by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
David Sirota, July 18, 2024 [The Lever]
In 2008, I published a book with a straightforward premise: the upcoming era of American politics would be defined by a competition between the left and right to harness the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests.
It was the twilight of the Bush era, and the country was beginning its nose-dive into recession and turmoil, but hope and change seemed just over the horizon. I predicted that with elements of both political parties in a warrior stance, simmering conflicts over deindustrialization, financialization, and neoliberalism would soon explode and realign politics, birthing some American version of either social democracy or authoritarianism.
The 16 years since The Uprising was released have delivered much of the tumult I imagined. It has been a period of unrest, chaos, and flip-flopping control of government — and yet, amid all that volatility, the decline persisted. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower life spans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything — life in America just kept getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.
In the political arena, there was a sensation of change, but in real life, there was more of the same.
Donald Trump’s 2016 win was a reaction to the dissonance — a pressure cooker that finally exploded — but still possibly just a weird anomaly. For shellshocked liberals, the end of his first term felt like the conclusion of a roller-coaster ride, a reversion to a mean, and proof that the competition to harness the discontent had finally been won on the center left.
But as Trump surges and Democrats teeter in this blazing summer of discontent, it’s the 2020 election that seems more like the anomaly — a last rest stop on a wild Natural Born Killers-style jaunt. 2024 feels like the final destination in a journey bookended by two iconic roadside billboards: the “HOPE” poster featuring Barack Obama’s cool gaze, and now the photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump defiantly calling his armies to battle….
Can J.D. Vance’s Populist Crusade Succeed?
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 07-19-2024]
On Monday, Donald Trump unveiled his choice for Vice President, and picked a young Senator from Ohio, best-selling author and populist J.D. Vance. Last night, Vance spoke to the Republican National Convention, attacking Wall Street barons, the war in Iraq, multi-national corporations, and trade deals like NAFTA. What he said was shocking for a Republican. “We’re done catering to Wall Street,” he said. “We’ll commit to the working man.”
But what he *didn’t* say was equally shocking. There was no talk of tax cuts, deregulation, or attacks on government, and while he levied plenty of fire at Democrats over immigration, environmentalism and overall weakness, he did not go after the substantially populist pro-labor and competition focused elements of the Biden administration. Vance’s fight is not just with Democrats, it’s within the Republican Party.
It’s hard to overstate the earthquake this pick has fostered in the citadels of power. CNBC, libertarians, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are in mourning. “Wall Street will be begging for the return of Lina Khan after two months of the Trump-Vance administration,” said one New York dealmaker to the Financial Times. CNBC is replaying clips of the Vance speech, with Jim Cramer analogizing it to William Jennings Bryan’s famous 1896 Cross of Gold oration….
At first, Vance bought into standard libertarian ideas, consistent with Thiel’s thinking. Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal with Elon Musk, and the alums from PayPal, the so-called “PayPal mafia,” are hugely influential in Silicon Valley today, though they are not entirely aligned with big tech. Thiel, for instance, hates Google, and this group is one of Vance’s core influences….
So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing of the family that animates this new group, not worship of the market. At Remedy Fest, Vance was explicit in his agreement with this notion, saying “I don’t really care if the entity that is most threatening to that vision is a private entity or a public entity, we have to be worried about it.”….
Musk, Andreessen, and the crypto world are aligned in their own ways with Vance, though the extent of the alignment isn’t wholly clear. The arguments of these venture capitalists and crypto purveyors deserve to be taken seriously. Fortunately, Andreessen and Horowitz laid them out in a recent 90 minute podcast describing why they are supporting Donald Trump with vast financial resources. It comes down to the basic thesis that they believe that Joe Biden, far from a do-nothing President, is an existential threat to the status quo….
Andreessen and Horowitz have a view of America in which our might, and thus the world’s peace and prosperity, rests on three pillars: a strong economy, world-leading technology, and a powerful military. American culture is, as they put it, “depraved” and full of drug addiction, but our strength is that talented people can build things. We are not, as they put it, Argentina, or the Soviet Union. In World War II, America won because we invented better technology – not the government – but the private sector, the ‘Little tech’ guys like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, whose legacy Andreessen and Horowitz see themselves as upholding….
[TW: Stoller summarizes what Andreessen and Horowitz believe: ” In World War II, America won because we invented better technology – not the government – but the private sector, the ‘Little tech’ guys like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, whose legacy Andreessen and Horowitz see themselves as upholding.”