The United State of America — What Happened?

I am a Israeli American who has been living in the United States for over 40 years. I woke up on Nov. 6, 2024 and found myself in a new country. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected as US president, but the country did not know exactly who he was and what he stood for. In 2024, the country knew exactly who he was and what he stood for, and yet he was re-elected. How did that happen?

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about “US Campus Antisemitism — How Did We Get Here?”. Looking back at that article, I realized that it also answers my question from the above paragraph. So let me just quote below from that article.

How Neoliberalism Gave Rise to Identity Politics

About what did the political Left and political Right traditionally argue? Going back to The Communist Manifesto, the debate has been about states and markets: should markets be left alone (hence the term “free market”), as the Right believes, or should governments insert themselves into the economy to address undesirable societal impacts of free markets, as the Left believes? This debate raged among economists, e.g., Hayek vs Keynes (regarding government intervention in the economy to lift it out of recessions), and it raged among political parties, with US Democrats pulling left and US Republicans pulling right.

The political debate, however, rather died out in the US with the election of Ronald Reagan as president of in November 1980. Following the failure of Keynesian policies during the 1970s, Reagan ushered the era of Neoliberalism, which emphasize the use of market mechanisms to solve most of society’s problems and needs and is generally associated with policies privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. The American historian Mark Lilla described Neoliberalism as the “Reganite idolatry of individual property rights and the market.” After landslide defeat to the Republican Party led by Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the 1980s, and the demise of Soviet-style communism — based on central economic planning — in the late 1980s, the Democrats reacted by shifting to the right, which led to the rise of the New Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, who went on to win the presidential election in 1992. In 1996, in his State of the Union Address, President Clinton proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” What Reagan created, Bill Clinton consolidated, described Gary Gerstle, in his 2022 book, “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” A similar phenomenon happened in the United Kingdom. In 2002, twelve years after Margaret Thatcher left office, she was asked at a dinner what was her greatest achievement. Thatcher replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour”. (Note, however, that Republicans have accepted government intervention during financial crises; see the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act of 2020.)

The neoliberal era has not been kind to poor and working-class people. As described by the historian James G. Stahlman: “A stunning U-turn in the fortunes of poor and working-class whites began in the 1970s, as de-industrialization, automation, globalization, and the growth of the high-technology and service sectors transformed the U.S. economy. In the decades since, many blue-collar jobs have vanished, wages have stagnated for less educated Americans, wealth has accumulated at the top of the economic food chain, and social mobility has become vastly harder to achieve.” In particular, as described by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White rural voters hold the greatest electoral sway of any demographic group in the United States, yet rural communities suffer from poor healthcare access, failing infrastructure, and severe manufacturing and farming job losses.

In their 2020 book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, set out to understand what accounted for falling U.S. life expectancies. They learned that the fastest rising death rates among Americans were from drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease, and these deaths disproportionately occurred in white men who had not earned college degrees. They argued that a key driver of these deaths is economic misery. Nicholas Eberstadt wrote in 2017 about “Our Miserable 21 Century”. “From work to income to health to social mobility,” he wrote, “the year 2000 marked the beginning of what has become a distressing era for the United States.”

The Democrats did not completely abandon their traditional Leftist leanings. President Clinton signed the 1993 expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor, and President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) in 2010. Yet, these initiatives made only a small dent in the overall economic decline of poor and working-class people. (Some economists criticized Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 as too small to address the Great Recession adequately.) “That might explain why the slogan of the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump — `Make America Great Again!’ — sounds so good to so many of them”, wrote Stahlman, just before the 2016 presidential election. In her 2022 book, “Left Behind — The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality”, Lily Geismer described how, eventually, the Democrats lost interest in working-class people and started courting Silicon Valley and college-educated urbanites. “The modern Democratic Party, and liberalism itself, is to a substantial extent a bastion of college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals,” wrote recently Michael Powell. While the COVID-19 pandemic may have signaled the end of the Neoliberal era, that 40-year long era will surely have a lasting impact.

In another trend, the post-World War II period saw growing recognition that various segments of the population have traditionally suffered oppression, exclusion, and/or marginalization. The Democrats, which used to be the pro-slavery party in the 19th Century, and the Jim Crow party after the Civil War, have become, by the middle of the 20th Century, the party of liberation from societal oppression, giving the word “liberal” its current American meaning. (Classical liberals believed in a free economy with minimal government interference.) President Truman integrated the US Armed Forces racially by executive order in 1948. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Congress passed The Equal Rights Amendment, which sought legal equality for women and banned discrimination based on sex, in 1972 (but, following a conservative backlash, was never ratified by enough states to become law). The Clinton Administration prohibited in 1993 military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants (“Don’t ask, don’t tell”). The policy still prohibited people who “demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts” from serving in the US Armed Forces. The Administration of President Obama removed that ban in 2011.

From 1992, the phrase “social justice” for the Democrats gradually lost its connotation of economic justice, and became more and more focused on racial, ethnic, and sexual justice, and, thus, the Democrats drifted towards identity politics. As described by the philosopher Susan Neiman, “It begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization.” As Thomas Piketty explained in his 2020 book, Capital and Ideology: “When people are told that there is no credible alternative to the socioeconomic organization and class inequality that exist today, it is not surprising that they invest their hopes in defending their borders and identities instead.” In fact, Clinton’s “The era of big government is over” expressed disillusionment with President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” ambition, which was to addresses societal inequities via policy. This disillusionment explains the somewhat religious tone of today’s identity politics.

The identity-politics trend has accelerated following the founding of the Black-Lives-Matter movement in 2012, and the murder of many Black men by law-enforcement personnel during the 2010s. Since these identity-based social-justice issues did not resonate with white working-class people — all the way to the civil-right struggle of the 1960s — Republicans were happy to emphasize that focus of the Democrats, launching the so-called “Culture Wars” to gain political advantage. These efforts go back to Republicans’ Southern Strategy in the 1960s, but as the Democrats leaned more into identity politics, the Republicans leaned more into the culture wars, where they even found an ally in Russian president Vladimir Putin, as the latter has made the culture war an important aspect of his war on the West. As Fareed Zakaria wrote, “politics is moving away from the left-right divide over economics to an open-closed one centered on cultural issues such as immigration, identity and multiculturalism.”

While identity politics has had some notable successes, e.g., the legalization of same-sex marriage in the US, it is sometimes preoccupied with terminology, but with little progress to show for it. In early 2024, Google’s Gemini software created images of historical figures in variety of ethnicities and genders, forcing Google’s CEO to apologize. Pundits ask “What happened to identity politics?” Even after Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, Democrats kept pushing for identity politics. (See this recent account of the Democratic Party current “identity crisis”.) Some on the Left have complained that identity politics has “abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint.” Identity politics is today such a strong theme of the Democratic Party that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now fracturing the Party and may have played a role in the electoral loss.

Bottom line: Democrats lost in 2024 because they have abandoned the working and middle classes. Plain and simple.