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Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of
Brexit
Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald
November 9 2016, 10:43 a.m.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ⟶
The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in
June and the U.S.’s even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president
Tuesday night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles)
aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters
of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative
(validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and
irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one
another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national
capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop
— were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail
was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except
for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who
defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West,
for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the
economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While
elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino
gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the
poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely
ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit
too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as
troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of
meritocracy.
That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that
have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the
population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and
corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go
unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people
they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite:
purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their
instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents,
dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they
regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else,
contempt for them and their welfare.
After the Brexit vote, I wrote an article comprehensively detailing these
dynamics, which I won’t repeat here but hope those interested will read. The
title conveys the crux: “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and
Failure of Western Establishment Institutions.” That analysis was inspired by a
short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit
Facebook note by the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both
Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions
that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the
1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the
gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and
now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”
For those who tried to remove themselves from the self-affirming, vehemently
pro-Clinton elite echo chamber of 2016, the warning signs that Brexit
screechingly announced were not hard to see. Two short passages from a Slate
interview I gave in July summarized those grave dangers: that opinion-making
elites were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who
would decide this election — so contemptuous of them — that they were not only
incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump but were unwittingly accelerating
those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.
Like most everyone else who saw the polling data and predictive models of the
media’s self-proclaimed data experts, I long believed Clinton would win, but
the reasons why she very well could lose were not hard to see. The warning
lights were flashing in neon for a long time, but they were in seedy places
that elites studiously avoid. The few people who purposely went to those places
and listened, such as Chris Arnade, saw and heard them loud and clear. The
ongoing failure to take heed of this intense but invisible resentment and
suffering guarantees that it will fester and strengthen. This was the last
paragraph of my July article on the Brexit fallout:
Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within
themselves, [elites] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of
their corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus
relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them. That
reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions
that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and
destructive and thus cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in
turn, only ensures there will be many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our
collective future.
Beyond the Brexit analysis, there are three new points from last night’s
results that I want to emphasize, as they are unique to the 2016 U.S. election
and, more importantly, illustrate the elite pathologies that led to all of this:
1. Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and
everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing
defeat of their party.
You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks,
James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including,
perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on
Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning
in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.
When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to
one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the
candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find
ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that,
and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that
does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently
worthless.
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely
vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely
perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of
status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried
frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and
scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone
and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this
climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted
on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.
But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more
significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party.
Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with
Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar
checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street
banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret
speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book
advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same
games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that
would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic
Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and
powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this
post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.
It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with
personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden.
That’s too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he
could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has
steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian,
its consummate beneficiary.
Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the
masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more
efficiently. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in The Atlantic
three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made
decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically
proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical,
self-interested seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.
Of course there are fundamental differences between Obama’s version of “change”
and Trump’s. But at a high level of generality — which is where these messages
are often ingested — both were perceived as outside forces on a mission to tear
down corrupt elite structures, while Clinton was perceived as devoted to their
fortification. That is the choice made by Democrats — largely happy with status
quo authorities, believing in their basic goodness — and any honest attempt by
Democrats to find the prime author of last night’s debacle will begin with a
large mirror.
2. That racism, misogyny, and xenophobia are pervasive in all sectors of
America is indisputable from even a casual glance at its history, both distant
and recent.
There are reasons why all presidents until 2008 were white and all 45 elected
presidents have been men. There can be no doubt that those pathologies played a
substantial role in last night’s outcome. But that fact answers very few
questions and begs many critical ones.
To begin with, one must confront the fact that not only was Barack Obama
elected twice, but he is poised to leave office as a highly popular president:
now viewed more positively than Reagan. America wasn’t any less racist and
xenophobic in 2008 and 2012 than it is now. Even stalwart Democrats fond of
casually branding their opponents as bigots are acknowledging that a far more
complicated analysis is required to understand last night’s results. As the New
York Times’s Nate Cohn put it: “Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the
places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism
story.” Matt Yglesias acknowledged that Obama’s high approval rating is
inconsistent with depictions of the U.S. as a country “besotted with racism.”
People often talk about “racism/sexism/xenophobia” vs. “economic suffering” as
if they are totally distinct dichotomies. Of course there are substantial
elements of both in Trump’s voting base, but the two categories are
inextricably linked: The more economic suffering people endure, the angrier and
more bitter they get, the easier it is to direct their anger to scapegoats.
Economic suffering often fuels ugly bigotry. It is true that many Trump voters
are relatively well-off and many of the nation’s poorest voted for Clinton,
but, as Michael Moore quite presciently warned, those portions of the country
that have been most ravaged by free trade orgies and globalism — Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Michigan, Iowa — were filled with rage and “see [Trump] as a chance to be
the human Molotov cocktail that they’d like to throw into the system to blow it
up.” Those are the places that were decisive in Trump’s victory. As the
Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney put it:
It has long been, and still is, a central American challenge to rid society of
these structural inequalities. But one way to ensure those scapegoating
dynamics fester rather than erode is to continue to embrace a system that
excludes and ignores a large portion of the population. Hillary Clinton was
viewed, reasonably, as a stalwart devotee, beloved agent, and prime beneficiary
of that system, and thus could not possibly be viewed as a credible actor
against it.
3. Over the last six decades, and particularly over the last 15 years of the
endless war on terror, both political parties have joined to construct a
frightening and unprecedentedly invasive and destructive system of
authoritarian power, accompanied by the unbridled authority vested in the
executive branch to use it.
As a result, the president of the United States commands a vast nuclear arsenal
that can destroy the planet many times over; the deadliest and most expensive
military ever developed in human history; legal authorities that allow him to
prosecute numerous secret wars at the same time, imprison people with no due
process, and target people (including U.S. citizens) for assassination with no
oversight; domestic law enforcement agencies that are constructed to appear and
act as standing, para-militarized armies; a sprawling penal state that allows
imprisonment far more easily than most Western countries; and a system of
electronic surveillance purposely designed to be ubiquitous and limitless,
including on U.S. soil.
Those who have been warning of the grave dangers these powers pose have often
been dismissed on the ground that the leaders who control this system are
benevolent and well-intentioned. They have thus often resorted to the tactic of
urging people to imagine what might happen if a president they regarded as less
than benevolent one day gained control of it. That day has arrived. One hopes
this will at least provide the impetus to unite across ideological and partisan
lines to finally impose meaningful limits on these powers that should never
have been vested in the first place. That commitment should start now.
* * * * *
For many years, the U.S. — like the U.K. and other Western nations — has
embarked on a course that virtually guaranteed a collapse of elite authority
and internal implosion. From the invasion of Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis
to the all-consuming framework of prisons and endless wars, societal benefits
have been directed almost exclusively to the very elite institutions most
responsible for failure at the expense of everyone else.
It was only a matter of time before instability, backlash, and disruption
resulted. Both Brexit and Trump unmistakably signal its arrival. The only
question is whether those two cataclysmic events will be the peak of this
process, or just the beginning. And that, in turn, will be determined by
whether their crucial lessons are learned — truly internalized — or ignored in
favor of self-exonerating campaigns to blame everyone else.
≡
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t
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1062
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of
Brexit
/staff/glenn-greenwald/ Glenn Greenwald
/staff/glenn-greenwald/ /staff/glenn-greenwald/
/staff/glenn-greenwald/
November 9 2016, 10:43 a.m.
▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ⟶
The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in
June and the U.S.’s even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president
Tuesday night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles)
aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters
of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative
(validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and
irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one
another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national
capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop
— were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail
was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except
for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who
defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West,
for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the
economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While
elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino
gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the
poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely
ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit
too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as
troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of
meritocracy.
That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that
have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the
population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and
corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go
unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people
they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite:
purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their
instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents,
dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they
regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else,
contempt for them and their welfare.
After the Brexit vote, I wrote an article comprehensively detailing these
dynamics, which I won’t repeat here but hope those interested will read. The
title conveys the crux: “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and
Failure of Western Establishment Institutions.” That analysis was inspired by a
short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit
Facebook note by the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both
Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions
that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the
1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the
gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and
now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”
For those who tried to remove themselves from the self-affirming, vehemently
pro-Clinton elite echo chamber of 2016, the warning signs that Brexit
screechingly announced were not hard to see. Two short passages from a Slate
interview I gave in July summarized those grave dangers: that opinion-making
elites were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who
would decide this election — so contemptuous of them — that they were not only
incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump but were unwittingly accelerating
those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.
Like most everyone else who saw the polling data and predictive models of the
media’s self-proclaimed data experts, I long believed Clinton would win, but
the reasons why she very well could lose were not hard to see. The warning
lights were flashing in neon for a long time, but they were in seedy places
that elites studiously avoid. The few people who purposely went to those places
and listened, such as Chris Arnade, saw and heard them loud and clear. The
ongoing failure to take heed of this intense but invisible resentment and
suffering guarantees that it will fester and strengthen. This was the last
paragraph of my July article on the Brexit fallout:
Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within
themselves, [elites] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of
their corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus
relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them. That
reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions
that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and
destructive and thus cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in
turn, only ensures there will be many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our
collective future.
Beyond the Brexit analysis, there are three new points from last night’s
results that I want to emphasize, as they are unique to the 2016 U.S. election
and, more importantly, illustrate the elite pathologies that led to all of this:
1. Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and
everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing
defeat of their party.
You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks,
James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including,
perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on
Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning
in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.
When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to
one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the
candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find
ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that,
and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that
does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently
worthless.
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely
vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely
perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of
status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried
frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and
scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone
and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this
climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted
on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.
But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more
significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party.
Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with
Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar
checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street
banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret
speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book
advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same
games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that
would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic
Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and
powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this
post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.
It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with
personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden.
That’s too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he
could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has
steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian,
its consummate beneficiary.
Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the
masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more
efficiently. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in The Atlantic
three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made
decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically
proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical,
self-interested seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.
Of course there are fundamental differences between Obama’s version of “change”
and Trump’s. But at a high level of generality — which is where these messages
are often ingested — both were perceived as outside forces on a mission to tear
down corrupt elite structures, while Clinton was perceived as devoted to their
fortification. That is the choice made by Democrats — largely happy with status
quo authorities, believing in their basic goodness — and any honest attempt by
Democrats to find the prime author of last night’s debacle will begin with a
large mirror.
2. That racism, misogyny, and xenophobia are pervasive in all sectors of
America is indisputable from even a casual glance at its history, both distant
and recent.
There are reasons why all presidents until 2008 were white and all 45 elected
presidents have been men. There can be no doubt that those pathologies played a
substantial role in last night’s outcome. But that fact answers very few
questions and begs many critical ones.
To begin with, one must confront the fact that not only was Barack Obama
elected twice, but he is poised to leave office as a highly popular president:
now viewed more positively than Reagan. America wasn’t any less racist and
xenophobic in 2008 and 2012 than it is now. Even stalwart Democrats fond of
casually branding their opponents as bigots are acknowledging that a far more
complicated analysis is required to understand last night’s results. As the New
York Times’s Nate Cohn put it: “Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the
places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism
story.” Matt Yglesias acknowledged that Obama’s high approval rating is
inconsistent with depictions of the U.S. as a country “besotted with racism.”
People often talk about “racism/sexism/xenophobia” vs. “economic suffering” as
if they are totally distinct dichotomies. Of course there are substantial
elements of both in Trump’s voting base, but the two categories are
inextricably linked: The more economic suffering people endure, the angrier and
more bitter they get, the easier it is to direct their anger to scapegoats.
Economic suffering often fuels ugly bigotry. It is true that many Trump voters
are relatively well-off and many of the nation’s poorest voted for Clinton,
but, as Michael Moore quite presciently warned, those portions of the country
that have been most ravaged by free trade orgies and globalism — Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Michigan, Iowa — were filled with rage and “see [Trump] as a chance to be
the human Molotov cocktail that they’d like to throw into the system to blow it
up.” Those are the places that were decisive in Trump’s victory. As the
Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney put it:
It has long been, and still is, a central American challenge to rid society of
these structural inequalities. But one way to ensure those scapegoating
dynamics fester rather than erode is to continue to embrace a system that
excludes and ignores a large portion of the population. Hillary Clinton was
viewed, reasonably, as a stalwart devotee, beloved agent, and prime beneficiary
of that system, and thus could not possibly be viewed as a credible actor
against it.
3. Over the last six decades, and particularly over the last 15 years of the
endless war on terror, both political parties have joined to construct a
frightening and unprecedentedly invasive and destructive system of
authoritarian power, accompanied by the unbridled authority vested in the
executive branch to use it.
As a result, the president of the United States commands a vast nuclear arsenal
that can destroy the planet many times over; the deadliest and most expensive
military ever developed in human history; legal authorities that allow him to
prosecute numerous secret wars at the same time, imprison people with no due
process, and target people (including U.S. citizens) for assassination with no
oversight; domestic law enforcement agencies that are constructed to appear and
act as standing, para-militarized armies; a sprawling penal state that allows
imprisonment far more easily than most Western countries; and a system of
electronic surveillance purposely designed to be ubiquitous and limitless,
including on U.S. soil.
Those who have been warning of the grave dangers these powers pose have often
been dismissed on the ground that the leaders who control this system are
benevolent and well-intentioned. They have thus often resorted to the tactic of
urging people to imagine what might happen if a president they regarded as less
than benevolent one day gained control of it. That day has arrived. One hopes
this will at least provide the impetus to unite across ideological and partisan
lines to finally impose meaningful limits on these powers that should never
have been vested in the first place. That commitment should start now.
* * * * *
For many years, the U.S. — like the U.K. and other Western nations — has
embarked on a course that virtually guaranteed a collapse of elite authority
and internal implosion. From the invasion of Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis
to the all-consuming framework of prisons and endless wars, societal benefits
have been directed almost exclusively to the very elite institutions most
responsible for failure at the expense of everyone else.
It was only a matter of time before instability, backlash, and disruption
resulted. Both Brexit and Trump unmistakably signal its arrival. The only
question is whether those two cataclysmic events will be the peak of this
process, or just the beginning. And that, in turn, will be determined by
whether their crucial lessons are learned — truly internalized — or ignored in
favor of self-exonerating campaigns to blame everyone else.
