Wayne O'Leary

Broken Clocks are Right Twice a Day

Before we bid goodbye once and for all to our 45th president (assuming he’s really checking out and not just lying low), it’s worth posing a question about Donald Trump. Simply put, did he get anything right during four years in office?

Giving the devil his due, the reluctant answer is yes — in at least two respects. Trump was right in recognizing, and running on, the flawed nature of economic globalization that two generations of political leaders of both parties had ignored. And he was right about the fundamental instability created by this country’s dysfunctional approach to mass immigration over the same time span. How he chose to address these legitimate concerns is, of course, another matter.

Trump was not the only politician to perceive that the worldwide political establishment was fatally wrong about the benefits of globalization, which recent scholarship estimates cost 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011. Nor was he the first to generate a populist response to the globalist status quo. Bernie Sanders perceived it as well, perhaps even earlier than Trump. Both men undertook to build political movements against it within America’s two major parties in 2016. The difference between them was not in recognizing the political moment, but in their analysis of the problem, the solutions they offered, and the success they did or didn’t achieve.

Whereas Sanders tried to promote a genuine program of economic reform to deal seriously with the deindustrialization of America brought about by globalization and its offshoot free trade (by taxing and regulating capital, reworking international trade pacts, and the like), Trump gave lip service to opposing corporate-led globalization, then adopted standard, pro-corporate Republican economic policies.

Trump did disrupt global trade as promised, but not as part of any rational, coherent implementation of policy. Instead of reining in the multinationals, he gave them tax cuts. Instead of devising a fairer world trading regime, he engaged in selective trade wars. Instead of educating the public about the dangers of economic rule by transnational corporations, he focused on designated enemies (China, for example) and ramped up nationalist xenophobia through a narrowly applied protectionism.

Sanders, for his part, understood that unsupervised international capitalism, not rogue nation states, was the problem, but his brand of progressive populism found no avenue to success in a Democratic Party committed to globalization, which rejected him twice as standard-bearer. Trump’s right-wing populism, however, fit isolationist rank-and-file Republicanism’s worldview perfectly. His prescriptions (to the extent he really believed in them) were all wrong, but he accurately identified the issue of the hour and rode it to victory in 2016.

The Democrats, devolving away from their working-class roots and increasingly corporate in their perspective, lost, and justifiably so. America subsequently got a needed dose of populist politics for four years, but it was a flawed, essentially phony populism. Along the way, the very concept of “populism” as a valid political philosophy was devalued and discredited.

The immigration crisis at the southern border has highlighted another way in which Donald Trump was right in identifying an issue and wrong in applying solutions. Yet, despite exploiting immigration the way he did globalization; that is, using it to generate personal political support rather than fixing the problem — in this case, by playing on nativist sentiments — Trump did draw attention to a genuine sore spot on the body politic. There is no doubt, as he claimed, that immigration to this country is out of control; it has been, furthermore, for several decades.

For reasons explained in detail in this column previously (11/1/16 and 11/15/16 TPP), immigration has been on an unsustainable upward trajectory for a half-century now. The catalysts were a series of laws enacted on a mostly bipartisan basis between 1965 and 1990 that liberalized the process, dramatically raising the ceiling on legal admissions, granting amnesty to prior illegal arrivals, and broadening migrant diversity by accepting many more applicants from the Third World. In the wake of loosened restrictions, the incoming number of undocumented also surged, most noticeably (but not exclusively) from across our southern border.

The end result has been an influx averaging roughly one million a year since the 1960s and an increase in America’s percentage of foreign-born that reached nearly 14% of the population (45 million people) in 2017, the highest share since circa 1900, when it approached 15%. By 2065, a recent Pew Research Center study suggests, immigrants and their progeny will represent over a third of the entire US population, which will then total an estimated 441 million. That’s 117 million more people than today and more than double the population of the 1960s.

Donald Trump asserted two years ago that this country was “full;” that’s an overstatement, but it’s not far wrong. Look at California. How many more newcomers America can accommodate without massive socioeconomic dislocations is a fair question, one Trump was the first national party leader to raise. Unfortunately, his responses ranged from stupid (the Mexican border wall) to cruel (incarceration of children and separation of families), accomplishing only the purpose of providing him an issue to demagogue.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been in denial about the scale of the ongoing migrant crisis and captive to the liberal humanitarian impulse that says America must always welcome all the world’s tired and poor huddled masses. This is especially true as regards the present emergency, since unaccompanied children are involved. Indeed, progressive politicians, reacting in counterpoint to Trump, have called for decriminalizing unauthorized entries and raising the numerical limit on resettled refugees several times over. There’s little doubt “open borders” is a value that, if only subliminally, informs liberal immigration policy in parts of the Democratic left.

There are also less noble arguments Democrats advance for expanded immigration. First, business interests want it (immigrants, white- or blue-collar, work cheaper), and the Democratic establishment is now residing uneasily in the pro-corporate camp. Second, immigration will presumably redound to the party’s long-term political advantage through changing demographic patterns (i.e. the immigrant population, being mostly nonwhite and relatively impoverished, will vote Democratic). This assumption is exaggerated; ethnic groups grow more conservative as they prosper in America. In 1960, 80% of Irish-Americans voted for JFK; today, 50% are Republican.

In the end, Donald Trump proved the broken-clock adage correct. He identified two intractable dilemmas, globalization and immigration. Now, Democrats will somehow have to solve them.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2021

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