Donald Trump from the right and Bernie Sanders from the left are leading the charge, not back to the future, but rather back to the past, a past that many if not most of their followers can’t even remember. This is why:
As late as 1970, the “West”—basically, western Europe and North America—held an overwhelming advantage over the rest of the world. Only the West had a literate workforce, a modern industrial infrastructure, a trained scientific elite housed in sophisticated, well-funded institutions of higher learning, and stable, responsive governments that enforced middle-class property rights with a fair degree of honesty. In all the rest of the world, only Japan seemed to be making much headway in breaking into the charmed circle of “modern nations.”
Cartelization, either formal or informal, was almost universal among the basic industries of the day—for steel and coal, for automobiles themselves and the related industries that clustered about them, and for transportation, including railroads, airlines, and trucking. The companies charged monopolistic prices, sharing the wealth with their unionized workers. Consumers, riding the wave of an ever more productive economy, rarely noticed.
A decade later, if all hadn’t changed, a lot had. I remember, in 1981, sitting in a congressional hearing and listening to Lynn Williams, then head of the United Steel Workers, as he begged Congress for protection against South Korea. “We can’t compete,” Williams said. “The South Koreans have state of the art technology. We’re so far behind them. We’ll never catch up.”
Yes, in one decade, the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen had become a museum piece, something that just couldn’t function in the real world. It was time to turn the U.S. of A. into a sort of industrial retirement home, a cozy back water where our workers could putter around with their outdated technology, secure in the knowledge that their lack of competitiveness would never cost them their jobs.
Congress didn’t listen to Williams, of course, and both employment and production in the U.S. steel industry declined sharply. But, somehow, the U.S. did not fall apart. In fact, today life is better than it was 35 years ago in almost every aspect. Yet once again the idea that we can wall ourselves off from the rest of the world is exerting its appeal on millions of Americans.
The same trend is observable in Europe, with both xenophobia on the right and nostalgia for trade union socialism on the left, and it’s painful that these movements, which speak so strongly to millions of people, have almost no grounding in reality. Trump, of course, is very largely a bigot. Sanders is far less repulsive, but no more right.1 Bernie reflects the same emotions that prompted Ralph Nader’s run in 2000: the frustration of the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” over the neoliberal conviction, which I share, that most of the energy and direction of a free (that is to say, a capitalist) society will (and should) come from the private rather than the public sector. The eternal frustration of the liberals, that we don’t get to run things the way they do in Europe, boils over from time to time, particularly after eight years of playing ball with Wall Street. And poor Hillary, who once dreamed of leading us to a more “ecstatic”2 future, doesn’t seem to promise much ecstasy.
