Why the Populist Mood Is Abroad in the Land

For what might be the first time, I find myself in material agreement with Robert Reich. In his recent op-ed at The Boston Globe he writes:

Despite the recovery that began in 2009, confidence in economic institutions has fallen precipitously. In 2002, a Gallup poll found 77 percent of Americans satisfied with opportunities to get ahead by working hard, and only 22 percent were dissatisfied. By 2014, only 54 percent of Americans were satisfied and 45 percent dissatisfied.

Perhaps that’s because people have started to notice. Millions are still out of work six years after the recession ended. The jobs that have replaced the jobs that were lost pay less and, frequently, carry no benefits. All or practically all of the jobs gained can be attributed to immigrants being hired. Those aren’t things from which great satisfaction are born.

Confidence in political institutions has followed the same downward trajectory. In 1964, just 29 percent of voters believed that government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” By 2012, that opinion predominated, with 79 percent of Americans agreeing.

I wonder why that could possibly be? Could it be because trust among Congress and between Congress and the White House has eroded to the point that nothing can get done?

The erosion in public trust has been particularly steep in the past few years. In 2006, 59 percent of Americans felt that government corruption was widespread; by 2013, 79 percent of Americans felt that way. In Rasmussen polls undertaken in the fall of 2014, 63 percent thought most members of Congress were willing to sell their vote for either cash or a campaign contribution, and 59 percent thought it likely their own representative already had.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, etc. When the Senate is primarily composed of multi-millionaires, representatives are elected to Congress with barely a sou to their name and emerge after having been serially re-elected 40 years later as multi-millinoaires, people may talk. See also the Clinton Foundation which gives the impression of corruption even if corruption can not be proven to have taken place. As Dan Rostenkowski once put it, never take a bribe. Just hand ’em your business card.

Many Americans have expressed their mounting frustrations by not voting. The largest political party in America is neither the Republican party nor the Democratic party; it’s the party of nonvoters. Only 58.2 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in the 2012 presidential election.

Only the most optimistic or the most interested can possibly believe that the challengers are much better than the incumbents.

The antiestablishment backlash can be heard in populist rhetoric coming even from the Republican Party. “[We] cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people, and Wall Street,” said Republican senator Rand Paul, in seeking to position himself for a 2016 presidential run.

It probably doesn’t help that the explicit objective of the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing was to help “fat cats, rich people, and Wall Street” and that we no longer have a fiscal policy in this country only a monetary policy. Very little of that money has landed in the pockets of people who aren’t “fat cats, rich people, and Wall Street”, at least not in this country. The Forbes Index of Living Extremely Well has soared, however.

Polls show, for example, support among self-described Republicans as well as Democrats for cutting the biggest Wall Street banks down to a size where they are no longer too big to fail. In 2014, Republican Representative David Camp, House Ways and Means Committee chairman, proposed a quarterly tax on the assets of the biggest Wall Street banks in order to give them an incentive to trim down. “There is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street,” said Rand Paul.

As it worked out “bailing out Wall Street” was a bipartisan policy, supported both by the George W. Bush Administration and the succeeding Obama Administration. For an administration that had a primary strategy of doing the opposite of what Bush did, bailing out Wall Street stands out as a notable exception.

In 2013, when Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation to recreate such an act, Republican Senator John McCain cosponsored it. Tea Party Republicans expressed strong support of the measure, even criticizing establishment Republicans for not getting more fully behind it.

There is also growing bipartisan support for ending “corporate welfare,” including subsidies to big oil, big agribusiness, big pharma, Wall Street, and the Export-Import Bank. Progressives on the left have long been urging this, but by 2014 many on the right were joining in. David Camp’s proposed tax reforms would have eliminated dozens of targeted tax breaks. Ted Cruz urged that Congress “eliminate corporate welfare and crony capitalism.”

Everyone supports eliminating crony capitalism except when it’s their cronies.

Finally, grass-roots antipathy has grown toward trade agreements crafted by big corporations. In the 1990s, Republicans joined with Democrats to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement, join the World Trade Organization, and support China’s membership in the WTO.

But more recently, rank-and-file Republicans as well as Democrats turned against such agreements. “The Tea Party movement does not support the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” stated Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation. “Special interests and big corporations are being given a seat at the table,” he said, while average Americans are excluded.

Negotiating agreements in secret and forbidding the disclosure of the terms of agreements could conceivably have something to do with that. Has any administration ever kept something they thought would be popular a secret? I can’t think of any.

It is likely that in coming years the major fault line in American politics will shift from Democrat versus Republican to antiestablishment versus establishment.

In a typical campaign year suppressing your opponent’s base is a routine strategy for achieving electoral success. This cycle suppressing your own base may emerge as the new strategy.