How do we explain the wide success that Trump has achieved, despite everything that we know about him today?
The argument here is that there are basic lines of division and conflict in society, divisions that have shifted dramatically in the last half century or more from an industrially—based old economy to a high-tech consumption based new economy, profiting some groups at the expense of others, and shifting the lines of division among them (see Blogs #90d and #90e). In reality, Deep down under, those shifts explain how people act politically, including how they vote in elections. Trump has taken advantage of these shifts to promulgate a Deep Story that justifies his own behavior and now underlies his campaign for the presidency. As a businessman, he takes full advantage of the new consumer-based economy while he continues to exploit those in the old economy with whom he has direct business dealings. In his political campaigning, he holds himself out as working for those hurt by the economic change, the loss of industrial jobs, the newer and greater exploitation in the processes of consumption. And as an individual, he claims that his conduct as an individual is an irrelevant and largely malicious topic that should not be related in any way to his activities as a businessman nor his qualifications for the public office for which he campaigns.
So there are in fact three Trumps: Trump The Individual, Trump the Businessman, and Trump the Political Campaigner, and he keeps the three quite separate so, that their real contradictions do not become painfully obvious, distorting the Deep Story he trumpets on Twitter, in which his individual characteristics are not relevant politically, his business activities in fact entitle him to public leadership even though they are largely anti-social, and his campaign rhetoric is almost transparently opportunistic
Trump embeds the businessman the campaigner displays in a seductive new Deep Story: the story of a past great America where everyone had job and people knew their places and were happy with them, a Deep Story in which Trump promises as part of a fairy tale to restore a better old world with a sweep of his magical (small?) hand. And many of those hurting from the change from old to new economy, seeing no alternate rescue in sight, buy his new Story, even though, analyzed, it is a jumble of incoherent and little thought out impulsive Twitter feeds..
To look at the Three Trumps one at a time:
To begin with, what sort of person is Trump the Individual? Repulsive, conventionally sexist and racist, with really no self-awareness, ability to see himself as others see him, to the point of obvious excess. That’s Trump, as an individual, an aging bundle of prejudices and jumbled ideas and values, of uncontrollable tics. That’s Trump the Individual. He’s the one who, intrudes on women in the dressing rooms of beauty contestants and gropes them on airplanes and in elevators, insults virtually every minority group in society and one majority group, lambasts war heroes and makes fun of disabilities and displays an egregious egotism and inability to accept criticism.
Perhaps we may also see him for that very reason, as sad, even pathetic, out of control by the forces that control him. And a lot of discussion and theorizing has gone into his psychological make-up, what makes him behave as he does, so often irrationally. Trump the Individual is not, however, the one on whom this article wants to focuses.[1] Rather it is Trump the Businessman who is of concern, the one whose conduct ought theoretically to repel precisely those who proclaim their allegiance to him. He’s the Trump whose actual business policies, writ large, are so much at odds with concepts of social justice
As for Trump the Businessman, the purported billionaire, the real estate mogul, the restless entrepreneur, the competitor and winner in the world of big business, the winner and loser in real life games with large odds, he’s independent of the other two, although he doesn’t fail to have is campaign activities contribute to the income from the various private enterprises n which he has an interest as a business matter. And the three Trumps are fundamentally out of sync.
And Trump the Campaigner is of concern even more, the public figure, the candidate for high public office, even trying to imagine what policies he might pursue or endorse as President produces nightmares. . Trump the Individual may have engaged in locker room talk about groping women, but according to Trump the Campaigner he had never, never, never actually done such things. Trump the Campaigner is the one who knows more about military strategy than the generals, who alone can right the economy, produce jobs, handle Wall Street, deal with Putin. And Trump the Campaigner is not Trump the Businessman , who exploits his workers, makes money by manipulating banks and credit institutions extensively uses governmental assistance and subsidies in those businesses he actually runs, takes advantage of the bankruptcy laws to avoid paying his creditors when his businesses fail.
What follows is an attempt to go beyond any one of these three views, which deal separately with Trump the Individual, Trump the Campaigner, and Trump the Businessman. I focus below first on Trump the Businessman with an under-explained pattern of conduct, and then turn to the reality that underlies his business activities and finally to the political implications for Trump the Campaigner of the changes in that reality. I take a key underlying line of division in that reality to be the line that divides a base in the traditional industrial capitalist economy from one based on the new less industrially -based higher-tech market economy.
My hypothesis is that Trump the Businessman represents the distilled essence of the modern businessperson in a post-industrial more market-based economy and neo-liberal political society, and that Trump the Campaigner appeals to an audience suffering from the transition from the preceding industrially-based society to its present new form, producing an intrusion of populist rhetoric in a presentation that fundamentally serves his business purposes in the changing economy. What is happening is essentially a real conflict between those involved in the class conflicts of the old industrial capitalist system as it the have evolved in the new less-industrially based market system. The contradiction between Trump the Campaigner and Trump the Businessman is a widely accepted paradox, that a billionaire should be leading the downtrodden, the ignored, the insecure.
(Whether there is now in fact a “new” class structure in creation, or simply a new aspect of the on-going development and transmogrification of the old capitalist and working classes, is still a matter under serious debate, but the answer is not critical for the present analysis, at least in the near future. Likewise, whether today’s economy is post-industrial or not is a matter of much dispute, but by-passed here, simply differentiating the old from the new by the terms “industrial capitalist” vs. “market,” accepting the fact that the two are inextricably mixed.)
The election, and the distribution of support for Trump among the electorate, is unfortunately not a good test of the hypothesis, because Trump the Individual features much more prominently in voters’ decision-making than it does in the analysis here. You might think, if the hypothesis above is correct, that Silicon Valley and the hedge fund industry would be strongly pro-Trump as all participants in the new economy, but with minor exceptions they aren’t. Nor should blue-collar working class members be supporting a candidate who has never lifted a finger in his extensive business dealings or as an individual to show any concern for their welfare. But they do support him.
One explanation for this apparent logical discrepancy lies in the image of Trump the Individual and his conduct and rants. It may be that Trump loses support among the college-educated because of the danger they see to the rational conduct of public affairs if he is elected, which may over-ride such other affinities they may have with him as a businessman. Or it may simply be that I, as a college-educated blogger with a real fear of a Trump presidency, simply assume that others similarly situated would be as afraid of a victory by Trump as I am. Or there may be some antipathy for Hillary Clinton, having nothing to do with her actual substantive platform, whose cause lies outside anything discussed here. In any case, election results are not an easy way to test the three-Trump hypothesis.
Neither are the frequently developed analyses of the elections that uses demographic divisions among citizens to predict voting–age, color, gender, generation, education, ethnicity, for example, useful in testing the hypothesis about economic divisions among the electorate. While such divisions are easily analyzed statistically for their level of correlations with voting behavior, some may conceal more fundamental divisions along economic, income, and occupational as well as racial and gender lines.
Demographic categories used statistically, such as millennials, or male and female, or 1% and 99%, or college educated and more and high-school educated or less, are only marginally useful, and their importance needs an explanation if they are to be seriously considered. Categories such as middle class themselves demand explanation if they are to be useful. The prevalence of demographic analysis to explaining political behavior leaves a lot to be desired.
But superficial attributions of cause and effect to demographic changes are only part of the explication of why the Deep Stories that Trump trumpets, described in detail in Blog #90f, have been as effective as they have been in attracting his supporters.
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In what follows, then, we begin first with Trump the Businessman, then turn to Trump the Campaigner, , and then view how Trump tries to bring the two together in the Deep Story that he assumes will justify the actions of both.
So what does a modern businessperson like Donald Trump do in a consumer-based post-industrial economy?
See Blog #90b – Trump the Businessman: The Commodification of Every-day Life.
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