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| Peter Evans |
Trump’s minions have already made it clear that organised labour will be among their immediate targets. Public sector workers, who are the main pillar of organised labour’s strength, will be attacked early. Turning the National Labor Relations Board into a thoroughly anti-labour organisation will make union certification, via officially sanctioned elections, close to impossible. Another obvious agenda item is a national ‘right to work’ law which will remove the requirement that workers represented by a union pay membership dues. I will not try to exhaust the list of likely attacks here, although projecting the disastrous details of Trump’s regime will be a crucial part of figuring out how to mount some kind of defense.
Trying to think about how it might be possible to change the political landscape is a different sort of task. It requires a careful debate on the structural circumstances that produced so many Trump voters. Theories of ‘The Trump Voter’ abound, and sorting them out will require a careful analysis of exit polls that has yet to be done. But two preliminary themes have already emerged.
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| Thomas Greven |
Donald Trump clearly lost the popular vote and will only inhabit the White House because of the anachronistic and undemocratic institution of the Electoral College, once specifically designed to foil populists like him. Contrary to claims that he somehow ‘hijacked’ the Republican Party, I argue that he simply used the traditional Republican playbook to the extreme - dividing the population along racial, ethnic, and religious lines as well as exploiting anti-elite sentiment – to sell economic and social policies that will hurt the majority of Americans. This got him support from right-wing extremists in the Alt-Right movement as well as the white working class – Americans without a college education – and surprisingly also from white working class women, given that he tried very hard to offend all women. This latter group of voters, previously either non-voting or marginally part of the Democratic coalition, was the key group for Trump’s success in the old industrial heartlands now called the rust-belt states. It is necessary to ask why this group supported him.
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| Trevor Evans |
The 1980s finance-led phase of capitalism has been characterised by marked cycles led by the US economy, with periods of expansion leading to increasingly serious recessions in 1990/91, 2001/02 and of course 2007/09. The most recent expansion, now in its seventh year, has been especially weak, and the latest forecasts anticipate that growth will remain low (IMF 2016; OECD 2016; UNCTAD 2016). This is led by the world’s three largest economies – the US, the euro area, and China – which together account for more than half the world’s output.
United States
The US’s most recent expansion began in 2009, boosted by Obama’s US$ 787 billion expansionary programme, but it was not until 2012 that output returned to its pre-crisis peak, and growth has remained uncharacteristically weak.[1]
The expansion raised profitability. The share of profits in national income is strongly cyclical, and the peak has risen in every expansion since the 1980s, reaching a high of 14.5% of GDP in 2012. But the rise in fixed investment, which is also strongly cyclical, has weakened. Firms have made record distributions to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, which incur lower taxes. Non-financial corporations have also become significant financial investors since the 1990s, with the value of their holdings rising from 4% to 9% of GDP. They have continued to borrow despite relatively weak fixed investment. Their indebtedness relative to GDP, which declined in the aftermath of the crisis, is once again as high as in 2008.
