In the wake of the stunning upset to the status quo that Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States represents, people are trying to understand what it means and what the impact will be.
Trump himself and people in his entourage, most recently Sarah Palin, have likened his win to the Brexit vote, and the comparison may well be apt, for all that neither Trump nor Palin is known for having deep thoughts.
As Palin also said in her comments, “Britain – we’re going rogue and the people are taking back control.” Instinctively she knows that the people who voted for Trump and the people who voted for Brexit have much in common. First and foremost, as her comments suggest, they are united by a feeling that they have no control, no voice – that they have been left out and behind. And they are right.
What we are living through is perhaps the beginning of a new era, but it is definitely the culmination of a slow evolution over decades – an evolution that has finally reached a breaking point. What many people, especially those in power, seem to have willfully ignored is that we have developed a new economy in the West. An economy that is leaving a large swathe of the population in the dust, whether that “dust” is dreary council housing in the UK with a meager dole, being consigned to the encroaching, economic wastelands of the US, anemically fuelled by trade in oxycodone and home-cooked meth, or an entire country – Greece – being put in solitary confinement, economically speaking.
The new economy is run on monopoly money and backed by ever-rising quarterly returns. If you can produce the quarterlies, you can get financing, and that is all that really matters. It is an economy of leveraging gone wild, as we saw in 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed. The subprime mess was, in simple terms, caused by a neat trick that allowed lenders to leverage real estate to the max and then leverage the same real estate a second time against the future. It blew up, but the principle didn’t die, even if about 30% of the combined principal of the West did.
One simple way to improve your quarterlies is to cut costs. So first you cut the bennies, a little. Then you cut them some more. Then you make your employees pay for their bennies, or limit their hours so they don’t even qualify for any benefits (remember Walmart?). You can also cut wages and you can move people off the payroll all together, while retaining their services, either by calling people consultants, which sounds high-class, or by using temps. When you can’t any longer find people to work for your measly wages, you can always move the jobs abroad.
Meanwhile, the people who do the really important and essential work of the company, i.e. the people who get the sales and cut the costs to improve the quarterlies, have to be compensated more generously. They get decent salaries, benefits, bonuses and stock options. There are also some people in the middle, who are deemed essential but less important. These are the people who oversee the everyday logistics of managing the temps, the consultants and the call center in Greece. They get paid just enough to stay on. Those people, the middle managers and their bosses, vote for Hillary or whoever the establishment candidate is, because the new economy is working for them and they want to keep things as they are. They know that things are tough out there, especially the middle managers, who live in eternal fear of being relegated to the meth fields.
Until this election, there were only establishment candidates to choose from, so the middle managers and their bosses had the luxury of expressing an opinion without any danger to their livelihoods, while the people of the wastelands simply didn’t bother to vote. If they did occasionally vote, it was without any particular passion or conviction, since they knew nothing would change for them either way.
Then came Trump and Bernie. Bernie folded, but Trump plugged on, largely taking the GOP by stealth. All those nice, polite country club republicans were convinced that someone like Trump couldn’t possibly win the nomination. By the time they thought again, it was too late, and “that man” was their candidate. Many establishment republicans voted for Hillary, George Bush Sr. reportedly among them. The people for whom the system works rallied around the establishment candidate, parties be damned. They no longer had the luxury of pretending to have political convictions. The problem is that this group is shrinking and the have-nots along with the have-barelies are growing in number and they are mad. Mad enough to trudge down and vote, if they think a candidate will speak up for them. It is a new movement born of the new economy and it has been creeping up on us for decades.
It is both entirely fitting and deeply ironic that this movement is being led by Trump, the biggest leverager of them all and the personification of all that is wrong with the new economic model. The establishment may still have a chance to turn things back to the status quo ante, but it will only be sustainable if something is done about the wastelands, real and metaphoric.
Going Greek 