Ever since this article by Susan McWilliams was published in 2016, I've been going back to it periodically as a way of understanding the rightwing populism that we're seeing in various places around the world. McWilliams writes that Hunter S. Thompson's 1967 book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, as well as an earlier article by Thompson published in The Nation, warn of the rise of a new form of rightwing politics that "is 'nearly impossible to deal with' using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left". The thing Thompson, and by extension McWilliams, identify as key to understanding these people is what Thompson calls "an ethic of total retaliation". From the article:
Thompson’s Angels were mostly working-class white men who felt, not incorrectly, that they had been relegated to the sewer of American society. Their unswerving loyalty to the nation— the Angels had started as a World War II veterans group—had not paid them any rewards or won them any enduring public respect. The manual-labor skills that they had learned and cultivated were in declining demand. Though most had made it through high school, they did not have the more advanced levels of training that might lead to economic or professional security. “Their lack of education,” Thompson wrote, “rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy.” Looking at the American future, they saw no place for themselves in it.
In other words, the Angels felt like “strangers in their own land,” as Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it in her recent book on red-state America. They were clunky and outclassed and scorned, just like the Harley-Davidsons they chose to drive. Harleys had been the kings of the American motorcycle market until the early 1960s, when European and Japanese imports came onto the scene. Those imports were sleeker, faster, more efficient, and cheaper. Almost overnight, Harleys went from being in high demand to being the least appealing, most underpowered, and hard to handle motorcycles out there. It’s not hard to see why the Angels insisted on Harleys and identified strongly with their bikes.
Just as there was no rational way to defend Harleys against foreign-made choppers, the Angels saw no rational grounds on which to defend their own skills or loyalties against the emerging new world order of the late 20th century. Their skills were outdated; their knowledge was insubstantial; their powers were inferior. There was no rational way to argue that they were better workers or citizens than the competition; the competition was effectively over, and Angels had lost. The standards by which they had been built had been definitively eclipsed.
We parents tell our children that when you know you’ve lost an argument or a race, the right thing to do is to be a good sport and to “get ’em next time.” But if there is no next time, or you know that every next time you are going to be in the loser’s lane again, what’s the use of being a good sport? It would make you look even more ignorant, and more like a loser, to pretend like you think you have a chance. The game has been rigged against you. Why not piss on the field before you storm off? Why not stick up your finger at the whole goddamned game?
Therein lies the ethic of total retaliation. The Angels, rather than gracefully accepting their place as losers in an increasingly technical, intellectual, global, inclusive, progressive American society, stuck up their fingers at the whole enterprise. If you can’t win, you can at least scare the bejeesus out of the guy wearing the medal. You might not beat him, but you can make him pay attention to you. You can haunt him, make him worry that you’re going to steal into his daughter’s bedroom in the darkest night and have your way with her—and that she might actually like it.
McWilliams continues:
Thompson would want us to see this: These are men and women who know that, by all intellectual and economic standards, they cannot win the game. So whether it be out of self-protection or an overcompensation for their own profound sense of shame, they lash out at politicians, judges, scientists, teachers, Wall Street, universities, the media, legislatures—even at elections. They are not interested in contemplating serious reforms to the system; they are either too pessimistic or too disappointed to believe that is possible. So the best they can do is adopt a position of total irreverence: to show they hate the players and the game.
Understood in those terms, the idea that Trumpism is “populist” seems misplaced. Populism is a belief in the right of ordinary people, rather than political insiders, to rule. Trumpism, by contrast, operates on the presumption that ordinary people aren’t going to get any chance to rule no matter what they do, so they might as well piss off the political insiders using the only tool left available to them: the vote.
While many commentators say Trump will have to bring back jobs or vibrancy to places like the Rust Belt if he wants to continue to have the support of people who voted for him, Thompson’s account suggests otherwise. Many if not most Trump supporters long ago gave up on the idea that any politician, even someone like Trump, can change the direction the wind is blowing. Even if he fails to bring back the jobs, Trump can maintain loyalty in another way: As long as he continues to offend and irritate elites, and as long as he refuses to play by certain rules of decorum—heaven forfend, the president-elect says ill-conceived things on Twitter!—Trump will still command loyalty. It’s the ethic, not the policy, that matters most.
McWilliams, of course, was writing this in the immediate aftermath of Trump's electoral victory, and the applicability of Thompson's insights is obvious here. But it's not hard to see the same phenomenon in the "Freedom Convoy" that we saw in Ottawa last year. The truckers going into the national capital (as well as other cities, including Winnipeg), tying up traffic, putting fear into the local residents, driving them out of their skulls with their constant honking - this is the "ethic of total retaliation" front and centre. The fact that it put fear into city residents was not a bug, it was a feature - this was the truckers' act of pissing on the field. And make no mistake, while the vaccine mandates were the trigger for this particular round of protests, this was really an expression of something that's been seething for a long time. And it's no coincidence that truckers are at the centre of this - trucking was, at one time, a really good way out of poverty for someone without higher education. No longer, according to this article in The Guardian:
When adjusted for inflation, median wages for truck drivers in 1980 were about $110,000 annually. In 2020, median annual wages for truck drivers were $47,130. Nearly 40% of US truck drivers were covered by union contracts in 1983, which dropped to 10.1% in 2020. Many trucking companies also misclassify drivers as independent contractors, shifting overhead costs on to workers and burdening them with massive amounts of debt for their vehicles, gas and fees.
Given this, it's not surprising that such a paroxysm of rage would come from that sector.
The question that has to be asked, though, is what to do about it. The question of solutions has been raised by Paul Krugman, in this article. Krugman is talking about the more general resentment from rural areas (he's talking about the US, but much of this is applicable to Canada as well). He points out the dramatic rise in resentment in rural America:
Rural resentment has become a central fact of American politics — in particular, a pillar of support for the rise of right-wing extremism. As the Republican Party has moved ever further into MAGAland, it has lost votes among educated suburban voters; but this has been offset by a drastic rightward shift in rural areas, which in some places has gone so far that the Democrats who remain face intimidation and are afraid to reveal their party affiliation.
But is this shift permanent? Can anything be done to assuage rural rage?
The answer will depend on two things: whether it’s possible to improve rural lives and restore rural communities, and whether the voters in these communities will give politicians credit for any improvements that do take place.
Krugman points out that rural areas, even though they feel left out by policymakers, actually get a disproportionate amount of government support:
This week my colleague Thomas B. Edsall surveyed research on the rural Republican shift. I was struck by his summary of work by Katherine J. Cramer, who attributes rural resentment to perceptions that rural areas are ignored by policymakers, don’t get their fair share of resources and are disrespected by “city folks.”
As it happens, all three perceptions are largely wrong. I’m sure that my saying this will generate a tidal wave of hate mail, and lecturing rural Americans about policy reality isn’t going to move their votes. Nonetheless, it’s important to get our facts straight.
The truth is that ever since the New Deal rural America has received special treatment from policymakers. It’s not just farm subsidies, which ballooned under Donald Trump to the point where they accounted for around 40 percent of total farm income. Rural America also benefits from special programs that support housing, utilities and business in general.
In terms of resources, major federal programs disproportionately benefit rural areas, in part because such areas have a disproportionate number of seniors receiving Social Security and Medicare. But even means-tested programs — programs that Republicans often disparage as “welfare” — tilt rural. Notably, at this point rural Americans are more likely than urban Americans to be on Medicaid and receive food stamps.
And because rural America is poorer than urban America, it pays much less per person in federal taxes, so in practice major metropolitan areas hugely subsidize the countryside. These subsidies don’t just support incomes; they support economies: Government and the so-called health care and social assistance sector each employ more people in rural America than agriculture, and what do you think pays for those jobs?
Krugman suggests that more efforts by governments to arrest rural decline are necessary in any case, and offers hope that "just maybe" this would help avert rural radicalization as well. Unfortunately, if Thompson and McWilliams are right, this can't be counted on.
In fact, I believe one of the things that makes the problem even harder is that this goes beyond economics - it's cultural. The people we're talking about here - farmers, truckers, oilpatch workers, etc - define their identities by what they do. So giving them, say, a basic income - or even stable employment in another field - will not satisfy many of them. This is especially true of oilpatch workers, if this 2013 article by George Monbiot is any indication:
It seems to me that this is not about jobs. It's not about securing energy supplies. It's not even about the money. The government's enthusiasm for fracking arises from something it shares with politicians the world over: a macho fixation with extractive industries...
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So we miss part of the story when we imagine it's just about the money. It's true that industrial lobbying often defeats a rational assessment of our options, especially, perhaps, when Lynton Crosby has the prime minister's ear. But cultural and psychological factors can be just as important. Supporting shale gas rather than the alternatives means strutting around with a stiff back and jutting jaw, meeting real men who do real, dirty things, shaking hands and slapping backs, talking about barrels and therms and rigs and wells and pipelines. It's about these weird, detached, calculating, soft-skinned people becoming, for a while, one of the boys.
This makes a lot of sense, and it's a hard problem. I think ultimately the solution will have to be to recognize that these people are heading towards irrelevance anyway, and just push through. Of course, we shouldn't be trying to leave them behind economically, but there's only so much that can be done for someone who, say, doesn't want to transfer his drilling skills from oil extraction to the geothermal industry because he thinks clean energy is for pussies.
And that's not even getting into the changes to food production that will have to occur in the coming decades if we're to avoid a complete catastrophe on the climate front. More and more of it will follow the rest of industry into the cities, as vertical farming replaces traditional vegetable farming and cultured meat replaces ranching.
On the positive site, eventually the changing demographics, and the resulting changes in electoral maps, will ultimately win the day for the cities anyway. So maybe the best thing to do is to hunker down and let rural rage burn itself out. It won't go easy into the night, though; those people have a lot of guns, and some of them will probably be driven to use them. But in the long run they will lose.
In terms of what Canadians are going to see in the short run, we've got two data points coming up this year. Both Alberta and Manitoba are facing provincial elections, and the NDP has a good chance of winning both of them. It will be interesting, though, to see what the electoral maps look like after those elections. My prediction is that it will be a pretty stark breakdown between rural and urban areas, and the urban areas will tip the balance to the NDP due to having more people. I think this will be especially true in Alberta; I predict that Calgary, Edmonton, and the part of Lethbridge where the university is will go NDP, while the rest of the province sticks with the UCP. This should make for an NDP victory, since Calgary and Edmonton alone account for more than half the population. In Manitoba it may be more nuanced, due to a long history of NDP wins in places like Dauphin, Swan River, and the Interlake, but there are no guarantees. Dauphin and Interlake went Tory in 2016 despite not flipping even in the disastrous 1988 election and have stayed Tory since; Swan River briefly went Tory after that election but flipped back to the NDP in 1990, but we didn't see a similar phenomenon there in 2019. The seat projections from the latest polling put the NDP as most likely to get 29 seats (a bare majority); my guess is that the most likely way that could occur is by picking up seats in Winnipeg (and maybe Brandon and Selkirk) while the rural areas stay firmly Tory. Now obviously that would be a lot better than losing, but it would still not be a good result. I'm not sure we can hope for anything better in this political climate, though.
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