I remember back in 2016 when stories like the one below started appearing in US newspapers. People were dying at growing rates, and not just any people, but specially *white* people, which is the sort of thing that isn’t supposed to happen in the US racial caste system.
They were dying of opioid overdoses or alcoholism or suicide, what researchers came to call “deaths of despair.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/04/08/we-dont-know-why-it-came-to-this/
1/8
Here’s an excerpt from that article:
“Goals receded into the distance while reality stretched on for day after day after exhausting day, until it was only natural to desire a little something beyond yourself. Maybe it was just some mindless TV or time on Facebook. Maybe a sleeping pill to ease you through the night. Maybe a prescription narcotic to numb the physical and psychological pain, or a trip to the Indian casino that you couldn’t really afford, or some marijuana, or meth, or the drug that had run strongest on both sides of her family for three generations and counting.”
2/8
I want to flag that these articles were reflecting trends that were already unfolding at least as early as 2014.
And then Covid happened, and more people died, and a bunch of other stuff happened too, and I think we sort of lost sight a bit of those trends, but they haven’t forgotten us:
“The study — led by Hannes Schwandt, associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy, associate director at Feinberg’s Buehler Center and fellow at the Institute of Policy Research — was published in the journal JAMA Network Open. The researchers found that life expectancy overall in California has decreased sharply since 2019, with a deficit of .86 years remaining in 2024 relative to 2019.”
3/8
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the globe saw unprecedented causalities and increased mortality. While many nations have since recovered, new Northwestern University research shows that California has not rebounded to pre-pandemic life expectancy, based on early data obtained from the state.
In the wake of the 2016 election and Trump’s first presidency, it became fashionable in liberal and some left circles to dismiss the idea that economic anxiety could have played a role in the Trumpist movement and the US pivot to fascism.
Rather than a reaction of the working poor to their immiseration, Trumpism is the product of (white male) petite bourgeois resentments at their relative loss of status in a society that was, at least culturally, increasingly tolerant of differences and inclusive of the previously marginalized.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/1/4/14160956/trump-racism-sexism-economy-study
4/8
It became something of a shibboleth among some liberals that the economy was SO great under Biden that the only reasons people might express any anxiety about their economic situation were either trickery by Republican propaganda or a foolish inability to objectively assess their own situation.
All of this—the rejection of the idea that Trumpism is a reaction to economic problems or even that economic problems existed at all—was a way for liberals to rationalize their support for candidates who sought, above all else, to preserve the capitalist status quo.
5/8
By any conceivable metric, overall economic conditions in the USA are vastly better now than when Joe Biden took office nearly three years ago. So why is public opinion so negative on the questions of how well the economy is doing, and Biden’s performance in this regard? (Giving much praise or blame to the president […]
I’m old enough to remember when, in 2016, Clinton was running for president and unveiled her policy proposals for competing with Trump…
…and they included things like “marginally larger tax credits for some people” or “making it easier to take on debt and pay interest to lenders to access housing.”
In the same world that more and more Americans were dying of deaths of despair, the most liberals could muster was *more capitalism*, just tweaked around (some of) the margins.
6/8
With the 2016 presidential election inching closer at a seemingly glacial pace, one issue that many of the main candidates have neglected to address is housing and its impact on the country’s economy. But it appears that is about to change as Hillary Clinton, the Democratic hopeful and former Secretary of State, recently announced a sweeping economic agenda that includes some major housing reforms.
US society is fundamentally, catastrophically broken, and has been for a long while. And it is not statically broken, either, but has steadily been getting worse since the neoliberal revolt of the 1970s.
A shredded social safety net. Underemployment and precarity that give lie to official unemployment statistics. Gutted labor unions. Wages that were stagnant for fifty years or more. Repeated financial crises. Deindustrialization that devastated entire communities. Crippling indebtedness. The rise of a grift economy.
When we talk about “the economy,” it’s more than just neoliberal obsession with a handful of formal statistics and subsections of the tax code. It’s a person’s sense of control over their own material condition. It’s a person’s sense of stability and security from the vagaries of impersonal market forces and the gambling of the super-rich.
7/8
“The economy” is not, as neoliberalism insists, a distinct sphere that, unlike every other aspect of our lives, operates according to precise mechanical laws.
It is, like any other aspect of our lives—family, art, politics, religion, whatever—a way of expressing our values through the mundane operations of our day-to-day activities. And the value that the US economy expresses is: most Americans are worthless, and can be readily discarded when The Line Goes Down, and can only expect help, if at all, in the form of marginal tweaks to tax credit rates or edits to mortgage lending rules.
So *of course* Trumpism is driven in part by racism, and by reactionary petite bourgeoisie, and elite resentment.
But we do ourselves an immense and politically fatal disservice when we pretend that things aren’t falling apart. Collapse tends to drive at least some people to latch onto movements like Trumpism that (pretend to) offer revolutionary change or, failing that, to burn the whole rotten mess down.
8/8
Thanks for your insightful threads. It's always nice to see you in my timeline.
HeavenlyPossum
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