Commentary
The social compact has been replaced with hate
Without a new social compact, Robert Reich argued, politicians would soon reap “the bitter harvest of popular rage.” And then, one Tuesday night, we found ourselves facing the nightmare Robert Reich had predicted.
On Nov. 5, to escape the trickle of the presidential election results, I watched the recording of an older speech by a colleague of mine, economist Robert Reich. It was 1994, and Reich, then Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration, said he was concerned about the end of the American dream. The forces of technology and globalization, Reich said, are putting pressure on the middle class, creating a society divided between a few winners and a mass of the left behind.
The result, he said, was anger, disillusionment, and “social resentment that could poison our society.” And which, moreover, can be “easily manipulated.” Without a new social compact, Reich concluded, politicians would soon reap “the bitter harvest of popular rage.”
In the 30 years since that speech, we have witnessed the failure of the attempt to renew the compact between workers, entrepreneurs and politicians, starting with the Clinton administration itself. Instead of the new American dream advocated by Reich and a broadening of the middle class to include other social groups, we have witnessed the growth of inequality, amplified by powerful and all-pervasive technologies.
Politics has proved incapable of managing this change, acquiescing to the devaluation and precarization of labor, the degradation of workers' living conditions, short-term profits and the creation of monopolies. The two key points here are the failure to regulate Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and the bailout of Wall Street – with no accountability – after the 2008 crisis. Both took place under Democratic administrations. And then, one Tuesday night, we found ourselves facing the nightmare Robert Reich had predicted.
But Trump's second term cannot be explained only in economic terms: politics also thrives on symbols, on horizons of meaning. Many working-class men who had voted for Obama and Biden now went for Trump. They clearly found something compelling in what Trump had to offer.
This by no means implies that they believed all of his promises: some polls have shown that a significant portion of Trump's own voters found him lacking in credibility. But they certainly saw him as radical, an alternative, the one who would destroy a system from which they felt excluded. And then, beyond the unlikely economic promises, there is something very important that Trump can offer his base: an identity and a sense of belonging.
The red MAGA hat is the gateway to a reactionary utopia. It promises a community based on traditional values, including teenage-level machismo and a hierarchical, racialized social order. The bargain of the American dream was based on the exchange of labor for socioeconomic security, and its key driving sentiment was the ambition to belong to the middle class: a house, a car, being able to send one’s kids to college. In a society that is now structurally unequal, that dream has vanished and the key sentiment can only be hatred: toward those who are different, towards new immigrants, towards women.
The MAGA imaginary is strongly misogynistic: according to it, a woman does not have the intellectual abilities and character to take up leadership positions, and a woman of color even less so – as was clearly seen in this election. It’s enough to review the vulgar insults hurled by Trump, Musk, and Vance at Harris, and more generally at all women who don’t embody a stereotype of subordination.
And then, there is their vision of the eternal 1980s, which viewed from a MAGA perspective strongly recall the murderous yuppyism of American Psycho, but without Brett Easton Ellis’s irony. An aging Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt on stage next to Trump and the fake gold of Trump Tower are perfect symbols for a movement that thrives on nostalgia for a world that was right in the process of falling apart. The wrestling connection is by no means a superficial: at Trump rallies, as in wrestling, everyone knows it’s all fake. But that’s not the point: the point is standing together around the ring and shouting at the top of one's lungs in support of the hero fighting against the forces of evil.
And what did the Democrats put forward to counter this worldview and these rituals? What alternative vision? What idea of community? The widespread perception, I’m afraid, was that they simply wanted to defend the status quo.
David Graeber rightly pointed out that, since the 1990s, the moderate centrism that has dominated the Western left has been essentially promising business as usual, but with a little more bureaucracy. That’s not exactly an electrifying vision. It’s here, perhaps, that they can make a new start.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/ideologia-maga-il-patto-sociale-e-stato-rimpiazzato-dallodio on 2024-11-10