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CHAPTER 1

Economic Anxiety

Towards the end of the decade that followed the global financial crash, parties, campaigns, and political formations associated with the radical right achieved shocking victories across Europe and the United States. In textbook "populist" style, these groups have represented themselves as speaking for a politics that "the people" – the good and sensible silent majority – has always wanted and believed in, but has been denied by a vapid liberal elite. Since then, commentators branding themselves as anthropologists of the "white working class" have fallen over each other to explain the motivations of those who have voted for populism. (There has been much less curiosity, incidentally, about why moderate and liberal voters were so insufficiently inspired by their spokespeople to turn out in adequate numbers to counter the so-called populists ...) Two competing explanations for the right-wing victories dominate. The first is that voters who respond to the populist right do so as a result of the "economic anxiety" of life under globalization. While the liberalization of the world economy since the 1970s has brought net wealth to many western countries, it has also had many deleterious effects: upturning traditional communities and ways of life, depressing wages and imposing inequalities unknown in the twentieth century, as well as expelling whole demographic groups from dependable employment and meaningful political representation (and that's before we get on to its vampire-like treatment of the global south ...) Yet the value of critiques that attribute support for the radical right to economic insecurity seem to be forestalled when we note that being personally "economically insecure" is not a reliable predictor of voting for anti-establishment parties. As Matthijs Rooduijn concludes in an ambitious international study, "there is no consistent proof that the voter bases of populist parties consist of individuals who are more likely to be unemployed, have lower incomes, come from lower classes, or hold a lower education." Frank Mols and Jolanda Jetten have shown that wealthy people often adopt right-wing populist attitudes, even in times of relative economic security. And, more anecdotally, Joe Kennedy has remarked that the farmers of the Vale of York or South Norfolk, "wealthy by any sensible count – land-rich, medium-size employers who often get away with paying the minimum wage, or less," have as much claim to being the archetypal Brexiteers as the proletarians of the media's fixation.

As such, a growing group of scholars have moved away from economic arguments to focus on "values." Eric Kaufmann believes that the Leave/Remain, Trump/Clinton divide is best understood not through the lens of class, but via "the difference between those who prefer order and those who seek novelty": a division reflected in any number of recent "post-liberal" defences of socially conservative "somewheres" against freewheeling liberal "anywheres." Specifically, Kaufmann writes, immigration "is unsettling that portion of the white electorate that prefers cultural order over change." Endorsing this frame, Matthew Goodwin dismisses the idea of trying to persuade anti-immigration voters of the economic dangers their positions may entail (much less of hoping racism can be countered with left-wing redistributive policies). For Goodwin, because anti-immigration attitudes run deeper than political argument, the idea that states might "fudge immigration reform and that these voters will return to the mainstream fold seems unlikely."

The problem with this "values" approach is that it confers a dignity of permanence (and a misty-eyed aura of special sincerity) onto such views, that isn't really backed up by reality. The fact that many geographical areas where people are most hostile to immigrants have fewest of them raises the question of whether the "values" of these people are really so beyond question or argument. Or what of the British Social Attitudes survey showing that, since the referendum, British voters have the most positive attitudes towards immigration – both culturally and economically – that they have held since 2011? There are many possible reasons for this change: satisfaction at reducing immigration figures, a feeling that with Brexit forthcoming immigration is no longer an imposition outside democratic consent, or even the impact of a Labour leadership that has broadly refused to play with the xenophobic fire of its predecessors. But none of these reasons suggest a permanent rooting of anti-immigrant feeling in the immoveable identities of individual voters.

During the "long 2016," many among Kaufmann's group of "those who prefer order" have pursued it precisely by "seeking novelty," whether in voting to accommodate a Donald Trump, or even – as did 16% of former UK Independence Party voters in 2017 – a Jeremy Corbyn. "Values" seems an oddly ossifying term to apply to a time when electorates seem mainly notable for their ability to change their minds. At its worst, the "values" approach risks becoming a kind of political phrenology – explaining political behavior not in the complexity of our social lives, but in individual, quasi-racialized, pathology – as with one scholarly paper which concludes that voting for populists is rooted in "low Agreeableness" (one of the "Big 5 personality traits" psychologists have claimed we are all reducible to).

Another crucial problem for the "values" approach is that everything these new populist formations offer – and, with the exception of the German AfD, virtually all organizations that made advances under populism's banner around 2016 – was available to electorates well before the financial crash. If the new populists are succeeding not just because of the economic struggles of their voters, but because they resonate with the permanently held principles – even the neurological make ups! – of their electorates, why are these formations only being taken up on their offer now? As Rolling Stone put it in 2016, Trump won the Republican primary because "white conservatives in places like Indiana hate sneering, atheistic, know-it-all types from cosmopolitan cities. But they hated all those people eight years ago, sixteen years ago, thirty years ago. What's new about the Year of Trump?"

Once Upon a Time in the West

"What's new" is populism's position as one of three interacting and mutually confirming "vectors" that have given the 2010s their form. The other two are the fallout of the economic decisions made in the west in the wake of the crash of 2008, and developments in digital capitalism occurring at the same time. My generalization about the economy is this: versions of "austerity" – huge cuts to public expenditure – adopted across the west after the crash greased the way to populism not simply by making prospective voters poorer and therefore more amenable to it, but by depleting the stake people had in the economy "as such." Victories for Remain in Britain's EU referendum and for Hillary Clinton seemed inevitable right up to polling: first, because established electoral wisdom said that people will always vote for whatever they think is in the interests of the economy at large, and second, because Leave and Trump were being treated by all experts as dangerous economic prospects. What had quietly diminished since this electoral wisdom was established, however, was the extent to which electorates saw themselves and their own interests reflected in the fate of this abstract idea of "the economy."

In other words, in contrast to the populism scholars discussed above, I do believe in economic anxiety! Only not in the sense in which the term "anxiety" is generally used. For the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, anxiety was not so much a contingent disorder that a given patient may or may not suffer from. Rather, Lacan saw it as a generalizable condition deriving from the sneaking suspicion all of us are prone to, that our reality may have come "unmoored" from the great signifiers we think give it meaning – God, national identity, family etc. – and that things may instead at this stage just be "going with the drift." In Lacan's view, we might well feel like that, since our relation to those signifiers is always – by definition even – hesitant and incomplete. This is to say that we are undertaking a time of collective economic anxiety in the Lacanian sense, not merely because many of us are personally anxious about our finances, but more structurally. With the acceleration of perverse outcomes and beguilement of cause and effect in the economies of the west since the crash, we are anxiously left wondering if "the economy" – as a signifier – even exists at all.

Take Britain. During the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition of 2010-15, numerous conspicuously negative economic phenomena were nonetheless reported as if they reflected economic success – and full employment – within the Treasury's official metrics: shrinking real-terms pay, incomes diminished further by the transfer of expenses from the state to the individual through cuts to the public sector, a housing shortage affecting the young and poor disproportionately, a flimsy and geographically patchy recovery, and an increasingly casualized job market and rise of "in work poverty." People might have voted for austerity in the general election of 2015 and might have told polling companies that they found the arguments for it convincing. But that didn't stop the effects of it from quietly eroding the stake they had in the economic status quo. There was what Jack Halberstam might call a "toxic positivity" in David Cameron and George Osborne's claim to have facilitated a "jobs miracle." It quietly severed the sureness of the connection between how the economy was being represented officially and the decaying public sphere people saw around them. Meanwhile, government and media willingness to point the blame for economic difficulties at foreigners, minorities, and welfare claimants was stoking sadistic libidinal energies that were just waiting to take their opportunity.

Ordinarily, the electoral rulebook said, arguments for economic stability would – in the end – win out over xenophobia and other wild (but ultimately secondary) emotional sallies. As some of the strategists at the top of the Remain campaign remarked: "These people are vociferous in their dislike of the EU, but what will sway them is if their pocket is likely to be hit" (Andrew Cooper); "They aren't going to be won over by telling them how wonderful the EU is – they want to know the cold, hard economic facts. Will it hit them in the pocket or not?" (Jim Messina); "We know that there has been no election in the last hundred years where people have voted against their direct financial interest" (Craig Oliver). But these rules only applied for as long as economic success was something people authentically identified with, for as long as it was felt that it was "their pocket" that was really in question. With those ties of identification loosened, it became increasingly possible to think, why not?

Have a Good Crisis!

After the housing bubble collapse of 2007 and the chain reaction of defaults it set off in international banking and finance, states stabilized the system by bailing out failed banks, adding the cost to their own existing national debts. In the Eurozone, such rapidly increased levels of state debt threw some economies into terrifying insecurity, or exposed longstanding cultures of predatory lending by banks from richer Eurozone countries on a scale impossible to pay back. Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (the "PIIGS"), each turned to the troika of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank for emergency loans, which came at the price of surrendering their own economic planning for identikit programs of privatization and public spending cuts imposed from outside. In Britain meanwhile, a confected idea that such insecurity was just around the corner provided a pretext to accelerate what had been euphemistically called the "modernizing" agenda of the past two decades: taking as much infrastructure of the state as possible off the public books, and encouraging a cabal of private providers to compete for lucrative contracts to run it instead.

The carve up came with what the sociologist Saskia Sassen called "the implicit promise that if we could reduce these excesses we would get back to normal, back to the easier days of the postwar era." The deal was that citizens would sustain a limited period of hardship, allowing governments to reduce their deficits and pay down these huge new debts, before getting back to a more generous society that would this time live within its means. The problem, Sassen continues, is that "too many corporate economic actors do not want it back. They want a world in which governments spend far less on social services or on the needs of neighbourhood economies or small firms, and much more on the deregulations and infrastructures that corporate economic sectors want." In the Eurozone, France and Germany could, in a performance of solidarity, approve new loans to Greece, knowing full well that most of the money would immediately wash back to their own private bankers in loan repayments, reinvigorating their own disgraced finance sectors through the back door. When, under the guise of deficit reduction, the debtor nations were then forced to sell off parts of their public sector, who was there to gobble it up but the private companies of their creditors?

As the economist and former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis remarked, Europe's destructive obsession with driving down deficits at any cost was frowned upon in the US by the new Obama administration, because it threatened to contract the American economy in turn. "Washington has every right to be furious," he wrote, when "despite the mountains of money that the Fed has printed to stimulate the domestic economy, US-based corporations refuse to invest sufficiently in quality jobs and productive machinery, fearing another chill wind from Europe." In fact, Obama had his own "austerity" problem, because of the pathological obsession of the American right with state debt which prevented any adequate financial stimulus being agreed. In this humpty-dumpty world, George W. Bush's saving of American capitalism via bank bailouts and the "Troubled Asset Relief Plan" was a grievous act of socialism (never mind the deficit already created by Bush's tax cuts and wars), and Republicans were keen that under Obama there wasn't to be another crack at the whip. Justified public disgust at the leniency with which finance had been treated after bringing the world economy to its knees became, grotesquely, the justification for demanding cuts to public spending, and for blocking or neutering the progressive measures (such as healthcare) Obama had been voted in to effect. Meanwhile anti-tax think tanks, "paleo-libertarian" economists, right-wing news networks, and grassroots Tea Party activists, were coalescing around a narrative that redistributive "big government" had caused the crisis and was certainly helpless to resolve it.

Obama never convincingly overcame this narrative, but reading accounts of his presidency, it becomes tricky to see where the will to overcome it could possibly have come from. The Democratic establishment's embarrassing obsession with bipartisanship – for reaching consensus with Wall Street, with Health Insurers, with the Republicans, instead of putting them in their place while the mandate was there – was one thing. But more damning was the way the idea of "meritocracy" in the Obama milieu swung both ways. Merit elevated brilliant Ivy Leaguers to the upper reaches of government (in contrast to the incompetent cronies of Obama's predecessor). But it also cast doubts about whether economic inequality was really any of Government's business. Maybe those at the bottom of society got down there on their own merits too. So, the Clintonite economist, Larry Summers, as he ascended to the directorship of Obama's National Economic Council:

One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way they're supposed to be treated.

Obama left office after two terms during which 90% of income growth went to the top 1%. Not that one would infer this from the socially right-on, feel-good atmosphere that surrounded Obama himself for the duration. That a black man was president mattered. A lot. But the terrible fact is that Obama's brilliant deployment of his uniquely inspirational backstory may – paradoxically – have been part of the problem, vindicating the myths America tells itself at the very moment that it should have been taking a hard look at them. Second chances for the architects of the Iraq war and financial crisis contrasted with sadistic punishments dealt out to whistle-blowers who exposed the state's crimes, and indifference for those who had lost their homes to rancid phony mortgages. After a presidency troubled by constant populist disquiet from both right and left, overseeing the tin-eared coronation of Hillary Clinton, the human embodiment of establishment hypocrisy, as a successor candidate was the final act of a president whose irresistible personal affability was a great inoculator. Obama glided out of office with an impossible 60% personal approval rating, while his party, his signature policies, and much of civic society itself stood discredited.

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Excerpted from "Other People's Politics"
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Copyright © 2018 J.A. Smith.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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