Democrats could have triangulated their way into 
the hearts of enough educated and affluent suburbanites to make up for the 
working class voters they’ve lost over the years, but somehow that strategy rarely 
works out. They could have gone from boasting about Dick Cheney’s endorsement 
to becoming a version of Mr. Cheney themselves, and it still wouldn’t have been 
enough. A party of the left that identifies with people like Mr. Cheney is a 
contradiction in terms, a walking corpse.

For a short time in the last few years, it looked as if the Democrats might actually 
have understood all this. What the Biden administration did on antitrust and 
manufacturing and union organizing was never really completed but it was inspiring. 
Framed the right way, it might have formed the nucleus of a strong appeal to the 
voters Mr. Trump has stolen away. Kamala Harris had the skills: She spoke powerfully 
at the Democratic convention about a woman’s right to choose and Mr. Trump’s 
unfitness for high office. Speaker after speaker at the gathering in Chicago blasted 
the Republicans for their hostility to working people. There was even a presentation 
about the meaning of the word “populism.” At times it felt like they were speaking 
to me personally.
At the same time, the convention featured lots of saber-rattling speeches hailing 
America’s awesome war-making abilities. The administration’s achievements on 
antitrust were barely mentioned. There was even a presentation by the governor 
of Illinois, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, in which he boasted of being a real 
billionaire, not a fake one like Donald Trump supposedly is, and the assembled 
Democrats cheered their heads off for this fortunate son. Then, once Ms. Harris’s 
campaign got rolling, it largely dropped economic populism, wheeled out another 
billionaire and embraced Liz Cheney.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, put together a remarkable coalition of the disgruntled. 
He reached out to everyone with a beef, from Robert Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk. 
From free-speech guys to book-banners. From Muslims in Michigan to anti-
immigration zealots everywhere. “Trump Will Fix It,” declared the signs they waved 
at his rallies, regardless of which “It” you had in mind.
Republicans spoke of Mr. Trump’s persecution by liberal prosecutors, of how he was 
censored by Twitter, of the incredible strength he showed after being shot. 
He was an “American Bad Ass,” in the words of Kid Rock. And clucking liberal pundits 
would sometimes respond to all this by mocking the very concept of “grievance,” as 
though discontent itself was the product of a diseased mind.
Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The 
Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by 
now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. 
Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise 
anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. 
Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.
I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt 
that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever 
turn on the lightbulb for the liberals. I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march 
on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their 
social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.
Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to 
rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, 
inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. 
It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. 
It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the 
cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming
-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well
-meaning professionals.
That seems a long way away today. But the alternative is — what? To blame the 
voters? To scold the world for failing to see how noble we are? No. It will take 
the opposite sentiment — solidarity — to turn the world right-side up again.
Further Reading
Listen, Liberal – or whatever happened to the party of the people? Thomas Frank (2016)