Thomas Frank wrote "That we are a nation divided is an almost universal lament of this bitter election year," then went on to observe that "we," by which he meant the commentariat, "know for sure the answer isn't class" and "rule that uncomfortable subject out from the start," instead certain that the matter must be culture, culture, not class, with the "red state-blue state" divide the favorite suspect and constant point of reference.
Frank wrote all this two decades ago, but it is still the song sung by the centrist "Establishment" commentator today, a reminder of how after the events of the last twenty years (a historic financial crash, the metastasizing of the country's wars, pandemic, the resurgence of great power confrontation, the profound deepening of the ecological crisis, the ascent of the far right) their conventional wisdom has not changed one iota, to their absolute discredit. Indeed, one can argue that their extreme refusal to countenance any "uncomfortable" ideas that call into question their complacent idiocies played its part in making the past two decades of American and world history the train wreck they have been.
Still, if their ideas about this matter did not change--if we still hear ceaselessly of "division," and "culture, not class," and "red states and blue states"--there is at least one thing that I can say seems to me different from how things stood in 2004. This is that Thomas Frank wrote that comment in an article for the New York Times--a newspaper far less likely to give Frank or anyone like him a platform these days as it boosts ever more openly far right commentators, all as Mr. Frank seems to be regarded as ever less admissible by the gatekeepers of Big Media broadly pushing the same line, as you are reminded should you look at its content.* Doing that these days you are far, far more likely to read about a soccer coach who just so happens to have the same name as Frank--while it seems telling that Frank's most conspicuous appearance in the print media in years would seem to be an interview not with any outfit comparable to the Times (or even The Guardian or Harper's, for which he used to write), but with Jacobin back in February.
* In the wake of Trump's victory at the polls (which came after I wrote this post) the Times deigned to publish Frank once more. You may read the item here.
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
The Stories Elites Tell Themselves About the World
A New York Times story about the response of then-President of the United States Barack Obama himself in the wake of Donald Trump's victory at the polls in 2016 reported that Obama "had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and . . . promoted an empty cosmopolitanism that made many people feel left behind," and wondered aloud among his aides that "'Maybe we pushed too far . . . Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.'"
Whether it was an accurate account of President Obama's reaction or not it would seem telling that at least in the story he thought the vote was about "people . . . want[ing] to fall back into their tribe," and that this was what the Times reported--reflexively seeing the note of revolt in so many persons voting for Trump as a matter of cultural discontent rather than of economic discontent, with the issue "liberal" cosmopolitanism rather than the neoliberal economics promoted by "liberal" and "conservative" alike for four decades. Never popular and increasingly bankrupt, that neoliberalism, which eviscerated the industrial base, gutted public services and protective regulations, left Americans' incomes in freefall relative to the cost of living, and, as Arthur Schlesinger put it when writing of the monetary policy of Andrew Jackson's day that all too closely paralleled that of the neoliberal era, generally left them "the victims of baffling and malevolent economic forces which they could not profit by," was plausibly what really made much of the American public "feel left behind."
That Obama himself--Obama, who after promising the public he would stand against those "baffling and malevolent economic forces" on the campaign trail behaved as a staunch neoliberal in office, be the issue the financial crisis and its fallout, the reform of health care, energy-climate policy, or anything else--might in spite of his conduct of the immediately preceding eight years have in an unguarded moment actually shown himself to have been thinking this speaks to the depth of the preference of the elite Obama derived from and represents for regarding politics as a matter of cultural divisions than of class divisions, or "values" rather than "interests."
Thus does the American punditry prefer to speak of the "culture war" pitting religiosity against secularism, see the country as torn between states which are "Blue" or "Red," or even claim to "discover" that America is really nine or eleven or some other number of "nations" whose differences of culture are the key to understanding the country's political life--and amid it all see opposition to "globalization" less as a matter of reaction by those injured or made insecure by it against its economic inequities than a System that in the age of robotized factories producing Lexus luxury automobiles, some want to "hold on to their olive trees" (as Thomas Friedman wrote, and as Obama's statement suggested in its less imagistic way).
All this is underlined by how they do speak of "class" on those occasions when they dare to do so at all, preferring to treat this, too, as a cultural matter, stress "education" and consumption choices over property, income, wealth (such that for many, as Thomas Frank put it, "the word 'elite' refers . . . to someone who likes books"); bind up class with regionalism, as in discussion of "coastal" or "big-city" elites as against the presumed non-elite of the interior, rural areas and so forth, or with race as in rhetoric about the "White working class" (as if working people were not the great majority in every ethnic group); and speak of "classism" as if it were analogous to prejudices of ethnicity or gender ("racism," "sexism," etc.) rather than class being a matter of the fundamental structure of society itself, with all that means for understanding anything about society at all.
The result is about what you would expect, the Establishment "expert" centrists so fawn over apt to understand little or nothing about these matters, and after opening their unsightly yaps leave the minds of those who heed them even more muddled than they were before, such that it would have been better had they never said anything at all.
That Obama himself--Obama, who after promising the public he would stand against those "baffling and malevolent economic forces" on the campaign trail behaved as a staunch neoliberal in office, be the issue the financial crisis and its fallout, the reform of health care, energy-climate policy, or anything else--might in spite of his conduct of the immediately preceding eight years have in an unguarded moment actually shown himself to have been thinking this speaks to the depth of the preference of the elite Obama derived from and represents for regarding politics as a matter of cultural divisions than of class divisions, or "values" rather than "interests."
Thus does the American punditry prefer to speak of the "culture war" pitting religiosity against secularism, see the country as torn between states which are "Blue" or "Red," or even claim to "discover" that America is really nine or eleven or some other number of "nations" whose differences of culture are the key to understanding the country's political life--and amid it all see opposition to "globalization" less as a matter of reaction by those injured or made insecure by it against its economic inequities than a System that in the age of robotized factories producing Lexus luxury automobiles, some want to "hold on to their olive trees" (as Thomas Friedman wrote, and as Obama's statement suggested in its less imagistic way).
All this is underlined by how they do speak of "class" on those occasions when they dare to do so at all, preferring to treat this, too, as a cultural matter, stress "education" and consumption choices over property, income, wealth (such that for many, as Thomas Frank put it, "the word 'elite' refers . . . to someone who likes books"); bind up class with regionalism, as in discussion of "coastal" or "big-city" elites as against the presumed non-elite of the interior, rural areas and so forth, or with race as in rhetoric about the "White working class" (as if working people were not the great majority in every ethnic group); and speak of "classism" as if it were analogous to prejudices of ethnicity or gender ("racism," "sexism," etc.) rather than class being a matter of the fundamental structure of society itself, with all that means for understanding anything about society at all.
The result is about what you would expect, the Establishment "expert" centrists so fawn over apt to understand little or nothing about these matters, and after opening their unsightly yaps leave the minds of those who heed them even more muddled than they were before, such that it would have been better had they never said anything at all.
Europe's Failures: A Few Thoughts
In the 2020s the prospects of the European Union (EU) seem a long way from what its advocates and sympathizers and even its opponents thought it was a generation ago (when, for example, the anti-EU crowd in Britain hated the entity, but thought anything like Brexit just a fantasy, however much they longed for it). The change arguably comes down to three ways in which the EU's foundations proved wholly inadequate for the ambitions held for it, namely
1. The building up of the institution on the basis of short-term elite interest, and even that rather unevenly, the elites of the more powerful countries advantaged against those from poorer countries. Thus the EU produced a trade, fiscal and currency regime which gave German exporters access to the vast European market, the benefit of the cheaper labor just over their border in Eastern Europe, and the help of (in relation to their products) an undervalued currency that made for that much more competitiveness in the global market, producing Germany the export giant, and indeed the way a "greater Germany" in the economic sense has come to be the core of the Union. Other members of the Union, however, have not done nearly so well, Germany's gain often their loss (Germany is a champion exporter in part because it outcompetes them, while Germany does that in part because the German government has sacrificed the social rights of the German worker on the altar of "competitiveness" in the Hartz reforms and other policy changes, and with them their share in any gains, as the rising inequality in the country testifies. Meanwhile, looking even beyond the distribution of immediate costs and benefits, what about when just keeping the arrangement some found so congenial going required more than what German industrialists have found congenial in the short term? The European Union was not prepared for that.
2. The practical limits to Europe's expansion in the resulting conditions. Especially in light of that stress on short-term elite interests, with some elites more elite than others, one could expect expansion to stop where really big, deep, long-term thinking was required to make it happen—with one result the failure to incorporate the great bulk of the old "East bloc" and especially the former Soviet Union, with only Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (6 million people altogether) in the EU, and Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and especially Russia (almost 200 million people) outside it. The result is that in spite of the fall of the Iron Curtain and three decades of existence what is called the "European Union" actually encompasses a mere two-fifths of the territory of the European continent, containing a mere three-fifths of that continent's people, with little prospect of its being extended any time soon.
3. The economic situation of Europe along with the rest of the world in an era of profound global downturn, with which European elites were ill-equipped to deal. It can seem symbolic that the European Economic Community's first round of expansion came in 1973, the year widely associated with the end of the post-war boom, and the epoch of weaker growth that followed; that the European Community became the European Union in 1993, amid a deep global recession; that, barring the entry of Croatia, the EU reached its limits with the inductions of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, the year in which a long-developing financial crisis came to a head and plunged the world into a recession from which it never truly recovered, such that it can seem as if Japan's "lost decades" became the norm for the industrialized world, with all that meant for Europe's own prospects.
One may question whether in anything like the world we live in the European Union could have developed in any other way. The relevant negotiations were between countries very different in development and interests, very unequal in size and power, and just as unequal internally with all that meant for the line they took. Reflecting this economic integration ranked at the top of the list of priorities of the elites of the participating countries, rather than democracy, equality or social concern, with many not at all sorry to see economic decisions about such fundamental matters as government spending or monetary policy made by bodies less accountable to their electorates, and imposing limits on what national governments could do--while as they went about it they proved no more "enlightened" in their understanding of their self-interest than their counterparts elsewhere (the delusions of their silly admirers just that). Subsequently, whether one attributes the fact to the weakness of those countries' economies under their pre-1989 regimes, or the chaotic and destructive character of the reform process their leaders undertook afterward, Eastern Europe was in a far weaker state than many of those who had hoped for really continent-wide union had thought it would be in the 1990s, with all that meant for their integration into Europe, and what they would add to it if they were integrated. (There was, too, the sheer size and potential power of the Russian Federation even when taken as a single state, and as those familiar at all with geopolitics know full well, the implications of a Russo-German combination in any form for those anxious about the balance of power in the world.) Meanwhile the period generally saw slow growth, and frequent crisis, which Europe's neoliberalism-minded elite met with, again, orthodoxy, most notoriously in the post-Great Recession sovereign debt crisis. (Indeed, if Europe has done less poorly in relative terms than the sneering of committed Europe-bashers about "Eurosclerosis" implies it has still quite sufficed to pose no end of troubles from the standpoint of profits, employment, taxes, budgets and debt--all as Europe has abided by the neoliberal trend rather than trying to "buck" it, arguably to its disadvantage, both where its economic performance and its political attractiveness have been concerned.)
All of this meant that the EU was institutionally underdeveloped--as in its having a currency union without also having a "transfer union," with all the inherent instability of such a combination. It meant that Europe had a far narrower base of power, quantitatively and qualitatively (compare the EU that exists now with one that had managed to integrate the European members of the former Soviet Union, with their 200 million people, their natural resource wealth, and in particular Russia's technological specialties and military capacities), while rather than its tensions being dissolved, or sublimated, within a Europe concerned with getting on rather than nationalistic feuds and power politics, the EU's eastern frontier was that much more a scene of potential conflict (with far and away the most dramatic instance the conflicts that now have Russia and Ukraine fighting the biggest conventional war on European soil since 1945). It meant that if German business did well, at least for a time, deindustrialized, on the whole West European states got poorer and the East European states which had been allowed into the club saw their aspirations to solidly First World productivity and living standards disappointed amid shock that tested the institution's viability, and proved as unflattering to its independence as it had been unflattering toward the independence of its members (the U.S. Federal Reserve bailing out the EU's banks with $10 trillion in loans amid the Great Recession). And especially with Europe identified with elite interests and policies which hurt working people, and ruled out those policies that might help them (for instance, a freer hand in the fiscal arena), that the European project failed to acquire a popular base--all as those looking to play what is often euphemistically called the "populist" card very easily pointed to Europe as the cause of their discontents, and won election after election by it in circumstances promising little but the continuation of the EU's stagnation and slow unraveling that has characterized its recent history. In fairness, ruptures like what we saw with Britain seem unlikely to recur any time soon. (Britain's long aloofness from the continent and physical insularity, and the way its size, financialization and apparent other options for association seemed to give it alternatives, are not shared by any other EU member, all as even then it has been a close-run, rancorous, widely regretted thing, unlikely to encourage imitation.) Still, it is highly plausible that the situation will still prevent further expansion and consolidation, while complicating any attempts at national or EU-wide solutions to the continent's larger and more pressing problems--all as my guess is that in spite of visions of a peace-and-prosperity-minded EU coming together for the sake of security in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the fact that the conflict has been hugely unpopular with many of the EU's various publics, and produced significant divergences in policy between its member governments, will only add to Europe's difficulties in forming a "more perfect union," not facilitate its surmounting them.
1. The building up of the institution on the basis of short-term elite interest, and even that rather unevenly, the elites of the more powerful countries advantaged against those from poorer countries. Thus the EU produced a trade, fiscal and currency regime which gave German exporters access to the vast European market, the benefit of the cheaper labor just over their border in Eastern Europe, and the help of (in relation to their products) an undervalued currency that made for that much more competitiveness in the global market, producing Germany the export giant, and indeed the way a "greater Germany" in the economic sense has come to be the core of the Union. Other members of the Union, however, have not done nearly so well, Germany's gain often their loss (Germany is a champion exporter in part because it outcompetes them, while Germany does that in part because the German government has sacrificed the social rights of the German worker on the altar of "competitiveness" in the Hartz reforms and other policy changes, and with them their share in any gains, as the rising inequality in the country testifies. Meanwhile, looking even beyond the distribution of immediate costs and benefits, what about when just keeping the arrangement some found so congenial going required more than what German industrialists have found congenial in the short term? The European Union was not prepared for that.
2. The practical limits to Europe's expansion in the resulting conditions. Especially in light of that stress on short-term elite interests, with some elites more elite than others, one could expect expansion to stop where really big, deep, long-term thinking was required to make it happen—with one result the failure to incorporate the great bulk of the old "East bloc" and especially the former Soviet Union, with only Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (6 million people altogether) in the EU, and Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and especially Russia (almost 200 million people) outside it. The result is that in spite of the fall of the Iron Curtain and three decades of existence what is called the "European Union" actually encompasses a mere two-fifths of the territory of the European continent, containing a mere three-fifths of that continent's people, with little prospect of its being extended any time soon.
3. The economic situation of Europe along with the rest of the world in an era of profound global downturn, with which European elites were ill-equipped to deal. It can seem symbolic that the European Economic Community's first round of expansion came in 1973, the year widely associated with the end of the post-war boom, and the epoch of weaker growth that followed; that the European Community became the European Union in 1993, amid a deep global recession; that, barring the entry of Croatia, the EU reached its limits with the inductions of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, the year in which a long-developing financial crisis came to a head and plunged the world into a recession from which it never truly recovered, such that it can seem as if Japan's "lost decades" became the norm for the industrialized world, with all that meant for Europe's own prospects.
One may question whether in anything like the world we live in the European Union could have developed in any other way. The relevant negotiations were between countries very different in development and interests, very unequal in size and power, and just as unequal internally with all that meant for the line they took. Reflecting this economic integration ranked at the top of the list of priorities of the elites of the participating countries, rather than democracy, equality or social concern, with many not at all sorry to see economic decisions about such fundamental matters as government spending or monetary policy made by bodies less accountable to their electorates, and imposing limits on what national governments could do--while as they went about it they proved no more "enlightened" in their understanding of their self-interest than their counterparts elsewhere (the delusions of their silly admirers just that). Subsequently, whether one attributes the fact to the weakness of those countries' economies under their pre-1989 regimes, or the chaotic and destructive character of the reform process their leaders undertook afterward, Eastern Europe was in a far weaker state than many of those who had hoped for really continent-wide union had thought it would be in the 1990s, with all that meant for their integration into Europe, and what they would add to it if they were integrated. (There was, too, the sheer size and potential power of the Russian Federation even when taken as a single state, and as those familiar at all with geopolitics know full well, the implications of a Russo-German combination in any form for those anxious about the balance of power in the world.) Meanwhile the period generally saw slow growth, and frequent crisis, which Europe's neoliberalism-minded elite met with, again, orthodoxy, most notoriously in the post-Great Recession sovereign debt crisis. (Indeed, if Europe has done less poorly in relative terms than the sneering of committed Europe-bashers about "Eurosclerosis" implies it has still quite sufficed to pose no end of troubles from the standpoint of profits, employment, taxes, budgets and debt--all as Europe has abided by the neoliberal trend rather than trying to "buck" it, arguably to its disadvantage, both where its economic performance and its political attractiveness have been concerned.)
All of this meant that the EU was institutionally underdeveloped--as in its having a currency union without also having a "transfer union," with all the inherent instability of such a combination. It meant that Europe had a far narrower base of power, quantitatively and qualitatively (compare the EU that exists now with one that had managed to integrate the European members of the former Soviet Union, with their 200 million people, their natural resource wealth, and in particular Russia's technological specialties and military capacities), while rather than its tensions being dissolved, or sublimated, within a Europe concerned with getting on rather than nationalistic feuds and power politics, the EU's eastern frontier was that much more a scene of potential conflict (with far and away the most dramatic instance the conflicts that now have Russia and Ukraine fighting the biggest conventional war on European soil since 1945). It meant that if German business did well, at least for a time, deindustrialized, on the whole West European states got poorer and the East European states which had been allowed into the club saw their aspirations to solidly First World productivity and living standards disappointed amid shock that tested the institution's viability, and proved as unflattering to its independence as it had been unflattering toward the independence of its members (the U.S. Federal Reserve bailing out the EU's banks with $10 trillion in loans amid the Great Recession). And especially with Europe identified with elite interests and policies which hurt working people, and ruled out those policies that might help them (for instance, a freer hand in the fiscal arena), that the European project failed to acquire a popular base--all as those looking to play what is often euphemistically called the "populist" card very easily pointed to Europe as the cause of their discontents, and won election after election by it in circumstances promising little but the continuation of the EU's stagnation and slow unraveling that has characterized its recent history. In fairness, ruptures like what we saw with Britain seem unlikely to recur any time soon. (Britain's long aloofness from the continent and physical insularity, and the way its size, financialization and apparent other options for association seemed to give it alternatives, are not shared by any other EU member, all as even then it has been a close-run, rancorous, widely regretted thing, unlikely to encourage imitation.) Still, it is highly plausible that the situation will still prevent further expansion and consolidation, while complicating any attempts at national or EU-wide solutions to the continent's larger and more pressing problems--all as my guess is that in spite of visions of a peace-and-prosperity-minded EU coming together for the sake of security in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the fact that the conflict has been hugely unpopular with many of the EU's various publics, and produced significant divergences in policy between its member governments, will only add to Europe's difficulties in forming a "more perfect union," not facilitate its surmounting them.
"It's Still the Economy, Stupid"--and Don't You Ever Forget It
"It's The Economy, Stupid" was a cliché of the 1992 presidential election.
By contrast the different ways in which "pundits" expressed the thought, questioning of the idea that "It's the Economy, Stupid," usually by playing off of the four word phrase attributed to James Carville (like "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"), became a cliché of the 2024 election. (We saw this in the New York Times, and the Financial Times, and The New Republic, and the Guardian, and Salon, and I am sure many, many other fora.)
That it was not the economy, stupid, was a comforting thought for those who hoped to see the Democratic Party do well. After all, they were incumbents in a situation in which the economy was not doing well, which meant that its being about the economy was to their disadvantage--the more in as the Democratic Party had dispelled a great many illusions about itself since 1992, perhaps usefully explained through reference to that longtime stalwart of the post-war Democratic Party, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. As he explained it, in America "Big Business" government is the default mode of government--an unsustainable default, in that Big Business government eventually makes a mess of things, eventually producing an overwhelming pressure for reform that acts as a necessary, periodic, corrective. So far as conventional wisdom went it was the Democratic Party's function to be the vehicle of such reform--a function the party bosses never had much enthusiasm for, and which they increasingly kicked to the curb from the 1970s on with the ascent of Charles Peters' "neo-liberals," and indeed the election of a member of that group, Bill Clinton, who made the Democratic Party a party of neoliberalism in the more widely used economic sense of that term, a course from which it has not deviated (not with Gore, not with Obama, not with Hillary Clinton, not with Biden, not with Harris), in spite of the public's consistent, increasing, undeniable hostility to that line and its results (the mess that got bigger and bigger because reform never came), which played its part in costing them election after election (the midterms of 1994 that ushered in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America-armed Republican Revolution, in 2000, in the midterms of 2010, in 2016).
Indeed, the Democratic Party and its supporters were eager to see the election be about anything else, as they showed again and again--for instance, in the Times' Michelle Goldberg gleefully looking forward to the Fifth of November as a Day of Feminist Wrath in which "women's fury," far too long "underestimated," would drive a mighty Blue tide across the land—the Democratic Party and its supporters apparently oblivious to the fact that they were doing what the Republicans had done in 1992, counting on the culture war in hard economic times, to the same result, losing by several million votes, as even many who were genuinely furious over abortion rights voted for Trump, because It's Still the Economy, Stupid--with those who suggested otherwise earning the sobriquet "Stupid" in an even more than usually blatant and inarguable way than is the case for the Order of the Brass Check.
By contrast the different ways in which "pundits" expressed the thought, questioning of the idea that "It's the Economy, Stupid," usually by playing off of the four word phrase attributed to James Carville (like "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"), became a cliché of the 2024 election. (We saw this in the New York Times, and the Financial Times, and The New Republic, and the Guardian, and Salon, and I am sure many, many other fora.)
Indeed, the Democratic Party and its supporters were eager to see the election be about anything else, as they showed again and again--for instance, in the Times' Michelle Goldberg gleefully looking forward to the Fifth of November as a Day of Feminist Wrath in which "women's fury," far too long "underestimated," would drive a mighty Blue tide across the land—the Democratic Party and its supporters apparently oblivious to the fact that they were doing what the Republicans had done in 1992, counting on the culture war in hard economic times, to the same result, losing by several million votes, as even many who were genuinely furious over abortion rights voted for Trump, because It's Still the Economy, Stupid--with those who suggested otherwise earning the sobriquet "Stupid" in an even more than usually blatant and inarguable way than is the case for the Order of the Brass Check.
Was the "Economy" Really Doing So Well Under Biden?
Before and after the recent election Establishment commentators claimed that the U.S. economy was performing splendidly, insisting that inflation is falling, unemployment low, growth robust, and the stock market "booming." Yet anyone with a scintilla of understanding of these matters knows how all of this can have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual condition of the vast majority of the country, and how it has rightly become cynical about them. The official inflation numbers have long been suspect in the eyes of the public--with the same going for unemployment. (Consider how before the pandemic we had many years of "full employment" that were on close inspection anything but.) "Growth," which is automatically overstated whenever inflation is understated, has long been a matter of paper profits in an ever-more hollowed-out economy, with the same going for the stock market, the dubious benefits of all of which accrue to the super-rich and not working people, whose disadvantage is often registered in a rising Dow Jones Average. (A company announces layoffs, and its stock will rise high. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that hiring is slow, and the Average shoots up.)
Certainly it ignores the way that the long-term decline in the ability of working people to afford the essentials of life, like housing, has continued painfully these past years. Back in the 1960s the median-priced home went for the equivalent of three to four years of the median male income. By the 2010s it was more like seven to eight years, and in 2022 it hit nine years. Only a complete idiot would characterize this as a situation bespeaking unexampled prosperity for the public, the more in as the trend has been similar with other essentials, from the price of a car (used as well as new), to the price of health insurance, to the price of college tuition. It does not sweeten the deal that those supposedly enjoying this era of "low unemployment" have experienced it as an era of high underemployment, not least for college graduates, with, contrary to the STEM fetishists and those sneering at the victims of the student debt racket who love painting its sufferers as fools who got "useless" humanities degrees (the number of these has in fact fallen sharply in recent years), the underemployed very frequently people with "practical," occupationally-oriented degrees. (Did you know that a year after graduation 1 in 4 engineering majors lacks employment in their field, and the picture just gets worse from there? Indeed, the practical business major is no better off than the humanities degree holders.)
It ignores, too, the fact that, as Michael Roberts has explained, "[t]he headline GDP [Gross Domestic Product growth] rate" that is the basis for the talk of robust growth, "is driven by healthcare services, which really measure the rising cost of health insurance," with a little help from those extra defense outlays for the wars being waged abroad (hardly the form of consumption Americans equate with higher living standards!)--all as inventories of unsold goods are piling up, with the last fact the easier to understand when one remembers that, as Ruchir Sharma admitted in the Financial Times the day before the election, the gap between the spending of the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent has become "the widest . . . on record," the richest consumers spending, the others having less and less leeway to do so given all the ways in which they are hard-pressed--and of course, not getting any relief from the rising stock prices, because they do not own stock.
Still, for all that the talking heads have persisted in telling the public "You've never had it so good"--and afterward, apparently not caring in the slightest that the public disbelieved what they have to say not because it was deluded, but because it was less deluded than the "experts" for whom centrists so snarlingly demand absolute deference . Of course, considering the experts as deluded one is left with the problem of determining in just which way they happened to be so deluded--whether they were deluded about what the public could be got to believe about the economy, or deluded about the state of the economy itself. The second possibility cannot be ruled out--or the dangers associated with that slighted.
Certainly it ignores the way that the long-term decline in the ability of working people to afford the essentials of life, like housing, has continued painfully these past years. Back in the 1960s the median-priced home went for the equivalent of three to four years of the median male income. By the 2010s it was more like seven to eight years, and in 2022 it hit nine years. Only a complete idiot would characterize this as a situation bespeaking unexampled prosperity for the public, the more in as the trend has been similar with other essentials, from the price of a car (used as well as new), to the price of health insurance, to the price of college tuition. It does not sweeten the deal that those supposedly enjoying this era of "low unemployment" have experienced it as an era of high underemployment, not least for college graduates, with, contrary to the STEM fetishists and those sneering at the victims of the student debt racket who love painting its sufferers as fools who got "useless" humanities degrees (the number of these has in fact fallen sharply in recent years), the underemployed very frequently people with "practical," occupationally-oriented degrees. (Did you know that a year after graduation 1 in 4 engineering majors lacks employment in their field, and the picture just gets worse from there? Indeed, the practical business major is no better off than the humanities degree holders.)
It ignores, too, the fact that, as Michael Roberts has explained, "[t]he headline GDP [Gross Domestic Product growth] rate" that is the basis for the talk of robust growth, "is driven by healthcare services, which really measure the rising cost of health insurance," with a little help from those extra defense outlays for the wars being waged abroad (hardly the form of consumption Americans equate with higher living standards!)--all as inventories of unsold goods are piling up, with the last fact the easier to understand when one remembers that, as Ruchir Sharma admitted in the Financial Times the day before the election, the gap between the spending of the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent has become "the widest . . . on record," the richest consumers spending, the others having less and less leeway to do so given all the ways in which they are hard-pressed--and of course, not getting any relief from the rising stock prices, because they do not own stock.
Still, for all that the talking heads have persisted in telling the public "You've never had it so good"--and afterward, apparently not caring in the slightest that the public disbelieved what they have to say not because it was deluded, but because it was less deluded than the "experts" for whom centrists so snarlingly demand absolute deference . Of course, considering the experts as deluded one is left with the problem of determining in just which way they happened to be so deluded--whether they were deluded about what the public could be got to believe about the economy, or deluded about the state of the economy itself. The second possibility cannot be ruled out--or the dangers associated with that slighted.
The Election of 2024: A Predictable Debacle for the Democratic Party?
The 2024 U.S. presidential election is over, and if you are reading this you almost certainly know exactly how it went.
Not only did Trump win, but he became only the second Republican to win the popular vote in a presidential election since 1988 (the only other such case was Bush in 2004 when he was up against John Kerry, 'nuff said), and that by a margin of almost three million votes at last count. It is also the case that in spite of (the fixation of many analysts on the existence of an unprecedented "gender gap" in this election ) those same observers, including the folks at the Guardian (second to none in its stridency about this reading of earlier polling), are now looking at the actual result of the election and scratching their heads in their inability to support that conclusion with the available data, though not for lack of trying --the better, I suppose, to sideline the way in which the matter of "the economy" was decisive with voters who largely experienced the situation as miserable, all as the Democratic Party's "strategists" delivered a "greatest hits" edition of their record of post-World War II failures. Consider the following:
* An unpopular Democratic Party incumbent (an ex-Senator who was the last Democratic President's VP) whose domestic program withered while he escalated U.S. involvement in a major land war on the Eurasian mainland in a process that saw him keep going beyond his formerly declared limits with no clear end in sight, announces late in his first term that he will not run for a second. Leaving his party off-balance, the party bosses, displaying contempt for the preferences of the Democratic Party base--and giving a rising anti-war movement two middle fingers--sideline any input from the party base to put "their" candidate on the ballot, with, among other consequences, their leaving the Republican candidate room in which to pose as a "peace candidate" before a public sick and tired of war.
* A Democratic President elected in a period of backlash against what was seen by its detractors as disgracefully crude, corrupt and even impeachable Republican governance presides over a period of national crisis in his first term including inflationary shock. The rising prices, and his opposition to striking workers, which saw him resort to old anti-union legislation to suppress a major strike action, infuriate a great many working people, enough so as to make them shift their support to his Republican opponent.
* The VP of a Democratic administration which was widely seen as having betrayed working people runs as his party's nominee for President in the next election--with the baggage of their predecessor's unpopularity compounding the candidate's problems of simply being "uninspiring" to the electorate, both as a policymaker, and as an individual in his own right (with their having tried and failed to get the party nomination in a prior presidential primary arguably not a point in his favor).
* The Democratic Party, facing a rising tide of anti-elitist, anti-Establishment sentiment and popular opposition to neoliberalism and neoconservatism that the incumbent Democratic President has not dispelled, insists on running a thoroughly Establishment neoliberal-neoconservative candidate against a Republican (the very same one!) appealing to populist resentments in ways that made many in his own party uncomfortable, and relying on identity politics and the failings of the opponent much more than a positive platform to "sell" the public on them.
Yes, as the above implies this election saw repetitions of the mistakes of 1968, 1980, 2000 and 2016, of Johnson and Humphrey and Carter and Gore and Hillary Clinton in just the one election, while not content with simply repeating their own mistakes they decided to repeat at least one great Republican mistake of the past as well. In 1992 the Democratic Party in a hard-times election went by the principle "It's the Economy, Stupid," as the Republicans tried to make it an election about the "culture war." However, that was exactly what the Democratic Party did this time, its supporters insisting "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" on the way to making clear who really was being stupid here.
No serious analysis of "what went wrong" for the Democratic Party can overlook the plenitude of factors discussed here--and no analysis which does overlook them should be taken seriously. Which tells you just how seriously you can take the drivel that is most of what has been written about the matter to date, and the worse sure to come as the party bosses and their supporters blame anything and everything but themselves for the outcome in a reminder that the "pragmatic," "practical," "conventional wisdom"-abiding person abides by the opposite of what Uncle Ben taught Peter Parker. If hypocritically saying that with power comes responsibility in practice they go by the principle that those who have all of the power have none of the responsibility--and vice-versa--and snarl at anyone who would suggest they ought to do otherwise.
Not only did Trump win, but he became only the second Republican to win the popular vote in a presidential election since 1988 (the only other such case was Bush in 2004 when he was up against John Kerry, 'nuff said), and that by a margin of almost three million votes at last count. It is also the case that in spite of (the fixation of many analysts on the existence of an unprecedented "gender gap" in this election ) those same observers, including the folks at the Guardian (second to none in its stridency about this reading of earlier polling), are now looking at the actual result of the election and scratching their heads in their inability to support that conclusion with the available data, though not for lack of trying --the better, I suppose, to sideline the way in which the matter of "the economy" was decisive with voters who largely experienced the situation as miserable, all as the Democratic Party's "strategists" delivered a "greatest hits" edition of their record of post-World War II failures. Consider the following:
* An unpopular Democratic Party incumbent (an ex-Senator who was the last Democratic President's VP) whose domestic program withered while he escalated U.S. involvement in a major land war on the Eurasian mainland in a process that saw him keep going beyond his formerly declared limits with no clear end in sight, announces late in his first term that he will not run for a second. Leaving his party off-balance, the party bosses, displaying contempt for the preferences of the Democratic Party base--and giving a rising anti-war movement two middle fingers--sideline any input from the party base to put "their" candidate on the ballot, with, among other consequences, their leaving the Republican candidate room in which to pose as a "peace candidate" before a public sick and tired of war.
* A Democratic President elected in a period of backlash against what was seen by its detractors as disgracefully crude, corrupt and even impeachable Republican governance presides over a period of national crisis in his first term including inflationary shock. The rising prices, and his opposition to striking workers, which saw him resort to old anti-union legislation to suppress a major strike action, infuriate a great many working people, enough so as to make them shift their support to his Republican opponent.
* The VP of a Democratic administration which was widely seen as having betrayed working people runs as his party's nominee for President in the next election--with the baggage of their predecessor's unpopularity compounding the candidate's problems of simply being "uninspiring" to the electorate, both as a policymaker, and as an individual in his own right (with their having tried and failed to get the party nomination in a prior presidential primary arguably not a point in his favor).
* The Democratic Party, facing a rising tide of anti-elitist, anti-Establishment sentiment and popular opposition to neoliberalism and neoconservatism that the incumbent Democratic President has not dispelled, insists on running a thoroughly Establishment neoliberal-neoconservative candidate against a Republican (the very same one!) appealing to populist resentments in ways that made many in his own party uncomfortable, and relying on identity politics and the failings of the opponent much more than a positive platform to "sell" the public on them.
Yes, as the above implies this election saw repetitions of the mistakes of 1968, 1980, 2000 and 2016, of Johnson and Humphrey and Carter and Gore and Hillary Clinton in just the one election, while not content with simply repeating their own mistakes they decided to repeat at least one great Republican mistake of the past as well. In 1992 the Democratic Party in a hard-times election went by the principle "It's the Economy, Stupid," as the Republicans tried to make it an election about the "culture war." However, that was exactly what the Democratic Party did this time, its supporters insisting "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" on the way to making clear who really was being stupid here.
No serious analysis of "what went wrong" for the Democratic Party can overlook the plenitude of factors discussed here--and no analysis which does overlook them should be taken seriously. Which tells you just how seriously you can take the drivel that is most of what has been written about the matter to date, and the worse sure to come as the party bosses and their supporters blame anything and everything but themselves for the outcome in a reminder that the "pragmatic," "practical," "conventional wisdom"-abiding person abides by the opposite of what Uncle Ben taught Peter Parker. If hypocritically saying that with power comes responsibility in practice they go by the principle that those who have all of the power have none of the responsibility--and vice-versa--and snarl at anyone who would suggest they ought to do otherwise.
Owen Jones on Centrism in 2024
Earlier this month Owen Jones had something to say of the "surprise" outcome of the U.S. election--specifically, that it was no surprise. Discontent, not least over such matters as the purchasing power of hard-pressed consumers, tends to work against incumbents--and Kamala Harris, whose substitution for President Joe Biden on the ballot a scarce four months before election day in a manner many criticized as not just belated and undemocratic but incompetent, saw her promise continuity to a public which, on various grounds, seems to see continuity as an existential threat to the things they care about. Of course, many others have said that, but Jones does sum up the situation in a last sentence that I think merits attention from anyone considering the election, and what it reminds one about regarding the limits of the kind of politics the Democratic candidate ran on, namely that "voters . . . wanted politicians to solve their problems."
Alas, in the eyes of the centrist that desire has always been suspect--and in an era in which those who espouse centrism regard themselves as less and less able to do just that than their predecessors, simply unreasonable. Unsurprisingly centrists have a harder and harder time winning elections these days--and equally unsurprising, centrists refuse to acknowledge any connection between one fact and the other.
Alas, in the eyes of the centrist that desire has always been suspect--and in an era in which those who espouse centrism regard themselves as less and less able to do just that than their predecessors, simply unreasonable. Unsurprisingly centrists have a harder and harder time winning elections these days--and equally unsurprising, centrists refuse to acknowledge any connection between one fact and the other.
Owen Jones on Centrism in 2017
Some years ago Owen Jones took on the matter of centrism. As Mr. Jones remarked, centrists present themselves as "above ideology: pragmatic, focused on 'what works,' being grown up," in contrast with the extremists to the right of them, and (especially) the extremists to the left of them, while when one moves beyond the abstract principles to specific policy positions one finds that they offer "a blend of market liberalism, social liberalism and--more often than not--a hawkish military posture." Translating to an obliviousness about the reality that they are just another pack of ideologues pushing most of the substance of right-wing politics with an insistence quite at odds with their pretensions to an enlightened moderation.
All this seems to me about right as a characterization of British Labour party centrism. It also seems to me that Jones was right about how centrists have conducted themselves amid what must now be regarded as decades of not only economic stagnation but economic crisis and nationalistic backlash, "offer[ing] little evidence of reflection about their plight," sure that everyone but themselves is to blame for their rejection by a public as they refuse to admit the existence of problems, let alone suggest solutions.
Of course, in considering what this has meant for the Labour Party, where the centrists were out of power amid the ascendancy of "Corbynism" (and going out of their minds over the fact), Jones would seem to have underestimated centrism's capacity to recover politically--and this without modifying themselves in the slightest. Thus does the last sentence of his comment read that "until [the centrists] come to terms with their own failures, they will surely never rule again." Not quite two-and-a-half years later Keir Starmer ousted Jeremy Corbyn from the party leadership, while if it is undeniable that Starmer passed himself off as a social democrat at the time of the contest, his quick and brazen retreat from his promises (confirmed in his repudiation of almost all of them by the time of the 2024 General Election, as an examination of the party's GE Manifesto shows, while he engaged in a ruthless purge of the left-leaning members of the party in Parliament), makes it almost impossible to deny that the center is back in control of not just the party but the country without having come to terms with said failures as it shamelessly flogs the same old policies.
Still, in fairness to Jones one should note that if the center returned not just the leadership of the party but to 10 Downing Street it did so in most unusual circumstances. The election of 2024, after all, came after fourteen straight years of Tory rule with little but a train of disasters to show for it (austerity, Brexit, the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 sterling crisis) that ignominiously ended one prime ministership after another in unprecedented succession (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss each leaving office in, to use one of Ms. Truss' favorite words, "disgrace"); and with the particularly unfortunate and multiply unsalable Rishi Sunak at the head as Nigel Farage's Reform UK split the right's vote in a manner unseen in British electoral history; which enabled Starmer to become Prime Minister even with his party getting the ballots of a mere fifth of the eligible voters (rather less than Jeremy Corbyn lost with in 2017, and even less than he lost with in 2019). Nevertheless, if Starmer's becoming Prime Minister is less explicable as a Labour victory than as a shocking Tory collapse that one can be forgiven for recalling to the minds of the historically literate of 2024 the shake-up of the electoral system seen in 1924, it still happened, a reminder of just how much business-as-usual manages to creak on in the absence of anything like genuine public support for political "leaders" and the policies they advance as a product of "consensus."
All this seems to me about right as a characterization of British Labour party centrism. It also seems to me that Jones was right about how centrists have conducted themselves amid what must now be regarded as decades of not only economic stagnation but economic crisis and nationalistic backlash, "offer[ing] little evidence of reflection about their plight," sure that everyone but themselves is to blame for their rejection by a public as they refuse to admit the existence of problems, let alone suggest solutions.
Of course, in considering what this has meant for the Labour Party, where the centrists were out of power amid the ascendancy of "Corbynism" (and going out of their minds over the fact), Jones would seem to have underestimated centrism's capacity to recover politically--and this without modifying themselves in the slightest. Thus does the last sentence of his comment read that "until [the centrists] come to terms with their own failures, they will surely never rule again." Not quite two-and-a-half years later Keir Starmer ousted Jeremy Corbyn from the party leadership, while if it is undeniable that Starmer passed himself off as a social democrat at the time of the contest, his quick and brazen retreat from his promises (confirmed in his repudiation of almost all of them by the time of the 2024 General Election, as an examination of the party's GE Manifesto shows, while he engaged in a ruthless purge of the left-leaning members of the party in Parliament), makes it almost impossible to deny that the center is back in control of not just the party but the country without having come to terms with said failures as it shamelessly flogs the same old policies.
Still, in fairness to Jones one should note that if the center returned not just the leadership of the party but to 10 Downing Street it did so in most unusual circumstances. The election of 2024, after all, came after fourteen straight years of Tory rule with little but a train of disasters to show for it (austerity, Brexit, the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 sterling crisis) that ignominiously ended one prime ministership after another in unprecedented succession (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss each leaving office in, to use one of Ms. Truss' favorite words, "disgrace"); and with the particularly unfortunate and multiply unsalable Rishi Sunak at the head as Nigel Farage's Reform UK split the right's vote in a manner unseen in British electoral history; which enabled Starmer to become Prime Minister even with his party getting the ballots of a mere fifth of the eligible voters (rather less than Jeremy Corbyn lost with in 2017, and even less than he lost with in 2019). Nevertheless, if Starmer's becoming Prime Minister is less explicable as a Labour victory than as a shocking Tory collapse that one can be forgiven for recalling to the minds of the historically literate of 2024 the shake-up of the electoral system seen in 1924, it still happened, a reminder of just how much business-as-usual manages to creak on in the absence of anything like genuine public support for political "leaders" and the policies they advance as a product of "consensus."
Is Britain Without London Really Poorer Than Any U.S. State?
About a decade ago the Spectator's Fraser Nelson made the observation that when London is cut out of the picture Britain is poorer than Mississippi when considered in terms of per capita Gross Domestic Product, with comparisons of this sort since becoming a commonplace.
Is it really true, however?
Recently checking the relevant statistics at the Office of National Statistics I found that in per capita terms London was in 2022 almost twice as "rich" as the rest of Britain, with a per capita GDP of £63,400 to £32,900.
As sterling equaled $1.24 on average in 2022, one may say that Britain outside London had a per capita GDP of $40,800 that year. Meanwhile (going by the GDP figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the mid-year population figures from the U.S. Census Bureau) the poorest U.S. state was Mississippi, which had a per capita GDP of $48,600 in that year--while second-poorest Alabama had a rather higher $56,200. In other words, Britain outside London was about a quarter poorer than Alabama, and a seventh poorer than Mississippi, when judged by that metric.
The result is that the numbers really do bear out the claim--unfortunately for Britain. Still, significant as the regional disparity may be within Britain, the disparity within London itself should not be overlooked. The city has a Gini coefficient of 0.58--which bespeaks far greater inequality in London than in the country as a whole (Britain's score ranged over 32-33 in 2017-2021), and indeed a wider disparity than has been observed in countries like Botswana and Colombia. It is thus not Londoners who are rich, but a comparative few of them--once again, the differences between classes trumping the differences between regions, though of course acknowledgment of the fact is less than congenial for commentators who prefer to concentrate their attention, and their audience's, on anything else.
Meanwhile, whether one thinks in terms of region or class the reality is inseparable from the way the British economy has transformed since Margaret Thatcher's time, with a near half century of neoliberal reform thoroughly deindustrializing and financializing Britain. London has been a beneficiary of financialization, and the city's emergence as a second or even first home for a disproportionate share of the planet Earth's oligarchs, their hangers-on, parasites, etc.--while other regions have had less to show in the way of anything to blunt the losses.
Of course, Keir Starmer's new government being what it predictably is, anyone would be very naive indeed to expect any significant change in direction any time soon--with whatever little room there may have been for those questioning this path to continue hoping for change pretty much shrinking every time Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves makes a public statement.
Is it really true, however?
Recently checking the relevant statistics at the Office of National Statistics I found that in per capita terms London was in 2022 almost twice as "rich" as the rest of Britain, with a per capita GDP of £63,400 to £32,900.
As sterling equaled $1.24 on average in 2022, one may say that Britain outside London had a per capita GDP of $40,800 that year. Meanwhile (going by the GDP figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the mid-year population figures from the U.S. Census Bureau) the poorest U.S. state was Mississippi, which had a per capita GDP of $48,600 in that year--while second-poorest Alabama had a rather higher $56,200. In other words, Britain outside London was about a quarter poorer than Alabama, and a seventh poorer than Mississippi, when judged by that metric.
The result is that the numbers really do bear out the claim--unfortunately for Britain. Still, significant as the regional disparity may be within Britain, the disparity within London itself should not be overlooked. The city has a Gini coefficient of 0.58--which bespeaks far greater inequality in London than in the country as a whole (Britain's score ranged over 32-33 in 2017-2021), and indeed a wider disparity than has been observed in countries like Botswana and Colombia. It is thus not Londoners who are rich, but a comparative few of them--once again, the differences between classes trumping the differences between regions, though of course acknowledgment of the fact is less than congenial for commentators who prefer to concentrate their attention, and their audience's, on anything else.
Meanwhile, whether one thinks in terms of region or class the reality is inseparable from the way the British economy has transformed since Margaret Thatcher's time, with a near half century of neoliberal reform thoroughly deindustrializing and financializing Britain. London has been a beneficiary of financialization, and the city's emergence as a second or even first home for a disproportionate share of the planet Earth's oligarchs, their hangers-on, parasites, etc.--while other regions have had less to show in the way of anything to blunt the losses.
Of course, Keir Starmer's new government being what it predictably is, anyone would be very naive indeed to expect any significant change in direction any time soon--with whatever little room there may have been for those questioning this path to continue hoping for change pretty much shrinking every time Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves makes a public statement.
Rethinking How We Talk About the Political Spectrum
Recently I remarked the unsatisfactory way in which we discuss political ideology in America.
Having done so it seems to me fair to offer a possible alternative that has seemed to me useful.
In explaining it I think it best to start by saying that, contrary to what some seem to think, the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative," "radical" and "reactionary," "right" and "left," and their various synonyms and derivatives deriving from the Enlightenment and its subsequent controversies remain entirely relevant to the discussion of American politics today. However, there is a significant gap between the labeling and the actualities that causes a lot of confusion. What people conventionally call "conservatives" tend to actually be reactionaries, desirous of restoring a past state of society (somehow going back to before the New Deal, or the Progressive era, or the counterculture of the 1960s, for example); what we call "liberals" and might more usefully call "centrists," who are really conservatives; and what people conventionally call the "left," insofar as this is identified with identity politics, is a conservative or reactionary politics which differs from the others in being the conservative or reactionary nationalism of groups which have been marginalized. Thus do all of them broadly embrace the neoliberal-neoconservative economic and social vision, domestically and internationally, with this at most being adapted in an age of ascendant economic nationalism and geopolitical shifts (above all, related to the rise of China).
Considering the picture of conservatives who are really reactionaries, centrists who are conservatives, and a left that is not really farther to the left than the others, it has seemed to me fair to, following Richard Hofstadter's precedent, refer to conservatism today as "pseudo-conservatism," and extend this to the others by making "pseudo-liberalism" a synonym for today's centrism and so-called "liberalism," and label what many rush to call the left the "pseudo-left," respectively--with the pseudo-liberal, in line with their centrism, giving a good deal of ground to the pseudo-conservative in such areas as the economy and foreign policy, and making concessions to the pseudo-left's demands in the cultural sphere.
Of course, other tendencies exist. There are old-fashioned liberals--reformists eager to redress what they see as the problems of capitalism out of genuine social and economic concern rather than merely "upholding consensus" in the fashion of the centrists in those days in which their equation with liberalism was most justified, and supportive of much more reform than the minimalism toward which centrists tended even before the neoliberal turn. There are classically class-minded leftists interested in deeper change. But while one may speak of liberal or left individuals, media outlets, even political parties, and even argue that the associated sentiments are widely held among a large part of the population, none is an organized and significant force at the level of national politics. That is a very different thing from those tendencies having somehow disappeared, and anyone who writes them off totally makes a profound mistake (just as mid-century centrists made a profound mistake when they thought the "pseudo-conservative" right finished)--but there is no question that, as things have generally stood in recent decades, they have been very marginalized, so much so that those who would like to pretend they did not exist anymore have been able to get away with it (at least, in the muddled mainstream mind).
Having done so it seems to me fair to offer a possible alternative that has seemed to me useful.
In explaining it I think it best to start by saying that, contrary to what some seem to think, the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative," "radical" and "reactionary," "right" and "left," and their various synonyms and derivatives deriving from the Enlightenment and its subsequent controversies remain entirely relevant to the discussion of American politics today. However, there is a significant gap between the labeling and the actualities that causes a lot of confusion. What people conventionally call "conservatives" tend to actually be reactionaries, desirous of restoring a past state of society (somehow going back to before the New Deal, or the Progressive era, or the counterculture of the 1960s, for example); what we call "liberals" and might more usefully call "centrists," who are really conservatives; and what people conventionally call the "left," insofar as this is identified with identity politics, is a conservative or reactionary politics which differs from the others in being the conservative or reactionary nationalism of groups which have been marginalized. Thus do all of them broadly embrace the neoliberal-neoconservative economic and social vision, domestically and internationally, with this at most being adapted in an age of ascendant economic nationalism and geopolitical shifts (above all, related to the rise of China).
Considering the picture of conservatives who are really reactionaries, centrists who are conservatives, and a left that is not really farther to the left than the others, it has seemed to me fair to, following Richard Hofstadter's precedent, refer to conservatism today as "pseudo-conservatism," and extend this to the others by making "pseudo-liberalism" a synonym for today's centrism and so-called "liberalism," and label what many rush to call the left the "pseudo-left," respectively--with the pseudo-liberal, in line with their centrism, giving a good deal of ground to the pseudo-conservative in such areas as the economy and foreign policy, and making concessions to the pseudo-left's demands in the cultural sphere.
Of course, other tendencies exist. There are old-fashioned liberals--reformists eager to redress what they see as the problems of capitalism out of genuine social and economic concern rather than merely "upholding consensus" in the fashion of the centrists in those days in which their equation with liberalism was most justified, and supportive of much more reform than the minimalism toward which centrists tended even before the neoliberal turn. There are classically class-minded leftists interested in deeper change. But while one may speak of liberal or left individuals, media outlets, even political parties, and even argue that the associated sentiments are widely held among a large part of the population, none is an organized and significant force at the level of national politics. That is a very different thing from those tendencies having somehow disappeared, and anyone who writes them off totally makes a profound mistake (just as mid-century centrists made a profound mistake when they thought the "pseudo-conservative" right finished)--but there is no question that, as things have generally stood in recent decades, they have been very marginalized, so much so that those who would like to pretend they did not exist anymore have been able to get away with it (at least, in the muddled mainstream mind).
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