We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism… The nation-state remains the true foundation of happiness and harmony.

– Donald Trump¹

NOW that the government of the United States, long seen as the mastermind of globalization, has itself suddenly become a leading advocate of anti-globalization, and in doing so has adopted a style that could well be considered authoritarian as well as nationalist, it seems like a good time to reconsider the relationship between authoritarianism, nationalism and globalization.

It’s tempting to give an autonomous value to authoritarianism by citing the appeal of the strongman. However, in the American case that is probably getting things backward. When all the major forces on the political scene are committed to variations on the status quo, then citizens who are not organized, whose common grievances are inchoate at best, who have no tradition of collective action, little or no common identity and no shared theory of historical motion – such people are likely to embrace a political leader who seems authoritarian if only because any leader giving radical focus to the desire to break the status quo is going to seem authoritarian.

Both Trump and Bernie Sanders, in different ways, fit that mould. Both were running against their own parties as well their opponent’s party.² Neither was running to take over the party per se, so much as to upend it; both spoke of leading a ‘movement’ that was defined and embodied by the candidate himself. It is hard to see what else they could have done and still been successful in a competitive democratic context. Cometh the hour, cometh the man: an authoritarian style was the price to pay for being able to rally the type of support they did.

They rallied interestingly similar constituencies. Sanders was a socialist with a long career behind him representing a state (Vermont) that was 95 per cent white.³ He was (and is) registered as an independent rather than a Democrat; his entire approach as a Democratic candidate was to run as an outsider. ‘I am not a Democrat,’ he once explained, ‘because the Democratic Party does not represent, and has not for many years, the interests of my constituency, which is primarily working families, middle class people and low income people.’⁴ During the Democratic primary campaign, a surprising majority of non-white party members, who in economic terms are predominantly from that very constituency, disagreed by voting for Hillary Clinton.⁵ Sanders’s support was concentrated among younger white Democrats; he was also strong among white working class and middle class Democrat men.⁶ This sense of a Sanders constituency bounded by race as well as class was reinforced by his vote against the 2007 immigration reform bill: ‘What it is about,’ he said, ‘is bringing into this country over a period of years millions of low wage temporary workers with the result that wages and benefits in this country, which are already going down, will go down even further.’⁷ Sanders was, in short, appealing to a Democratic version of the Trump constituency, and pitting it against the party status quo.

 

When a defeated Sanders appeared before the Democratic convention to support Hillary Clinton, he did so in this way: ‘Together, my friends, we have begun a political revolution to transform America and that revolution – our revolution – continues.’ In essence, he was going to continue running as an independent, with his own revolution, to wherever the end might be. ‘This election,’ Sanders said, ‘is about ending the 40-year decline of our middle class, the reality that 47 million men, women and children live in poverty… This election is about ending the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that we currently experience, the worst it has been since 1928.’⁸ That 40-year period, of course, began with the Jimmy Carter presidency, included eight years of Bill Clinton, and ended with eight years of Barack Obama; it was a period half Democratic and half Republican, neatly shared by the parties Sanders had once described as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.⁹

 

The apocalyptic note (since 1928!), the personalism, and the vague assertion of an unseen ‘revolution’ are all characteristic of authoritarian politics. Sanders was certainly outdone by Trump, whose own victory convention almost entirely ignored the Republican party, its traditions and its policies, in favour of the candidate, his views and his family.

As he had throughout the campaign, Trump in his victory speech hit the apocalyptic note hard: ‘Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens… I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper… Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in third-world condition, and 43 million Americans are on food stamps… Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they have lived through one international humiliation after another. One after another.’

 

Nor did he neglect the personalist dimension. He positioned himself as the tribune of ‘the forgotten men and women of our country, and they are forgotten, but they will not be forgotten long. These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice… I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen first-hand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders. He never had a chance.’¹⁰

These were two very different men, with different political experiences and values and different goals for their country. Yet they were propelled by similar constituencies and adopted similar campaigning styles: highly personalized, with very few advisers; relentlessly anti-establishment; insistent on their status as outsiders despite having enjoyed great success well past the normal retirement age; dismissive of their predecessors and the incumbent, and of the leaders of the parties they sought to lead; and painting a picture of a country and a political system in such ruin that only they could bring America back from chaos and misrule. And they both opposed globalization, which was their rivals’ common vulnerability: the other candidates had all fundamentally accepted globalization as the way of things and did not offer, or emphasize the urgency of, alternatives.

The common thread among Trump’s (and, in a somewhat different way, Sanders’s) followers was a sense of chronic disempowerment. The fact that his core demographic – middle class white Americans – is not usually viewed by people outside it as disempowered does not mitigate the reality that such people actually did feel that way.

 

Trump’s success among white voters has led many to see his victory as racially driven. Given that Hillary Clinton is herself white, the suggestion is necessarily that Trump had a pro-white, or at least not anti-white, message beyond the fact of his skin colour. Trump did not advance a white racial politics per se, but he did not repudiate white racially motivated voters either. He did oppose immigration, particularly from Mexico, and the majority of immigrants today are not white in the conventional sense. But identity politics in the US, as elsewhere, are complicated. For generations, Americans in the Hispanic category have intermarried with whites and tended over time to self-identify as white.¹¹ Asian-American intermarriage also skews toward ‘marrying white’.¹²

In America, the durability of whiteness has owed a great deal to its flexibility; a significant body of scholarship has been devoted to examining the process by which immigrant out-groups in the great influx of southern Europeans around the turn of the 20th century ‘became white’ over time.¹³ It’s also worth noting that the main exit poll used in American politics – the National Election Pool, financed by a consortium of major news organizations – found that Trump scored slightly better among Hispanic voters than his Republican predecessor in 2012, Mitt Romney.¹⁴ He also did about as well among black voters as George W. Bush did in 2000 (when Bush and the Republican party made a serious effort to attract more non-white voters into the ‘big tent’ of ‘compassionate conservatism’).

 

And as many commentators have pointed out, Trump could not have won without significant support from voters who chose the black candidate, Barack Obama, in 2008 and 2012. Obama’s approval rating among whites increased by 15 percentage points over the course of the 2016 campaign and reached a seven-year high among the general population at the time of the election.¹⁵ The racial factor is real but it is not simple or obvious in its workings.¹⁶

 

What is clearer is that Trump took middle class voters away from Clinton and the Democratic Party. According to one careful study of voting patterns in middle class dominant (above 55 per cent) areas, Trump successfully retained all the areas won by the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 (when Obama gained the presidency) – and took an additional 18 of the 30 such areas that had been Democratic in that year.¹⁷ In the tranche of areas that are slightly less middle class dominant (above 50 per cent), Trump also pulled voters into the Republican column: of 59 such areas that voted Democratic in 2008, 16 switched to the Republican candidate in 2016.

Trump was particularly strong among the less educated – including in low educated ‘majority-minority’, i.e. not dominantly white – counties, in areas dominated by manufacturing, and in rural areas. While Clinton generally trailed Obama’s performance in 2012, she outperformed him in areas with a higher concentration of people with college degrees.¹⁸

 

There is a very strong connection between higher education and middle class social mobility, wealth and employment stability. A 2012 study, for example, found that an American child born into the middle class had a vastly higher chance of moving into a higher income category by adulthood with a college degree than without one.¹⁹ This ‘college wage gap’ increased through the 1980s and 1990s and by 2011 had reached its greatest extent since statistics began to be collected in 1915.²⁰

What proved to be the core Trump demographic – middle class to lower middle class, mainly white but within the normal range for a Republican candidate, with high school or single-degree college education, more male than female – has been the subject of intense political interest since about 1970, at which time feminism, civil rights (for African-Americans in particular), the repeal of certain discriminatory immigration laws, the weakening of labour unions and the diminution of skilled manufacturing positions in favour of services seemed to conspire to displace the white, skilled (though not necessarily college educated) male from the centre of American life.

This demographic has had its moments of resurgence now and then over the past 46 years, but this time does feel different. Leaving Trump himself aside for the moment, what has changed?

 

Both the commercial logic and the rhetoric of globalization seem, in retrospect, to have been designed to enrage this particular group. The extension of supply chains around the globe meant that the types of jobs that sustained middle and lower middle incomes would be lost. This could be eased by credit or asset bubbles, or an increased density of workforce participation within the household (i.e., working wives), or reduction in the cost of household goods (e.g. through improvements in the price and quality of imported goods). But after 2008, the pattern of lost middle income work began to look unalterable. There were still jobs at the lower and higher ends, as well as amply growing returns to capital, but elsewhere wage growth was stagnant.

By 2016, the famous ‘elephant graph’ of former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic – showing that emerging market middle classes had prospered over the past 30 years while developed world middle and working classes had not – illustrated that globalization had undermined precisely the Trump demographic.²¹ As Milanovic argued at a talk in New York last fall, whatever might be said about Trump voters, they did vote their own economic interests. They were never, ever going to become software engineers, bankers, lawyers, tech entrepreneurs or capitalists. It was too late.

 

The Trump vote skewed old; younger voters were more likely to vote for Clinton, and many commentators pointed to this as indicating that, over time, the Trump demographic would still weaken politically, and its distinctive losses and sadnesses would die with it, and perhaps the 2016 presidential election would one day be seen as a bump in the road toward an ever more multicultural and globalizing America. But is it truly possible to become more diverse indefinitely, in a sort of Zeno’s Paradox of multiplicity? And why assume that 18 to 24-year-olds would simply continue to vote as they did in their youth, come what may?

The rhetoric of globalization was actually worse than the material reality. Globalization was the only ideologically powerful source of optimism after the Cold War. This optimism, however, trafficked in its own inevitability, and had hardness as well as warmth. Globalization, Bill Clinton said in 2000, is ‘not something we can hold off or turn off. It is the economic equivalent of a force of nature.’ Countries had little option other than, in Thomas Friedman’s phrase, ‘integrating with the global economy and submitting to its rules.’ Tony Blair explained in Chicago in 1999 that ‘globalization is not just economic. It is also a political and security phenomenon… We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not.’ Western liberals of the 1990s may have inherited this tone of inevitabilism (were that ever to become a word) from Margaret Thatcher but they really made it their own.

 

The hardness of globalization brought us a rhetoric of winners and losers. Globalization’s premise was that the extension of supply chains and remixing of labour markets across the globe led to an overall gain in productivity; the collective gain compensates for individual losses. This also meant that the pattern of winning and losing was of such fantastic complexity that no one person could really understand why he was a winner or a loser. It was like Calvinism. Fate was beyond human ken.

If you believe that globalization is at once inscrutable and inevitable, then the rhetoric of winner and loser and victim, of ‘unprotected’ people ‘left behind’ by globalization, leads to the conclusion that some portion of the population is simply unnecessary. If globalization had had a place for them, it would have offered one; and it didn’t. Whatever claim they might have on others, it would be non-economic.

Trump reversed these rhetorical polarities. He said Americans would be winners, and only his enemies were losers. He said nothing was inevitable. No one would be left behind. He pitied only his opponents. He famously said ‘I love the poorly educated’,²² which seemed to be an error but did tell the poorly educated that he thought they were ok. They had not heard someone say that for years; globalization had scheduled the poorly educated for destruction once the technology was ready. What’s more, this New Yorker son of an immigrant mother, his father also a son of immigrants, his wife an immigrant (like the wife before her), made no appeal either to cultural diversity or to assimilation. He didn’t deride this perennial question; he simply ignored it. Indeed, it seemed never to have entered his mental field.

 

Trump made a very strong appeal to Americanness but not to any particular American identity or even to American history. For white listeners, particularly of the growing non-winner variety, this heralded an end to more than two decades of being told that the future would be ever more non-white and that was a good thing because white identity had no positive content, unlike every other form of identity in the diversity mix. (They could not claim the identity of ‘just plain American’ either, as that was seen as an aggressive appropriation of the norm.) Trump just whistled his way past this set of concerns.

This was liberating for many white Americans not because it celebrated their skin colour but because it seemed to free them from it. That was something Obama, in a very different way, had also seemed to do, or seemed to want to do, which may help explain why his own popularity endured and grew as Trump gained ground, and why the diversity-promoting Hillary Clinton’s own whiteness seemed to do her no good at all.²³

Given that Trump was simply sidestepping decades of fairly settled opinion on key questions of race, class, and economics, with no established political base and in the teeth of his own party’s establishment, it is not surprising that his own approach would be authoritarian. His entire campaign was a triumph of personal will (and wealth). He had not reasoned his way to these positions. They were not the result of deep study. He simply asserted that the entire nation was going to be great again, for no reason and with no justification beyond its own desire.

 

Trump’s nationalism is interestingly devoid of content, just as his personalist authoritarianism is oddly free of substance. It may well be that high-church globalization was fated to wane even without a Trump presidency. The East Asian approach to globalization has always been grounded in the advancement, rather than the elimination or supersession, of the nation state (and the ethnically based nation state at that). This has also been the post-Yeltsin approach in Russia and seems to be catching on quickly in post-Brexit Europe.²⁴ Now we can add the United States. Taken together, these polities – some democracies, some not – account for an immense share of the global trading economy. Whatever globalization turns into, it will be decisively shaped by these nations, and now not one of them is contemplating it with an eye toward the betterment of the whole.

 

Footnotes:

1. Julian Hattem, ‘Trump Warns Against "False Song of Globalism’’’, The Hill, 27 April 2016. http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/277879-trump-warns-against-false-song-of-globalism

2. The Trump-Sanders equivalency was briefly a hot topic. See Molly Ball, ‘What Trump and Sanders Have in Common’, Atlantic, 6 January 2016. http://www.theatlan tic.com/notes/2016/01/what-bernie-sanders-and-donald-trump-have-in-common/422907/; Peter Beinart, ‘A Party at War With Itself’, Atlantic, 26 July 2016.http://www.theatla ntic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/a-party-at-war-with-itself/493016/; David Harsanyi, ‘Friendly Reminder: Bernie Sanders is a Bigger Authoritarian Than Donald Trump’, The Federalist, 26 July 2016. http://thefedera list.com/2016/07/26/friendly-reminder-bernie-sanders-is-a-bigger-authoritarian-than-donald-trump/

3. http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/50

4. Michael Kruse and Manu Raju, ‘Can Bernie Sanders Win the Love of a Party He Scorns?’, Politico, 10 August 2015. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/bernie-sanders-2016-democrats-121181_Page2. html#.WGfMJ7YrLdd

5. On race and the 2016 Democratic primary see, for example, Isaac J. Bailey, ‘How Bernie Sanders Exposed the Democrats’ Racial Rift’, Politico, 8 June 2016. http://www.politico. com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-democrats-race-racial-divide-213948; Jeet Heer, ‘Bernie’s Revolution is too White to Win,’ The New Republic, 1 March 2016. https://newrepublic.com/article/130958/bernies-revolution-white-win; Joan Walsh, ‘What’s Wrong With Bernie Sanders’s Strategy’, The Nation, 21 March 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/whats-wrong-with-bernie-sanderss-strategy/

6. See e.g. Tamara Keith, ‘Bernie Sanders Has Strength Among White Men Pinched by the Economy’, National Public Radio, 13 March 2016. http://www.npr.org/2016/03/13/470278253/bernie-sanders-has-strength-among-white-men-pinched-by-the-economy

7. Amber Phillips, ‘Yes, Bernie Sanders Voted to Kill Immigration Reform in 2007. But it’s Complicated’, Washington Post, 10 March 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/10/yes-bernie-sanders-voted-to-kill-immigration-reform-in-2007-but-its-complicated/

8. A transcript of the speech was published by Time magazine on 25 July 2016: http://time.com/4421574/democratic-convention-bernie-sanders-speech-transcript/

9. Linda Qiu, ‘Is Bernie Sanders a Democrat?’, Politifact, 23 February 2016. http://www. politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/feb/23/bernie-sanders-democrat/

10. The transcript is at Vox, 22 July 2016: http://www.vox.com/2016/7/21/12253426/donald-trump-acceptance-speech-transcript-republican-nomination-transcript

11. See William Darity Jr., ‘The Latino Flight to Whiteness’, The American Prospect, 11 February 2016. http://prospect.org/article/latino-flight-whiteness

12. See Min Zhou, ‘Are Asian Americans Becoming "White"?’, Contexts, February 2004. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240758659_Are_Asian_Americans_Becoming_White

13. See Scott Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2000, pp. 346-386; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. Routledge, New York, 1996; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso, London, 1999.

14. Alec Tyson and Shiva Namian, ‘Behind Trump’s Victory: Divisions by Race, Gender, Education’, PewResearchCenter, 9 November 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/; Harry Enten, ‘Trump Probably Did Better With Latino Voters Than Romney Did,’ FiveThirtyEight, 18 November 2016. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-probably-did-better-with-latino-voters-than-romney-did/; Karthick Ramakrishnan, ‘Trump Got More Votes from People of Colour Than Romney Did. Here’s the Data’, Washington Post, 11 November 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/11/trump-got-more-votes-from-people-of-color-than-romney-did-heres-the-data/. There is some controversy about these exit poll results. See Taeku Lee, ‘Analysis: How Exit Polling Missed the Mark on Asian Americans’, NBC News, 11 November 2016. http://www. nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/analysis-how-exit-polling-missed-mark-asian-americans-n682491.

15. Jennifer Agiesta, ‘Obama Approval Hits New High’, CNN, 6 October 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/06/politics/obama-approval-rating-new-high/

16. It’s sometimes forgotten that throughout the last quarter of 2015 the two leading Republican candidates were Trump and Ben Carson, who is black. In January 2016 they were joined at the head of the polls by Marco Rubio, a bilingual son of Hispanic immigrants (neither of whom was a U.S. citizen at the time of Marco’s birth), and Ted Cruz, also Spanish-speaking though not bilingual, who was born in Canada, the son of a Canadian citizen father originally from Cuba. See the running tallies at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_ presidential_nomination-3823.html

17. Ruth Igielnik and Rakesh Kochhar, ‘GOP Gained Ground in Middle-Class Communities in 2016’, Pew Research Center, 8 December 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/08/gop-gained-ground-in- middle-class-communities-in-2016/

18. Nate Silver, ‘Education, not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump’, Five Thirty Eight, 22 November 2016. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/

19. Economic Mobility Project, ‘Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations’, Pew Charitable Trusts, July 2012, fig. 17. http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2012/pursuingamericandreampdf.pdf

20. Lindsey Cook, ‘Seriously, Go to College’, U.S. News and World Report, 17 August 2015. http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/08/17/study-benefits-of-a-college-degree-are-historically-high; U.S. Department of the Treasury, ‘The Economics of Higher Education’, December 2012. https://www. treasury.gov/connect/blog/Documents/20121212_Economics%20of%20Higher% 20Ed_vFINAL.pdf

21. Luke Kawa, ‘Get Ready to See This Globalization "Elephant Chart" Over and Over Again’, Bloomberg, 27 June 2016. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-27/get-ready-to-see-this-globalization- elephant-chart-over-and-over-again; Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Belknap, London, 2016.

22. https://youtu.be/Vpdt7omPoa0

23. There has begun to be a fascinating discussion of what Obama did and didn’t expect of white Americans, and what they did and didn’t expect of him. See Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘My President Was Black’, Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/; Tressie McMillan Cottom, ‘The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America’, Atlantic, 13 December 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/obamas-faith-in-white-america/510503/. I anticipated some of this in Malcomson, ‘The Nation: An Appeal Beyond Race’, New York Times, 1 August 2004, http://www. nytimes. com/2004/08/01/weekinreview/the-nation-an-appeal-beyond-race.html.

24. I discussed the Asian and European aspects in ‘European Nationalism Goes Mainstream’, World Post, 10 October 2016 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/european-nationalism-goes-mainstream_ us_57fbc24be 4b0b665ad8186da