Sobriety Week on Biden-Harris

That felt good. Now it's post-Biden-Harris Sobriety Week. Over at the blog Lawyers Guns & Money, Elizabeth Nelson writes, "let’s not interpret a Biden administration as an opportunity to indulge in cultural and political comfort food. Let’s not feel reassured or validated. There is nothing validating about 70 million votes cast for Donald Trump....This is not the time for upbeat “I knew we’d prevail!” indie rock. ...The anger should feel more acute now than ever. Per the GOP’s proven system, Trump will hand Biden a terrible economy and quite possibly an exaggerated winter of  I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck-How-Many-Die response to the pandemic. Biden will be pilloried, vilified and obstructed from the moment he takes power. Let’s push back harder than ever." Yes, exactly.

Writing in the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom defines the pushing back as "radical responsiveness" to real US conditions. This means above all extracting full accountability for the Trump Administration: legal forensics into the damage Trump and his people did to public systems from the Dept of Justice to the Environmental Protection Agency to the misuse of executive branch paramilitaries in policing demonstrations in a way that created the illusion of leftist violence that Republicans took with them to the voting booth. There must be a calling to account. The attack on systemic racism that Biden invoked in his victory speech, the rebuilding of public health infractructure (including the disgraced CDC), energy conversion to renewables . . .everything depends on a militant reassertion of expertise, reality-testing, interpretative skills, the whole quantitative and qualitative set of knowledge practices that Trumpism voids. Liz Chatterjee and I have pieces in a forthcoming book (coedited by Anna Alexandrova, to be published by Alan Thomas) arguing that experts truly did earn popular mistrust by supporting policies that did systemic damage to majorities in both the US and UK. That said, the Biden-Harris admin will need to assert, with full militancy, the value of knowledge practices for solving social problems. This will require *investigations* and *prosecutions* of Trumpian corruption, including their deliberate epistemic sabotage. There should be the theater of congressional hearings and legal proceedings, tied to specific lessons to expand the "reality-based community in post-truth America," in Ian Masters' tag-line for his excellent show. Nothing could be worse than forgive-and-forget.

Cottom can be read in conjunction with Larry Elliott's Guardian column about economic troubles. Biden doesn't have an analysis of finance capitalism that can dig the US or anyone else out of the current hole--to the contrary, as Elliott and others point out, Biden is part of the Clintonian Dem establishment that got us here. What kind of worked in the 1990s is failing now, and real budget policy ("fiscal") requires a Congress that Biden-Harris don't control. As Elliott writes, "Monetary policy [via the Federal Reserve] is no answer to America’s need to renew its infrastructure or to make its welfare system more generous. To the extent that it does make a difference, [Quantitative Easing] works by pushing up asset prices and creating a feel good factor so it tends to be better for Wall Street than for the struggling communities in the less well-off states." This has been the play since Alan Greenspan took over the Federal Reserve in 1987, with unaffordable housing and low productivity growth (via low investment) being just two of many negative symptoms. (See French economist Cédric Durand's "Fictitious Capital" for an important analysis of asset-price opium and its damage to the real economy.) So we're going to need a radical rethink of US/UK capitalism, and that work is going to have to be done on a huge scale outside the Biden Admin, which won't touch it unless it grows into a movement.

I'm Going to Enjoy This As Long as I Possibly Can

I didn’t support Biden or Harris in the primaries, mostly trying to decide between two candidates I really did like- Sanders and Warren. Neither Biden nor Harris had policies strong enough to address the scale of the problems that we have. Nor, I thought, did they have the ideas that could mobilize the base. My friend 

Ricki told me I was wrong about the latter, that Harris’s status as first woman and first woman of color in either position would rally people—which did rally me along with tens of millions of other Dems—and also that people would respond overwhelmingly to Biden’s decency and non-reactionary policies. She was right! We all can continue to debate whether more progressive policies would have helped make the Dem margin bigger, including in House and Senate races. But there’s a massive, immediate victory for four issues:

1. racial justice, where overt racism won’t be sanctioned at the top. It’s only a start, but the Democratic win will end the demonization in Biden’s corrupt terminology of mainstream civil rights campaigns, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, queer people at that level of the federal government. The king of the Neo-confederacy has been beaten.

 

2. judicial corruption. The Republicans did pack the Supreme Court and the federal bench, but the removal of Barr from the Attorney General position will allow the Dept of Justice to function more professionally. This will help with civil rights enforcement, investigation of racist police departments, reduction of violence against indigenous peoples protecting water and land, and other basics. We can also again start to imagine enforcement of anti-trust and other regulations in relation to a Wall Street that has had a free hand to reinflate asset bubbles, invest against their own customers, etc. The same goes for the Department of Education on student debt and for-profit abusers, among many others. Rampant sexism no longer has a safe space in the White House, so gender equality can return to its status as a normal goal in the 21st century.

 

3. environmental regulation. Neither Harris nor Biden support the Green New Deal, but they can undo a ton of Trump’s gratuitous damage. They can be pressured into stronger, more adequate positions. and they’ll rejoin the Paris Accords.

 

4. Covid-19. Biden and Harris understand the concept of public health and the essential role of the public sector in operating a pandemic response. The country will get well much faster next year because the Democrats are back in the White House.

 

Other issues are up for grabs—education and higher education policy, labor rights, reproductive  rights, fiscal policy, transportation, infrastructure, the Middle East, China and foreign policy more generally. But i’m going to take a few days off from worrying about that.

 

And I’m very happy to have a community college professor as First Lady. It’s about time!

The Election Standoff: First Exit Poll Review

The blue wave never arrived, and as expected, Donald Trump declared victory--"frankly, we did win this election." He then demanded that ballot counting stop in the swing states where at 2:30 am ET he was ahead. Here's the full clip.

Both Fox and CNN denounced Trump's claim that continuing to count votes would be illegal. On Fox, Chris Wallace said, "This is an extremely flammable situation and the president just threw a match into it. He hasn't won these states ... the president doesn't get to say he won states ... there's no question that all these states can continue to count votes." On CNN, Jake Tapper declared, “what the president just said is undemocratic and false and premature."  

Now the battle begins, first just to complete voting counts, which will shift blue in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  And the Senate is still up in the air, with only the more predictable flips being called--a Dem loss in Alabama (I'm sad about Doug Jones, actually), and two Dem gains, in Arizona and Colorado. It's all especially terrible for those of us from states like California, where we are hostage, election after election, to the whims of a few perennial swing states, many of which are also bad at counting.

I have some early thoughts on the Edison Research exit poll posted at the New York Times. It confirms David Sirota's take, especially the first and last items, "Democrats' weak economic message hugely helped Trump," and "A large percentage of Americans have lost their minds."  

1. Let's start with the economy (Trump in red, Biden in blue)

Trump does not win the working class vote. I could complain about 40+ percent of the bottom income quartiles voting for an unvarnished plutocrat, but Trump doesn't get a majority until family income hits six figures, or the most affluent 25 percent.  Trump is the candidate of the white middle- and upper-middle class. (re the title of this, my ancient blog). 

This one is extremely annoying.

People whose main issue is the economy went with Trump by 4:1! These aren't necessarily the people who know the most about economics (obviously).   "The economy" seems to have become a proxy for pro-business ideology--tax cuts, deregulation, etc., rather than being a chance to evaluate policy performance. This is a massive failure for the Democrats, and confirms both of Sirota's points above.

No less absurd is the Republican vote for the guy who addresses public safety by endangering it. 

A bit more on the economy: incumbents always do very well with people who think the economy is good (for them). Covid-19 and economic inequality notwithstanding, over 40 percent of respondents say they're better off than 4 years ago.  The surprise to me is that only a fifth of respondents say they are worse off now.  A third of  even those people voted for Trump, again confirming the point that Biden didn't have a strong enough message to beat Trump with the 50 percent who think the economy is not so good or poor (below).

Finally, union households. They are only a fifth of respondents, and Trump gets a percentage of them that should embarrass Democrats, or unions, or both.  Forty percent of union families voted for guy whose appointees have done serious damage to the status of unions, quite deliberately.

2. Race and Gender

One story was that whites were still largely Trumpers but that white women had had enough. This was wrong. 55 percent of white women stuck with Trump.  For me, this is big surprise number 2.

At first glance, 1 + 2 = a confirmation of 2016 analyses that stressed Trumpers voted to keep their racial position rather than to overcome economic anxiety.  This is a depressing continuity.

3. College. 

Another story was the educational divide: non-college people were said to resent the rule of experts and B.A. know-it-alls. Trump was to lose the college crowd, especially women, but score big with the non-college crowd.

Trump hung on to white women and won a narrow victory with white women college grads.  College curbs but doesn't eliminate white enthusiasm for a president who so clearly elevates money and power over knowledge that he makes George W. Bush look like William Faulkner.  The most anti-intellectual president in modern history still gets half of white college grads -- and slightly more women than men. 

The main surprise here is among white men, where college cuts their Trump support two-thirds to under half.

4. Party Identity. 

The red state / blue state dichotomy is a tedious cliché. That doesn't make it wrong.  What seems to be happening is that D v. R isn't about parties anymore, but breeds of American.

Note two things. First, the major parties each only have a third of the electorate.  Second, they each had nearly 95 percent candidate loyalty.  There are not so much two parties as two Americas. I dislike writing that stupid sentence but it seems to be true.

The question for Trump gets the same numbers: the other party's candidate inspires concern or fear in 90 + percent of either party. And that's true even for an "Uncle Joe" moderate like Biden. 

A silver lining is tentative vindication of people like Sanders and Warren who tried to talk the Democrat establishment out of their faith in moderation and the centrist voter.  There's going to be hell to pay for the strategists who spent millions on white "persuadables" instead of on first-time Latinx voters, for example.

Party also beats region.  West and East are more Democratic as we already knew, but not by a landslide.  Biden got nearly half of the South, the same as his score in the Midwest.  We now have country  vs. city parties--confirmation of a trend people have analyzed for years.

5. Pandemic politics

This exit poll confirms that in America, there is no independent reality--only a party line.

We see the same 90+ percent correlations between perception of Covid-competence and party membership. This is a huge embarrassment for a country that prides itself on can-do realism.

Equally embarrassing is the failure of rocketing Covid infection rates to make many people rethink Trump's performance. The same goes for the split on reopening vs. containment.  Democrats did not break through the wall on the basic point that if Covid isn't contained the economy won't rebuild. There's lots of bad news here about the country's epistemic competence.

This polls has huge gaps on issues and better data will be flooding out.  And as of noon in London the count is far from over.

 

 

The Longer Arc of Covid History

The short story of the U.S. 21th century is the tale of four disasters.  The first was the response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001--the invasion and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ensuing era of permanent war and suffering in the greater Middle East.  The second was the failed response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: that's Kanye West at left intoning his immortal line, "George Bush doesn't care about Black people."  The third was the 2008 financial crisis. The fourth is unfolding now--the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic depression likely to ensue.

The failed response to these disasters has a common element. It is the Republican party and its world view.

George W. Bush ignored intelligence warnings about the activities that led to the attacks, which caught the enormous US military completely off guard. Military solutions made the situation worse, and were overcompensations for the initial failure.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 became a human catastrophe, particularly for Black residents of New Orleans and southern Louisiana, through the Bush administration's then-astonishing failure to manage basic disaster relief.  FEMA was run by a political crony.  Much talk of reform ensued, but the structural problems persisted and then got worse under Trump, leading to the failures of 2020 that we are living through.

The 2008 financial crisis was created by Republican economic policies, which always center on tax cuts, government starvation, deregulation of business and banking, the continuous priming of equity markets with low interest rates and other tools, and asset securitization and other financialization processes that attracted capital out of production and non-financial services.

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic will be greatly worsened by another Republican administration's refusal to prepare for it.  A comparison to a competent public system like Germany's is profoundly painful. Why can't we do that here? The U.S. is now a formerly-1st world country, not a leader in any domain that requires cooperative skill in the use of large-scale structures.

Why have Republicans presided over all of these disasters - 4 out of 4? Bad luck? My selective reading? (true, I forgot Benghazi!)  Neither.  It's because their core belief is that "government isn't the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Government isn't something that creates and orchestrates common goods. Government is a piñata to hit with the political bat until the candy falls out for you.

To rehearse: Step 1 is to appoint political allies rather than competent professionals--allies you control.

Step 2 is to neutralize regulatory power or independent oversight. The knowledge-creating function of government agencies is silenced if not destroyed.  The same goes for unvarnished communication with the public.  (Attacks on a still-independent academia are part of this.)

Step 3 is to turn the government agency into an extraction pipeline that siphons public money into private pockets.  Mineral leases on federal and/or Native lands are one example; subsidies for fossil fuel but not renewable development are another.  The result of this structure in the pandemic is a war of all against all for masks, ventilators, and other basic equipment, like what you'd expect in a run-of-the-mill dictatorship.

Step 4 is Orwellian denial that the leadership has failed or manipuled reality-- as when the Department of Health and Human Services rewrote their webpage in the hours after "the president's ignorant son-in-law" falsely stated that the purpose of federal emergency stockpiles is not to help the states, to confirm his falsehood.

How did we get to this place--this place where the U.S. isn't operationally competent anymore? It's barely second rate in various measures of public health, disaster relief, housing, general education, and is worse than second-rate in other things like infrastructure. I can't imagine the U.S. increasing the number of intensive care beds by 50%  in 2 months, as Germany did. My hope a couple of weeks ago that UC medical centers would come to the rescue of California's infected people, offering lots of tests, tracing, beds in MASH-style hospitals, is sad to remember.

So there's the Republicans' phony non-state state in Ruthie Gilmore's term that hollows out government capacity to provide core human services--health, housing, and education--and to do this equitably, meaning without regard for ability to pay, as democracy theoretically demands.  But Republicans didn't take over the federal and most state governments at gunpoint--they were fairly elected (mostly). How'd they get there and stay there?

Some of it is dirty tricks and highly organized, intelligent strategy, plus excellent propaganda skills.  The roles of voter suppression and Fox News are well known.  But this doesn't change the fact that Republicans are there because white middle class voters keep them there.  Whites majorities still vote Republican even under Trump; he has lost many college whites but has kept non-college white middle class voters.  For decades, whites have voted overwhelmingly for conservative Republican policies on housing, health, education, taxes, voting, and civil rights.  Running through white flight, property tax revolts and opposition to busing, the paleomammalian cortex of the white middle-class decided to dismantle the common goods that created it rather than share them with people of color. 

This statement is pretty obvious to Black people: see, for example, this good explanation that historically-informed Black distrust of educated whites led them to support for Biden over Sanders in the South Carolina primary. There's also more awareness of this issue in the white middle-class than was the case ten or thirty years ago, but it hasn't changed anything--voting patterns haven't shifted enough to insure Trump's defeat in November.  It's this white expert discourse, even when officially anti-racist and enlightened.  Experts are as likely to tell people they have to go without things they want and need--like free college or public housing--than to form plans for social reconstruction.  Trump and Boris Johnson belong to parties that have openly sabotaged expert advice and expert institutions, so their failures to deliver affordable health care and higher ed are not mainly the experts' fault. And yet experts as a group, and their universities, neither offer big plans for nor systematically expose the anti-professional right as ruining the country.

In part because of professional class passivity, neither non-college whites nor people of color look to universities, professionals, or college degrees as reliable sources for progressive politics.  They aren't seen as institutions hellbent to build shared resources and infrastructure for all. This is one reason why even Dem support for college is more obligatory than passionate.  For example, one poll showed majorities of all groups, especially Latinx parents, saying that college is important for their children (p 15).  And yet they are far more likely, in California, to say public colleges are doing a "good" than an "excellent" job (p 10). "Good" and "not so good" together have close to 3/4ths of respondents.  I interpret this to mean that college isn't building a better world for people. It's mostly holding out the promise of a half-decent job.

The only solution is for experts and their white middle class base to map out the complete reversal of anti-government neoliberalism.  I say this although it is so entrenched, and the national opposition (Democrats) so compromised, that it is unlikely to happen without a political revolution.

Given its failure to reform its self-dealing neoliberalism, the white middle class will be one of this revolution's targets. The war on college-educated experts started long ago, and is now being waged enthusiastically by the Trumpian right.  The white middle class, since it turned on the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, and fought busing and property taxes in the 1970s, has sided with the inflation of asset prices over equitable development, including living wages for the multi-racial working class on which it depends. It has voted for people whose explicit program has been to cut taxes on business and the wealthy, give public lands to extraction companies, suppress unions, wages, and worker influence in their workplace, purge reproductive rights, and massively increase economic inequality, but but what the hell--these Republicans won't raise property or income taxes, pass rent control, or integrate the schools, so we'll just ride asset inflation up the steep slope of inequality. 

And with Covid, the Republicans will allow tens of millions to lose their jobs instead of paying companies to keep them employed, because that policy, adopted even by Boris Johnson's Tories in Britain, wouldn't treat workers as disposable.  Facing the Great Depression 2.0, borne of the right's hollow state and hatred of mass security, the middle class can either side with the multiracial workers of the country it fake-helped through Clinton-Obamanomics while keeping its assets growing, and redeem expertise in the bargain.  Or it can chose its overpriced property economy, and be crushed by the sultanistic oligarchy the Trump Party yearns to deliver.

English Nationalism in an Absurd Election

First off, this was a very English occasion.  Not British.  The map at left shows an overwhelmingly Tory England at odds with at least two of the other three nations of the United Kingdom.  Scotland may be gone by the end of Boris Johnson's five-year term. Northern Ireland, I think, will slowly realign with the Republic of Ireland in an island federation with capitals in both Dublin and Belfast.  Johnson may be the "one nation" UK's last prime minister.

Second, Labour's demolition in the UK election under social democrat Jeremy Corbyn does not mean that US Democrats should run to the pro-business center.  Roger Cohen et al. are wrong about this--and it will be really great of American liberals not to channel Steve Bannon's spin about a Brexit wave sweeping the globe.  In the main exit poll, voters who didn't vote Labour blamed Labour "leadership" rather than its "economic policies"--by a margin of nearly 4 to 1.  Among Labour voters who defected to the Tories, that margin was 9 to 1.  The share casting conscious votes against nationalization or infrastructure development or renewable energy or pension increases stayed in the single digits.  Labour's defeat was not a defeat of green democratic socialism as an increasingly popular project.

So if the working-classes weren't voting against socialism, what the hell happened?  Union leader Len McCluskey blamed Brexit, meaning Labour would have won if it had competed with Boris Johnson to be more pro-Brexit? I really don't think so.  This theory doesn't explain the tragic fact noted by a Labour MP from Birmingham, Jess Phillips, who wrote,

The more working-class a constituency was, the worse the result was for Labour. The problem isn’t just that working-class people will be hurt by the Tories – it’s that too many don’t believe we’re better than the Tories.

The hard question is why do working-class people who've been hurt for nine years by Tory austerity think that Labour is as bad as the Tories?  It's not like the US in 2016, where a representative of the New Democrats, Hillary Clinton, could be blamed by Obama-to-Trump voters for neoliberal policies that offshored jobs, deregulated banking, and watched millions lose their homes.  Corbyn was staunchly opposed to New Labour and to Tory austerity, and could hardly be accused of being a Tory enabler.

So it was something about Jeremy? Phillips almost gets there, but wanders off into complaints about intolerance in the party leadership towards dissent, which was a problem for MPs but not obviously for voters. 

Similarly, Lisa Nandy, an MP from outside Manchester, accused her party of not listening to people enough.  But again, even if Labour MPs like her were not listening a whole lot more than Tory MPs don't listen, which I strongly doubt, she doesn't say what better-listening MPs would have heard. It's not clear what policies would have mattered, since Labour has been out of power for nearly a decade, and it's the Tories that have run the government and squeezed every council budget and every public service in the country.  Perhaps local Labour officials did crap jobs in working-class constituencies that Labour lost--I wouldn't know. But it makes no sense that people hurt by explicit Tory policies don't hold the Tories responsible for the damage they are famously resentful about.

This is a map from the BCC coverage showing constituencies that changed hands.  In England, nearly all went to the Conservatives (in blue; yellow is the Scottish National Party, and orange the Liberal Democrats).

I'm struck by that middle belt from west to east, which corresponds to the "Northern Powerhouse" whose overstuffed, clunky trains, tattered NHS clinics, and generally neglected services have been famously not improved by the Tories over their decade in power.  So where was "vote the rascals out"?  In fact, a bad ten years was rewarded with another five--in part by austerity's leading victims.

This was not a close election. An Observer editorial summarized the scale of the Tory win.

This is the largest Conservative majority the country has seen since 1987, delivered on the biggest share of the vote won by any party since Margaret Thatcher’s first victory in 1979. For Labour, this defeat is its fourth in a row, producing the smallest cohort of MPs the party has seen since 1935. Britain’s electoral map has been upended as the Conservatives have swept to victory with a raft of seats in the north and the Midlands that were not so long ago seen as impregnable Labour strongholds.

England went whole-hog Tory, with the exception of the London city-state.

Were voters duped by the Tory press?  I'm not a fan of dupe theory: if a Labour voter was going to vote for Corbyn but switches after following a Facebook link to an Evening Standard headline about his "red plan for Britain," she wasn't a Labour voter. Dupe theory begs the question of why people are "duped."  People also don't enjoy being tricked.  They didn't vote for the victory of the "bullshit-industrial complex."  Nor did they hope for Boris Johnson to "extract a dangerous lesson from his win: that putting out untrue claims about your opponents, blaming them for events that happen on your watch, and avoiding scrutiny at all costs is an effective political strategy."

So back to leadership: I would like to know why Corbyn wasn't a "leader" even to traditional Labour voters.

His handling of the anti-Semitism charges did real damage.  A couple of my (working-class) neighbors in Islington have dwelt upon it.  The charge is very serious-- and yet it feels to me more like a screen for a deeper misgiving about Corbyn overall.  The party went through a constantly scrutinized investigation, but it produced no findings and served mostly to keep the charges alive. Corbyn and some other Labourites are certainly opposed to Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza toward Palestinians, but voters need to have reasons not to see or care about the difference between that and anti-Semitic policies or beliefs.

Corbyn also made a massive leadership mistake in not coming out for or against Brexit. He was swept into party leadership by his reputation for principled integrity, clarity, and consistent political values.  When he equivocated on the main issue of his time as party leader, he threw away his reputation for integrity.  When he spoke, he became evasive and hard to understand.  He could have campaigned for Socialist Remain and tried to persuade his Brexit base, or on the other hand promoted an exciting and coherent Lexit. He did neither, for whatever reasons, and threw away his main credential as a political figure.

But the real problem is the English electorate.  The vote seems to me driven by English nationalism, damn the social consequences.  This involves seeing the country as still-exceptional and innately great, in spite of its current condition.  It also demands never criticizing the evil outcomes that have gone with its imperial history.  Corbyn's career revolved around criticizing those outcomes, as he was a confirmed anti-imperalist who opposed state policies in Palestine and Ireland, among others, that were endorsed by the English establishment.  His leadership failure was a "failure of patriotism." In contrast, Johnson advanced himself as the new Churchill.  This evoked the England of World War II and of imperial glory, not of Montbatten the Last Viceroy in India or the Suez defeat or Britain declining slowly as it passive-aggressively decolonized.  Corbyn was not the person who would tout English good intentions or English successes in those nationalist missions.  Thus he was distrusted or even despised by all sorts of English people, working-classes much included.

English nationalism is also a white nationalism.  I'm surprised at the lack of mainstream discussion this weekend of the anti-immigrant motive behind Brexit, and of Islamophobia.  The election took place on the 13th day after the London Bridge knife attacks, in which Usman Khan killed two people before being chased by the public and then shot dead by police.  The victims were two University of Cambridge graduates who worked with a prison education program called Learning Together, which was having a meeting in a facility near the bridge.  Formerly incarcerated people were in attendance, including at least one who tried to hold Khan off. Khan was himself formerly incarcerated, convicted of terrorist offenses in 2012: how he wound up at Learning Together, killing two people working with the currently and formerly incarcerated, beggars belief.  The victims were both white; the father of one, Dave Merritt, tried to keep his son's death from being used to stoke anti-Islamic sentiment for political gain, and publicly accused Boris Johnson of doing exactly that.  But the sides were quietly drawn: it was easy, for example, to find coverage of Khan's story that tied "the terrorist's UK-based family" to Pakistan.  It was also easy to vote silently for a de facto anti-Islam and anti-immigrant ticket that needn't actually speak its name.

A further dimension is England's economic nationalism, which may have once been dragged into supporting public transportation, housing, health, education, telecom, and the other publicly-funded foundations of the modern private sector, but which now looks for living incarnations of Keynes's "animal spirits." Johnson routed Corbyn in the contest for "a spontaneous urge to action" which sweeps all obstacles from its path.  In Keynes' words,

a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

Johnson presented himself as the improbable transformation of Brexit horror into future triumph, to be won through his indomitable vitality.  English people are like Americans in frequently skipping the details of capitalist operations in favor of capitalist vigor. The hero of this story is the willful entrepreneur, the small business person, the "job creator"; the villain is government regulation and society itself.  Descended from Schumpeter, Hayek, and many others, what we now call neoliberalism is a thinly-veiled social Darwinism.  The losers--the homeless, children in poverty, the poorly educated, the shivering elderly whom Labour would befriend--are required by the nature of things.  It's what Cedric Robinson called racial capitalism in action.

For Corbyn and other Labour candidates to try to make England more equal and just was seen as irrelevant or even opposed to prosperity, which is now generally assumed to come from private investors, financial engineering, from everywhere except from the "poorest communities" and their labor.  Given the nationalist mixture of manhood, race, country, and money, it's common sense even for many members of those communities themselves.  In reality, the private sector depends fundamentally on state investment--and on privatizing public resources.  The fountainhead of "market forces" as channeled by vigorous male champions was outdated even as is was being (again) conceived in the 1930s. But it persists in countries like England and the United States, where it dovetails with nationalism.

Thatcher was one of the origin points of economic nationalism for working people.  She offered them income through property ownership rather than industrial labor, which she helped to destroy. After decades in which investment returns have increased much faster than wages, the main way to stay afloat in England is to join Thomas Piketty's rentiers, who prosper in an England where labor does not.  Big returns are implicitly adversarial--your wealth is the other's hardship (your London house, their unaffordable rent).  They require a kind of hardness that Johnson relishes and that Corbyn rejects.  Rentier relations are threatened by Labour's ideals of shared social investment in collective development, and they threaten the parts of the working- and middle-classes that depend on property income or ever-growing spreads between their cost and your price.

Overcoming this conjunction of property interests, racial-religious identity, and masculinity is going to take much more time.  Sadly, as Johnson becomes the Orban of England, it's a very multi-racial English working-class that will pay the biggest price.

A very Tory England:

Trump's Triumph Over the Professional Middle Class

I'm going to tote up a few things that are sometimes too obvious to say, but that should be in circulation.  The end point is that Donald J. Trump's post-fact ethos is the visible piece of a submerged crusade to make the United States a post-middle class society.

The first visible thing is the national knowledge crisis.  People now talk about a post-fact era, and  even the summit of the Washington establishment is feeling distress about Trump's power to dismiss any analysis that "conflicts with his a priori assumptions."    A more banal but pervasive problem is that it is impossible to understand any public issue through television, our dominant news medium.  This is also true of most print outlets, where coverage is superficial and fragmented. That is slightly better than superficial and chaotic, or simply propagandistic, which is the range on TV.  (Social media varies from deep, authoritative expertise to fake news propaganda to dark marketing psy-ops, but I leave that aside here.)  The U.S. has no public framework of political understanding today.  Crisis is too weak a word for the state of national knowledge.

The second clear thing is that Trump's success rested on a classic plutocratic appeal to white racial resentment.  There are two parts to this. Part one, the resentment, takes the form, "my white stuff has been given to minorities by the government."  We often talk as though this just another way of saying "white racism," but that begs the question, what is white racism today? My own sense is that it is tied to a white feeling of superiority and to a white feeling of failure--to the economic and cultural failure to be successful, central to the society, recognized as such. The complicated result is racial resentment, which is fused with resentment of government. Our knowledge crisis then helps many whites trace their sense of failure to the great government giveaway to racial minorities.*

Part two: Plutocracy is Trump running as the American businessman-king, who has a sovereign power to make everything work.  This figure is embodied in the corporate CEO, who has two core features. He [sic] maximizes private/corporate self-interest. He [sic] has a proven capacity to dominate others in pursuing this private self-interest. A plutocracy admits no public interest that is separate from the private interests of the dominant figures. It has no need for democratic processes that are separate from the executive's power to dominate ("to get things done").  Hence Trump's failure to admit the need to separate his business interests from the state or to grant the importance of the emoluments clause that opposes this use of the state to advance private interests.  He of course understands that there are frequent conflicts of interests (Carrier management and Carrier employees, perhaps Putin the oil baron vs. Putin the Middle East strategist). He does not grant that conflicts must be adjudicated by a non-dominating public-interest procedure that differs from the behavior of the strong private executive, and is ruined by the executive.

So far we have a knowledge crisis sustaining a plutocracy crisis that hinges on racial scapegoating. This gets us to a third thing: Trump's voters supported plutocratic racial capitalism because they hate the supposed alternative, the professional-managerial class's knowledge economy, championed by the Democratic party.  The professional-managerial class** seems to oppress them more directly--as managers and know-it-alls--than moguls do. Moguls like Trump act like Machiavelli's Prince, existing above all laws and rules, possessed of a magical ability to get things done.  A quarter-century of Clintonian know it alls--including Robert "symbolic analyst" Reich and Richard "creative class" Florida--have abandoned the American working class and let their towns and cities go to hell.

On top of that, Clintonist professional-managerial types demanded that workers convert themselves into people like them if they wanted jobs.  This meant not just demanding university degrees of 45 year olds but a change in their culture and values and relationships.  On the other hand, Republicans offered the preservation of some manufacuturing and extractive industry jobs for which blue-collar folk were already trained--as well as the continuity of conservative cultural values.  Republicans have been the political champions of blue-collar work, even as their tax giveaways to the wealthy undermine it.  Blue-collar workers can legitimately wonder how much worse Trump could be for them than Clinton and Obama.

Fourth, the professional-managerial class displays a conceptual failure that rests on this practical failure to keep the working class (only 1/3rd white male in the mid-1990s, and less so today) fully inside the U.S. economy  The conceptual failure is to have abandoned a sharp distinction between the public and the private good.  As Clintonist centrist Democrats practically abandoned the industrial working class and racial equality of outcome, they also gutted public good conceptions of social cohesion and majority prosperity.

Fifth, in abandoning the blue-collar economy and a strong public-good ethos, Clinonist professional managerial folk mooted the difference between expert authority and executive authority.  The PMC is supposed to earn its (limited) authority on the basis of knowledge, which is then to generate equity and effectiveness.  Expert authority is supposed to be an alternative to domination, while executive authority is domination. A good large chunk of the population, including the nonprofessional middle-class, now seems to think we may as well have domination via Trump, and this Trump strength exists because the supposed non-domination of expert authority has done nothing economically for Trump voters in the past 35 years.

The two great government programs even Tea Partiers like, Social Security and Medicare, were New Deal and Great Society programs that were in place a generation before the Clinton-Obama quarter century of Democracy Lite.  The yuppie army of knowledge economy advocates added nothing to them. They never built an employment base to match that of dirty industry--steel, auto, coal, et al. To top it off, the Clintons personally squandered the PMC claim to equity and effectiveness--to the absence of partiality and corruption--with their steady stream of minor but revealing scandals over these 25 years.  They also got rich through government service--a common right-wing talking point--further eroding the public vs. private good distinction on which professionals' superior virtue depends.

Disliking professional authority helps explain why Trump's vote correlates with medium and low levels of education more than with higher or lower levels of income: the population that respects the moral and political claims of expertise has shrunk to other experts or near experts like holders of B.A. degrees.  Trump's people never penalized him for his contempt for the governing claims of professional people--quite the opposite. He needs functional skill, but this is a commodity that he can buy, and the Trumps of the world can buy any expertise at some price.  As a commodity, knowledge expertise lacks political rights or moral authority.  The Clinton period has witnessed the commodification of increasingly complex skill, with the irony that professional skill is going the way of blue-collar skill--a point I discuss at length in The Great Mistake.

At this point, a card-carrying professional like myself can rush into discourse critique: In contrast to people like doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, accountants, nurses, college professors, city planners, and so on, Trump has spent his life in a world where a sales pitch plus money and influence creates its own reality, which is good at fleecing people but not at building a society.  More fundamentally, his personality structure disables the sort of verbal analysis, debate, and synthesis that is second nature to knowledge workers. His move is to throw the disputant out of the language game, which, in Jean-François Lyotard's classic definition, is terrorism.  Lyotard's definition of "postmodernism" in his famous book on the topic was not the end of "master narratives," but the rise of economic determinism, embodied in the U.S. by the businessman-king, who has the power to expel any irritating opponent from the language game before it starts.   Right-wing media plays its major partnering role.  The point is not to debate democratic socialists, for example, but to define them as bad people who want to destroy America, which means you don't need to debate them at all.  In this discursive sense, Trump is the Terror King.

All true enough. But the structural point is that Trump is also the triumphant enemy of the professions and professionals that make up the PMC.  Professionals, living in their traditional world of self-regulated standards and widespread social respect, do not understand this fact: the American right in general, and Trump in particular, have built a post-knowledge economy in which expertise is a commodity they buy for pennies on the global market.

The convenient effect of this hatred for the professions is that Trump can create the kind of cabinet he has:  foxes will guard every henhouse.  He picked an enemy of the minimum wage and the 40 hour week to head the Department of Labor, an enemy of public education to run the Department of Education, an unhinged opponent of everything public to run Housing, an extractor of treasury funds to run the Department of Treasury, a fan of war to run Defense, an enemy of environmental protection to run the Environmental Protection Agency, the head of the World Wrestling Federation to run the Small Business Administration, and now, reportedly, the leading advocate of private petro-interests to run the Department of State. From from Trump's point of view, why not?  Professional expertise and democratic deliberation either don't really exist or are obviously inferior to executive command.  And the public interest isn't different from private self-interest (an American neo-Smithian truism not limited to Trump).  This frame lends logic to Trump's kleptocapitalist cabinet, running energy policy for the petro sector, banking for hedge funds, labor for fast food chains, and education for charter school chains.

The wider political spectacle will be executive power crushing self-proclaimed independent professional expertise.  Every member of the cabinet of predators represents the use of autocratic authority against collective forces--cultural change, social movements, labor unions--whose political claims have been embodied in the disinterested languages of ethics, the law, and bureaucratic rationality.   Most professionals still think they are sheltered from direct executive power, and the high end perhaps believes their high salaries will protect them.  Protect them from poverty perhaps, but not from humiliation or political marginalization--or from being made historically obsolete as they had made the nonprofessional working and middle classes.

In short, the key achievement of Trump's business wing of the Republican party is have contained the knowledge economy.  It has done this by overcoming the class opposition between the working class and the bourgoisie that Eric Olin Wright could still identify twenty years ago. He has forged a working-class/bourgoisie alliance by rendering the professional middle classes their common enemy.

One big effect is to turn high-end professionals into servants, as I already mentioned.  Another is to have flattened the democratic potential of the tech economy that advocates like John Seely Brown had long predicted. Brown's co-authored Shift Happens is a good window into the promise of 2009 (and 1999). The shifts this book describes are:

1. Value is moving from stocks to flows
2. Power is shifting from organizations to individuals
3. Performance is falling for organizations.

(3) is entirely true: corporations are failing, measured as Return on Assets and other ways.  Large, top-down organizations in general are a mess, and are burdening society in many ways I can't go into here.  In addition, (1) and (2) are true in principle. But the point of resurgent, extractive, financialized Trumpian organizations ruled by businessman-kings is to make (1) and (2) false. Trump's capitalism locks up value in stocks that companies control and meter, and traps individual insight and energy within organizations, where they commodify that insight.  In our era after the knowledge economy, management is more powerful than ever, audit culture rules professional organizations more than during the Bush years, and executives are more entitled autocrats than in any other period.

This is the work of Trump's circle of allies, waging war on dissent, focusing Prince-like entirely on their own rule, and making knowledge creators into subordinates.   It is also the work of Silicon Valley culture, which has been stupid about and contemptuous of human processes and so can't protect them.  It is also the work of Clintonism, which has blamed people and their (non)skills rather than management/moguls for every economic thing. The Valley and Clintonism broke whatever alternative to Trumpism was in the minds of the Google bus dissidents as they were shipped in their rolling crates to work.

The current default is that Trump autocracy will rule American capitalism, keeping it extractive and oppressive to white- and blue-collar labor alike, opposing even minimal reforms, accelerating the aging of the U.S. economic apparatus and its productive decline.  The result is to be a U.S. that is no longer middle class in economic entitlement, political rights, or multi-racial equality.

Such is what the executive-plutocracy-working class alliance foretells.  When the musician Beck, in the top photo, released "Loser" a few weeks after Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, he called it "forces of evil in a bozo nightmare."  We were warned, and now we have to do something about it.

Addendum: I started this blog as a kind of diary ten years ago this month. In the first post I pointed out that "when the gloves come off, the Creative Class goes down like a bag of cement." Still so true!  Happy anniversary to "Middle Class Death Trips."

------

*I realize someone like George Lakoff would say facts won't change the framing, and that analysts going back to Du Bois would say facts won't change the social structure.  I agree: a national knowledge system rests on frames or paradigms and not just facts, and the frames are rebuilt every day, week after week.  Thus a functional national knowledge system would fail to support, and therefore erode, this white sense that, to paraphrase Zizek, "the government has stolen my enjoyment.  And given it to racial minorities." We don't have one.

**I generally use Erik Olin Wright's 12-class model from Class Counts (1997), in which the middle-class is a set of "contradictory positions within class relations" that reflect variations of authority and expertise.  This class ranges from expert to skilled to unskilled, and has a range of authority positions as well.  I'll use professional managerial class for the expert/skilled white-collar people, and gloss over a bunch of details, particularly the current civil war between professional and managers in medicine, academia, and elsewhere.

Depressing Hillary

The reality is that I don't know a Democrat who is actually enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton becoming the next president. Many Democrats think she's earned her shot and is very qualified. Everyone sees the value of having a woman president.  And yet my twenty-something feminist friends and students have said, "yes I want a woman president.  Just not that woman."  Reports this morning are that in spite of the Trump terror factor, African American early voting is down.

Clinton has not broken with her dynasty's 1990s New Democrat vision of business as the great progressive force, and made no case in the debates that the public mission would be back in charge.  She already ran for president in 2008, when she was defeated by the then more populist candidate Barack Obama.   She didn't have a good record in her last big job as Secretary of State--her acceptance of the removal of the democratically elected Manuel Zelaya as president of Honduras helped disintegrate that society, which in turn led to some of the immigration that Donald J. Trump has successfully stigmatized.  And she isn't clearly willing the integrity race with the demagogic salesman, scapegoater, tax avoider, and OPM artist Trump.   On policy, she will be Obama Minus: about the same centrist ineffectuality on banking reform and economic redevelopment, and worse on the Middle East on other areas of foreign policy.  On personal integrity, she isn't in Obama's league--she's more like Trump Plus.

The root problem is her neoliberal self.  This has been nicely defined by the political theorist Wendy Brown as devoting one's working life to increasing the value of oneself as human capital.  The Clintons are profoundly unoriginal thinkers who have stayed inside of the influential orthodoxies of the particular time, for example, favoring stereotype-driven"super predator" mass incarceration in the 1990s rather than confronting the deindustrialization that drove the crime spikes; then opposing mass incarceration thanks to Black Lives Matter et al. in 2016.  This reflects the fact that they always take positions that will maximize their own position and influence. People who have watched them over the years understand this, and it is at the root of the feeling that they are unreliable allies.  The single worst example early on was Bill Clinton's abandoning of Lani Guinier, his nominees for the civil rights head of the Department of Justice, when a Wall Street Journal labeled her a quota queen.  But everyone can imagine the Clinton's abandoning a position at any time, which gives them a queasy feeling.

Another aspect of the neoliberal self is not being able to tell the difference between public goods and self-advancement.  This seems like something anyone could and should be able to do, but this has become less true in practice.  One of the FBI investigations of the Clintons involved "pay to play" use of their foundation in which foreign leaders that Hillary Clinton treated as the Secretary of State could get enhanced access through donations to the Clinton foundation.  Reporters have found a statistical correlation between donations and meetings with Hillary Clinton. The causal connection would never be direct, but what matters is the general ability to imagine that Bill would certainly do this and that Hillary would go along.  They spent the 2000s using their political prominence to get rich.  Though they pay full taxes on their multi-million dollars of annual income, they are the kind of people that can't imagine their wealth impairing their public vision.  That's neoliberalism.

This week CNN announced the firing of former DNC head Donna Brazile because they found that she was feeding questions to the Clinton campaign ahead of interviews.   This is cheating.  The same goes for former head of the party Debbie Wasserman, who was forced to resign in the wake of WikiLeakes information of her skewing party resources away from Bernie Sanders. Hillary's response to that was not to apologize for taking advantage of unfair advantage, but to give Wasserman a job.

I have a bad feeling about what is to come.

Trump's Noir Power

This piece blames the Democrats for the persistence of Trump. My reason is that Trump wields what I'll call the power of noir, and the mainstream Democrats are unable to fight it.  Noir is a vision of terrible trouble and of violent recovery that in this election mixes authoritarianism, economic pessimism and racial fear (of white weakness, rather than certainty of white supremacism).  In the U.S., noir always beats nothing.  And that, at the moment, is what the Dems are offering--the status quo, no change, nothing, nothing that we don't already have with Obama, and that is clearly not enough.

This was Clinton's weakness in the debate she won.  The first question noted that half of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck and asked how the candidates would create good jobs.  Clinton answered that this is an opportunity to think about the country we want, mentioned her two-year-old granddaughter, said "I want us to invest in you," called for more profit-sharing, and said she supported better work-life balance.  All very nice.  None of them offer a direct means of restoring middle-class jobs.

Here's Trump.

Our jobs are fleeing the country. They're going to Mexico. They're going to many other countries. You look at what China is doing to our country in terms of making our product. They're devaluing their currency, and there's nobody in our government to fight them. And we have a very good fight. And we have a winning fight. Because they're using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China, and many other countries are doing the same thing.

So we're losing our good jobs, so many of them. When you look at what's happening in Mexico, a friend of mine who builds plants said it's the eighth wonder of the world. They're building some of the biggest plants anywhere in the world, some of the most sophisticated, some of the best plants. With the United States, as he said, not so much.

So Ford is leaving. You see that, their small car division leaving. Thousands of jobs leaving Michigan, leaving Ohio. They're all leaving. And we can't allow it to happen anymore. As far as child care is concerned and so many other things, I think Hillary and I agree on that. We probably disagree a little bit as to numbers and amounts and what we're going to do, but perhaps we'll be talking about that later.

But we have to stop our jobs from being stolen from us. 

Trump said, of course we need child care.  But we're talking about other countries stealing our jobs. He offered a direct cause for job loss: other countries are getting our jobs.  He then turned to two direct solutions:

All you have to do is take a look at Carrier air conditioning in Indianapolis. They left -- fired 1,400 people. They're going to Mexico. So many hundreds and hundreds of companies are doing this.

We cannot let it happen. Under my plan, I'll be reducing taxes tremendously, from 35 percent to 15 percent for companies, small and big businesses. That's going to be a job creator like we haven't seen since Ronald Reagan. It's going to be a beautiful thing to watch.

 Trump's first direct solution helped caused the problem he laments: Reaganite deregulation allowed companies to offshore production with no financial penalties. It's a terrible solution, and will in fact make the problem worse. But he did offer a direct response to the problem, and scores points for that.  He then offered a better, second response:

The first thing you do is don't let the jobs leave. The companies are leaving. I could name, I mean, there are thousands of them. . . . And what you do is you say, fine, you want to go to Mexico or some other country, good luck. We wish you a lot of luck. But if you think you're going to make your air conditioners or your cars or your cookies or whatever you make and bring them into our country without a tax, you're wrong. 

And once you say you're going to have to tax them coming in, and our politicians never do this, because they have special interests and the special interests want those companies to leave, because in many cases, they own the companies. So what I'm saying is, we can stop them from leaving. We have to stop them from leaving. And that's a big, big factor.

This is Trump's best line, and it's straight noir.  "Big people are screwing you.  They have to be made to stop. I will stop them.  I will charge them to leave, and that will make them stop."

How did Clinton respond? By recalling the financial crisis eight years ago, and saying this:

That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.

In fact, Donald was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis. He said, back in 2006, "Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can go in and buy some and make some money." Well, it did collapse.

TRUMP: That's called business, by the way.

CLINTON: Nine million people -- nine million people lost their jobs. Five million people lost their homes. And $13 trillion in family wealth was wiped out.

Now, we have come back from that abyss. And it has not been easy. So we're now on the precipice of having a potentially much better economy, but the last thing we need to do is to go back to the policies that failed us in the first place.

Independent experts have looked at what I've proposed and looked at what Donald's proposed, and basically they've said this, that if his tax plan, which would blow up the debt by over $5 trillion and would in some instances disadvantage middle-class families compared to the wealthy, were to go into effect, we would lose 3.5 million jobs and maybe have another recession.

Clinton is basically right, but it doesn't matter.  There is no noir agent in her crisis. "Tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy" isn't an agent: it is an effect of some unnamed parties. How do we know she knows who they are?

Clinton needed to say this: "Donald has supported tax cuts his whole life, and is a champion tax avoider.  I mean he's the king of the legal tax dodge--at least I assume they're legal, Donald.  The congresspeople he gave money all through the 1970s and 1980s when jobs were leaving--they paid him back.  They cut his taxes and deregulated real estate and Wall Street.  When Wall Street blew up the economy with exactly the know-it-all arrogance we see Donald show, Donald and his friends make more money than ever, while his banker friends evicted you or your neighbor or your family member from your house.

She should have continued: "Donald will say, 'that's called business.'  Donald means, 'I win when you lose.'   Now he wants to take another $5 trillion away from you by depriving the government of $5 trillion more after he and his friends lost $13 trillion in family wealth.  He wants to take another $5 trillion from schools, clinics, roads, bridges, colleges, parks, police, firefighters, everything you need for a decent life, and give it to the same wealthy people who made all the money from the crash. Made money from the crash just like Donald did.   I won't allow that.  As president, we'll put the money Donald and his rich friends took from you back into your communities and the economy."

Clinton can only fight Trump noir by writing her own noir plot and making Trump the predator.  As many a Bernie voter knows, she is probably prevented from doing this by her own alliances with Wall Street and her own distance from the working class Democrat base that, starting with the Carter and ending with the Clinton presidencies,

The Clinton-Trump exchanges I mentioned all occur in the first six pages of a forty-page debate transcript.  Clinton goes on to invoke solar energy, inviting Trump to defend another of his terrible claims, which is more oil and coal because global warming is a hoax.  Trump instead turns Clinton-Obama back into the noir villain:

TRUMP: She talks about solar panels. We invested in a solar company, our country. That was a disaster. They lost plenty of money on that one. 

Now, look, I'm a great believer in all forms of energy, but we're putting a lot of people out of work. Our energy policies are a disaster. Our country is losing so much in terms of energy, in terms of paying off our debt. You can't do what you're looking to do with $20 trillion in debt. 

The Obama administration, from the time they've come in, is over 230 years' worth of debt, and he's topped it. He's doubled it in a course of almost eight years, seven-and-a-half years, to be semi- exact. 

So I will tell you this. We have to do a much better job at keeping our jobs. And we have to do a much better job at giving companies incentives to build new companies or to expand, because they're not doing it. 

And all you have to do is look at Michigan and look at Ohio and look at all of these places where so many of their jobs and their companies are just leaving, they're gone. 

And, Hillary, I'd just ask you this. You've been doing this for 30 years. Why are you just thinking about these solutions right now? For 30 years, you've been doing it, and now you're just starting to think of solutions. 

CLINTON: Well, actually... 

TRUMP: I will bring -- excuse me. I will bring back jobs. You can't bring back jobs. 

CLINTON: Well, actually, I have thought about this quite a bit. 

TRUMP: Yeah, for 30 years. 

CLINTON: And I have -- well, not quite that long. I think my husband did a pretty good job in the 1990s. I think a lot about what worked and how we can make it work again... 

TRUMP: Well, he approved NAFTA.. (CROSSTALK) 

CLINTON: ... million new jobs, a balanced budget... 

TRUMP: He approved NAFTA, which is the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.

Trump gets Clinton to defend NAFTA, which destroys her image as tough on Wall Street. She doesn't ever say what the great new ideas are that have come from 30 years of thought.  He goes on to point out that her own party's president is pushing a new trade deal that's like NAFTA, and she doesn't repudiate Obama.  She says, "there are different views about what's good for our country," which proves Trump's point that she can't be trusted to know who the enemy is or to do anything to that person.

When they get to the next segment on taxes, her big line is that she "would not add a penny to the debt." This puts her entirely in the camp of the conventional Republicans that Trump torpedoed in the primaries.  So it doesn't matter that Trump says "the wealthy are going to create tremendous jobs" when the wealthy have been doing the opposite for thirty years, because he is talking directly about overcoming an enemy--people who send American jobs abroad.  She is not.

In the final two-thirds of the debate, Trump lost focus and became defensive, so most pundits have declared her the victor. She was not. She didn't become a noir hero battling an identified evil with a direct intervention.  Trump remained one.

The same problem dogs today's New York Times revelation that Trump may not have paid income taxes for twenty years. Previous NYT reports have showed that Trump built much of his empire on political connections that generated $885 million in tax breaks in postindustrial New York, made his money on a labyrinth of debt, on bankruptcy, and on shorting investors he'd attracted while stiffing working-class contractors.   As U.S. manufacturing and its blue-collar workers declined, real estate deals and Trump's extractions soared.  So you'd think Clinton could make Trump the poster child of American decline, caused by its greedy extractive financiers.

Not so far.  In response, Trump said the Times is an arm of the Democratic party,  that they broke laws to get the tax documents, that Hillary Clinton is even more criminal than Trump is, that Trump is a supremely skilled businessman who was obliged to minimize his tax burden which is what he did. The crucial statement appeared in a Trump tweet: "I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them."

Translating the noir code: "I know the system, I used the system, I broke the system. If you want to fix the system, hire the person who was big enough to break it.  And if you don't, I will keep breaking it."

In a guilt-driven nation like ours, he who shows no guilt will be considered innocent, and receive a hero's welcome.  This is how we have gotten to Trump, the conquering hero.  Some analysts feel that Trump is such an obviously unqualified and corrupt candidate that it's a miracle that Hillary Clinton isn't 20 points ahead. I feel that Hillary Clinton is such a weak candidate on working-class and middle-class economics that Trump still can win. 

UPDATE: Trump's "bitchy sewing circle of overweight men" performed exactly this spin control about the NYT story today (h/t Meranze)--Trump the conquering tax hero.